Live from London: The Europas Awards Live Stream, from 6pm GMT

The Europas, the Europan tech startup awards from, will be streamed live from this post from 6pm tonight London time/GMT (10am SF, 1pm NYC). We’ll kick off with a startup pitch competition, followed by a panel of some of the leading lights in tech consisting of: our own Sarah Lacy, Jolicloud founder Tariq Krim, MyDeco’s Brent Hoberman and Michael Birch co-founder of Bebo. The actual announcement of The Europas winners will be from around 8.30pm GMT onwards. After that, well, a huge party. Over 300 people are attending from all over the European tech scene. Our streaming partner is TechFluff.tv. If you couldn’t get to the awards, if you’re somewhere in Europe working on your own startup, then tonight raise a glass, put the projector screen on in the bar and have your very own Europas awards with us. We salute you.

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A huge thanks to our sponsors for supporting this inaugural event: Thanks to the UKTI for sponsoring the pitches; Viadeo for sponsoring the Best Design category; Bootlaw for sponsoring Best Bootstrapped Startup; Quick.tv for sponsoring Best European Investor; Zendesk for sponsoring Best New Startup; Moonfruit for sponsoring Best Social Innovation; Latitude and Parklane Champagne for the Awards Prizes; oneDrum for sponsoring the drinks party and Mixcloud for sponsoring the DJ.

PITCH SPONSOR

UKTI

UK Trade & Investment is the government organisation that helps UK-based companies succeed in the global economy. We also help overseas companies bring their high quality investment to the UK’s dynamic economy – acknowledged as Europe’s best place from which to succeed in global business. UK Trade & Investment offers expertise and contacts through its extensive network of specialists in the UK, and in British embassies and other diplomatic offices around the world. We provide companies with the tools they require to be competitive on the world stage. For further information please visit www.uktradeinvest.gov.uk or telephone +44 (0)20 7215 8000.

AWARD CATEGORY SPONSORS

Sponsor: Best Design Category

Viadeo

Founded in June 2004, Viadeo quickly established itself as the place to be for professional networking in Europe and beyond. Since then, with more than 8.5 million members (as of June 2009). Follow them on Twitter @viadeo. Viadeo is essential for those who want to:

• Increase their business opportunities (to discover new clients, staff and business partners)
• Enhance their visibility and their online reputation
• Manage and develop their network of professional contacts

Viadeo’s members consist of business owners, entrepreneurs and managers from a diverse range of businesses both start-up and well established. Each day Viadeo attracts more than 10,000 new members; 40,000 new connections are made and over one million profiles are viewed. Based in Paris (head office), Viadeo also has offices and teams in the UK (London), Spain (Madrid and Barcelona), Italy (Milan), China (Beijing), India (New Delhi) and Mexico (Mexico City). The company employs 200 staff worldwide. www.viadeo.com

Sponsor: Best Bootstrapped Startup Category

Bootlaw

Bootlaw is a free boot camp for emerging technology, internet and digital businesses and the professionals working in them who want to learn more about the legal issues they face. Its brought to you by Barry Vitou and Danvers Baillieu the friendly lawyers at Winston & Strawn in London. For more information go to www.bootlaw.com

Sponsor: Best Entertainment Application or Service

Skimbit

Skimbit helps website publishers monetise their content in ethical and user-friendly ways. We love the internet, and want good websites to be able to sustain themselves. Display advertising alone may not be enough, and can be intrusive to users, and affiliate marketing can be difficult to do well. We want to help publishers earn incremental revenues from their editorial and user-generated content in a way that doesn’t compromise editorial integrity or interfere with the user-experience and adds value to publishers. Our flagship product is Skimlinks which aggregates more than 7000 international merchants across 18 affiliate networks to make affiliate marketing easy, Skimbuzz is an innovative community builder aimed at forums, while Good.ly and skimthat work to monetise Twitter. Skimbit has recently been recognised by some of the major authorities in the affiliate marketing industry; with three gongs at the A4U Affiliate Marketing Awards 2009 for Innovative Publisher of the Year, Best New Entrant in Affiliate Marketing and Best Use of Technology within Affiliate Marketing, two trophies for Best New Business and Technological Innovation at the NMA Effectiveness Awards 2009, as well as runners-up awards in the Technology Genius and Best New Publisher categories at the US Linkshare Golden Link Awards 2009. Our CEO Alicia Navarro has also been shortlisted for the National Business Awards Entrepreneur of the Year 2009.

