News Roundup: TechHub Prague, MyGuidie, UXPin and more

12.07.2011, No Comments, News, by .

For those of you not busy with Le Web, here is your midweek news roundup.

Filmaster apps come out of beta, learn who is behind them

12.05.2011, No Comments, News, Poland, Startups, by .

Filmaster thinks I'm pretty cool :)

Filmaster (@Filmaster), a Polish startup that is one of the culprits behind the Reaktor startup mansion, released its Android app today after testing it in festival partnerships for a few months. The revamped iPhone app with major usability fixes was also released last week.

Filmaster combines social movie recommendations with a local element by allowing users to check in at the movies or check screening times. It also develops partnerships with film festivals and provides social and local mobile app support for them. The local features currently only work in the United Kingdom, United States, and Poland.

The founder, Borys Musielak (@michuk), always wanted to build a movie-related startup, his love of movies inspired by Roman Gutek’s New Horizons film festival. He refined his vision when spending long hours commuting on the posh Virgin train (with a laptop and wifi) between Coventry and his job as an investment banking consultant in London. He wanted to combine movie info, reviews, and recommendations in one polished service. This holistic approach to a quality movie experience is indeed what might give Filmaster its edge.

The company is based in Warsaw, which has its pros and cons. On the whole, Borys thinks that running a startup out of Warsaw is “definitely harder,” and would be easier from San Francisco, New York, or London. However, being in Poland does have its advantages. Namely, it’s considerably easier to find great developers that don’t use up all your funding in a few months. Also, planes are cheap, Borys is in the US 2-3 times a year for different events; same goes for London or Berlin. As he says: Read more

XtGem: from the world of super broadband to WAP

12.01.2011, No Comments, Lithuania, Startups, by .

Lithuanian XtGem serves an audience that we don’t talk about very often on this blog – people without much access to a computer or programming knowledge, and (gasp!) often without smartphones. XtGem is a visual mobile website builder, and has been working relentlessly at a complete redesign of the service for the past few months. They’ve been providing a no-programming-needed mobile website creation tool since 2006 and the current design shows it. Fortunately, the new design is much improved, both aesthetically and in terms of usability.

The redesigned version is currently in closed beta, and it should be opening to the public as soon as the last bugs have been fixed. Fortunately for you, the readers of this blog can already take a peak. All you need to do is register on the existing XtGem site and after logging in head over here (using a web browser).

When digging through usage data XtGem provided me, an interesting thing stood out: Quantcast ranks them as the 1st most visited set of domains in Vietnam, 3rd in Indonesia, and 6th in India. This is not a result of any specific marketing strategy. It’s possibly attributable to the fact that the XtGem tools are accessible through any web-enabled mobile device, and people in these countries have much easier access to mobile devices than to computers. Supporting this theory is the fact that XtGem’s market penetration in Africa looks pretty good as well.
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GrabCad now 50,000 engineers strong

11.22.2011, No Comments, Estonia, News, Startups, by .

I thought of GrabCAD today when writing an article about Farmeron, reminded of CEO Hardy Meybaum’s generous move at Seedcamp Week where he offered GrabCAD’s €25K prize to Farmeron. I checked in on GrabCAD and learned that they just recently hit 50,000 engineers registered on the site. That is a very encouraging number for a community of highly specialized members.

GrabCAD is a community for mechanical engineers, offering a variety of features that aim to make design work more efficient for them, share their talent and find projects. The founders’ dream is to erase boundaries between softwares, companies and locations, enabling a 24-hour design process.

It all started with a 2-person company in Estonia offering engineering services. However, Meybaum, and his co-founder Indrek Narusk, quickly saw that there is too much friction in the engineering process and wanted to eliminate it. GrabCAD was born as the solution to all these problems.

Even though GrabCAD is keeping a development team in Estonia, they moved their headquarters to Boston, MA a year ago. In Meybaum’s words: “Boston is the capital of CAD and we want to play an important role here.” It sounds like it’s working.

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The story of Farmeron: AngelList, 500 Startups, and unicorns

11.22.2011, 2 Comments, Croatia, Startups, by .

The Croatian startup Farmeron grabbed my attention a while ago, and it turns out I wasn’t the only one. This web-based farm management and analytics tool shined at various Seedcamp events this year, and caught the famed Dave McClure‘s eye. The founder, Matija Kopić (@matijakopic), and his team, are currently in the 500 Startups accelerator in Mountain View, CA, and I caught up with him to share his experiences with you. From a farm in eastern Croatia to an office with a view of the Google campus, it’s definitely not boring.

