I’m happy to announce that we’re gladly continuing our media partnership with Finovate, the leading conference in innovative financial services startups.

Finovate, after holding their first European conference, will return to San Francisco on May 10 and 11, with an expanded two-day showcase of dozens of the biggest and most innovative new ideas in financial and banking technology. As a subscriber of TheStartup, you are eligible for a special discount – see below for more details.

Last year’s event sold out, so the event has moved to a larger venue in 2011 to keep up with demand. FinovateSpring offers an unparalleled opportunity to watch the cutting edge of banking and financial technology unfold, along with the chance to network with hundreds of leading financial executives, venture capitalists, press, industry analysts, bloggers, and fintech entrepreneurs. With only 7 minutes afforded to each demoing company, no other event packs as much unique value into just two
days.

After completing its extensive screening process, FinovateSpring is pleased to announce the following companies who will be demoing this May in San Francisco:

Afiniate, Aptys Solutions, Arroweye Solutions, Backbase, Balance Financial, BancVue, Bill.com, Billeo, BillFloat, Bills.com, BillShrink, Braintree, Bundle, ChargeSmart, Clovr Media, Code Green, Crossroads Financial Technologies, Currensee, doxo, Dwolla, edo Interactive, Enloop, eWise, Expensify, Experian, Figlo, Fiserv, Gold Bullion International, Gratio Capital, HelloWallet, HOYOS, ID Analytics, Ideon, Intellaegis, Kabbage, Kiboo, Kony Solutions, Lend Street, Lendio, Liqpay.com, Mint.com, MyBankTracker.com, oFlows, Pageonce, PayDivvy, PayNearMe, PayPal/Discover, peerTransfer, ProfitStars, Q2ebanking, Ready Receipts, Silver Tail Systems, TILE Financial, TrustedID, Wikinvest, Wipro, and Xero.

In addition to the above companies, a handful of stealth startups and large established players will be announced closer to the conference date.

As part of theStartup’s partnership with Finovate, we’ve negotiated a special discount specifically for our members. On the registration page, simply enter the discount code TheStartupSpring to save 10% off the ticket price. Regular tickets will be available until April 29, but tickets are going fast – register now to lock in your spot!

For more information or to register for FinovateSpring, visit www.finovatespring.com.

On February 1, 2011, the Finovate conference series goes to London to showcase cutting-edge financial and banking technology innovations from and for the European market.

FinovateEurope will feature the unique mix of short, fast-paced demos (no slides allowed) from handpicked fintech companies and intimate networking time with each demoing company’s top executives that Finovate events are famous for in the US. They do two events per year, in NYC and SF.

FinovateEurope 2011 is less than two months away, and the conference is really starting to take shape. Technological innovation in the financial world is continuing at a remarkable rate despite the current economic uncertainty, and the Finovate team was pleased to see such a strong pool of quality applicants for their first European event. While this meant some difficult decisions for the Finovate team, it means a day packed full of exciting, innovative demos for us.

This are some of the presenting companies:

Early Registration Tickets are on sale through December 22. As an official FinovateEurope partner, we are offering a special discount code, TheStartup10, which will save you an additional 10% off the current ticket price. If you register before the deadline you can save £170 and attend for only £625! See you in London!

Today was the startup competition day at LeWeb, and the 16 finalists got the chance to pitch the audience and be judged by some pretty high-profile people. David Hornik, from August Capital, was moderating.

You already know what this startups are doing but I’ll refresh your mind anyways.

• Badgeville

Badgeville is a white label social rewards & analytics platform to make it easy to increase the loyalty and engagement of your web audience. Basically they bring Foursquare-like badges and other kind of achievements to your website.
Badgeville is projecting some $1m in revenues for Q1 ‘11 and is officially launching in Europe today. They already got some investments and coverage.

• Deways

Deways is a personal car sharing community born to target the suburbs. People share their own cars. The average price will be around €0.20 per km. Read TechCrunch Europe article.

• Garmz

Designers can promote and present themselves through uploading their work and get instant feedback from a worldwide audience and customers. If a design is successful, Garmz handles the complete production and offers a complete webshop system, selling the finished fashion to customers worldwide.

