Seedcamp, the European seed funding network and startup accelerator, came through San Francisco this week as part of its annual multi-city trip to the United States. On Tuesday afternoon in downtown SF, 18 Seedcamp startups pitched a roomful of industry investors, advisors, executives, and general startup enthusiasts.

Each company was solid — you can find the full list here — but I pulled aside five of the most compelling startups for one-on-one interviews to get a bit more insight on what they do. These startups hail from all over the EU and they each have very different target markets, from amateur sports teams to money-transferring jetsetter types. But the common thread is that in their demos, they each presented unique and well-designed solutions to specific and very real problems. Check them out below:

Pult

Pult, based in Tallinn, Estonia, lets you stream content from cloud services on the web such as YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook and others to any connected device with a screen — without requiring any cables or special hardware whatsoever. Basically, Pult’s co-founders Andrus Raudsalu and Veiko Jaeaeger told me, it is like Boxee — but without the box. Next, the company is looking to work with specialized and premium content providers so that its technology can integrate with those services. The service is available in beta mode at Pult.io.

Transferwise

The London-based Transferwise allows you to convert money between currencies and send international money transfers at super low costs online. The company, co-founded by Kristo Kaarmann and Taavet Hinrikus, launched in January 2011 and currently deals in Euros and British pounds — as of today, $10 million in payments have already been brokered by the service. Transferwise is looking to expand to the United States in the coming months.

Holvi

Holvi, based in Helsinki, Finland, is making a software program that functions as a checking account, bookkeeping service, and fundraising app — all in one. It’s built to be used by organizations such as charitable associations, social clubs, event planners, and sport teams: Groups that need to manage money by necessity, but are not companies with dedicated finance and accounting arms. The service is not open to the public yet, and at launch will only be accessible to users in the EU, but founder Kristoffer Lawson demoed a slick, clean, and fully featured service. Holvi is definitely one to watch.

Teleportd

Paris, France-based Teleportd is a search engine and licensing platform for mobile photo services such as Instagram, Twitter, yFrog, Picplz, and others. The service lets people search through all the public photos added to these services, and reach out to the photographers to make licensing arrangements — essentially, “a ShutterStock/Getty for the Instagram generation.” Gabriel Hubert, who co-founded Teleportd, says the company is currently in the process of raising seed funding.

Bluefields

Based in London, Bluefields is a web program and mobile app aimed at amateur sports teams. Bluefields lets teams manage the scheduling of practices and games, collect money, and communicate with each other online. According to co-founder Andrew Crump, 60,000 players from 600 athletic clubs have joined the site since Bluefields first launched in August.

When I attended the recent Startup Sauna demo day in Helsinki in December 2011, I met teams not only from Finland but also from Russia, Poland and the Baltic Rim. I was amazed how young many of the participating entrepreneurs were. So when the performance stats from Startup Sauna hit my mailbox I was curious to learn what actually happens to all those startups after they complete the seven-weeks-long coaching program in the startup co-working space Aalto Venture Garage.

Of course, it is too early to judge the results of the most recent Demo day, but up until October 2011 the teams and their results were counted by Startup Sauna coach Paolo Borella.

Startup Sauna is funded by  Aalto University Center for Entrepreneurship and the Finnish government (via Tekes). It takes nothing in return for the coaching program, and covers accommodation and travel costs. But interestingly, this is the most comprehensive report on an accelerator performance I have seen.

Here are the main findings.

Within the first year of Startup Sauna operation, it saw 36 out of 38 alumni companies raising 8.2 million Euros, and almost 30 percent raised over Euro 260 000. One of the startups Blaast, a cloud-based mobile platform for those who use mobile phone as the only access to the Internet, has received Euro 2.8 million ($3.7 million) in funding from founding engineers of Skype amongst others.

As far as deal funnel goes, the Finnish accelerator, which screens startups during on-location coaching sessions called Warmups, has received over 500 applications, met over 250 teams and admitted 54 of them. The acceptance rate went down from 23 percent in the first batch to 7 percent for in 2011.

Subsequently it saw 38 teams graduate, 71 percent of which are still working on their product. Out of 29 teams who responded to the survey, 34 percent have launched a commercial product, while another 42 percent are in private beta.

To compare Startup Sauna with other European accelerators I asked Jon Bradford of Springboard, Kirsten Campbell of Seedcamp and Luis Rivera of Startup Bootcamp Madrid if any KPI were available for public consumption.

Bradford, who still accepts applications for Springboard London until Sunday, shared observations about fundraising efforts of 10 teams from the August 2011 batch (230 startups applied). Six months later five out of ten startups have either raised new funding or received offers. But it would be unfair to compare Springboard to closely with others at it is barely a year old.

According to Rivera of Startup Bootcamp, five out of the nine teams of in the first batch of the Startup Bootcamp Madrid program have raised total of Euro 770 000 ($1 million), the highest investment being Euro 500 000. For the rest of the teams the fundraising efforts continue. In total the accelerator received over 300 applications, of which 115 were qualified submissions. This makes Startup Bootcamp acceptance rate similar to that of Startup Sauna.

