TheStartup.eu

This is a guest post by Andrea La Mesa, founder and CEO of PubliSoftWeb, an italian startup focused on developing social media presence for brands with their white-label My.So product. As I could not attend the event, he kindly offered to share the experience on theStartup.

Last weekend more than 100 web developers, web entrepreneur and other web enthusiasts gathered in London at PayPal offices to work on their ideas and launch a web app in 48 hours.

The weekend started on friday night, after a day-long conference where mentors and experts covered various subjects such as legal 101 for startups, digital PR, marketing and social media. (All the slides are online).

Soonafter everyone had a chance to pitch his own idea, in front of the other attendees. 35 people showed up and only 6 made it to the final round of voting.

Each of us had a chance to pick the idea he liked the most, and join the team.

You can find a video of each idea on TechFluff.tv.

The following 48 hours have been very challenging and inspiring. Each group found his balance, some natural leaders emerged, and tasks were split among the team members. Each of us had a chance to prove his value, sometimes in a field other than his core skills.

I was amazed to see that all of the six startups already had a prototype working by sunday at 4pm, with interesting business plans and marketing strategies.

For those who might be thinking that 48 hours are not enough to launch a business, here’s my point of view.

1) The experience of working with a team of strangers is professionally enriching, entertaining and enlightning.

2) I was actually amazed to see how much work can be achieved in a team, in just 48hrs. I will never allow myself to spend days and days thinking about the best way to do something;, after having seen so many results in just a few hours.

Whether or not these 6 startups will keep on developing their ideas is not what matters the most.

It’s the journey, not the destination.

Shazam, a London-based startup that lets you discover music with mobile applications, just announced some major news.

The company provides an audio discovery application for iPhones, Android, BlackBerry and some Nokia phones. It’s one of the most stunning and useful pieces of software I have ever used and I must say I’m in love with the app. Have you ever wondered the title of the song playing on the radio or in a club? Well with Shazam there’s no need to ask the DJ or call your friend saying “Hey do you know that song that goes lalalala”, you just need to put the phone close to the speakers and Shazam will discover the track for you. I use it at least once per day in my car or in clubs, and it has always worked. Impressive.

Back to the news itself, Shazam announced it has now more than 50 million users which is an increase of 15 million users since February of this year.

The company, which previously raised over $18 million from firms like DN Capital, Acacia Capital and IDG Ventures Europe, is now welcoming aboard Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, backers of Google and Amazon, with an undisclosed amount of money.

“This milestone and the backing of KPCB is a testament to both the success and enormous potential of Shazam,” said Andrew Fisher, CEO of Shazam. “Not only are significantly more people around the world accessing the service every day, they are using it with increased frequency, discovering and acquiring new music and sharing their discoveries with friends all from their mobile phones.”

KPCB has one of the most impressive portfolios ever: AOL, Amazon.com, Citrix, Compaq Computer, Electronic Arts, Genentech, Genomic Health, Google, Intuit, Juniper Networks, Netscape, Lotus, Sun Microsystems, Symantec, VeriSign and Xilinx. The investment is being made from its iFund and will enable the company to continue to expand accessibility of the service around the world by continuing to develop applications for additional mobile platforms and in multiple languages.

“Shazam is profitable and experiencing sustained acceleration in its growth rate. We are delighted to be partnering with KPCB, who join our existing investors Acacia Capital and DN Capital and will help us execute against the significant market opportunity ahead.” concluded the CEO.

London is burning with tech events, it’s just amazing.

Tomorrow Carsonified is going to throw the Workshops Day of the Future of Web Applications conference.

The workshops are:

• Copywriting fundamentals for the web
• How to Build with Facebook Connect and add Social Context to Your Website
• Building Web Apps Using Atlas
• How to Build Accessible Web Apps
• Kick-ass Online Marketing Techniques
• How to Build a Web App from A-Z
• Setting up Your Web App – Powerful Alternatives to LAMP
• Site Building with Drupal

For more details, such as the schedule for the other days of the event, or if you still need to buy your tickets, visit the official website.

Yesterday I attended TechCrunch London, an event put together by TechCrunch Europe.

I couldn’t live blog the event, as there was no working wi-fi. Other than that, I think the event was a success. The venue was very nice, the talks were inspiring and the startups who presented were very interesting.

You can find pics of the event on Facebook and Flickr (different sets).

These are the companies that launched yesterday.

Fiabee is a spanish company that presented an online backup solution that focuses on security and ease of use.

Notion Learning is an e-learning web application developed by two London-based students. They have some tough competition, but they had some fairly unique points. Keep an eye on them.

Audioboo is an audio microblogging platform, much like Twitter, but with audio. Posts are kept to at most three minutes long, though for most of us, that’s all we need.

Winner: Festbuzz provides crowsourced reviews about festivals (starting in the Edinburgh area). They’re making the traditional Festival word-of-mouth digital

Kohive is an online collaboration tool with a desktop-like interface. It has many applications and is going the freemium way (plus iphone app). The interesting part is they are building a platform for other developers, and thus have an app store.

Kyubid was a fun presentation. They are developing a new dating site based on bidding (but not with real money, put it away).

Aware Monitoring is, as the name suggests, a monitoring service. It’s SaaS based and it goes behind your login monitoring every component of your web application.

3rd: Social Safe is an application that lets you back up your Facebook friends, photos and profile to your computer. You can keep track of all your posts, and finally own your content.

Yoomoot facilitates mass online discussions which are focused and navigable. Yoomoot merges comments, wikis, forums, blogs and social bookmarks into one simple and flexible format.

En-twyn.com presented a complete high speed networking solution that enables you to connect your media devices and your environmental management devices to the same network running through the power sockets in the home. Think wi-fi and hdtv all around your place.

Mywidz.se is a mobile service that gives users worldwide the power to collect, share and create mobile widgets, independent of subscription, phone brand or nationality. Think an app store for every phone.

2nd: Mixcloud’s vision is to be the YouTube of radio with on-demand radio shows spanning music and talk and truing to make it make it more social, personalised and ‘democratic’.

After those pitches, and some other inspiring talks, the Seedcamp folks came along and we rocked it all night long with a very nice party and networking event.

(pics credits to BitchBuzz)

Here is the live video stream of the TechCrunch London event, brought to you by Hermione Way

Live Broadcasting by Ustream

Original TechCrunch post.

At 3:00pm GMT TechCrunch Europe will be hosting the TechCrunch London event, in partnership with Seedcamp.

I will try to live blog the event, profiling and reviewing the startups that will pitch.