Matija grew up aware of farm data management problems since he was a little boy. He comes from Osijek, a city in the eastern Croatian region of Slavonia, from a family with a long tradition in agriculture. Already during his computer science studies at The University of Zagreb, he sought ideas that would use information technology to help small and medium farmers.

By the time Matija graduated from university in September 2010, his student work was spotted by a manager from a large agricultural company in Croatia. A week after graduation, Matija and Marko Dukmenić, his co-founder, landed a contract to develop a dairy farm management analytics solution (tracking cows and their output). However, as they finished the software a few months later and started expanding sales, they realized they were headed at a momentous pace in a direction they weren’t sure about. The university taught them how to develop software, but nobody told them how to sell it or what to do after that.
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Startup Awards Slovakia sends 4 to Silicon Valley

11.18.2011, 3 Comments, News, Slovakia, by .

Startup Awards.SK is the first major startup competition in Slovakia, and its first iteration yesterday was a fun event that exceeded many expectations. When it was first announced, some people were not even entirely convinced that there would be 10 Slovakian startups to qualify for the contest. As it turns out, not only did the organizers find the 10 finalists, they received 37 applications. This is a lot for a country where “startup” is not a word many people recognize and the Slovak translation of the word entrepreneur is sometimes uttered with derision.

The event was organized by Sario, an investment and trade development agency of the Slovak government; Neulogy, science, R&D, and entrepreneurship consultancy and incubator; Dell, and KPMG. The main prize for the top four startups is a ticket to Silicon Valley, a three month stay at the Plug & Play tech center, and mentorship from Slovak entrepreneurs in the valley and their networks. The whole event was in English, expertly moderated by Paul Jozefak, an American venture capitalist with Slovak roots, with the exception of the keynote by the Minister of Economy, which was in Slovak.

The first prize winner and one of the crowd favorites was Nice Reply, which allows companies to receive ratings of their customer support responses and aims to be “the Google Analytics of ratings.” It’s a spinoff created by CEOs of three other Slovak companies who saw a need for this product themselves and decided to build it.
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News roundup: ARNav, Click&Grow, Summify, and more

11.16.2011, No Comments, News, by .

To be honest, there isn’t much in the way of breaking news this week so far other than the exciting TechHub Riga launch, but a handful of CEE companies got some nice press coverage that is worth mentioning.

TechHub boosts the Riga startup community

11.16.2011, 2 Comments, Latvia, News, by .

The startup community in Riga, Latvia just got a new focal point. The famed London startup co-working space TechHub (@TechHub), founded by the entrepreneur Elizabeth Varley (@evarley) and Mike Butcher (@mikebutcher), the editor of TechCrunch Europe, announced its first international expansion last night – TechHub Riga (@TechHubRiga).

The driving force behind this project consists of four Latvian entrepreneurs: Andris Brezins, CEO of Amooz, Gunars Grundstoks, CEO of RentMama, Ernests Stals, CEO of Reach.ly and Viesturs Sosars, CEO of Real Sound Labs. They began discussing the idea of establishing a co-working space in Riga a while ago and their original inspiration was the Founders House in Copenhagen. But Andris Brezins tells me that during the process they “recognized that one of the most important aspects of this for the Riga community would be connections to a global network and the exchange of information, contacts, ideas that this entails. When we talked to Elizabeth at TechHub, it turned out that our plans neatly coincided with their plans and a partnership was born.” Read more

Czech android Kinzo now available

11.11.2011, No Comments, Uncategorized, by .

The previously mentioned Czech-made android smartphone Kinzo by Verzo is now available in the Verzo store. It sells for €419 with free worldwide shipping. The price includes free maps of Europe and navigation by Sygic, a Slovak GPS company. Other free accessories include headphones, a leather case, car charger, and more. The Kinzo has its own version of the Android GUI, but, charmingly, they support switching to the clean Android version and even have instructions on their blog. If anyone gets their hands on one, let me know.

News Roundup: Easyling, Estonian botnet, Salespod, etc.

11.11.2011, No Comments, News, by .

Happy Friday! Read some news, and tune back in next week for some very exciting interviews coming up on Eastist.