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.

So the time of the year has come when everyone involved in the EU startup scene begins to book his tickets, look for a couch to crash on and buy his LeWeb tickets.

The major european tech conference is on again, in Paris on the 9th and 10th of December. The speakers are the top of the line you’d expect and they include: Gary Vaynerchuk, Yossi Vardi, Alexander Tamas, Barry E. Silbert, Robert Scoble, Kevin Rose, Dave McClure, Matt Mullenweg, Marissa Mayer, Phil Libin, Salim Ismail, David Hornik, Dennis Crowley, Jeff Clavier and dozen of others.

Also, there’ll be the classic startup challenge hosted by TechCrunch, and the 16 finalists that are going to present are:

• Badgeville Inc (NETHERLANDS)
• Cauwill Technologies (IRELAND)
• City M (FRANCE)
• Desk.io GmbH (GERMANY)
• Fiddme (ISRAEL)
• Garmz (AUSTRIA)
• Greendizer (FRANCE)
• GreenPocket GmbH (GERMANY)
• Nuji (UNITED KINGDOM)
• Praized Media Inc. (CANADA)
• Smallrivers (SWITZERLAND) (Paper.li)
• Super Marmite (FRANCE)
• Tagattitude (FRANCE)
• Tinypay.me (NETHERLANDS)
• Waze (ISRAEL)
• Work4 Labs (FRANCE/USA)

Expect some major coverage on this very blog.

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.

Here are the companies that got to pitch in front of more than 2000 attendees:

• 1st: Stribe


This is one of the services I was looking forward to. It’s one of the first very useful ones, enabling you to create a social network platform on top of your website very easily.
In their own words: “Stribe is a plug and play service to instantly create a social network on any website”

• 2nd: TigerLily


This one was an unexpected surprise, it’s a set of facebook applications to help you manage your pages and make them more interactive. Presentation was a bit boring, slides where cool and product sounds good. In their own words: “Tigerlily is a set of Facebook apps for marketers who want to get more from Facebook pages.”

• 3rd: CloudSplit


In their own words: “Real-time spending insight, real-time cost control.”
CloudSplit is a very cool product, targeting a real business problem. It’s a very comprehensive tool to monitor your cloud spending and see how much each application is costing you, and reduce your overall costs.

There were some very cool companies presenting this year at LeWeb and the choice was very hard for the judges. Please take a time to check the others companies that presented too!

The third batch of startups presenting at LeWeb:

• Kukunu
• Kukunu is a new travel startup, focused on helping you find the best places. They are targeting non tech-savvy users, and obviously has all the now mandatory social features. Monetization will be through commissions.
• Sports Predictions
• Sports Predictions’ product, Get In, provides the user with free scientific premier league recommendation. They claim to have a 50-70% success rate.
• FitnessKeeper, Inc.
• FitnessKeeper is the company behind RunKeeper, the awesome iPhone application that tracks all your running experiences. They are announcing a new and improved iPhone application and a web platform where you can compare to peers with the usual social features. They are announcing also a $400k outside financing round.
• Liqpay
• Liqpay is a new startup in the mobile payment space. They have the concept that a mobile phone number can be a unique payment ID. To use the service you don’t need to sign up, register or have an account. It’s very easy to use. They are also launching a KILLcoin.org initiative.

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.

CloudCamps are unconferences, in the classic barcamp style, where early adopters, developers, businesses and end users exchange ideas about Cloud Computing. Topics range from the classic Infrastructure as a service (Joyent, Amazon Ec2, Nirvanix, etc), Platform as a service (BungeeLabs, AppEngine, etc), Software as a service (salesforce.com) to every new technology related to “the cloud”.

Here are the 3 european dates for this summer:

• June 11: Paris
• June 15: Barcelona
• July 9: London

If you are interested in cloud computing you should definitely attend one in your area.