Seedcamp Singapore

Yes, that's right - we are going abroad again, this time to the east! Singapore is an exciting location, having embarked on the entrepreneurship train later, but with a vengeance. All indicators show that the activity and dedication of local entrepreneurs is ticking up, including the number of businesses started, expectation of founders, financing, and people employed.

What a better place would there be to expand our Seedcamp model - even more when having amazing local partners on board.

We are proud to announce our venture east with opening the application system for Seedcamp Singapore on the 5th of October this year. Find the place to let us know about your great business here - we are looking for great internet technology companies from all over Singapore and South East Asia.

We are already in talks with some great sponsors and mentors for this event, so please keep an eye out for further announcements about Seedcamp Singapore!

We are growing - and looking for you!

At Seedcamp, we are still a very tiny team - we are only 2.5 full time employees, thankfully supported by eager interns and formidable fellows every now and then. Over the past couple of years, we have added more and more Seedcamp events to the calendar, now even reaching out beyond Europe. This increase of reach makes it challenging to keep up with a small team, so we are looking for two people to join us.

First is the general management position (a term aptly coined by Union Square Ventures) - we need you to help us organising all the nitty gritty around Seedcamp events, finding partners and sponsors, and making the events run as smoothly as they ever have. Obviously, this position also covers a wide array of tasks in the back office like overseeing the application process, PR initiatives, outreach to the community and other exciting Seedcamp projects that we want to start in the coming months. If you are experienced in public relations, event organisation and related areas and enthusiastic about the startup and tech scene in Europe, apply for this position - more info here.

The second open position is a longer term internship, as our current intern Indre is leaving for Lithuania at the end of August. We are looking for a high-powered student or graduate with an impressive academic background to help out around the office and events for about 3 to 6 months. If you are passionate about startups and are thinking about being a founder yourself: This is the best opportunity to meet people, find out about the european tech scene, and kick around ideas with smart people. Find more details here.

Both positions are based in London - feel free to reach out and apply by emailing Philipp. Please include information about your background, experience, your work with startups and tech companies, and everything else you feel is relevant for the job. The job descriptions for the general management and internship positions should tell you more about our requirements.

Howzit?! Seedcamp Johannesburg recap

Last week we held our first out-of-Europe Seedcamp event in South Africa, and it was a full on success. We were already delighted by the high quality during the application process - the event itself turned out to be even more impressive.

After the usual short pitches by teams in the morning, the teams broke up into the mentoring sessions to take in all of the knowledge the mentors were ready to share. We shared some information on Seedcamp and our foray into new geographies after lunch, followed by another batch of mentoring sessions.

The overall energy and the startups' thirst for knowledge was really inspiring - it was clear that the mentors' input was highly valued by all the participants. All sessions needed to be almost violently broken up to keep up with the schedule, which is always the best indication for great discussions.

The popular vote showed Cognician and iSigned to be the darlings of the audience - two teams tackling complex problems with some elegant ideas and solutions.

We want to say a big thank you to all of the great mentors who took all of their day to help Seedcamp and the participating teams to grow and go forward. Gareth Knight, the organiser of the Tech4Africa conference helped us to find some really outstanding mentors from different backgrounds - we had visitors from all disciplines of venture capital, angel investors, successful founders and company builders, bloggers, advisors, and strong support from large local and international technology companies.

The day would not have been possible without the support of our sponsors: Google helped with the welcome drinks the night before, the Gordon Institute of Business Science was a brilliant venue with nice breakout spaces, Microsoft sponsored lunch, and Vunanitech pitched in as well.

If you have any plans of visiting South Africa soon - we can not recommend it more. The local entrepreneurship scene is growing, there is very strong mutual support, and South Africans are quite simply amazing hosts. Tech4africa, which was held on the day after Seedcamp, was a great testament to that.

Some of the teams also blogged about their experiences:

• Patrick from Cognician on how to get most out of the day
• Jason from 10layer wrote an open letter to say thanks (our pleasure!)

Seedcamp Johannesburg

As we announced back in July, we are very excited to move beyond the European borders to find even more great startups and founders. Our first stop is Johannesburg, South Africa, and we will be holding the mini Seedcamp Johannesburg already next week.