Kirsten Campbell came back with the Seedcamp stats as well. Out of 2,000 startups that apply in a year, 10 percent attend mentoring sessions, and out of those 10 percent get funded. Once Seedcamp invest, 90 percent of their portfolio companies raise further funding as well. Between 2007 and 2009 it supported 22 teams, which have collectively raised over Euro 30 million in venture investment. So on average Seedcamp has a larger base to work from, especially as applications came from 30 countries so far.

Revenue, profitability and exits would be a useful KPI to look at once startups cease being startups and become fully fledged businesses. But for starters 95 percent of fundraising success rate is a pretty good result for Startup Sauna and its graduates. Here is their full report.

In 2011 Antti Ylimutka, Ville Simola and the coaches travelled throughout Scandinavia, Russia, Baltic countries and Poland to select startups for the program. From what I hear, their ambitions in 2012 is to go global.

Kwaga, a Paris, France-based startup that specializes in tools to make email ‘smarter’ by leveraging semantic technology, has raised $1.55 million in Series A funding. The company, which received seed funding from Seedcamp and Kima Ventures after its founding in 2008, raised the money from unnamed private investors, advised by investment consultancy firm Financière Fonds Privés.

Kwaga aims to build semantic software that will make us love email again and turn it into a productivity enhancer rather than killer by analyzing the data contained in messages. The company’s flagship service, WriteThat.Name, for instance automatically updates a user’s address book based on the information that can be found in the messages received.

Currently available for Gmail and Google Apps users, Kwaga will soon add WriteThat.Name support for additional email clients, such as Microsoft Outlook, and integration with CRM software suites.

Kwaga, a Paris, France-based startup that specializes in tools to make email ‘smarter’ by leveraging semantic technology, has raised $1.55 million in Series A funding. The company, which received seed funding from Seedcamp and Kima Ventures after its founding in 2008, raised the money from unnamed private investors, advised by investment consultancy firm Financière Fonds Privés.

Kwaga aims to build semantic software that will make us love email again and turn it into a productivity enhancer rather than killer by analyzing the data contained in messages. The company’s flagship service, WriteThat.Name, for instance automatically updates a user’s address book based on the information that can be found in the messages received.

Currently available for Gmail and Google Apps users, Kwaga will soon add WriteThat.Name support for additional email clients, such as Microsoft Outlook, and integration with CRM software suites.

Kwaga, a Paris, France-based startup that specializes in tools to make email ‘smarter’ by leveraging semantic technology, has raised $1.55 million in Series A funding. The company, which received seed funding from Seedcamp and Kima Ventures after its founding in 2008, raised the money from unnamed private investors.

Read more at TechCrunch Europe.

In this, our third installment of “Free Startup Tools”, we wanted to highlight an agreement launched by Seedcamp, the European startup accelerator, to help startup founders negotiate the early stages of building a company. (You can check out our first post on The Founder Institute’s effort to standardize the founder-advisor relationship and compensation here and the second post on a tool that helps founders compare their term sheets to the standards here.)

While we’ve touched on these better ways to negotiate term sheets and relationships with advisors, founding a company also often entails bringing on co-founders to help you build your business. Of course, in doing so, it’s important for co-founders to be able to establish a level of trust that allows each founding member to fairly share in the benefits of success.

To do so, Seedcamp (via its Seedhack initiative) is launching the “Seedhack Founder’s Collaboration Agreement”, which according to the initiative’s blog post, has been created to allow newly formed founding teams to “agree on what each founder’s shareholding stake should be” as well as codifying the amount of equity co-founders should receive in accordance with the level of time and effort they pour into the business.

Readers can check out the PDF of the agreement here.

As the accelerator said via its Seedhack blog, the intent with the collaboration agreement is to have it be of use to accelerators and incubators that hose events like Seedcamp’s Seedhack, where “collaboration is key”, as well as to the thousands of startups out there building businesses (and investing sweat equity) in those many ideas, products, and tools before officially creating a “formal” company or enterprise.

Seedcamp says that it wants co-founders to treat the document as fuel for discussion, which can either be used “as-is”, but it should be noted that it is still both a work in progress and a template which founders should modify as they see fit. (Hence the items in brackets, which are left up to founders to input their own language.)

Note: The Seedhack Collaboration Founders Agreement is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Please feel free to share your impressions of the agreement, including whether or not readers believe that the vesting schedule proposed in the document applies generally or is more in line with hackathon-type scenarios.

Excerpt image courtesy of Ideachampions.com

As I wrote last week when Seedcamp made a flurry of announcements, including fresh funding and ambitious plans for international expansion, I spent some time in London last week to get acquainted with a bunch of interesting European startups.

Below is an overview of all 20 Seedcamp Week 2011 finalists, starting with the 3 (well, actually, 4 winners).

But first, it’s worth noting that Seedcamp, which had already financially and otherwise backed 16 of the 20 companies that presented their wares during Seedcamp Week 2011 – over and over, I might add – held interviews with the four remaining startups and decided to inject some seed capital into them, too. So, in a way, they all sorta kinda ‘won’.

Furthermore, The Accelerator Group (TAG) has made investment offers to five Seedcamp startups, although it’s unclear to which ones, and how much they offered to invest, exactly.