Garmz is a Seedcamp 2010 winner.

• Greendizer

A free and open platform to aggregate invoices, messages and payments with customers using only their email address. The team, from Morocco, is very passionate and has a really big vision. Execution will be a problem.

• GreenPocket

Green pocket is a software provider for the interpretation and visualization of smart meter consumption data. The company already secured its Series A round. The centerpiece of the GreenPocket technology is the Energy Expert Engine (EEE), which uses algorithmic and heuristic processes to enable the intelligent interpretation of energy and water consumption data. Energy monitoring tools enable this data to be visualized via web portals, wall-mounted devices or iPhone applications in a consumer-friendly and trendsetting way.

• Needium

Needium monitors social media sources and detects business opportunities based on local user needs and life events. It also listens for merchant name mentions (reputation management). Same stuff as a LOT of other people around.

• Nuji

Nuji makes shopping better by revolutionizing the way you interact with real-world objects. You can tag real world objects via pictures and barcode scanning and online objects via a bookmarklet, you will then get deals on the objects you like.

Nuji is a Seedcamp 2010 winner.

• Paper.li

Paper.li organizes links shared on Twitter into an easy to read newspaper-style format. Newspapers can be created for any Twitter user, list or #tag. A great way to stay on top of all that is shared by the people you follow – even if you are not connected 24/7. Paper.li is already established having got some pretty good coverage, investors bidding on it and Guy Kawasaky as an advisor.

• Phonedeck

Phonedeck is a call productivity application for mobile aficionados. For every incoming call phonedeck shows you automatically who is calling on your computer. Caller profile displays information from your phone book, emails, past SMS, twitter and various social networks. Not bad at all. Read TC EU coverage.

• Pinpoints

PinPoints allows an address to be converted in a short url that can be then shared via emails, SMS, forum posts, blogs, tweets etc. Basically a Bit.ly for maps. Big deal. TC EU covers it.

• Sociablitz

Still not sure what Sociabliz was doing there as they advertise themselves as a social media agency. They have some proprietary software for Facebook Pages marketing. Super big deal.

• Super Marmite

The first social network to buy and sell homemade dishes. Won’t comment that much on this. Basically if you’re hungry your neighbor can cook you dinner and you pay him.

• TagPay

TagPay’s revolutionary technology can transform any mobile phone into a secure payment or authentication tool. This sounded pretty cool indeed, but the founder didn’t explain very well the technology. They are using audio to make payments. You don’t need a bank account, you just need a phone number, and once you receive a payment you automatically have an account. They are targeting african countries.

• Tinypay.me

A very easy was to start selling whatever you want online. Hmm.. it’s 2010? Anyways, they announced a new version of their service which includes marketplaces.

• Waze

Waze is a social mobile application providing free turn-by-turn navigation based on the live conditions of the road. The israeli company is moving to Palo Alto and news just broke that they raised a MASSIVE $25m series B round. Not really fair. They already have some 2.2 million drivers on their platform.

• Work for us

Work for Us, Facebook’s #1 recruiting app, allows companies to find and hire candidates through the world’s largest social network. Over 3,000 companies use the “Work for Us” application (growing at a rate of 1,000 per month). Key clients include Accenture, PwC, Cisco, L’Oréal, American Apparel, P&G, Sodexo, Amadeus, and Areva.

A few words regarding this startup competition.
There was a big french presence and I need to say that while I respect the decisions of the people who selected these companies, in my opinion this is not the best of the european scene. Also, these companies are in completely different stages so its pretty impossibile for someone like Nuji to compete with Waze and its $25 millions in the bank. I think there should be strict rules in startup competition but unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be the case. Ever. NY Techcunch Disrupt conference had the same problem. (Soluto won, having $8 million in the bank while Ujam founded just 2 months earlier and with an awesome product got nothing).
But without further adue, here are my 3 predicted finalists:

• Paper.li
• Waze
• Badgeville

This are also the companies that are well ahead and strongly positioned to be big successes (not really sure for Badgeville, lot of things I don’t like there), and the ones that are out of the league in this competition. My special mentions goes to TagPay.