Thanks to our local partners we have gotten a great response to our call for applications. We selected 11 teams to participate and we are looking forward to hear presentations from the following teams:

• 10Layer: A feature-complete, competent and customisable open source content management system for publishers and media houses.
• Cobi interactive: An incubator for developing mobile software ideas.
• Cognician: The original thinking guide. A software application that automates complex intellectual tasks by asking you a range of intelligent, thought-provoking questions.
• Cred: A micropayments and subscriptions service that allows you to monetise text, audio or video content.
• Feeperfect: Feeperfect are building, and permitting anyone to build, quality SMS services people are willing to pay for.
• FloCash: The first cross border Pan African payment network offering basic financial services to the un-banked masses.
• GetaGreatBoss: We enable great managers to showcase their management strength in order to attract talent and boost their own careers.
• Obami: A web-based communication and collaboration platform that’s been developed for use within, and between schools.
• iSigned.com: Offers secure, permanent online storage, management and sharing for legal & other important documents.
• Thisarmy: Builds clean, simple & fun web apps.
• Twangoo: South Africa’s premier group buying club uses the power of the web to create a platform for its members to access exclusive deals at restaurants, spas, lessons, sports facilities, events etc.

The event will take place at the impressive Gordon Institute for Business Science in Johannesburg and we have already lined up some great mentors to help the startups get to the next level. Amongst others, expect the country's top venture capital firms, successful entrepreneurs, and representatives from large and small technology companies.

Mini Seedcamp London - bigger, better, awesome!

Mini Seedcamp London is over and it was by far the most intense Mini Seedcamp of the year. We had more teams, mentors, applications, sessions (and coffee) than ever before and spent a great day with the best startups from all over Europe.

The participating teams were from as far as Turin, Moscow, and Warsaw, others came from Germany, Scotland and - shocking - London proper. After a short kick-off with Reshma's introduction to Seedcamp and an update on the programme, the teams set off for the first mentoring sessions with their mentors. Due to the unusually high number of participating mentors, the teams had their pockets bulging with business cards already by lunchtime.

After a first break, we had the pleasure of listening to Saul interviewing an excellent panel of former venture capitalists that decided to switch sides to become entrepreneurs (again). Avid Larizadeh, Greg Marsh, and Max Niederhofer were not shy to talk about their insights into the decisions of taking VC or Angel money, deciding on a viable business model, and pointing out that they were all actually entrepreneurs turned VCs and back - an important distinction.

After exhausting themselves in the mentoring sessions for the rest of the day, everybody was eager to hear the final selection of startups by popular vote and to finally get to the bowling alley for closing drinks.

• Editd - Fashion industry data analysis and forecasting
• Eyequant - Fast eye tracking results for websites

• FinanceACar - Comprehensive comparisons for car finance
• 
Memrise - Memory enhancement techniques applied to online learning
• 
PageDo - Automated landing pages 


Amongst all the participating mentors and teams, we want to say another big thank you to our sponsors and supporters for the day - Orrick and m8capital made the evening event possible, IBM Global Entrepreneur pitched in for lunch, and our long standing partners, Spark PR, UKTI and Sun Startup Essentials helped support us once again to make it all possible.

Our supporters who helped spread the word for us around the EMEA included - Ballou PR, Startup Business, Maestros Del Web, Arctic Startup, Techcelerate and Startup Digest; without them we would not have had such an amazing application response for Mini Seedcamp London.

Last but not least, we are forever grateful to UCL Advances for providing the fantastic venue for Mini Seedcamp London and we can't wait to get back there for Seedcamp Week in September.

Also check out some of the other posts being written about Mini Seedcamp London (tell us about more in the comments):

• "Highlighting Europe's young digital Entrepreneurs" at the Guardian
• Sean Park (Seedcamp investor) on being on "the other side"
• Adam Paulisick on his experience as a mentor
• Matt from pagedo on his day at Seedcamp

Seedcamp Announces a Sizzling slate of Startups for Mini Seedcamp London

It’s been a sweltering summer so far in London and the city is set to be alight with talented startups when Mini Seedcamp London hits the town on 27th July 2010.