On a personal note, I genuinely found the quality of most Seedcamp startups amazing.

These are the top three winners of the competition:

Vox.io (website – CrunchBase profile)

Vox.io is a simple service that lets you make voice and video calls straight from your browser. No downloads, installations or firewall configurations are required.

Transferwise (website – CrunchBase profile)

TransferWise is an online currency exchange service that essentially allows people to exchange currency using mid-market rates, for a flat fee.

GrabCAD (website – CrunchBase profile)

GrabCAD is a services marketplace that connects manufacturing and product development companies with CAD (computer-aided design) engineers around the world.

GrabCAD won the Gold investment prize (€25,000 in seed capital). However, the company decided that, since it has recently raised enough funding from investors like Matrix Partners and Atlas Venture, they should ask Seedcamp to invest the money in another startup, Farmeron. Good karma.

Which brings us to the fourth top winner:

Farmeron (website – CrunchBase profile)

Farmeron helps farmers across the world manage their farming data online, do farm-performance analysis based on aggregated statistics and collaborate with other farmers.

And here are the remaining 16 Seedcamp Week 2011 finalists, in alphabetical order:

AppExtras (website – CrunchBase profile)

AppExtras is a cross-promotion network for mobile app publishers. The idea behind the startup’s service is that mobile application developers and publishers can get more downloads, new user and extra revenue for generating installs within the network.

Bilbus (website – no CrunchBase profile yet)

Small businesses often don’t understand their cash flow, but rely utterly on it. A kind of “Wonga for SMEs”, Bilbus lets them borrow $10 million to $50 million based on their cash flow.

Bilbus effectively helps matching borrower needs to lending preferences and provides all the key information in one place, thus making it easier for commercial lenders to lend to businesses.

Blossom (website – CrunchBase profile)

A project management tool for ‘lean startup teams’. Software for agile development if you will.

If “Lean is the new agile” then the tools are missing for lean project management and issue tracking, so Blossom wants to correct that. Competitors cost $25 per user per month, so they will offer it free.

Campalyst (website – CrunchBase profile)

Campalyst is social analytics software that measures the revenues and conversions from Facebook Pages, and helps brands understand whether their fans convert into customers.

It sounds implausible, but the startup claims that its software measures the full conversion funnel from a status update on Facebook to the purchase on advertiser’s website.

The team says it has already delivered working product and got customer traction. The software is available to agencies and in-house social media teams on a monthly subscription basis.

Compilr (website – CrunchBase profile)

Compilr is a dev tool which allow programmers to write code through their web browser. Think Google Documents for programmers.

It has 60,000 registered developers. The average user is a 23 year old male from the US – sounds about right. It claims to be the only online IDE that actually compiles code. Cloud9 is their biggest competitor, but then it has $45.5 million from Accel and Atlassian.

Crashpadder (website – no CrunchBase profile yet)

Crashpadder.com says it is the UK’s largest peer-to-peer accommodation network, along the lines of Airbnb. And to be fair, at least in the UK, you do tend to hear about it a lot more than the latter.

But where Airbnb allows someone to rent out an apartment on their own (sometimes with dire results it turns out), Crashpadder hosts stay in their place and of course, meet the person who’s Crashpadding.

Launched in 2008 when P2P accommodation took off, they ‘hard launched’ in January 2010. They claim 16,000 hosts in 1,800 locations in 93 countries, and 25,000 users so far.

Crashpadder.com earns a 10 percent commission on every booking, plus a £3 admin fee.

Crowd (website – CrunchBase profile)

Crowd is an aggregation and search service (mobile app + Web-based widget) that helps people visualize the stream of public geotagged and timestamped photos taken at every instant, all over the world.

Crowd basically when to give people a feeling for what is going on, right now and anywhere.

The Efficient Cloud (website – CrunchBase profile)

This startup enables hosting providers to offer cost-effective cloud hosting for Web applications based on PHP and Ruby on Rails. Efficient Cloud offers a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution that consists of a cloud computing backend, admin dashboard, provisioning system and an easy to use end-user control panel.

Fractal (website – CrunchBase profile)

Fractal validates HTML emails across all major email clients and can automatically fix known email quirks.

Holvi (website – CrunchBase profile)

Holvi aims to replace bank accounts with a service that offers a smart checking account for group activities.

The account and budget are shared by multiple people from groups, offering full transparency.

Mopapp (website – CrunchBase profile)

Mopapp tracks and analyzes mobile app sales across multiple application stores, and helps developers and publishers gain insights by generating easy-to-understand reports.

Oust.me (website – no CrunchBase profile yet)

Oust.me is a ‘geolocation game’, which turns locations into territories based on data provided by Foursquare, Gowalla and Facebook Places platforms.

Psykosoft (website – CrunchBase profile)

This French startup has developed Psykopaint, Web-based software that turns photos into stunning art.

Rentlord (website – CrunchBase profile)

Rentlord gives people everything they need to start, manage, renew and end a tenancy or flatshare over a social network custom-made for tenants, flatsharers and landlords.

