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Startup Weekend Cluj

“Ever wondered what it takes to be an entrepreneur?

The professional and personal challenges, the high and lows, the failures and the success?
Startup Weekend is a global grassroots movement of active and empowered entrepreneurs who are learning the basics of founding startups and launching successful ventures. It is the largest community of passionate entrepreneurs with over 400 past events in 100 countries around the world in 2011.
The non-profit organization is headquartered in Seattle, Washington but Startup Weekend organizers and facilitators can be found in over 200 cities around the world. From Mongolia to South Africa to London to Brazil, people around the globe are coming together for weekend long workshops to pitch ideas, form teams, and start companies.

All Startup Weekend events follow the same basic model: anyone is welcome to pitch their startup idea and receive feedback from their peers. Teams organically form around the top ideas (as determined by popular vote) and then it’s a 54 hour frenzy of business model creation, coding, designing, and market validation. The weekends culminate with presentations in front of local entrepreneurial leaders with another opportunity for critical feedback.

Whether entrepreneurs found companies, find a cofounder, meet someone new, or learn a skill far outside their usual 9-to-5, everyone is guaranteed to leave the event better prepared to navigate the chaotic but fun world of startups. If you want to put yourself in the shoes of an entrepreneur, register now for the best weekend of your life!”

The official Startup Weekend Cluj language is English. The organizers, the pitchers, the coaches and the jury will be speaking English. Why? Because it’s the Lingua Franca of startups, because we have invited international mentors and jury members, because we don’t want to exclude other nationalities and we want the world outside to know and understand what the heck we’re doing.

May 12, 2013 | Vlad Ciurca

CallerQ

The story behind the startup is this : after 10 years spent in sales for companies such as Siemens or Vodafone but also some smaller ones I realized that following up on sales calls is the single biggest reason that leads to success. You are expected as a salesman to make tens of calls each day for finding prospects but half of those calls don’t get answered or are being postponed for reasons related to not being a good time to talk on the mobile phone. So keeping track of hundreds of recurrent calls is difficult especially when traveling to/from the customer.

So I decided to find a tool to help me, and since I didn’t find any (even the mighty salesforce.com lacks this feature) I decided to build one. We started on Symbian in 2010 but scraped the idea after launching it and being hacked the second day we posted the app on ovistore.com (we were planning to make millions with it.
So we pivoted slightly and decided to give the app for free and charge the sales managers for analytics.
We switched to Android since Symbian died in the mean time and plan to release beta soon .

But we went to HowtoWeb and received tremendous positive feedback except the whole thing can be copied very easily which makes it un-attractive to invest.
Which kind of sucked again.

So we pivoted slightly, again , and decided to build the biggest call center in the world for the use of startups alone.
Why have 500 seats call center of talking “robots” when we can build a platform that connects startups and their digital products to sales professionals around the world that use our CallReScheduler app (which is essentially a call center function on your mobile phone) to sell directly to customers in their own country in their native language?

So, now we try to raise some capital (50k) to power up the SalesArena.com , a place for “gladiators” in sales that not only make a commission on each sale but also are awarded by stars and stripes in the community by proven track record of sales.
This is huge for sales professionals since there is no other way to attest their capabilities in sales.

April 21, 2013 | Sergiu Bologa

TheShopPage

Idea Exchange

Idea Exchange is a monthly networking event with special guest where participants can pitch their ideas by presenting a 2 minutes elevator pitch. Each edition brings about a special guest, an established entrepreneur that shares his experiences and offers feedback on the pitches.
The meetings are held at Readers Café in Bucharest (see the address).

Why attend?
• To meet like-minded young people
• To talk with investors and established entrepreneurs
• To validate your business idea with the audience by pitching it

March 24, 2013 | Romanian Startups

Brainient

BrainRolls is a cross-device interactive video platform that enables brands, advertisers, publishers and networks to create, deliver and measure interactive video campaigns across a multitude of platforms and devices. Customers use the BrainRolls platform to enhance their video campaigns, increase dwell time, drive engagement and generate conversions.

