The new Estonian accelerator program Startup Wise Guys, backed by the Estonian government-owned Estonian Development Fund and some former engineers from Skype, has just announced the seven teams it will be working with. Two of them from Estonia and one from Croatia, Ukraine, Germany, The Netherlands and UK.
Wise Guys received over 200 applications, and will provide the shortlisted projects with an extensive startup developing program. The projects will be supported by a squad of international mentors. The program starts on April 23 and includes three steps: shaping (3 weeks), building (4 weeks) and selling (3 weeks), supported by Wise Guys mentors. There will be an Investor Day in Tallinn on June 30th, followed by one in London on July 6th.
Startup Wise Guys, launched few months ago, is a joint effort of the players in Estonian startup ecosystem to bring international mentors to Estonia and attract talent across Eastern Europe and CIS countries.
The first members of the new Startup Wise Guys family are:
This is a machine powered by an Augmented Reality Engine that turns regular commercials into movie-like experiences. There are many possible use for Monolith, for example: in a clothing store you can try on a new collection in front of the Monolith, even without going to the fitting room; or, you could have a movie-like experience of your favorite story, movie or game just in front of the Monolith. Monolith is the first fully integrated augmented reality advertising device combining a hardware solution based on Kinect and a proprietary software platform for creating, distributing and measuring AR ads. Their first customers are a local Croatian soft drink company and will work for the Lenovo store in Zagreb.
Mojoo let´s people discover, organize & share local events, based on their interests and curated by their friends and tastemakers. It is a social discovery site for local events and things to do, curated by your friends and people who share your interests and your lifestyle, by leveraging word-of-mouth conversations on the social web. Think Pinterest-meets-Twitter for your local life, creating exciting and memorable moments every day. This could be a powerful formula: the hand-curated quality of a visual event & lifestyle magazine plus the speed of a blog plus the personal relevance of a social and local network. Thats moojoo! While people spend about 90 % of their time and money offline, the social and mobile market size is about to rise to $30 Billion by 2015. There is a huge potential for the next stage of the web aiming to connect people online in order to organize their life offline. 75 % of people already use the internet to organize things offline. People have about 6 h daily leisure time in average, which we want to help them to fill best possible.
This is like a local guide travel site where reviews are written by locals and creating your personal city guide takes only a minute. It helps people to create high-quality personal city guides that compile tips from locals into personalized travel guides that can be created quickly. Instead of browsing through hundreds of listings they have to look through only those places which fit their interest and budget. Their goal is to create an active community of local editors all around the world and offer local activists and travel bloggers a new medium to share their favorite places in their hometown. The market is the whole independent travel sector, who travel longer and spend more money in destinations. They are offering businesses that have been selected by editors an opportunity to highlight their listing with different features, like allowing direct booking of accommodation or tours, adding more photos, advertising their events (parties, live music, concerts etc), answering to customers more personally and letting people know about their specials (discounts, happy hours etc).
Wellbeing In the City is a social platform that offers simple & practical ways to achieve a balanced lifestyle through intimate communities & Wellbeing marketplace.
Wellbeing In the City is a social platform that offers simple & practical ways to achieve a balanced lifestyle. People are not living balanced lifestyles – Lacking time, energy, confidence and freedom – Forced to choose between competing needs of work, family, friends & self – 80% of people feel stress at work, but can’t find help in learning how to manage – Need to be inspired and supported by people they can relate to. Their solution is a social place that balances lifestyles. They are trying to get people to become addicted to positive, engaging and healthy living.
Monday52 helps people to have a better career by sharing their work experience and comparing it to others. Employees can rate their employers and get personalized job recommendations. Monday52 wants to prove the idea on a few pilot markets before expanding further. These markets are tech companies in Estonia and Ukraine. The business model is not yet clear, two big ideas so far are HR analytics and lead gen for recruiters. Their direct competitor is Glassdoor.com in US. Monday52 thinks that their edge is that they think you can’t get trustworthy reviews and ratings with real people (e.g. anonymous) and that’s what we’re going to do. In terms of a biusiness model, there are lots of “workplace rankings” from Hewitt to BBB and regional bodies. Unlike those folks, on Monday52 employees will get actual value out of participating in a survey.
They bring your daily dose of video on the web. By turning your device into your social remote, you can zap videos to any webTV.
Your personal TV portal. Flipboard meets spotify for video. With WappZapp you zap your way through the best internet video, track your favorite shows and share cool stuff with friends. Best of all, you can turn your iPad or iPhone in to the remote to zap any video to your internet TV.
WeatherMe aims to boost farming production by combining farming science and weather data in a simple way.
Farmers today are not benefitting from farming science because it’s complicated. For example only 4% of farmers use some kind of an information system to determine what pesticide to use. They use guesstimates and research has shown that these decisions are not always optimal. The product: They will create field and crops management system that is simple to use because it has most of the data, like weather inside already. The farmers will have to input less data manually and therefore are more likely to start using an electronic system for field management. With that, farmers will get a greater yield from their fields because they actually use the farming methods modern science provides through the system.
1Knows is your personal eLearning manager which guides you on your life-long learning path.
They aim to enhance your professional self via gamification. Based on your interests, 1Knows combines free as well as paid-for training, lessons and milestones to end up with a better and smarter you.