As mentioned in our post covering 5min, the semi-finals of the European focused Startup 2.0 contest were held in Madrid on the weekend.
5 startups were chosen as finalists, with the final to be held May 24 at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.
As a competition it’s a treasure trove of interesting European startups. Whilst we don’t have enough time and space to cover the 300 odd submissions, the 5 semi-finalists show that all good things need not originate from the United States.
Trivop
Trivop: Promoted as the first videoguide for hotels, Trivop allows consumers to browse hotels by video, assisting them in making an educated choice when deciding on which hotel to stay in. The layout is pure mashup, Google Maps being used as a base from which to add hotel or user submitted video, with user generated commentary pulled from TripAdvisor. The site launched in March with a focused on Paris and is currently expanding to other European cities. A clever idea.
Properazzi
Properazzi: Barcelona based Properazzi is a crawler-based web 2.0 property search engine covering all of Europe. Launched in March the site currently lists 1.8 million sale and rental properties in 45 European countries, in all European languages and currencies. Another mashup, data is pulled and overlaid onto a Google Map with listings able to be searched via country, location or price. The company is backed by Mangrove Capital Partners, one of the early investors in Skype.
11870.com
11870.com: Billed as a “real-life del.icio.us” where users can share with friends places they have visited using comments, tags, photos and video. The site is currently only available in Spanish. Google Translate delivered reams of gibberish so I couldn’t get a full feel for the site, but it looks promising.
5min
A “Life Videopedia”, 5min competes in a growing field of DIY/ How To video sites.
See our full revue of 5min here
Sclipo
Sclipo: a how-to based user-generated video site that competes directly with 5min. Content can be searched by skill, although on appearances primacy is given to user ratings with top rated videos being listed on the front page in preference to each category, a small difference from the competition. It’s a service with a lot of potential, but so is 5min and SuTree.
At the Startup 2.0 final on May 24, the 5 semi finalists will have 10 minutes each to present their startup with 10 minutes for a Q&A session. The finals are being held in conjunction with Blogak 2.0 with events being streamed live over the web for those keen to watch.