Sportlyzer (website – CrunchBase profile)

Sportlyzer is a fun and social online workout application, where a digital coach advises workouts and raises exercising motivation.

Zin.gl (website – CrunchBase profile)

Zin.gl aims to match singles with other singles that have a lot in common with them, based on their Facebook, Foursquare and other available online data.

As I wrote last week when Seedcamp made a flurry of announcements, including fresh funding and ambitious plans for international expansion, I spent some time in London last week to get acquainted with a bunch of interesting European startups.

Below is an overview of all 20 Seedcamp Week 2011 finalists, starting with the 3 (well, actually, 4 winners).

But first, it’s worth noting that Seedcamp, which had already financially and otherwise backed 16 of the 20 companies that presented their wares during Seedcamp Week 2011 – over and over, I might add – held interviews with the four remaining startups and decided to inject some seed capital into them, too. So, in a way, they all sorta kinda ‘won’.

I’ve spent the past couple of days in London getting caught up in the Seedcamp Week craziness, meeting some of Europe’s finest entrepreneurs and investors. Me and Mike Butcher will soon post a round-up of this year’s finalists (and highlight a few interesting ones separately), but first, Seedcamp has some – actually, a lot of – news of its own to announce today.

The organization, which combines an early-stage seed investment fund with a world-class mentoring program for European entrepreneurs, is expanding by striking a number of international partnerships, setting up new events (Seedhack), establishing an ‘experts-in-residence’ program and an impressive advisory board, raising more funding from a number of new strategic investors and strengthening its offering to fledgling companies with the help of several corporate sponsors.

Where to begin?

About a year ago, Seedcamp raised €3 million euros in funding. Today, the organization is announcing that €2 million more has been invested in the seed fund by a number of strategic investors, including ACT Venture Capital, Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments, GIMV, Reed Elsevier Ventures, Samos and HENQ. Individual investors such as former Google M&A exec Anil Hansjee and John Pfeffer are also participating.

Seedcamp’s fund is now €5 million euros, twice as much as its initial fund. Existing investors include Index Ventures, Atlas Venture, NESTA, Eden Ventures and plenty of others.

Seedcamp says entrepreneurs have been asking for a lot of things from the organization and its network of mentors, but one recurring theme was more ways to enter the U.S. market and establish partnerships with American companies. Meeting those needs, Seedcamp is today announcing that they’ve formed partnerships with the likes of 500 Startups, Dave McClure’s investment firm, and AngelList, a network that connects angel investors with promising entrepreneurs.

“We’ve already invested in 3 Seedcamp companies, and we keep coming back for more,” said McClure. “Our experience bringing international startups to the US is a great match for Seedcamp startups, by helping them improve their product and marketing efforts, as well as making introductions to Silicon Valley mentors and platform companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, YouTube and PayPal.”

500 Startups has indeed invested in 3 Seedcamp startups (ERPLY, Brainient and LOOKK) but I’ve also heard one of the companies in this year’s batch has closed a financing deal with the firm.

The partnership with AngelList strengthens Seedcamp’s own, similar initiative (dubbed Seedsummit – read more about it here) and Seedcamp is exploring other partnerships in the United States.

Seedcamp is also teaming up with startup events all over Europe that will feed into the regional Seedcamp events, in order to tie the European startup ecosystem a little tighter. Winners from events put on by the likes of Arctic Startups (Scandinavia), Garage48 (Baltics), TISEE (Eastern Europe) and eFestival + Social Media Week (Italy) will receive a spot in the relevant regional Mini Seedcamp.

We’re not finished yet.

Seedcamp is also slated to announce today that they’re establishing an experts-in-residence program, which is essentially a way to match up Seedcamp startups with relevant advisors who want to do more than hold a one-time mentoring session. Seedcamp will provide guidance to both the startups and experts on how to setup an ‘official’ advisor role and any documents they will need to formalize such a relationship.

Seedcamp has also set up an advisory board of its own, formalizing many relationships it’s long had with a number of people with various key skills.

The initial list of its Advisory Board members for 2011-2012 includes people like Anil Hansjee (ex-Google M&A exec and angel investor), Bindi Karia (VC and Emerging Business Lead at Microsoft), Bryce Roberts (investor with OATV), Christian Hernandez (Director of Platform Partnerships at Facebook), Dave McClure, Jeff Clavier (investor at SoftTech VC), David Yu (until recently CEO of Betfair), Gustav Soderstrom (Head of Product at Spotify), Henri Moissinac (Head of Mobile at Facebook) and many more.

Finally, Seedcamp is also strengthening its offering to startups by increasing the value of additional services it can offer via its 34 corporate sponsors (Facebook, Google, Qualcomm, Amazon and others) beyond the capital injection and access to its mentor network.

Sponsors are putting up around £50,000 in value for solutions ranging from infrastructure services to analytics, advertising, marketing and other services.

A lot of news to digest, but in essence: great news for both Seedcamp and European startups.

What if we could combine top-notch hackers with leaders from across different companies? What if we could bring talented developers from all over Europe to create innovative solutions for organizations or sectors that desperately need them? Could this format potentially form great new startups that address untapped needs?

