LeWeb – Startup Competition Finalists: Cloudsplit, Stribe, Tigerlily
We had four sessions, with four startups each session. Startups were given points for pitch and company/product, the scores aggregated and ranked and then deliberated over by myself and my co-host Ben Metcalfe. Ben is based in San Francisco, CA and founder & CTO of Plato’s Forms, a forthcoming communication platform for journalists, bloggers and corporate communication professionals.
Informally I think we were going for elements like technical excellence, traction and platform and of course the pitch itself. And it should be noted that one of the things we heard from our judges time and again was the importance of getting some of the real data points about your startup up front in the pitch. It is impossible to generalise of course as every one was different, but European startups need practise at this, just like anyone else in any other part of the world. Standing out from the crowd of 16 in some way was also a good idea.
To the finalists:
The winner of Gold was:
https://eu.beta.techcrunch.com/2009/12/09/leweb-stribes-plug-and-play-social-networks-with-a-difference/
The winner of Silver was:
For more see their full post on TechCrunch Europe, plus video of their pitch.
The winner of Bronze was:
With so much emphasis on cloud computing and the rise of the platform play these days it seemed natural to recognise CloudSplit. This is a real-time analytics tool working towards private beta which helps businesses understand where their cloud computing costs are going. This hopefully saves them from the shock of a massive bill when those PUT and GET requests come thick and fast. This is pretty exciting stuff, when you consider that Amazon itself doesn’t have a solution like this for its own customers. In addition to giving clear graphical breakdowns (including by application type and node) of where users’ cloud spend is actually going, CloudSplit offers a real-time control and budgeting service via alerts and cut off mechanisms. Based in Dublin, Ireland company has received €100,000 seed funding from serial tech entrepreneur Ray Nolan and, word on the street at least, is that the service has VCs and cloud computing customers lining up. Like any startup that wants to really scale, it’s on the hunt for $2m in VC funding to maximise the window of opportunity across the US and Asia that will open in 2010.
For more see their full post on TechCrunch Europe, plus video of their pitch.
See TechCrunch Europe for our full coverage of all the startups in the competition.