David Hornik just announced the LeWeb 2010 Startup Competition winner(s). The three finalists selected by the jury were Paper.li, Waze and Super Marmite. After their presentation the jury was supposed to choose gold, silver and bronze winners but it seems they weren’t able to find a winner so they revolutionized the prizes and decided to award three different prizes, making all of them winners:

First prize for virality: Paper.li

First prize for technology: Waze

First prize for originality: Super Marmite

BTW, got 2 out of 3.

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.

Silentale, the Paris-based startup that helps you keep track and backup all your conversations, just rolled out a major new feature: LinkedIn support.

If you don’t want to wait, and want to try it out you can get a special Silentale invite with the code: “theStartup.eu”. We have got 40 invites, hurry up.

I had the chance to try the product some time ago, and I find it really useful. In my opinion the LinkedIn connector will be a major game-changer for business users, allowing them to import contacts and conversations.

Laurent Pierssens commented on a quick note: “Our current users have massively requested the addition of LinkedIn Contacts for their Silentale account. It was the #1 requested connector, even in front of Facebook Messages.
We believe the reason is simple, the second use of the message is particularly important for professionals with a wide network of contacts.”
This feature was possible thanks to the recently launched LinkedIn API, and I’m sure it’s not gonna stop here.

Wozaik, a Paris-based startup which is developing a dynamic bookmarking system, is giving away 200 invites for an exclusive preview of their platform to theStartup.eu readers. You can grab one here.

You may have already heard of them as they were the winners of Mini Seedcamp Paris 2009, where they first demoed their product. They are still in private alpha, but will soon expand in a beta.

Wozaik provides you with a “mosaic view” of the web, meaning that you can place dynamic bookmarks on your wozaik page. That works with a bookmarklet, thanks to which you can clip portions on websites and insert them on your wozaik page. For example you could clip Techcrunch’s actively discussed posts, a market summary for a given stock, or some search results for a specific term.

If you are wondering how they are going to make money, they plan on generating revenue trough affiliations and a more classic freemium model. Premium features are however not disclosed at this time.

Let us know what you’re clipping in your wozaik. Here is a video that explains how it works.

LeWeb ‘09 looks more promising than ever. With the recent news of Queen Rania Al Abdullah attending on Dec 10th, the speakers’ list gets even more exciting.

To see the complete list of speakers you can either check the official list or follow the twitter list. As you can see the most famous internet stars will be there, and you should too.

I am an official blogger of LeWeb, and with many others I will be covering the event on twitter and on this blog. I suggest you follow the official bloggers’ twitter list.

The early bird ends on november 10, you can get a 10% discount on top of that with the following code: BLOG09.

Here is a video of the organizers, Loic and Geralindine, explaining the theme, program and speakers of LeWeb ‘09.

I’ll live blog the event, but I’d prefer to meet each and everyone of you over there!

• Germany: Earlybird has led a first round of financing for software company azeti Networks GmbH, alongside NRW Bank.
  Press release.
• France: Ventech and Auriga Partners have invested EUR 2m into software company BonitaSoft.
  Announcement.
• UK: Foresight Venture Partners and Octopus Group, via its Titan VCT fund, have invested, alongside private investors, in online CV and career profile provider iProfile, in a funding round worth more than £1.5m.
• Germany: A consortium of investors including Crédit Agricole Private Equity, Corporate Finance Partners CFP and Founders Investments GmbH & Co KGaA have invested an undisclosed amount into e-sports company Turtle Entertainment GmbH.
• France: Private equity firm Gimv has backed online furniture retailer Made in Design in a first institutional financing round worth EUR 4.5m.
  Press Release.

Sofinnova Partners led the second round of funding for enterprise social software company blueKiwi.
The funding amounts to €4.7 millions, making it one of the largest achieved in France since the beginning of the year on the small caps market.

The Paris-based company, apart from having a cool website, provides a software solution that enables people-centric organizations to create powerful and secure professional networks where employees, partners and customers can share conversations, ideas, skills, resources and best practice with one another. The very definition of enterprise social software.

“We are thrilled to complete this second tour and to welcome such a first class industrial partner as Dassault Systèmes” says Carlos Diaz, CEO of blueKiwi Software. “This strategic alliance will allow us to accelerate our international expansion and also to out-innovate new Enterprise 2.0 usages while elevating technological entry barriers”.

Dassault Systèmes, the worldwide leader in 3D and PLM solutions, is participating with more than €3 million and joining the board of the company. This new entry at blueKiwi Software’s board is a major milestone underlying a strategic technological and sales alliance signed by both companies to drive new growth opportunities and deliver on their shared vision of the Enterprise 2.0.

Olivier Sichel, partner at Sofinnova Partners concludes: “blueKiwi Software has a considerable potential of growth, encouraged by a steady increase of customers and a talented managerial team, now strengthened by Bernard Charlès joining as executive sponsor. This alliance is a perfect match and will propel the company at the first place with the ability to leverage Dassault Systèmes’ powerful team and exceptional experience”.

Some major venture capital activity today around Europe.

• Austria: Mobil Data gets €2.3 Millions

Wiener Wachstumsfonds and tecnet equity have invested more than EUR 2m into mobile working company mobil data, with part of the funding being used to acquire sector rival Tempore Zeiterfassungssysteme.


• France: Systancia gest €1.5 Millions

A Plus Finance has invested EUR 1.5m into Systancia, a server based computing company.


• UK: CMS SupaTrak raises third round of funding

YFM Group, via the South West Ventures Fund, has further invested in vehicle tracking and mobile working solutions company CMS SupaTrak in a third round of funding.