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:
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.
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:
As you could see from yesterday’s post, there has been a Startup Competition going on at LeWeb, in Paris. Mike Butcher, from TechCrunch Europe and the French Minister of Internet just announced the winners of the competition.