Those are the three rhetorical questions asked by Seedcamp, the well-known European early-stage seed investment fund and mentoring programme. In its quest to get answers to those questions, the company is organizing a new, totally free event called seedhack, which will be sort of like a hackathon – like the one we organize during TechCrunch Disrupt – but not just for programmers and designers but also for business people (with or without ideas).

The event will be held at the London Business School campus on September 23rd-25th, 2011, and is sponsored by Facebook, Paypal, and .me Domains. You can register here.

People interesting in developing a solution, and/or forming a new company, will be able to gather on the first day of the pow-wow to hear some talks from company leaders who will talk about problems plaguing their industry as a whole or their company’s value chain in particular.

This will be merely a kickstarter for ideas, Seedcamp explains. The general idea is to solve problems posed by people on the first day, but teams can form to hack around any industry, topic, or idea. The teams will be supported by a number of people from companies that offer APIs that can assist in the development of products or services – engineers will be on stand-by throughout the weekend to help out with any integration issues that may arise.

Evidently, there’s also time for networking, idea presentations and discussions. On Sunday, there will be a final presentation sessions during which all teams – which can be maximum 5 people strong – will showcase what they’ve come up with.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: any endeavor that can help inspire EMEA’s next generation of technology entrepreneurs and companies is welcome in my book, and Seedcamp seems to have a knack for coming up with great ideas to do just that.

Also read: Crunching some data after 3.5 years of Seedcamp

What if we could combine top-notch hackers with leaders from across different companies? What if we could bring talented developers from all over Europe to create innovative solutions for organizations or sectors that desperately need them? Could this format potentially form great new startups that address untapped needs?

Those are the three rhetorical questions asked by Seedcamp, the well-known European early-stage seed investment fund and mentoring programme. In its quest to get answers to those questions, the company is organizing a new, totally free event called seedhack, which will be sort of like a hackaton – like the one we organize during TechCrunch Disrupt – but not just for programmers and designers but also for business people (with or without ideas).

The event will be held at the London Business School campus on September 23rd-25th, 2011, and is sponsored by Facebook, Paypal, and .me Domains. You can register here.

Read the full article on TechCrunch Europe.

Something is happening in Europe. The tectonic plates in the startup ecosystem are moving and, like penguins on ice-flows, we all are slithering around trying to get a handle on how things will play out over the next couple of years.

We’re having exits (such as Tweetdeck to Twitter for $40million), large funding rounds (such as Wooga raising $24 million) and higher valuations (like Moshi Monsters).

Events have ramped up considerably. GeeknRolla in London was a blast this year, as was DLD, Founders Forum and the 1,000-strong Dublin Web Summit. And we still have The Europas and Le Web to go.

At the same time the incubator and accelerator scene is booming. A new study named Seedcamp as the top European accelerator with StartupBoootcamp looking like a pretty strong second.

And this week the brand new Oxygen Accelerator in the UK said it would literally give away £75,000 ($84,000 Euro / $120,000) with no equity tie as a prize to the ‘most improved startup on its programme’ (applications close June 30th, apply here).

This goes to show just how white hot the incubator and accelerator market in Europe is right now.

But despite studies I really feel that, amidst the birth pangs of a genuine pan-European tech startup scene, it is far too early to be ranking incubators and accelerators. There remains a huge amount of chaos in the market, and what appears to be a scramble for positions across territories and cities.

So I asked some key players in Europe of their opinion of this incubators / accelerator scene, and what they had to say is enlightening.

Investor Pawel Chudzinski of Point Nine Capital believes incubators are “good for the ecosystem” and “promote entrepreneurship” especially since “young people need role models / teachers / facilitators who can show them the possibilities one has in entrepreneurship.”

Bill Liao, a former co-founder of XING and now an angel investor who bases himself between Ireland and Switzerland says he has “seen the growth in smaller deals and value investing and the growth of accelerators and I am convinced that the more lean startup and accelerators there are the absolute better especially those that focus companies on getting customers and have a baptism of fire as well as great mentors.”

But he makes a distinction about incubators: “Anything raised in too comfortable an environment will likely fail when it hits the real world. The incubators must get tougher on having shorter programs and be ruthless in ridding themselves of Zombie startups that pivot too often and never break out. We have not yet fully explored the models that will rock the world for making startups more effective and better value creators so a proliferation is a good thing and we will see who is right and wrong in about three years from now when the exits happen, or not…”

Max Niederhofer, CEO of Qwerly and a former VC with Atlas Ventures is much more hesitant about the growth in accelerators: “I am very wary of this trend in general. Some people in this industry are vultures… they don’t create, they just want to participate in the (small) wealth creation that is going on. But Europe kind of needs what it can get at this point… so anyone with an actual entrepreneurial background doing an incubator should be welcomed.”

He goes on: “There are some folks (Seedcamp, Startupbootcamp, Springboard, others on the list in the latest study) that have great advisers, some money, a good process, decent connections. So for an entrepreneur new to the scene, they can be very helpful. Just best to do due diligence on them before you commit.” Wise words.

