Last night saw the closing of a 3-day-event called STARTEurope, in Vienna. Comparable to the recent Launch48 in the UK, it gathered entrepreneurial minds, developers, investors and a bunch of Wanna-bes to build and extend startups. Over the course of the weekend startups were able to exchange with business people, other startups and ultimately had to present what they were able to achieve and accomplish within those 72 hours.
Aside from some questionable “startups” there were several kick-ass products presented, one of which would receive the STARTEurope award, as voted by an expert panel consisting of people such as Amy Hoy from Slash7.com, Markus Wagner from i5invest or Bernhard Thalhammer from recently launched Austrian early-stage VC First love capital. It was a pleasure seeing Austria’s Startup scene evolve and since it was also filled with numerous people from the US and other european countries it has shown that EU startups are slowly but surely consolidating, bringing in people from diverse countries.
The winning startup of last night, Qriously, is vividly depicting this “Europeanisation” among Startups, since one of its founders is originally from the US and just moved to Austria.
The application allows mobile developers to inject a code snippet into any app that uses mobile ads for monetization, which turns those ads into a real-time feedback/voting tool. Thus, whenever market research organizations or politicans would like to do polls they can simply buy a number of “clicks” upfront and their submitted question will then be displayed on all apps using Qriously. Although there’s not much to see at their website currently, according to several questions asked by the panel, the startup already has 1 Million installs and is currently self-sustainable by what it makes out of their cost-per-poll-question model.
Their model is compelling and from what I can tell the execution is also extremely well done, which is why it’s hopefully not the last time we’ll here about them.
Play.fm, a Soundcloud competitor, with the self-proclaimed “largest database of DJ sets”, managed to build an app for the infamous Boxee. By last night they were able to present a beta version of it that is soon going to be available to all Boxee users. It lets you smoothly flick through all available DJ Sets from their web application, using the iPhone as a remote control and also adding iTunes-esque visuals for the big screen.
It has been the second time that the STARTeurope event took place and with other cities on the way this event is another great way to meet fellow startups and investors.