On December 5th, 2011 TechCrunch Europe came to Moscow again. Co-organized by TechCrunch Europe, Digital October and Kite Ventures, the second TechCrunch Moscow showcased several early stage startups and hosted panels on emerging technology trends in Russia and abroad.
The event, held in English, proved to be a smashing success, bringing together over 700 participants and attracting several thousand viewers online. Videos of the event can be found below including the amazing interview between Andrew Keen and Anton Nossik (media director of LiveJournal) on a pivotal day for Russian politics following the Russian Duma elections of the previous day. It’s a must watch.
As in 2010, Mike Butcher of TechCrunch Europe and Edward Shenderovich of Kite Ventures MC-ed the conference. The agenda combined panel discussions and fireside chats with industry leaders in Russia and culminated with the Startup Battle.
This time, the lineup of speakers included: Sergey Beloussov (founder of Parallels, partner at Runa Capital); Rob Cassedy (Ebay); Sasha Galitsky (Almaz Capital); Maelle Gavet (Ozon, Russia’s biggest online bookseller); Morten Lund (Everbread); Laurent Le Moal (PayPal Europe); Christian Lahng (CEO, Tradeshift); Denis Sverdlov (Yota, Russia’s Wimax operator); Arkady Volozh (Yandex, Russia’s leading search engine) and many others.
You can check out the photos here.
Below are links to the videos of each session.
What’s Next? Creating the Big Picture: Morten Lund, Sergei Beloussov, Rodion Shishkov
Presentation. Ostrovok.ru case study. Sergei Faguet, Kirill Makharinsky
Who rules mobile industry? Igor Schegolev, Dennis Sverdlov, Misha Lyalin
Digital Politics. Andrew Keen, Anton Nossik
E-commerce. Laurent Le Moal, Rob Cassedy, Maelle Gavet, Ruslan Fazlyev
New Digital Europe: Morten Lund, Annelies Van Den Belt, Mike Butcher, Lukasz Gadowski
Venture Investments: Leonid Boguslavsky, Alexander Galitsky, Igor Agamirzian
Presentation. Demyan Kudryavtsev. “Commersant” Publishing House
Startup Battle. Arkady Moreynis
Here are the startups that presented. The winners of the competition were ResumUp and TagBrand:
“ResumUp makes instant visual resumes for social network users and provide effective tools for recruiters. Go Visual – Get Visible. (We aim to set a new standard in career management, online and social recruiting. Globally).”
“Minutta.com allows for quick production of short video clips from user content based on cool professional templates. Now every consumer can turn her creative vomit into Hollywood or MTV -type product without any damage to nail polish. No need to download or install anything. Free for consumers, cheap viral for brands.”
“SalonPicker” is an integrated SaaS-service for appointment-based businesses. It includes online reservations, CRM helping to handle the client base, internet widgets for the businesses could be embedded into their sites or pages/groups in various social networks and insights to the business owners. Initially the project is focused on beauty salons, later it will be scaled to some other segments: car-washes, car repairs, clinics, fitness clubs, restaurants etc.”
Gipht.me
“gipht.me is a Greece-based US startup developing an innovative platform to change the way people communicate on smartphones. The gipht.me platform allows users to exchange interactive enhanced messages on mobile devices.These ‘giphts’ include virtual goods and highly interactive experiences for daily communication such as mementos, coupons, greetings, offers, geo located objects, augmented reality items and jokes available in seasonal and themed categories. gipht.me provides ’giphts’ in a ready-made content format that users can fully personalize before sending.”
“Menutka is a dish finder service. The disruption is that people could find the places based not on the common restaurant’s ratings but on the likes of the specific dishes in those restaurants. It is not about restaurants but about the food – about dishes you’ve tried and the opinion you want to share. You can think of it as of FoodSpotting but without any need to create the content but just to rate it and to share it with your friends and public.”
“KUZNECH has invented technology to index and compare billions of images online by 150 parameters, including composition. Business strategy is to implement the technology in a number of vertical applications (as well as provide API to third-party developers) with primary focus on in-image advertising, e-commerce and social communications.”
“If people buy brands they want to talk about that. They buy brands to let other people to know what they have. TagBrand is a site which allow them to share this info. This could be easily done by making “brand-ins” with their photos – it is like check-ins in places in FourSquare but about brand-ins in brands. With this service you could also ask other people looking for the brands other people are wearing. Or you can easily create polls about the things you are to choose using the TagBrand mobile app.”
“Wizee Shopping is a mobile app that enhances the consumer shopping experience by giving direct access to shopping-specific information, indoor mall maps and location-specific services. Wizee enables ultra-localized real-time communication between shoppers, retailers and malls in a revolutionary new way. Wizee currently covers 45 malls in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Novosibirsk, has 35,000 active users, established partnerships with hundred retail brands and is receiving top grades at the iPhone and Android app stores.”
Quote Roller
“Quote Roller is a software as a service application that helps to create interactive, beautiful sales proposals, invoices, agreements and other types of business documents out of your own branded system.”