Stefan Glaenzer of White Bear Yard and Passion Capital says they now have 11 teams with founders from 6 different nationalities. “We need even more options with ambition in Europe for talented entrepreneurs and coders if we want to create global competing companies (finally).”

Eileen Burbidge, also of White Bear Yard and Passion Capital believes “accelerator programs are valued by VCs more for the connection to the venture community and educational value to entrepreneurs than for deal flow”.

But for her, “accelerators are absolutely a benefit to the startup ecosystem. Anything which encourages, supports or motivates entrepreneurs to set up new teams, initiatives and “startups” is great for the ecosystem. We need more people who are trying more things, experimenting, iterating, testing, and generally thinking about different and new ways of doing things — from which great companies and value flow.”

Charles Grimsdale of Eden Ventures believes “Some of these incubators are doing a great job of helping to build the start-up support network… [and] are helping to drive the culture of start-ups…”

Unfortunately, he sounds an alarm bell about the longevity of the incubator/accelerator model : “However they generally can’t invest enough cash to be in any way meaningful. When they start to take too much equity for what they offer they may quickly turn people off, and will damage the ecosystem they are trying to help foster.”

This themes was picked up by Simon Murdoch, a serial entrepreneur, Angel and former VC who also works with Octopius Ventures. He had this to say:

“In the VC world you get a percentage of upside on exits and a management fee based on the size of your fund. But with early stage funds the fund is not large enough to live off, which is why VCs tend to move to larger funds as they go up. So Seedcamp should be encouraged as it’s harder at the lower end of the market. “

But he points out a drawback to Seedcamp’s model, in that they “don’t have huge resources to look after the companies once they have won the competitions” but that they really help with marketing and taking their startups around, such as on showcase trips. “They don’t have the infrastructure to do what a VC would do with ongoing help. And ideally over time their investors will give them more money to support the companies in the long run. It’s important not to knock them but they do have challenges in their business model.”

For her part, Reshma Sohoni, CEO of Seedcamp itself admits that (although she might be biased) “There are probably too many incubators and accelerators already in the hub locations. There aren’t enough in smaller geographies that could be tied-in to hub locations.”

She says that “In 3-5 years…there will likely be way too many more. They aren’t differentiated enough as they copy existing models too much. Ultimately it all comes down to the people who run them and the network they are a part of and can tap into to be active. It also depends on companies that succeed out of the accelerators. That will continue to separate the best from others.”

But the “accelerators are definitely adding value to the ecosystem” and “status quo of say 5 years ago would just be depressing for growth of tech businesses in Europe and beyond.”

Amen to that – if nothing had changed in five years I would certainly not be bothering writing TechCrunch myself!

Whatever shakes out in the next couple of years, it would appear the 40 entities identified by the recent Kauffman-sponsored study, will be just the tip of the ice-burg in a year’s time. The tech bubble is incentivising anyone with money to create a programme, cobble together a list of ‘mentors’ and try their luck.

So to answer our question: Is There A European Tech Incubator Bubble?

I think the answer is that although we may see one forming, it might actually be a nice problem to have. For too long Europe has barely had any kind of support like this for startups.

More competition in the market for entrepreneurs can only be a good thing – so long as it all works out when it comes down to terms sheets – a theme I will be returning to soon.

For now, entrepreneurs would do well to work out exactly what each one is offering before making the leap into one of these programmes.

Seedcamp was singled out for its “Seedcamp Week” jumpstart where A-List mentors swarm over startups in London and described as the European “gold standard” of accelerator programs, with the biggest number of Alumni and three exits to date.

But Startupbootcamp (also an affiliate of TechStars Network), which has only got going in the last couple of years, appears to be in Seedcamp’s rear-view mirror with its programmes in Spain, Denmark and Ireland. Additional programs will be run in London and Berlin for 2012. They’ve even hired former TechCrunch France editor Roxanne Varza.

The study also found as many as 40 startup incubators in Europe, with 50% of them starting in 2010.

Here are the top eight identified by the study:

1. Seedcamp (pan-European)

2. Startupbootcamp Spain / Tetuan Valley

3. Startupbootcamp Denmark

4. Springboard (UK /Pan European)

5. Openfund (Greece / South Eastern Europe)

6. NDCR Launchpad (Ireland)

7. Propeller Venture Accelerator Fund (Ireland)

8. Startupbootcamp Ireland

Springboard, a Cambridge-based accelerator, took fourth place for providing seed capital, office space and a network of mentors and other entrepreneurs.

Interestingly the Openfund, based out of Greece but focusing on Southern Europe, has significant investment from the Piraeus Bank.

NDCR Launchpad is Ireland’s first accelerator program, is based at The Digital Hub in Dublin, runs a three month program and provides up to €20,000 in seed funding.

Propeller Venture Accelerator Fund took seventh and is run by Dublin City University’s Ryan Academy for Entrepreneurship. And Startupbootcamp Ireland took home eighth place.

The study was put together Italy based venture capitalist Gianluca Dettori and Marco Ciccolini in conjunction with Aziz Gilani from DFJ Mercury. It was commissioned by the Kauffman Fellows Program, working in partnership with Tech Cocktail (blog post here) and the Kellogg School of Management.