We’ll see tomorrow who the actual finalists and presenters will be. Tonight I’m off at the official LeWeb party with Bob Sinclair.

After an amazing conference last year, where I was called on stage with Gary Vaynerchuck and Kevin Rose thanks to a post that went on the twitter wall, I’m pleased to offer theStartup.eu an exclusive 15% discount code to Future Of Web Apps London 2010.

The speaker list is really impressive and includes amazing foudners suchs as Jason Calacanis (Mahalo), Nick Halstead (TweetMeme), SandyJen (Meebo), Andrew Mason (Groupon), Mike McDerment (Freshbooks), Andy McLoughlin (Huddle), Joe Stump (SimpleGeo) and Josh Williams (Gowalla). Take a look at the full speakers list.

The conference will be structured as a 2-days 2-tracks event plus one day of workshops (last year I attended Mike’s “The A-Z of building a successful web app” and it was amazing).

So, free up some space on your calendars for October 4-6 2010 and book your flights to London. You can register here, be sure to enter the code 15DISC to get your 15% discount.

If you already know what SeedCamp is and can’t wait to apply, please do so right here.

Seedcamp Week will be held from 21^st to 25^th September at UCL in central London. It is a weeklong programme that connects 20 early stage web tech startups with over 400 highly experienced and sought after entrepreneurs, investors, marketers, product and developer experts.  Along with current board members Saul Klein and Reshma Sohoni, the chosen teams will also have access to Seedcamp’s recently appointed board members who have been selected for their broad range of entrepreneurial experience and international background in order to help Seedcamp deliver its mission to build a world-class, sustainable entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Just to name a few:

• Fred Destin, partner at Atlas Ventures
• Charles Grimsdale, co-founder of Eden Ventures
• Alex Hoye, co-founder of GoIndustry plc
• Christoph Maire, Head of Maps & Explore Unit, Nokia Services
• Dave McClure, Founders Fund
• Richard Moross, founder and CEO, Moo.com

The week will include interactive panel discussions, master classes and several informal 1:1 sessions. Teams will gain invaluable insight and a solid foundation to help kick-start a viable business in Europe today.

“The beauty of Seedcamp is that a start-up can fill his or her Rolodex in one day with quality business contacts that it would normally take five years to build.  We want to help entrepreneurs experience the whole rainbow, not just the pot of gold at the end.” Reshma Sohoni said.

At the end of the week Seedcamp will invest up to €50K each in 5 teams for a small equity stake (5%-10%). That’s enough money to move to London for 3 months and start building the product and the company. It’s not just work: weekly dinners, topical lunches, conferences, and continued mentorship, culminating in further Demo and Investor Days will make the stay invaluable as well as unforgettable. A trip to the Valley is also planned.

You can check the highlights of the 2007/2008 editions and follow Seedcamp on Twitter. If you missed the application link, here it is.

You may have noticed the banner on our sidebar, that’s because we are official media partners for Future Of Web Applications London 2009.

FOWA is one of the major conferences in the european tech scene, and each years features inspiring talks from the most influential people in the industry. This year looks promising as always.

If you’d like to get the feeling, you can watch video recordings of previous editions. Inspiring stuff.

To celebrate summer finally hitting the UK, Carsonified are having an absolute scorcher of a sale!

10 seats at 50% off (save £167.50)
20 seats at 25% off (save £83.75)
30 seats at 10% off (save £33.50)

If youre not quick enough to grab one of the first 10 there is still a chance to save some pennies as the sale will continue with the further 50 discounted passes.

This special offer applies to 2 day conference passes to FOWA London 09 only.

Keep your ears to the ground to find out where and when to get your Summer Sale pass!

Update: The FOWA Summer Sale - http://thinkvitamin.com/ will launch on 9th July at http://www.carsonified.com/

Today I’m attending Frontiers of Interaction V conference in Rome, a great event that each year brings together all the innovators and interaction designers.
Each year they chose a theme, and 2009’s is “smart cities, internet of things and social networking”.

