We just got word that the prestigious Seedcamp mentoring program (which also is an early-stage micro seed investment fund) selected one Romanian startup to be part of it for the Seedcamp Week London.
The startup name is Socialook, which provides an advocacy platform that enables companies to turn their employees into brand ambassadors. Other 17 European startups were selected too.

Socialook is from Targu-Mures, Romania and it was founded by Horatiu Mocian. This is his second startup, the first one being Newistic – which is a a customizable web dashboard used for monitoring and analyzing social media for the pharma and healthcare industries.

Other Romanian startups which were finalists in this program were uberVU (2008) and Brainient (2009), which are now quite established in the market.
Socialook is profiled on Romanian Startups website here.

The second news is that the startups TheShopPage (founder: Iulian Dragan) and Gameleon (founders: Adrian Calotescu, Mihaela Epuran, Victor Popescu,  Vlad Alexandru Radu) were selected as semi-finalists at the Webit Congress Startup Challenge, part of Webit Congress which is a Bulgarian tech conference (6-7 November, 2013).
While TheShopPage is based in Romania, Gameleon is based in Bulgaria but has Romanian founders.

Both TheShopPage and Gameleon are profiled on Romanian Startups, here and here.

Good luck guys!

Vienna, the City of Music and Architecture, the city which breathes of culture will be soon starting breathing of technology and entrepreneurship and that thanks to the Pioneers Festival.

Pioneers Festival is an event for entrepreneurship and innovative future technologies which will be held on 30-31 of October 2013 at the Hofburg Imperial Palace, with an additional day (29 of October) at the House of Industry (investors day).

The festival has lined up speakers ranging up from Dave McClure (the guy is busy this end of the year in Europe, he being invited also at Startup AddVenture in Kiev later on) to Danielle Morrill (Mattermark), Eben Upton (Raspberry Pi), Phil Libin (Evernote), David Noel (SoundCloud), Seth Goldstein (Turntable.fm), Vishal Sharma (Google), Eric Migicovsky (Peeble), Patrick Collison (Stripe), Jeff Clavier (SoftTech VC), and others.

As it happens usually at tech conferences, Pioneers Festival has also a Startup Competition section where hardware and software startups can apply for a chance to be selected and pitch in front of key players and investors.

This startup competition, Pioneers Challenge, has also lined up some experienced judges, among them being Tal Morgenstern (Sequoia Capital), Michael Treskow (Accel), Leo Batalov (Orrick), Lyuben Belov (LauncHub), Sean Seton-Rogers (PROfounders Capital).
Among all these judges there is also a Romanian one: Dan Lupu (Earlybird Venture Capital) who is a former student of University ‘Politehnica’, Bucharest and founding member of the Romanian Association of Financial Analysts (now CFA Romania).

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This is the story of Andreea Mihalcea, Geekcelerator’s first employee.
The original appeared on her website.
Geekcelerator.com is an investment fund, investing in startups that solve difficult technology problems for other startups.

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Getting to our path in the tech world meant having the guts, devotion and perseverance to chase our obsessions and transform them into a way of living.

I hit a crossroad and felt stuck. A hard truth had blown into my face and I had to deal with it: I was jobless and somehow purposeless. This was it. I’ve reached a dead end.

A choice needs to be made

Last March, that was my story. Our very dear project was put on hold indefinitely. There was nothing more to do. I hit a crossroad and I had to choose. My future had two versions and I wasn’t sure which way to go. One was the steady and proven path: take a 9 to 5 job in a big corporation, be a slight wheel in a huge machinery, struggle to climb up the complex hierarchic ladder, get to be a manager of managers of managers of something and wait for retirement, when I could travel the world and craft my dreams on my daily life flow. Or not.

The other was the risky path of following my passion for technology and pursuing my dream of building my own company. But I lacked experience, I had no idea where to start from and I was afraid of failure. I was damn scared of another dead end.

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75 tech startups are selected for the Lisbon Challenge acceleration program in Portugal and the Romanian tech startup Monitor Backlinks (profiled here) is one them.

The founder, Razvan Girmacea, will be moving to Lisbon on 28 of August where he will begin a 4 months intensive program. He will meet with 200 international mentors and investors and the beauty of this program is that no equity is taken from the startups. All startups will be given free office space, low cost accommodation, heavily discounted flights and visa help if necessary.

As those 4 months pass some startups will be eliminated (by a jury) and in the end only 10 will remain. Those 10 winner startups will share a 150,000 euros prize (about $198,000) and will be allowed also to participate at Investor Days in London, Sao Paulo and Lisbon. They will also get free office space in Lisbon up to 30 years (hopefully, they won’t need that after several years).

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Accelerator Assembly is, in their words:

“Accelerator Assembly is an initiative created by the European Commission as part of the EU initiative called Startup Europe.
The Accelerator Assembly is an industry-led initiative delivered by Bethnal Green Ventures, Seedcamp, Seed-DB and Startup Weekend, with the support of Nesta and Springboard/Techstars.

Startup Europe is a Digital Agenda initiative supported by Vice President Neelie Kroes promoting web entrepreneurs to start their business in Europe and to let them flourish in Europe.”

Basically, Startup Europe’s Accelerator Assembly is the network for startup accelerator programs in Europe and now How To Web, the leading tech conference in Romania and Central-Eastern Europe, is part of it too.

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