Products:
BrainRolls increases brand metrics such as engagement, dwell time and total time spent with your adverts. As a customer, you’ll be able to track all the metrics and export beautiful reports by using our real-time analytics dashboard.

The BrainRolls Studio is an interactive video editor that enables customers to create interactive video ads in less than 10 minutes. Clients can use a multitude of studio Apps, ranging from Engagement Apps such as our product carousel, branded Ad-selector, YouTube gallery or Twitter feed to Click-through Apps like Facebook, Pinterest, Amazon, etc.

Acquired by the video ad company Teads.

March 20, 2013 | Romanian Startups

Startup Weekend Mures

Startup Weekend Mures is an intense 54 hour event where a community of entrepreneurs, startup enthusiasts, developers, designers, marketing gurus and anyone interested in building a business will come together over the course of a weekend to share ideas, form teams, and launch a startup.

Though I don’t think Startup Weekends need any further presentation, let’s just make a summary. You get 3 days to make your idea known, validate it by seeing the excitement it gets when spoken out loud and seeing the people ready to adopt it and work on it. You get to create a team to work on your idea or adopt and work on someone else’s idea. You test your skills working on wireframing, designing, coding, or creating the business plan, marketing and communication plan for a business. And in the end, you present your work, get feedback and maybe get the fame that comes from winning the competition.

Whether you have a business idea or a skill that is necessary in building a successful startup, this event is one that aspiring entrepreneurs should not miss. Concept pitching and team building will take place on day one; teams will be formed around concepts and various skills that are brought to the table leaving the remainder of the weekend to mind mapping, strategizing and building a real business. There will be knowledgeable and successful entrepreneurs in attendance to inspire, share and help the teams throughout the weekend. The final day teams will have the opportunity to pitch their business to a panel of judges where real prizes and services can be won.

Startup Weekend is a global network of passionate leaders and entrepreneurs on a mission to inspire, educate, and empower individuals, teams and communities. Come share ideas, form teams, and launch startups.
The non-profit organization is headquartered in Seattle, Washington but Startup Weekend organizers and facilitators can be found in over 200 cities around the world. From Mongolia to South Africa to London to Brazil, people around the globe are coming together for weekend long workshops to pitch ideas, form teams, and start companies.

April 21, 2013 | Romanian Startups

Privacy Policy

Privacy Policy:

Romanian Startups (“Romanian Startups“) operates RomanianStartups.com and may operate other websites. It is Romanian Startups’ policy to respect your privacy regarding any information we may collect while operating our websites.

Website Visitors

Like most website operators, Romanian Startups collects non-personally-identifying information of the sort that web browsers and servers typically make available, such as the browser type, language preference, referring site, and the date and time of each visitor request. Romanian Startups’ purpose in collecting non-personally identifying information is to better understand how Romanian Startups’ visitors use its website. From time to time, Romanian Startups may release non-personally-identifying information in the aggregate, e.g., by publishing a report on trends in the usage of its website.

Romanian Startups also collects potentially personally-identifying information like Internet Protocol (IP) addresses for logged in users and for users leaving comments on RomanianStartups.com blogs/sites. Romanian Startups only discloses logged in user and IP addresses under the same circumstances that it uses and discloses personally-identifying information as described below, except that IP addresses are visible and disclosed to the administrators of the Website.

