Nickpoint

The creme of UK and Europe’s Tech startup community were at  Techcrunch’s Europas Awards last night. The inaugural event was held at the highly  fashionable Delfina in London. We also had guests from across the pond, including Sarah Lacy and a very hoarse Scoble. An endless stream of beer, wine and Tech startup high energy made for a great evenings entertainment. The evening started with six startup pitches, followed by a panel discussion and then the awards.

The Awards are up (image source)

The Pitches

First to pitch was Bernhard Niesner from Busuu with their Language learning and community app. Bernhard gave a energetic pitch with  amusing Austrian humor. Next up was Heikki Haldre from Fit.me a Virtual fitting Room app. A female from the audience had the crowd in stitches when she commented that most women don’t know their breast size. You can image the follow on comments.. Philipp Hubertus  Mohr from Comufy pitched their award winning personal communication aggregator.

Pitchero will help the UK find the next Jonny Wilkinson according to Mark Fletcher who gave a fast paced tour of their sport community websites app. The next pitch was from GigLocator who launch next week. James Proud gave a very relaxed, honest and friendly pitch. The crowd loved it. Last up was Ravi Sharma from Emarket with their CMG on-line exchange site.

Some great pitches and new European startups. BREAKING NEWS: Mike Butcher announced a European startup league table based on YouNoodle results. Way d’go Mike. A Champions league!!

The Panel

After the pitches a distinguished panel discussed the European startup scene:

• Stefan Glaenzer, from Last.FM feels that Europe is 3-4 years behind The Valley and falling further back. Stefan believes we need to focus more on sales and marketing. However we do need to keep in mind that Silicon Valley is in its own bubble.
• Sarah Lacy, author & TechCrunch editor, is on a world entrepreneurship and Innovation tour. Sarah’s visiting many emerging markets including India and China. Sarah sees demand increasing from non Western markets and Silicon Valley slipping back.
• Michael Birch, co-founder of Bebo and Brent Hoberman, MyDeco’s, announced they are setting up PROfounders Capital. This is an investment fund for startups. Its run by experienced founders for startups founders. Nice idea.
• Tariq Krim, founder of Netvibes – Tariq talked about the need to think globally with your startup.

It seems from the discussion we’ve come along way in Europe but have much further to go in today’s global economy.

The Awards

Spotify scooped up the most awards. They won: Best Web Application; Best Startup Founder(s); Best New Startup; and “The Europas GRAND PRIX”.

Alistair Mitchell & Andy McLoughlin, Huddle founders, win
The Best B2B category (source)

The full list of categories and winners are:

1. Best Bootstrapped Startup (less than 3 years old) – Soup.io
2. Best Design – Songkick
3. Best Social Innovation (benefits society, EMEA) – Mendeley
4. Best Cleantech / Environmental Startup (EMEA) – Alertme
5. Best European Hardware / Real World Gadget (EMEA) – Poken
6. Best Entertainment App or Service (EMEA) – SoundCloud
7. Best Mobile Startup (EMEA) - Nimbuzz
8. Best Mobile Application (EMEA)  – Spinvox
9. Best Web Application Or Service (EMEA) – Spotify
10. Best Enterprise / B2B Startup (EMEA) – Huddle
11. Best Startup Founder(s) – Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon, jointly for Spotify
12. Best Investor (VC or Angel fund, EMEA) – The Accelerator Group
13. Best Investor Personality (EMEA) – Yossi Vardi
14. Best New Startup, Summer 2008-2009 – Spotify
15. “The Europas GRAND PRIX” – Spotify

It was an evening of much fun and frolicking:

Mike on high!! (source)

Well done  to all the pitchers for their efforts and congratulations to the Award winners. Mike and his team did a wonderful job of organising this fabulous event. Until next year. Our startup may even enter with our new website monitoring app..

Tags: conference, Europas, Pitching

This entry was posted on July 10, 2009 at 3:49 pm and is filed under conference. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.