Natasha Starkell is the CEO of GoalEurope, the outsourcing advisory firm and a publication about outsourcing and innovation in Central and Eastern Europe.
For seven years she worked at Unisys in the areas of corporate strategy and M&A, corporate finance and outsourcing. In 2003 she obtained her executive MBA at London Business School and founded GoalEurope http://www.goaleurope.com.
She comes from Novosibirsk, Russia and lived in Switzerland and United Kingdom. She speaks Russian, English and German. She currently resides in Northern Germany where she blogs relentlessly about new technologies from CEE and CIS countries collectively tagged as Eastern Europe.
New startup conference for the ‘Baltic Rim’ TechChill Baltics took place again this year in Riga, Latvia. Following in the footsteps of the online infographics tool Infogr.am (from Latvia), the winner of the event this year is BliuBliu. This Lithuanian startup is working on a better way to learn foreign languages, which is an especially big challenge for minor languages such as Lithuanian. Grab… → Read More
With the holiday season upon us, let’s take a look at some of the gift-giving services and how well they work, writes contributor Natasha Starkell.
Facebook’s acquisition of Karma earlier this year must have caused quite a few sighs and fading hopes of the gift-giving websites, and Giftiki was even acquired by LaunchRock a couple of months ago. Yet Facebook Gifts differs from other gift… → Read More
As Dave McClure and Geeks on the Plane are touring Moscow, Tallinn and Zagreb this week, I have finally written this post summarizing the result of a year-long research project exploring the Russian and Eastern European startup ecosystem. The results will hopefully help those who weren’t invited to join the GOAP crowd to get a better sense of what is happening in the former socialist countries… → Read More
Startup Sauna has always been a slightly puzzling thing. It acts ike an accelerator but does not fund startups. It simply offers European (mostly from Nordic countries) and Russian startups coaching sessions and demo trips to Silicon Valley, and takes no equity. That’s because it is funded by Finland’s Aalto University and the Finnish Funding agency for technology and innovation. However, it has… → Read More
3D visualization technology has been around for some time, so Real5D closing a $1.2 million Seria A rund from the U.S. venture fund DoubleRock might look out of place to some. But San Francisco-based startup Real5D has taken 3D visualization to an interesting level of interactivity by applying it to the needs of the commercial real estate industry.
Founded by the Hungarian Balazs Farago… → Read More
Participants of the quarterly event Build organized by the European accelerator HackFwd usually stay in Motel One in Berlin, where Honestlybranded posters suggest guests leave anonymous feedback in exchange for discount vouchers. As it happens, Honestly emerged as a winner of Hackfwd’s Pitch In Berlin startup competition recently (here is a list of all participating teams).
To leave feedback… → Read More
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