Gathering of Personally-Identifying Information

Certain visitors to Romanian Startups’ websites choose to interact with Romanian Startups in ways that require Romanian Startups to gather personally-identifying information. The amount and type of information that Romanian Startups gathers depends on the nature of the interaction. For example, we ask visitors who sign up at RomanianStartups.com to provide a username and email address. We are also asking identifying information about the entities added to our database by the registered users (entities like startups, events, accelerators/incubators) and personally-identifying information about the founders/organizers of those entities (those information include photos). The website needs these kind of information in order to function properly and be informative (some information is mandatory while other kind of information is not – like the addressess or phone numbers). Also, those who engage in transactions with Romanian Startups are asked to provide additional information, including as necessary the personal and financial information required to process those transactions. In each case, Romanian Startups collects such information only insofar as is necessary or appropriate to fulfill the purpose of the visitor’s interaction with Romanian Startups. Romanian Startups does not disclose personally-identifying information other than as described below. The visitors can always refuse to supply personally-identifying information, with the caveat that it may prevent them from engaging in certain website-related activities. By filling out and submitting the Add Startups/Events/Accelerators/Incubators forms you agree with this information being displayed publicly (the phone numbers are only displayed to the visitors who are registered to the website while the email is never displayed). If you don’t want this information to be displayed publicly then don’t register to the website and don’t add any entity.

Aggregated Statistics

Romanian Startups may collect statistics about the behavior of visitors to its websites. Romanian Startups may display this information publicly or provide it to others. However, Romanian Startups does not disclose personally-identifying information other than as described below.

Protection of Certain Personally-Identifying Information

Romanian Startups discloses potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information (like the IP addressess or email addresses) only to those of its employees, contractors and affiliated organizations that (i) need to know that information in order to process it on Romanian Startups’ behalf or to provide services available at Romanian Startups’ websites, and (ii) that have agreed not to disclose it to others. Some of those employees, contractors and affiliated organizations may be located outside of your home country; by using Romanian Startups’ websites, you consent to the transfer of such information to them. Romanian Startups will not rent or sell potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information to anyone other than to its employees, contractors and affiliated organizations, as described above, Romanian Startups discloses potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information only in response to a subpoena, court order or other governmental request, or when Romanian Startups believes in good faith that disclosure is reasonably necessary to protect the property or rights of Romanian Startups, third parties or the public at large. If you are a registered user of an Romanian Startups website and have supplied your email address, Romanian Startups may occasionally send you an email to tell you about new features, solicit your feedback, or just keep you up to date with what’s going on with Romanian Startups and our products. If you send us a request (for example via email or via one of our feedback mechanisms), we reserve the right to publish it in order to help us clarify or respond to your request or to help us support other users. Romanian Startups takes all measures reasonably necessary to protect against the unauthorized access, use, alteration or destruction of potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information.

Other kind of information, like photos, addressess and description details (especially for founders/organizers) are displayed publicly by default because this is what makes the website useful. By filling out and submitting the Add Startups/Events/Accelerators/Incubators forms you agree with this information being displayed publicly (the phone numbers are only displayed to the visitors who are registered to the website while the email is never displayed). If you don’t want this information to be displayed publicly then don’t register to the website and don’t add any entity.

If you are one of which personally-identifying information was entered and displayed publicly (like the phone number, address, email address or photo), information which you didn’t add or consent to yourself (other than information which is already on the Internet), and wish that information to be taken down please contact us using the Contact page. You have to understand that this is an information website, its usefullness stays in the information it offers to the public. Depending on your request, we may have to take down your whole profile (if you are a founder/organizer), including the profile of the entity you are associated with.

Cookies

A cookie is a string of information that a website stores on a visitor’s computer, and that the visitor’s browser provides to the website each time the visitor returns. Romanian Startups uses cookies to help Romanian Startups identify and track visitors, their usage of Romanian Startups website, and their website access preferences. Romanian Startups visitors who do not wish to have cookies placed on their computers should set their browsers to refuse cookies before using Romanian Startups’ websites, with the drawback that certain features of Romanian Startups’ websites may not function properly without the aid of cookies.

Business Transfers

If Romanian Startups, or substantially all of its assets, were acquired, or in the unlikely event that Romanian Startups goes out of business or enters bankruptcy, user information would be one of the assets that is transferred or acquired by a third party. You acknowledge that such transfers may occur, and that any acquirer of Romanian Startups may continue to use your personal information as set forth in this policy.