The program is very interesting:

09,30 Welcome message from Leeander & Matteo Penzo
09:40 Bruce Sterling (Video) | Science Fiction Writer
||| About the Real Frontiers of Interaction |||
09:50 Fabio Sergio | Creative Director FROG DESIGN
||| Sing the Body Electric|||
10:10 Daniele Galiffa & Manuel Lima | Infovis + VISUAL COMPLEXITY
||| Discover the beauty of visual complexity in the age of infinite interconnectedness |||
10:30 Antonio Tombolini | CEO at Simplicissimus
||| Tutto parla: impara ad ascoltare le cose |||
10:50 Demo Site.
11:00 coffee break
11:20 Roberto Bonzio | Journalist at Reuters
||| “Frontiers Italians” |||
11:40 Riccardo Luna | WIRED ITALIA Director
||| ItAliens |||
12:00 KEYNOTE: Adam Greenfield | Author of “Everyware: The dawning age of ubiquitous computing”
||| Elements of a networked urbanism |||
12:30 David Orban | European Lead, Singularity University.
||| The Consciousness Panopticon |||
12,50 …video
13,00 Lunch
14:15 Joe Ferrari (Web Art Director di Wave Group) | Korinami (Sound Designer)
||| MUSIC & Video Live performance |||
14:30 KEYNOTE: Davide Bocelli & Alex Rose (video) | Long Now Foundation
||| La Long Now Foundation |||
15:00 Andrea Gaggioli | Università Cattolica di Milano
||| “Ecologia Partecipativa” |||
15:20 Matt Jones | Founder DOPPLR
||| The New Negroponte Switch |||
15,40 Coffee Break
16:00 Max Ramaciotti, Davide Casali & Luca Lisci | Maison,the
||| Community di Percorso: Pollicino nel bosco crossmediale |||
16:20 Carlo Maria Medaglia | Università La Sapienza, CATTID
||| Ubiquitous Computing |||
16:40 Luca Simeone & Salvatore Iaconesi | Vianet + Rhizome
||| Ubiquitous Anthropology |||
17:00 Andrea Vaccari | Senseable City Lab, MIT Boston
||| The Real Time City |||
17:20 Luisella Giani | Country Manager Italy Netlog
||| Web Celebrity |||
17:40 Conclusions with Leeander, Matteo, Carlo
18:00 End

I will try to write about the most important and cool stuff that comes out today, and maybe interview some entrepreneurs.
They also offer live streaming of the event.

Update: Online the first batch of pics.

Today Next09 opens up. The Next Conference is one of the most important happenings in the european tech scene. Started in 2005 it is now a 1500-participants conference.
The theme for this year will be: Share Economy, inspired by the following idea: “The more we share our success with others, the more we profit ourselves.” of Martin Weitzman.
The conference, organised by SinnerSchrader, will take place at Kampnagel in Hamburg today and tomorrow.

Expect a recap from us soon!

Here is a summary of the most important upcoming events in Europe.
We will try to cover as much of them as possibile.

• April 20th: Mini Seedcamp London.

http://seedcamp.com/pages/london09


• April 21st: Geek’n'Rolla London.

http://www.amiando.com/geeknrolla.html


• April 24th: Nonic Bilbao.

http://nonickconference.com/


• April 28th: Amazon Web Services Startup-Tour London.

http://aws.amazon.com/startupproject/


• April 28th-30th: Internet World London.

http://www.internetworld.co.uk/


• April 29th: Working Capital Camp Catania.

http://www.workingcapitalcamp.com/catania


• May 5th: Next09 Hamburg.

http://www.next-conference.com/next09/


• May 19th – 20th: European Venture Market Berlin.

http://www.europeanventuremarket.com/


• May 22nd: TechGarage Rome.

http://www.techgarage.eu/


• May 27th: TechCrunch Nordic Talk Stockholm.

http://www.amiando.com/tcstockholm.html


• June 23rd: Fuel09 London.

http://events.carsonified.com/fuel/2009/london/