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launchub-logoLaunchub, the Bulgarian seed fund, just announced it invested in nine teams from South Eastern Europe.
The latest investment decision followed the Long Weekend Event held during November 28 – December 1, 2013 (they also visited Bucharest, Romania during this period of time).

 

Among those nine teams, there are two Romanian teams:
Appticles, which allows to mobilize web content creating great user experience. The platfrom targets publishers and is based on the Open Web concept & HTML5 (Appticles is also in RomanianStartups.com database)
GameMatch, which is a mobile game discovery platform that helps players discover great games and developers find their target audience

appticles-gamematch-logos

Having these nine teams on board, Launchub increased its portoflio to 35 teams from 7 countries in Southeastern Europe – Bulgaria, Macedonia, Romania, Croatia, Greece, and Slovenia and Ukraine.
Read more on their blog.

 

RomaniansStartups.com partnered with Launchub in bringing Romanian startups to the seed fund’s attention.

January 7, 2014 |

Adelina Peltea, the co-founder of Splinter.me, tells us the story of her startup, the reasons she quited and the lessons learned from this adventure.

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Adelina PelteaStartups don’t die. They commit suicide.” – used to be my saying for quite a while. After one year of working full time on splinter.me, a few days ago I found myself resigning and believing it is better for me to pursue other dreams and challenges.

More than 90% of startups fail. In silence. In the media you will mostly hear about the success stories, making new comers naive. So here is one of the untold stories, which I hope will bring some light to the reality of the entrepreneurship world. Also, I owe breaking the news about what happened in splinterville to all my friends who followed me along the journey and sometimes even supported me.

The reasons

Let’s start with the final drop. Last week I wrote an article on the business blog that attracted 45.000 visitors on the blog, and managed to bring 12.000 of them on the business website. Out of that, we got less than 50 new users. And when you know it is not a glitch with the sign up process, you start to wonder.

………….   more on her blog   ………….

Lesson learned

1) Have a job aside.
2) Have a “prenup” with your co-founder.
3) Don’t confuse business investment with personal investment.
4) Draw a very strict timeline and stick to it.
5) If possible, get 3 co-founders.
6) Get leaders and doers. Separately.
7) Remote does work.
8) An accelerator can actually slow you down.
9) Don’t waste time and energy with contests, unless you are made for them.
10) Stop when you need to stop.

I learned lots of things that will prove useful later on. I learned how to be data-driven and use Analytics to the max. I learned how to create content that goes viral. I learned about different markets. I learned how not to work with technical people. I learned a lot about the recruitment industry, about social media and about tech startups. I learned what is hype and what is not in the startup world.

I have become stronger and more experienced. In the end, we are ourselves startups. Startups that we can never leave.

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You can read the whole article on Adelina’s blog.

December 11, 2013 |

rgda-logoThis next Tuesday, December 10, the Romanian Game Developers Association and TechHub Bucharest organize a special event having as guest speaker Bart Decrem, Senior Vice-President Walt Disney Group.

Bart Decrem had previously been VP and General Manager for Disney Mobile Games, the group behind the smartphone smash hits Where’s My Water, Temple Run: Oz and Where’s My Mickey.
Previously, Bart was the founder and CEO of Tapulous, one of the first companies in the iPhone space, and makers of Tap Tap Revenge, the most popular music game of all times.
All in all, Bart has headed the development of twenty-three number one App Store hits. He has also founded Flock (acquired by Zynga), co-Founded Eazel (sold to Disney), and ran marketing and business affairs for the Firefox 1.0 launch.
Born and raised in Belgium, Bart Decrem has started his own business when he was 13 and holds a JD from Stanford Law School. Bart has been featured in Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People in Business (May 2009), Advertising Age’s „2010 Creativity 50” (March 2010) and Newsweek’s Silicon Valley Future Superstars (April 2010).

Experienced entrepreneur, Bart will talk about the strategy used by Disney for developing mobile games and how can this be employed by startups for creating smartphone hits. The talks will be followed by questions from the audience and free networking.

Attendance to the event is free of charge upon online registration at: http://www.eventbrite.com/e/how-to-make-smartphone-hits-with-bart-decrem-senior-vp-walt-disney-tickets-9565746405

 

TechHub Bucharest is the first co-working space in Romania addressed exclusively to tech specialists, from entrepreneurs to developers, designers, or employees of companies of varying sizes that want to work in a creative and dynamic environment. TechHub Bucharest is divided between permanent offices for resident members, co-working places, meeting rooms and an event space hosting weekly meetups on technology and entrepreneurship subjects. The TechHub Bucharest membership also includes access to the global TechHub network as well as preferential access to the events organized by TechHub and the online community.

The Romanian Game Developers Association (RGDA) is a non-profit organization whose purpose is to support and promote the Romanian video game developers market. RGDA is a useful work group open not only for video game industry professionals, but also for those who wish to start a career in this area.