Sponsor: Best European Investor Category

Quick.tv

Quick.tv is a web-based ‘Video-as-a-Service’ platform, allowing the injection of dynamic and interactive features into online video clips. Aimed at business users, productions created through Quick.tv transform the viewer experience by prompting them to click on items within the video.

A full range of intuitive drag’n’drop tools include hotspots for e-commerce, real-time voting and graphs, RSS feeds for live data,
forms for viewers to apply for offers, hyperlinked text and image overlays, chapters for ease of navigation and more.

The end-to-end service delivers file transcoding and storage, player and play-out options and detailed analytics both on the video itself and the viewers’ use of the interactive features. It even has an editing tool to re-cut video clips online.

Templates and style sheets make the deployment of large numbers of interactive videos easy, leaving users free to monitor the increased monetisation and viewer engagement benefits the service has to offer.

Sponsor: Best New Startup, Summer 2008 – Summer 2009

Zendesk

Zendesk provides an integrated on-demand helpdesk – customer support portal solution based on the latest Web 2.0 technologies and design philosophies. The product has an elegant, minimalist design implemented in Ruby on Rails and provides seamless integration of the back-end helpdesk SaaS to a company’s online customer-facing web presence, including hosted support email-ticket integration, online forums, RSS and widgets. This is unusual, because most SaaS helpdesk solutions focus exclusively on the backend helpdesk and treat the Web as an afterthought. The system also leverages Web 2.0 ideas on the backend, such as tag based categorization throughout instead of the usual pre-defined drop down lists, RSS feeds for every customized view and a complete REST/JSON API for virtually every entity in the system.

Sponsor: Best in Social Innovation

Moonfruit

Moonfruit has been providing tools for people to build ‘Beautiful websites, simply.’ since 1999. To date 2.1m+ websites have been built by small businesses, communities, families, designers, crafters, freelancers and individuals who just want to express themselves. Moonfruit is passionate about creativity and simplifying technology for everyone. The Flash and Flex based platform provides our users with a unique drag and drop interface and ability to quickly design and customise their sites. The latest release of Moonfruit offers a free product with no ads as well as excellent premium packages for those who require extra bells and whistles e.g domains, shops and space. It also includes Moonfruit ‘People’ which supports businesses and communities who want to manage their customers or members more easily, plus social media integration with Facebook and Twitter. Moonfruit is part of Gandi Group which includes sister company Gandi.net, the ethical domain name registrar and virtual hosting provider.

Sponsor: Awards Prize

Latitude

Latitude is a leading digital marketing agency who deliver their expertise in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Pay Per Click (PPC), social media, online display, affiliate marketing and conversion analytics to clients including Tesco Personal Finance, Bet 365 and The Independent. Our whole approach is built on performance. Our conversion analytics expertise ensures that, once visitors get to your site, they convert from prospects to customers. We are confident that we can demonstrate a significantly better ROI on marketing spend. In fact, we’re so confident that we offer many of our clients performance-based pricing, so you only spend money when you’re making money.

Sponsor: Awards Prize

Park Lane Champagne

Park Lane Champagne: bringing the ability to source single bottles of champagne, personalised as you like, through their new online site at www.parklanechampagne.co.uk . Check it out and if you like what you see, do blog about it and tell the World.

Sponsor: Drinks & Party

oneDrum

oneDrum is a free, lightweight desktop application that can turn any application into a rich, collaborative environment. The first release of oneDrum, available to the public from July 2009, is the only platform on the market that takes the compromise out of collaborating in Microsoft Office.
It enables:
* Simultaneous, multi-author document creation and editing in PowerPoint, Excel and Word
* Effective communication, coordination and control of change
* Secure, synchronised file sharing and version management.

oneDrum is headquartered in London, England and was founded by Jasper Westaway, CEO

Sponsor: DJ

Mixcloud

Mixcloud aims to be the YouTube of Radio. The company’s vision is to be the definitive platform online for on-demand radio shows – from music to talk and everything in between. Mixcloud describe themselves as re-thinking radio, building a platform that connects radio shows (or what they describe as Cloudcasts) to listeners much more effectively. The unit of value for Mixcloud is the show rather than the song or the station. Mixcloud provides radio content creators with a toolkit to host, promote and distribute their content across the web, solving the frustrations associated with file sharing services or the complications of Podcasts. For listeners, Mixcloud helps them filter the content easily to find what’s relevant to them – e.g. what’s popular or what their friends are listening to.