Ads appearing on any of our websites may be delivered to users by advertising partners, who may set cookies. These cookies allow the ad server to recognize your computer each time they send you an online advertisement to compile information about you or others who use your computer. This information allows ad networks to, among other things, deliver targeted advertisements that they believe will be of most interest to you. This Privacy Policy covers the use of cookies by Romanian Startups and does not cover the use of cookies by any advertisers.

Privacy Policy Changes

Although most changes are likely to be minor, Romanian Startups may change its Privacy Policy from time to time, and in Romanian Startups’ sole discretion. Romanian Startups encourages visitors to frequently check this page for any changes to its Privacy Policy. If you have a RomanianStartups.com account, you might also receive (but not necessarily) an alert informing you of these changes. Your continued use of this site after any change in this Privacy Policy will constitute your acceptance of such change.

April 14, 2013 | Romanian Startups

VentureConnect

In two years,VentureConnect has become a milestone for local entrepreneurial initiatives and an investment hub for Eastern Europe, facilitating two venture investments and paving the way for over112 other entrepreneurial projects for the investor’s community.

This spring, entrepreneurs and investors meet at Grand Cinema Digiplex, Room 11, Floor 1 at Baneasa Shopping City on 28th May. We are uplifting the event location and making sure all pitching entrepreneurs feel just as Steve Jobs himself.
Starting with this spring and in addition to the collaboration of VentureConnect – Ziarul Financiar, we are giving our pitching session a new spin with two tracks: up to 12 promising entrepreneurial projects from Romania and the region.

First, we welcome early stage start-ups looking for quality networking, extensive training courses, result-driven feedback and seed investments. Next, we are happy to have on stage more mature companies, with a more elaborate service or product in search of venture capital to expand their business network in Romania and international markets.

Is your business changing the Tech/IT/Online ecosystem? Are you looking for feedback and business mentoring? Interested in seed or venture investments? Looking for extensive and long-lasting business partnerships?

Apply Now: http://www.ventureconnect.ro/apply-now-for-venture-connect/!
For additional information, please contact Alexandra Dumitru, Project Manager VentureConnect at alexandra.dumitru@ventureconnect.ro

March 28, 2013 | Romanian Startups

Startup Live Bucharest

People from different backgrounds come together to present ideas, listen to new thoughts, work their asses off and get to know each other.

This is steroids for your idea. Pitch, form your team, work, get feedback from startups, experts and mentors, present what you have achieved in front of about 80 people including experts from all over Europe. The process is accompanied by coaches, business angels, start-up entrepreneurs and all other participants. You get to know all these people in an informal way, usually standing there with a beer in hand hooking up with your future investors or mentors.

March 22, 2013 | Andrei Mihai Balan

Startup Live Cluj-Napoca

In a unique atmosphere, people from various backgrounds come together, get to know each other and develop early business drafts to a level where they are presented to investors. Participants can either pitch their own business idea, or help a presenter develop their project. The main objective is to form interdisciplinary teams whereby ventures are pushed to the next level.

In this 2nd Cluj-Napoca Startup Live series, we are going to emphasize the lean business principle which is based on customer-driven product development. The teams therefore will be asked to survey their potential customers to get instant feedback.
During the development process, the groups will receive guidance by coaches, business angels and former start-up entrepreneurs. The highlight of the weekend will be the final presentation in front of a panel of experts, who will provide insightful feedback.
On top of that, Startup Live offers networking at its best – meet your future co-founder or even investor during the event.

Startup Live is a three-day startup event that provides networking, resources and incentives for individuals and teams to go from idea to launch in just one weekend.
It was launched by STARTeurope, an extensive network of entrepreneurs, investors, experts and numerous impressive people through organizing various events surrounding entrepreneurship in Europe.

March 14, 2013 | Marius Mocian

The Romanian Internet Tech Startups Directory