Pioneers Festival Plans To Pit Europe Against The US

Mike Butcher

Mike Butcher is the European Editor for TechCrunch. A former grunge rock drummer, he became a long time journalist, and has since written for UK national newspapers and magazines including The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Times, The Daily Telegraph and The New Statesman. Mike is also a co-founder and shareholder of TechHub, a co-working space/service/community with several locations... → Learn More

Thursday, July 19th, 2012
Screen Shot 2012-07-19 at 19.17.42

A brief interlude to mention a good event coming up in Europe later this year that we think will add something to the community here. The Pioneers Festival is in Vienna on 29-31st of October, at the Hofburg Imperial palace. It’s aimed at 2,500 visitors and will host a main conference and startup competition. The winning startups get €25,000 prize money and applications for the competition are open till September 7th. With a Halloween closing party, product displays and art installations it should be quite different. The location of Vienna is also pretty convenient for a lot of Central European startups.

They also plan a “Clash of the Founders” where a team from Europe and team from the U.S. will battle it out to create a startup in 24 hours. Team Europe will be Felix Petersen (Amen) and Edial Dekker (Gidsy) vs. Team U.S.: Justin Kan (Socialcam) and Kyle Bragger (Forrst). The judges will be the imperious gentleman Ben “The Beast” Parr (it says here) and… yours truly.

Tomorrow we will publish a comprehensive guide to the major tech startup events in Europe.