Once again, Seedcamp received a record number of applicants applying from all over the EMEA to win a seat at Mini Seedcamp London, and ultimately a prestigious spot at Seedcamp Week in September.

The incredible quality and ideas of the teams applying to Mini Seedcamp London this year has considerably increased, with many teams already making great progress being self-financed and bootstrapped. Making the decision on the top 20 teams for London this year proved very difficult indeed (in fact we chose 21!) and we had to turn away many teams with great businesses and ideas, but we want to encourage those teams to keep plugging away – from what we are seeing, there is no down-turn in our sector and more and more people see startups as a viable alternative to a corporate career and 9 to 5 jobs…so don’t loose the dream!

And so, it is with great excitement that we announce our top 21 teams chosen to attend Mini Seedcamp London on 27th July 2010 at the celebrated campus of UCL:

cIRX - London, UK
DBVU - London, UK
Deskarma - London, UK
EDITD – London, UK
FinanceAcar - London, UK
Float - Edinburgh, UK
GaBoom Ltd - Surrey, UK
Kliknik - Kragujevac, Serbia
Matchik - Berkshire, UK
Memrise - Oxford, UK
MindQuilt – UK/USA
Movylo Shop - Turin, Italy
PageDo – London, UK
Profitero - Dublin, Ireland
Scramblr - London, UK
Smartupz - Warsaw, Poland
Subsify - London, UK
Sweeble Ltd – Staffordshire, UK
Trebax Innovations - London, UK
Vsetech - London, UK/Moscow, Russia
WhiteMatter Labs GmbH - Osnabrueck/Berlin, Germany

The teams will have the opportunity of a lifetime to pitch their ideas and engage with over 80 distinguished and industry leading mentors such as:

Alastair Mitchell, Huddle
Alex van Somoren, nCipher/UKTI
Ben Tompkins, Eden Ventures
Brent Hoberman, MyDeco
Christian Hernandez, Facebook
Claude London, Venturing Forth
Daniel Heaf, 4iP
David Langer, Groupspaces
Edward Kershaw, The Nielsen Company
Hendrik Brandis, Earlybird Venture Capital
Ian Hogarth, Songkick
Ivan Farneti, Doughty Hanson
James Aylett, Kittens with Jetpacks
Max Niederhofer, Entrepreneur (Atlas Venture)
Meagan Marks, Wonga
Michael Smith, Mind Candy
Paul Degueuse, 360 Capital Partners
Peter Ward, WAYNE
Taylor Wescoatt, eBay

Along with these, there will be specialists and gurus in HR, PR, Product, Marketing and Business Development attending, all at the top of their game, to help kick-start your ideas into viable, world-beating businesses.

We can’t wait to meet the teams face to face and look forward to seeing them strut their stuff!

See you in London!

Seedcamp Johannesburg

Africa? Yes, Africa. We are really excited to announce our first endeavour below the equator and bring you Seedcamp Johannesburg. We will host a Mini Seedcamp in Johannesburg, S.A. on August 11 and we are eager to see what the (South) African tech scene is all about. We are calling all teams and entrepreneurs to apply for this opportunity to meet not only the nation's , but also the world's greatest entrepreneurs and mentors, investors and industry folks.

We have already had some great feedback and lots of outreach from locals wanting to come, so we now want to make it official: Applications open today, go ahead and show us why and how your team will be successful in utilizing web technology to build a great business. Convince us why you are the right team to participate in Mini Seedcamp Johannesburg and why you should get the chance to meet with our great mentors and partners to learn how you can make your business even more successful.

Seedcamp South Johannesburg is the first "special" Seedcamp event that we are adding to our regular Seedcamp schedule. We want to reach out to new locales and markets to meet the great entrepreneurs we are missing who are located beyond Europe - after all, we have seen that the underserved Eastern European markets develops great companies like Erply, Ubervu, and Brainient - some of the former Seedcamp winners. We are excited to take Seedcamp global and Africa is a great place to start.

So, if you are an entrepreneur from South Africa or Namibia, Botswana or Simbabwe (or anywhere else, for that matter), please go ahead and apply for Seedcamp Johannesburg. If you are a mentor with great connections to the startup, business, and internet community in Africa, please get in touch and let's see how we can get you involved at Seedcamp Johannesburg!