December 5, 2013 |

Lisbon Challenge finished and here are the top 10 finalists (seven teams from Portugal, two from Germany and one from Romania).
The Romanian startup which qualified (from five of them) is Monitor Backlinks (10.000 EUR in prize). Congratulations!

Lisbon-Challenge-logoSince the 28th of August, the 74 startups were given over 900 hours of training, around 60 workshops and several mentoring sessions with global professionals (including experts from Google, PayPal, Softlayer, SAGE, Portugal Telecom, Seedcamp and many others) as part of the Lisbon Challenge acceleration program.
Only 10 startups were selected of the total 25 finalists.
These will have the opportunity to pitch investors in London, New York and São Paulo. On top of this opportunity, there are many other prizes: in all there is a money prize of 150 thousand euro (no strings attached) and around three million euro in services, such as 30 years of free office facilities offered by the Lisbon City Council.

Winners:

Orankl.com – a reviews platform that allows any online store to have a fully featured, customizable, and manageable review system with the minimal amount of effort.
Cell2B.com – a biotech company dedicated to the development of advanced cellular therapies.
WHALElabs.com – advanced tools allowing brands to better manage and track their social audience over any of their digital domains.
MonitorBacklinks.com – marketeer tool to achieve better rankings on Google and get more traffic for companies or their clients.
GetGlean.com – web and mobile app for social performance management to foster personal and organizational development.
MyChildNow.com – a parent engagement and learning management system that helps Day Care Centers and Preschools focus on child development instead of paperwork.
Stuffle.it – a flea-market or garage sale on your iPhone.
Limetr.ee – an organized and safe way to store your children´s moments online.
Vertequip.com – innovative technologies and equipments to work at heights in a safer, cheaper and more productive way.
YdreamsRobotics.com – this is spin-off company, specializing in robotics and mechatronics.

Read More…

November 14, 2013 |

knotch-logoThe Romanian startup Knotch, based in San Francisco, just announced that it secured a 1.5 million dollars in new funding.
The round was led by by Michael and Xochi Birch – the founders of Bebo, with additional contributions from Avadis Tevanian – a former top Apple technologist, Lars Rasmussen – a Facebook engineer who helped create Google Maps when he worked at the search giant, the venture firms Greylock and Lightspeed, and others.

The news was first mentioned in The New York Times, Tech section (read it here).

Knotch (the iPhone app) is a fun and simple way to capture and share their opinions on the world (in colors) with their friends and followers. To brands, artists, politicians, etc, Knotch is a source of accurate & structured sentiment data on topics relevant to them.

With a Twitter-like following model in play on the social side, Knotch allows you to see what your friends are sharing, as well as the topics trending across the network itself.

The team at Knotch (founders Anda Gansca – Romanian – and Stephanie Volftsun) also told that Knotch will be available on the web as well (you can sign up on the waiting list here).

Good luck, Knotch, in making this new social network into something big!

knotch-social-network-opinions-funding1

Read More…

November 2, 2013 |

Alin Stanescu, Krisztian Szabo and Andrei Pusoiu, the three co-funders of Evolso (based in Cluj-Napoca, Romania), just launched the app right after 2013 switched to 2014.
The app is avalable in the Google Play store, with an iOS App Store version coming soon (end of January). The website part of it is online at www.evolso.com.

 

What Evolso does?

evolso-logoIn short, Evolso allows you to connect with people and events around you.

For this you have to follow several steps:
– download the app from Google Play
– create an account
– check in the places you want and start receiving events organized in those places
– connect with people interested in the same places and events

 

If you want to promote an event (say you maybe own a place and organize events there) you have to:
– download the app
– contact Evolso so they’ll provide you with an account
– login to that account and create the event you want to promote
– watch the analytics telling you what’s going on with your event

 

The team of seven (three co-founders and four others) are bootstrapping the startup for now, but they are looking for investment also.
They started this in 2012 while participating at StartupWeekend Cluj-Napoca, first edition.
Some competitors of them are twoo.com. newmeet.com. blendr.com badoo.com meetme.com (eventbrite.com too).

See a video presentation of the service next.

Read More…

January 4, 2014 |

The best European startup was determined during the Startup AddVenture conference in Kiev (Ukraine) on the 5th of December.

It turned out to be the world’s first cloud-hosted 3D game development platform – PlayCanvas from the UK. The winners got a €25,000 investment and a real boxing championship belt.

startup-addventure-playcanvas

A total of 350 teams have applied for Startup Competition through AngelList. A jury of 20 angel investors and seed fund representatives from Europe, the CIS and the US were to decide on the winner. The jury was headed by Dave McClure, the founder of the world’s largest seed fund, 500 Startups (USA) and Kaushal Chokshi, the president of Cross Border Angels (USA). The finalists of the competition have taken a three-day intensive pitching training at Happy Farm Business Accelerator.

