Seedcamp Warsaw seeks out the Eastern startups

Seedcamp Warsaw wrapped up yesterday after a day of startup pitches and mentoring. It’s becoming apparent that there are gradually more startups appearing in the region – rather clumsily known as “Central and Eastern Europe”. The region is also well known for its strength in outsourcing companies who often work with Western European and US-based startups and I’m still here in Krakow finding out about a bunch of companies who do just that, many of whom appear to be Ruby On Rails gurus, including Lunar Logic, Applicake, Codesprinters, as well as Respectance, IIZT and Infinite Loop.

But without further ado, here are the Seedcamp winners.

HumanWay.pl: This is a “job applicant tracking system 2.0”. I liked this idea, assuming it can do everything it claims. It’s a working product already, which helps companies deal with the massive amounts of incoming material from jobs applicants – an increasing issue in these straightened times. HumanWay is a simple tool to create and distribute job requisitions and collect and manage applications. It screens applicants across social networks (it says here – sounds like a tough job) and generally take the heavy lifting out of recruiting. In all honesty? It sounds like may be trying to do too much and indeed, one of the judges criticisms was that some of the teams lacked focus. Still, something is working – HumanWay has already launched with 20 companies and so weren’t looking for money so much as sales and advisors / partners.

Joobili.com: Budapest based Joobili allows events and festivals organisers to input events. Then when you want inspiration for a holiday you work out what is on when. There appeared also to be a solcial element to it, in that you could see which of your friends were going to an event. The business model would include paid-for enhanced listings, affiiate sales etc. The famed Esther Dyson is a Seed investor and Mentor apparently. Since the public beta launched a month ago they have 1,000 European events in the database and a few partnerships signed.

MyPolitiq: This site works out which politicians match to your political views – though right now it’s just for Lithuania. Call it a”smart voting” site. At laast they freely admitted that they had no idea if the site had a business model or not, though – as the founders said – there are lots of EU government funds for this! They are looking to strenghten partnerships in Poland and have built a Poish version – Glosuje.com.pl. I believe the judges went for this as the team itself it pretty good and there are lots of ways to scale this across borders I think, in terms of a web app that gauges you political leanings.

SkryBot.pl: It turned out this was speech recognition software mainly targeted at consumer aplications like dictation, or navigation applications. However they saw it working in search engines, TV, GPS etc. The licenses are EUR 10,000. Perhaps rightly so this appeared to be a desktop application which didn’t have a lot of place being in a competition geared towards Internet startups, but if the software is as good as it’s supposed to be it feels like there’s scope for this to morph into a web app.