incrediblue – An Airbnb For Boats – Wins At HowToWeb’s Festival For CEE Startups

Now a solid fixture on the Central and Eastern European scene, HowToWeb in Bucharest, Romania is a conference with international speakers as well as a healthy dose of CEE startups to boot. Now in its third year, this year’s event once again showcased how CEE tech companies are breaking out of the old caricatures to create a number of new and interesting businesses. And HowToWeb’s maven founder Bogdan Iordache made a wise move by extending the startup pitch competition into a full-blown festival of meeting and acceleration over 4 days as part of its Startup Spotlight programme. Winner of the best pitch was Mavenhut / Solitaire Arena. The Innovation Award went to Gameleon / Bugtopia. The Startup Spotlight competition Runner-Up was Good Momming!. And the overall Competition winner was Incrediblue. Details on all are below.

In addition at the conference, it was announced that international co-working network TechHub would be launching a new space in Bucharest (Disclosure: I’m a cofounder/adviser, with CEO Elizabeth Varley).

Here are the startups that won:


incrediblue – Greece
incrediblue is a marketplace connecting boat owners & crew with travelers, globally. Consider it an Airbnb for boats. incrediblue standardizes the marine tourism industry and allows you to make buying decisions based on price, photos, location, availability and user reviews. Users list their boat on incredible, and allow people to book the boat as they would an apartment. It also offers skippers jobs to run the boats.


Good Momming! – Romania / UK
An exhibitor in Startup Alley at Disrupt SF, Good Momming! gives personalized baby feeding and growth recommendations to new parents. It’s done on mobile and in real time.


Mavenhut / Solitaire Arena – Romania / Ireland
MavenHut takes classic casual games into social multiplayer experiences, on mobile and on the web. This 1st game already has 75,000 users.


Gameleon / Bugtopia – Romania
This is a platform to create and publish multiplatform games and monetize content.

And here’s a fast run-down of the other startups that pitched:

Nexi.me – Romania / Netherlands
Nexi.me is an online platform for small and medium businesses that helps them hire top talents through referrals from their employees.

Achoo – Estonia
Professional networking for consultants, freelancers and doers. Share achievements and lessons learned to grow your reputation, get a crisp and always up-to-date professional profile.

Anctu – Croatia
We are opening a new channel of distribution for social apps, a new market, a new chance. Shortening the way to reach customers for developers that build social apps, taking 30% of their sale. Think social media companies, think promotion.

BeSuperhero – Romania
For every good deed you make, money will go to charity.

BugTopia – Romania
Imagine Diablo 1 in the browser. Zero plugins. Real-time. built with HTML5, and having social tools. Using a browser, users may play and create levels.

CallReScheduler – Romania
CallReScheduler helps sales professionals increase efficiency of their prospecting for customers by using smartphones and gives their sales managers analytics about it.

Eventriffic – Romania
Eventriffic is the best tool dedicated to Event Organizers to easily manage, monitor and analyze Social Media for their Events.

Green Horse Games – CarsCup.com – Romania
CarsCup is the living world of racing teams where you can prove which car brand has the best drivers.

Job Attest – Romania
Send your CV to all the companies that are searching a candidate for a job only by pushing one button: BID! You only have to apply to a general job title, and the companies that have that position free, will definitely know about it! It has never been simpler than that.

JotPot – Romania / UK
JotPot is a platform for students that takes the traditional paper notebook and backpack to a whole new level by putting them online.

KeenSkim – Romania / Bulgaria
KeenSkim helps people save time by reading less (& learn more). Get automatic summaries of web articles & news. Fast & easy!

Loyalster – Serbia
Customer-engaging marketing platform that helps fashion brands provide a truly personalized customer shopping experience.

Mediatoolkit – Croatia
Mediatoolkit is a must have content finder for media companies that can analyze any website in the world and provide real-time statistics.

Mixgar – Hungary
Mixgar is s social jukebox – it streams music to venues, like: bars, restaurants, festivals. Guests can check out using their mobiles which song is being played and can vote their favourites up on the playlist. Mixgar reads their favourites from Facebook and based on votes and music interest the songs most liked on that location will be played. So Mixgar is interactive, social and democratic!

MoodUp Dental – Poland
Edu mobile app for developing good healthy habits in children. We connect the app with their dentists & Amazon. All dental stuff in one app!

Monitor Backlinks – Romania
Monitor Backlinks is a link checking service that helps SEO developers and agencies discover and automatically check their backlinks statuses.

Nexi.me – Romania / Netherlands
Nexi.me is an online platform for small and medium businesses that helps them hire top talents through referrals from their employees.

Punish me for slacking – Bulgaria
The app that makes you get s#@ff done with the help of your mastermind. So long slackers, welcome doers! Punish season is ON!

Render Street – Romania
Render Street is an easy to use, affordable render farm for 3D animations with low fixed costs.

Seedbit – Romania
Seedbit disrupts the sponsorship market by helping event organizers to find the best sponsors for their event, online, fast and easy.

Sellbox – Poland
Sellbox changes your Dropbox into simple yet powerful ecommerce platform.

Simbound – Romania
Learn e-marketing by doing e-marketing in a risk-free environment.

Squirrly – Romania
Squirrly is the game that gets your products and skills noticed online on over-drive.

snipdocs – Romania / Germany
snipdocs’ productivity solution covers the complete process of research and content curation saving users time and stress.

The Pricing Agent – Romania
Most companies guess the prices for their products or set them without any scientific reasoning. This leads to financial losses and non-optimal revenue. In order to solve this situation, the PricingAgent helps companies find their most profitable price level for their products based on the prices of their competitors, market demand and big-data elements.

Treeach – Romania
Building the biggest community of language teachers in a sustainable business model that allows us to grow fast while bringing social impact.

TribeGarden – Romania
TribeGarden enables collaborative lifestyle for co-workers, neighbors and students, offering tools for buying and time sharing management.

Useful at Night – Bulgaria
Real time social guide for nightlife spotting the heat in town and people you are likely to meet.

Vibetrace – Romania
Vibetrace is an e-commerce personalization system, on website and emails, similar to Amazon’s, delivered as a service.