Plugg wraps with two very capable winnners
So Plugg, the European startups conference in Brussels today (organised by TechCrunch writer Robin Wauters) wrapped up with two overall winners of their startup competition, and if I do say so myself they were pretty worthy.
Myngle’s defensability against Livemocha and iTalki is, they claim, the combination of quality teaching and community. Teachers on Myngle are ‘checked’ before going online – though that does raise issues of scalability. However they do have revenues – they ask people to pay about 300-400 Euro up front for lessons, thus avoiding the “shall I continue” question with other paid-language sites, and this means they are booking 20,000 Euro per month and accelerating.
Some other highlights of the conference included:
• Synthetron sounded like a fascinating way to create a crowd conversation.
• Beebole.com looked liked an interesting mashup of the Netvibes model tailored to businesses
• Senseboard was a bizarre Minority Report-style startup from Stockholm that had a hand-controller for sensing movement opposite a computer screen. Wild.
• EyeTronics scanned your face into a 3-D image which, ideally, will get inserted into games
• Silentale continues to be one of the startups to keep an eye on.
• Dries Buytaert, the original Belgian creator and project lead for the Drupal open source web publishing and collaboration platform, gave a masterful speech about being an outsider on the US startup scene. This guy is rapidly making his way forward. He is president of the Drupal Association, a non-profit organization, co-founder of Acquia, the VC-backed software company which is the “Red Hat” of Drupal and is also working on Mollom, a service that helps you identify content quality and that stops website spam. And he’s in his 20s. Beat that.
• Bart Decrem, CEO of Tapulous is originally from Belgium, but now heads a company with a main-street office in Palo Alto where Mark Zukerburg will casually drop by. Decrem coordinated the creation of the GNOME Foundation, headed marketing and business affairs for the Mozilla Foundation, and founded Flock. His main message was that where as originally people thought iPhone apps would be about location services, in fact they turned out to be about disposable services and entertainment. Tap Tap was one of the most popular apps and now has 6m users and 1,000 games are completed every minute.