Dettori reveals more details of his findings at the NESTA: Startup Factories event in London tomorrow.

The report was based on a set of scores, such that incubators scored 25 percentage points if they had had qualified financing events (companies that got funded after completing the program), 50 points for for successful companies coming out of an accelerator and 25 points on program characteristics (seed money levels, equity stake for the accelerator, and the size of the alumni base). The rankings were supplemented by interviews with VC’s, investors and past accelerator participants.

But according to TechCocktail: “Europe’s accelerator systems are just a few years behind those in the U.S. and while the U.S. is one single market, European innovation ecosystems are like islands, loosely connected.” Also, European incubators and accelerators often operate with different variations of the model due to the different environments. That’s fair comment in my opinion.

The reports authors say that only a handful of accelerator programs in Europe ended up qualifying. And I must admit I was surprised not to see HackFWD in this list – which provides a year-long programme – alongside The Difference Engine in the UK. The latter has processed 19 teams, with seven funded and £1.2m+ raised by startups, post-programme.

In addition Microsoft’s BizSpark (admittedly more of a marketing programme for startups based on MS technologies), Garage48 (Estonia) and The Founder Institute’s European events were not named, presumbly because they didn’t fit the criteria of ‘for profit, closed terms of less than a year and paid in equity’. Also LeCamping in France, a non-profit model, alongside AAlto in Finland and TechGarage in Italy did not meet the standard, as did others which charge startups for their services.

Thus this also this excluded Plug&Play in Silicon Valley and Pier38 in San Francisco.

The study also found that Accelerator programs are valued by VCs more for the connection to the venture community and educational value to entrepreneurs than for deal flow.

Dettori says that after a year of research they found 200 entities between the US and Europe “that were somehow active”. He says they found 40 incubators in Europe and many of them launched in the past twelve months.

If you want to know the top US incubators singled out by the study, here they are:

1. TechStars Boulder
2. Y Combinator
3. Excelerate Labs
4. LaunchBox Digital
5. TechStars Boston
6. Kicklabs
7. Techstars Seattle
8. Tech Wildcutter
9. Dreamit Ventures
10. The Brandery

It’s been over 3.5 years since Seedcamp was launched to help establish Europe as a great place for startups, and how things have changed since then.

From where I’m standing, the European startup scene appears to be alive and kicking, and although we’re still very, very far from Europe being a perfect place to launch a business in many regards, I remain hopeful about the chances of major technology companies booting up around here in the next decade and beyond.

Anyway, Seedcamp is one of the ‘local’ projects I most admire, and today they’re sharing some numbers and facts – long overdue if you ask me – that underline just how important a role they play in the European startup ecosystem.

Annually, Seedcamp says it sees over 2,000 companies apply to the 11 events it organizes across the EMEA region. Of those, 10 percent (roughly 220) are provided active mentoring from the 1,200 mentors (entrepreneurs, investors, etc.) in the Seedcamp network.

Of those 220 remaining companies, 10 percent (15 to 20 startups) received seed funding from Seedcamp in addition to one-year long support, with a particular emphasis on active mentoring in the first 3 months after raising funding.

Here’s where it gets interesting:

Seedcamp points out that, of the 22 companies in which $1.5 million was invested from 2007 to 2009, no less than 90 percent of those startups raised follow-on funding (on average somewhere in between $300,000 and $2 million) in their next round.

Overall, Seedcamp-seeded startups have secured over $30 million in capital, and of the 17 companies that are stilll alive and independent after their participation in Seedcamp Fund I, the organization says all have a product launched, while all are generating revenue (except one unnamed startup).

Only two of the companies have ceased operations, and three have been acquired.

The biggest hit to date was Mobclix, which was acquired for $50 million within 2 years after its Seedcamp participation (the others are Talasim and Toksta).

Ultimately though, Seedcamp’s model doesn’t revolve around isolated ‘home runs’, and to underscore that here’s my favorite stat from the Seedcamp, erm, camp:

The 17 companies mentioned above boast over 300 employees in total today, as opposed to the 2 people on average per company when they came to Seedcamp. That’s a growth of 6x over 3 years in headcount over 3 years, and what makes me fond of Seedcamp.

For your further reading pleasure:

Seedcamp launches its own version of AngelList (Dec 2010)

Seedcamp Closes a New €3 Million Fund, Plans to Expand Globally (TCTV) (Nov 2010)

Saul Klein Defends the Honor of Wordy and London and Israel’s Tech Scenes (TCTV) (Sept 2010)

Exclusive: Saul Klein talks on Seedcamp’s present, past and future (Nov 2009)

Seedcamp data shows the startup trends in Europe (Sept 2009)

So, without further ado, the winners are:

Mopapp – from Bologna, Italy – This is an analytics tool for developers and publishers to track and analyze their mobile apps’ revenues from all major online stores (Apple App Store, Google Android Market, GetJar, RIM App World, Appia, MobiHand, WM7… ) and major mobile Ad networks.

The Efficient Cloud – from Vienna, Austria – Cost-effective Platform-as-a-service technology for hosting providers. Integration with Ruby on Rails, Java, Django, .NET and PHP.