Ukrainian startup, LeadScanner, is first runner-up and has received a $25,000 investment. LeadScanner is a lead generation tool that helps SMBs find prospecting clients in social media and boost sales. Using proprietary algorithms, LeadScanner finds social media users who have a validated intent to buy specific products or services, and then provides their social contacts to the interested local businesses. It is developed by YouScan team, headed by Aleksey Orap.

startup-addventure-leadscanner

 

Short list of Startup Competition finalists:

Read More…

December 10, 2013 |

The 2013 edition of How to Web tech conference ended (Bucharest, 20-21 Nov) and with it also the Startup Spotlight competition came to an end too.
Out of 32 competing teams, 8 finalists were chosen.

The jury which evaluated these startups was formed by experts such as Paul Ford (VP Softlayer, USA), Radu Georgescu (serial entrepreneur and angel investor, RO), Mike Butcher (Senior Editor TechCrunch, UK), Daniel Lynch (Managing Partner 3TS) or Teodor Ceausu (Country Manager IXIA Romania). The jury reviewed the startups by looking at their team fit and experiences, market size & trend, market validation & traction, customer acquisition cost, scalability and overall feasibility.

The big winner is a Bulgarian startup names Smart Hand that is engineering advanced mioelectric prosthetic hand for disabled people.

smart-hand-startup-spotlight-winner

The runner-up startup was Synetiq from Hungary which is providing businesses with valuable emotional insights about their marketing material directly from their customers’ brain (with the help of a neuromarketing software, called Mindr).

The IXIA Innovation award (IXIA is the main partner of Startup Spotlight) went to Wyliodrin from Romania – easy web based development for your embedded devices.

The last special prize, Best Pitch, went to DataMaid (Bulgaria) which is a tool for creating and publishing rich media content on the go.

Here are the 8 finalists of Startup Spotlight competition.

Read More…

November 23, 2013 |

Startup Spotlight, the startup competition which is part of the How to Web tech conference (Bucharest, 20-21 November 2013), announced the 32 startups which will be part of this competition. The startups selected are from Central and Eastern European countries.

– AirPlusPlus (Romania)
– Appticles (Romania / UK)
– Blogvio (Romania)
– Colosseo (Romania)
– Comperio.co (Poland)
– Daisy Pi (Romania)
– DataMaid (Bulgaria)
– Doitfor (Romania)
– Eventyard (Bulgaria)
– GameMatch (Romania)
– GloriaFood (Romania)
– Haute – Fashion Color Advice (Romania)
– Kiteops (Romania)
– KOLOS (Bulgaria)
– Minutizer (Romania)
– Monitor Backlinks (Romania)
– Omnipaste (Romania)
– Pneumo Project (Greece)
– RenderStreet (Romania)
– Smart Hand (Bulgaria)
– Snapper.VU (Romania)
– SOPRESO (Hungary)
– Sportwavez (Hungary)
– Spot the Number (Romania)
– Squirrly (Romania / UK)
– StatAce (Bulgaria)
– Synetiq (Hungary)
– TruckTrack (Serbia)
– Turbo Translations (Poland)
– Wallet Buzz (Romania)
– Wyliodrin (Romania)
– Zzzzapp (Bulgaria)

How to Web blog has more information about the competition and the conference.

November 2, 2013 |

ventureconnect-logoVentureConnect‘s next session is scheduled for November 5, 2013, and it will be hosted by one of the most exciting locations in Bucharest: Digiplex Grand Cinema in Băneasa Shopping City.
Following the spring edition of this year, the new autumn event will include two pitch sessions. If the first part is designed for early-stage companies that are looking for a seed investment, in part two, there will be presentations of mature companies that need substantial capital infusion.

The 12 companies selected (some are tech companies too) for presenting on stage for this edition of VentureConnect show real business promise, and you can find a more detailed description of each below. This is the eight session of VentureConnect, the project starting in early 2010.

In time, over 300 companies from Romania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Croatia, Hungary and USA have applied for the previous VentureConnect sessions. Among them, the best 12 companies have been selected to present their businesses to more than 250 representatives from Central and South-East Europe.

Since then, VentureConnect has facilitated two major investments. On one hand, in 2011, www.tjobs.ro project, an online recruitment platform which attracted funding from Andreas Cser (business-angel Fraser Finance), Alexis Bonte and Post-Privatizare Foundation, and, on the other hand, BITTNET Systems (www.bittnetsystems.ro), market leader in the field of Network Training in Romania, has announced that would receive investment from Razvan Capatina, a Romanian business angel.

If you wish to attend the 5th of November session, drop a line to the event’s project manager, Alexandra Dumitru, at alexandra@prsteps.com.

See the companies which are pitching this time.

Read More…

October 29, 2013 |

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