Between November 29 to 30 at the Crystal Palace Ballroom, Bucharest will host one of the most mesmerizing hacking & information security events in Romania – DefCamp.
The event has as special guests Raoul Chiesa, founder and president of The Security Brokers and Carsten Eiram, Chief Research Officer at Risk Base Security.

Having reached its foruth edition this year, Defcamp is a conference with tradition in Romania. This fall’s event will involve its participants in discussions on 0days, PRISM, mobile security problems, DDOS, networking, P2P networks, social engineering, camera surveillance, application security research, lock picking and secure system administration. The presentations are held by specialists like Raoul “Nobody” Chiesa president of The Security Brokers and Carsten Eiram, Chief Research Officer at Risk Base Security these being the Defcamp 2013 keynote speakers.

The list is hardened by Kizz MyAnthia, Senior Penetration Tester – Shadowlabs at HP Enterprise Security, Nathan LaFollette “httphacker”, Senior Security Consultant – Shadowlabs at HP Fortify, Nir Valtman, R&D Chief Security Officer @Retalix, Milan Gabor, CEO at Viris, Adrian Furtuna, Security Consultant at KPMG Romania, Bogdan Alecu, System Administrator at Levi9 and speaker with a history at Defcamp, and also Alex Negrea, Co-founder of docTrackr.com.

Defcamp 2013 is the biggest event in the information security and hacking domain in Romania, expecting over 300 participants from Romania and neighboring countries, participants with different levels of expertise – from students to industry leaders and experts in cyber security and research.

The DCTF (DefCamp Capture the Flag) will have an on line qualifying round scheduled to start on the 15th of November, followed by a duel during the event between the final teams. CTF topics are extremely varied and challenging – exploits, cryptography, programming, stenography, forensics, reverse engineering are just a few of the topics from the 25 problems in the qualifying round.

Similar activities, like DCTF, but dedicated directly to the participants of the event are Hack the Machine and App2Own where everyone will have at their disposal different services and services to put their skills to the test and win awards.

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Intel Global Challenge, held in Silicon Valley (Berkeley), just ended and now we know the winners.
Among them, there is a Romanian startup, Gameleon.

In their words, “Gameleon is a HTML5 platform enabling anybody to Create, Publish and Play Games. Multiplayer, Social and Multiplatform by default. Everything is visual and based on open standards.“.
Basically, you don’t need to be a programmer to create a game. Almost anyone can do it using their platform.

Victor Alexandru Popescu, Vlad Alexandru Radu, Mihaela Epuran and Adrian Calotescu are the co-founders of Gameleon. They were previously selected at Intel Business Challenge Europe (among other four startups) to participate at the Intel Business Challenge World 2013.

30 teams from all over the world competed in the finals of Intel Global Challenge and one team from Chile won the competition (and $50,000) with a project called “Mobile Monitoring Station”. Gameleon took home $10,000.

The Intel Global Challenge is where the best engineers and scientists present how they plan to make the world a better place through their innovations and entrepreneurial skills. The Intel Global Challenge partners with the best research institutions around the world and affiliates with regional competitions to find the technologies and teams that can have the greatest impact.

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How to Web 2013 tech conference (Bucharest – Nov 20-21) is organized around the “Let’s grow together!” central concept, motto that brings to focus the future development of the local and regional tech industries. On November 20 and 21 over 40 exceptional guest speakers from 4 continents will come to Bucharest (Romania) to share their experiences in front of the estimated audience of over 800 persons. Guest speakers will be talking about building successful tech products and services at a global scale.

How to Web 2013 will explore the “Let’s Grow Together!” central concept that brings into discussion the development of tech companies, products, and services with long term value, as well as the ways in which the local context can be used to leverage businesses. Participants will get the chance to discover practical applications for development tools & technologies, and they will also have access to presentations about future technologies that may influence the paradigm shifts or the evolution of UX/UI methodologies.

The beginning sections of each day of the conference include keynotes that will talk about innovation and the strategic ways of building long term tech companies, bringing sustainable benefits to both the founders and society as a whole. These themes will be approached by speakers such as Thomas Hartwing (CTO and Co-Founder of King.com, one of the most important gaming companies in the world that is getting ready to be listed on the US stock market) or Paul Ford (VP and CEO SoftLayer, infrastructure company acquired by IBM with 2 billion USD at the beginning of the year).

Adii Pienaar (Co-Founder and ex-CEO Woo Themens, worldwide leader in creating WordPress themes and plugins), from South Africa, and Kei Shimada (Director of Business Development at Dentsu), from Japan, will come in front of the audience to talk about their experience of innovating and developing global businesses from “the end of the world”.

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Adelina Peltea, the co-founder of the startup Splinter.me – aiming to improve the recruiting business (profiled on Romanian Startups too), was selected to participate at Lisbon Challenge startup acceleration program this year (other Romanian startups selected includes Monitor Backlinks, CallerQ, Eventya, 123dressme, Gameleon).

The Lisbon Challenge is an ambitious 4-month acceleration program aimed at eager startups in the growth phase, looking for a truly transatlantic international program.
The Lisbon Challenge is based in Lisbon (Portugal) with Investors Days in New York, São Paulo and London.
This summer 75 teams will meet with 200 international mentors & investors for a chance to be chosen as the 10 winners of the Challenge. Startups from any sector can apply, no equity is taken and no restrictions apply.

The article below is reproduced with her permission (published originally on her blog).

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It has been a month since I am exploring the startup hub in Lisbon, as I am participating Lisbon Challenge accelerator program on behalf of my startup, splinter.me.

And time has come to share my impressions on the local scene to all the founders out there that are looking for a great hub to settle in, or at least explore for a while. As a matter of fact, Lisbon’s movers and shakers encourage international startups to mingle here at least for a while, so here are 8 reasons why you should drop by:

1) Beta-i, the main organization supporting the local entrepreneurship, are damn good at what they do and are definitely the go-to people if you come by.

2) All main and influential local institutions support the local startup scene. For example, Beta-i has the support of Lisbon’s Mayor, Portugal’s President and of the biggest bank, Caixa Geral de Depositos. Besides, they also have the support of the European Commission and Seedcamp.

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On November 20-21, Crystal Palace Ballrooms from Bucharest hosts the 4th edition of How to Web (founded by Bogdan Iordache), the most important web and technology event in Romania and South Eastern Europe. Famous international speakers come for the first time in Romania to share their best practices with an audience of more than 800 persons.
The conference will be doubled by Startup Spotlight, competition and orientation program showcasing the 32 most innovative start-ups in the region, along with world-class accelerators, investors and support programs.

The major topic of How to Web event – “Let’s grow together in 2013!” – will bring into discussion the way in which successful products can be developed at a global scale. The subjects covered include innovation and scalability, mobile apps, software-as-a-service and social games, big data and smart interfaces, hardware and IT, as well as product localization and the particularities of the East-European Market.

The attendants will get the chance to follow practical case studies, discover how tech innovation changes the world, and meet peer tech entrepreneurs and professionals. In the end, they will have the chance to apply the lessons learned for scaling their products and further growing their own companies.

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