According to the blog post published by the team, this event received a record number of applications from across the globe – including India and Australia. And despite the strong majority of UK-based companies on the list (although nowhere near as many UK companies as last year), the 18 teams selected actually represent 9 different countries.

Here’s a rundown on the killer startups who made the cut:

Ad Avengers (London, UK): a network for smaller publishers to find advertisers, which operates on a credits-based system.

Bipsly (Paris, France): a mobile-based loyalty rewards platform, allowing local businesses to engage and reward customers.

Blomming (Milan/Modena, Italy): DIY e-commerce solutions for blogs, social media and soon mobile devices.

Bragbet (Dublin, Ireland): a social gambling platform.

Eeve (London, UK): a location-based platform for users to share information about events and parties.

Frooly (Sheffield, UK): a social-commerce platform for small independent businesses.

Geomium (London, UK): a social platform for users to find cool activities and meet people nearby.

GrabCAD (Tallinn, Estonia): an online marketplace connecting engineers and manufacturing companies.

Huikea (Helsinki, Finland): real social games for iPads & tablets, to be played with friends in bars, at school or at home.

Khojan (London, UK): online shopping platform allowing users to interact with individual shops, view profiles and buy products.

Minutebox (London, UK): a video-chat marketplace where users can buy and sell advice.

Mob1Serv (London, UK): SaaS solution to integrate innovative features into mobile and desktop applications.

MyRec (Lisbon, Portugal): a recommendation system to facilitate finding pertinent information in large databases.

Parcura (London, UK): “Linkedin for parents” or a social referral network for finding babysitters and other child-related services.

Psykosoft (Tours, France): online creative applications company, behind a photo-painting application with natural media brushes and tools.

Risparmiosuper (Milan, Italy): online price-comparison tool to save shoppers time and money.

Sylpheo (Saint-Quentin, France): sales-oriented mobile applications for making calls, customer notes, CRM updates and sending documents.

Vox.io (Ljubljana, Slovenia): Free voice and video calls over internet, straight from the browser.

After Seedcamp London, the next event will take place in Tel Aviv on February 16th. Applications for this event are open and will close on February 3rd.

As Seedcamp says, Europe doesn’t have the “the density of either the VC or angel money available in the Valley,” but perhaps this will increase the density and the transparency. At the least, Angels are listed whether they invested in the Seedcamp fund or not. The caveat of course is that this is not an independent media outfit – Seedcamp has skin in the game itself. It also means any Angel on the list – including Seedcamp – will see any deal pasing through the site. Having said that, we’d encourage European Angels to sign up, since anything that brings Europe’s scattered, disparate scene together is a good thing, frankly.

There is a dedicated space for both investors and entrepreneurs on the site and more features are planned.

Seedcamp will also host two full Seedsummit events for active angel and seed investors this year. The first will be taking place in January, right after Seedcamp London, and a Seedsummit in New York City in June aiming to connect Seed investors across the Atlantic.

Seedcamp is tieing up the loose ends in its quest to cross-cross the globe. Question, are others keeping up?

I have no idea why it seems to be “Europe week” for me, but here’s some more news from across the pond: Seedcamp has raised a new €3 million fund. I’m a huge fan of Seedcamp, even though I’ve given the co-founder Saul Klein a hard time about some of its winners in the past.

It is a combination of Y Combinator, a competition like TechCrunch Disrupt and a super angel, but one that aggressively takes itself on the road every month to find the best startups in emerging markets, particularly Eastern Europe. (It’s not unlike my own obsessive emerging market reporting. Oh wait, it’s completely different. They have actual money to invest.)

We caught up with Seedcamp’s other founder Reshma Sohoni to find out more about Seedcamp’s newly enlarged global ambitions. The video is below.

More than money, Seedcamp gives crucial mentorship for these early companies and has a decent track record over the last three years of helping these diamonds-in-the-rough connect with big Western investors like Union Square Ventures and Index Ventures, who is also a backer of Seedcamp.

This is just a first close, and Seedcamp is hoping to raise more money in coming months. This seems a no-brainer investment for a VC firm with too much cash that wants a savvy eye on up-and-coming companies and talent in Eastern Europe. Just throwing money at someone who is crazy enough to kill himself (or, ahem, herself) scouring emerging markets for unknown companies is a lot easier than doing it yourself. (cc:Michael Arrington/AOL)

In this video, Klein tells us about the overall theme of this year’s Seedcamp, and we dig in on the company we liked the best (Spoiler Alert!) and the company we liked the least (Spoiler Alert!). We then ask him why with so much going on in fast-growing economies in Africa, South America, Asia and the Middle East we should still care about stodgy old London’s tech scene, and he gives a pretty good answer. We wrap up with a discussion about Klein’s latest experiment: He’s relocated to Israel for a year to figure out why returns have fallen off in a country with so much technical and entrepreneurial talent.

Then Paul and Sarah say goodbye to Klein and have a fight about incubators. Paul tells people to get on a plane to the Valley if they want to start a company; Sarah loses it and calls him names. A lot of eye-rolling ensues.

It’s a long WITN this week, but, forgive us, we cover a lot of global ground.