So who won the TechCrunch Europe Summer Pitch Battle?
With Pitch Battle we threw open the doors. Anyone who had bought a ticket could submit a 1-2 line description of their startup (or idea). In total almost 200 people came. The judging panel was: Katy Turner and Ben Tompkins of Eden Ventures; Eileen Tso Burbidge (White Bear Yard); Wendy Tan White of Moonfruit and Paul Jozefak of Neuhaus Partners.
The initial pitches were sifted very quickly by the judges, who selected 30 to pitch for 1 minute. We even let the ones who weren’t selected (another 12) to just introduce themselves and read out their one-liners. Afterwards, 7 were nominated (along with another three who were part of a previous UKTI pitching clinic we help run) to pitch for a 3 minutes each and then the judges selected 3 final winners.
We got a great turnout of entrepeneurs and investors or corporate people including Google Corporate Development, Pearson, Peacock Fund, Advent Venture Partners, Balderton Capital, Dawn Capital, Eden Ventures (a sponsor), m8 capital (sponsor), Neuhaus Partners (from Hamburg), PROFounders Capital, Doughty Hanson and White Bear Yard.
Calaboard, Crowdscanner, Duedil, MindQuilt, Me-stars, OneLeep, Geomium and Gourmet Origins made it through to the second round (URLs below).
The three companies which won were Calaboard (of which more later), Duedil (which we’ve reported on before), and Geomium a location based service that pulls feeds from various LBS services and puts them on a map. Calaboard was considered the overall winner by judges.
I’m obviously biased but I think the event worked, although I’m taking feedback on what we could improve and change, of course. Feel free to leave your feedback in the comments. A couple of people blogged the event, but I’m grateful for Eileen Tso Burbidge, one of our judges, for publishing some great notes on the event which I wasn’t able to do at the time, since I was running it. These are quoted below.
- Hullomail: instant voice messaging
- DADapp: organizing, finding and reusing digital media
- Pzyche: real-time visitor intelligence for online gaming
- Calaboard (@calameda)* = 1st place winner; augmented reality video conferencing
- Crowdscanner*: event ice-breaker/iPhone app
- TRData: Bloomberg for emerging markets
- Duedil (@Duedil_app)* = 2nd place winner; people reputation system
- AdAvengers (@adavengers): making display-ads simpler
- MyArt: creativity marketplace (for collaboration and sharing)
- YourNextRead: book recommendation discovery and sharing
- MindQuilt*: enterprise knowledgement management platform
- Me-stars*: social casual games for mobile
- Whaddado: social bookmarking platform for events, gigs, happenings
- Logentries: collect, visualize and store log data
- Privilink: message and connect with people as easily as PayPal for payments
- OneLeep (@oneleep)*: pay to contact anyone (who sets a price on contacting them with %age going to charity)
- Nsyght: social search
- Eclector: white label bookstore platform
- TheNudge: location based service for recommendatiobs
- Geomium (@geomium)* = 3rd place winner; mobile location based “what’s going on around you”
- Pridesnapz (@PrideSnapz): mobile penny auctions and group buying
- Future Content Lab: last.fm for content, matching content with transactions/commerce
- Getyoo (@Getyoo): device for exchanging digital information, leaflets, PDFs, files
- Mojo: mobile airline live pricing database
- Fubles: eBay for matching players, pitches, games
- FaceValue: social commerce (buy and sell via social networks)
- OnePage (@myonepage): business cards in the cloud
- Subsify (@subsify): easy online payments (for SME/startups)
- Qhub: Q&A website platform for whitelabel
- Psonar: music in the cloud
- [ ]: graffiti for events
- Homemaker: Basecamp for families
- Dress2Press: drag and drop ecommerce items (fashion/clothes) onto photos
- [ ]: open source trust maps
- Hipsnip (@hipsnip): connecting real and online worlds
- Timeline-X.com: records history of site visitors
- OxygenOnline: content production company
- E-Export: manage logistics of import/export in/out of Brazil
- 28msec: XQuery in the cloud
- MoneyDashboard: Mint.com for UK
- SIPcast.me: converts SIP phone calls to webcasts
- HRLocker: HR software
- GourmetOrigins*: foodies and location/destinations
- Prospectvision*: sales and lead gen via behavioural analysis
* Companies who were selected to give 3 minute pitches
A huge thanks to our sponsors:
PITCH BATTLE SPONSORS
Basekit – Web 2.0 website design and hosting made simple
Borro – Lend yourself money
Huddle – The online tool for doing work, running projects and getting stuff done.
Reevoo – Decide what to buy
Truphone – The telephone company for the internet age
We7 – Free and legal music for the download generation
Further information on Eden Ventures and portfolio companies can be found at www.edenventures.co.uk.
Drinks sponsor
Bootlaw is a free boot camp for emerging technology, internet and digital businesses and the professionals working in them who want to learn more about the legal issues they face. With over 600 members, it is the biggest law-related meetup on meetup.com and it is brought to you by lawyers Barry Vitou and Danvers Baillieu, the friendly technology specialists at Winston & Strawn in London. For more information go to www.bootlaw.com