Seedcamp, ‘08: In a pack of copycats, two start-ups shine

Updated

Seedcamp is a European tech event that picks 20 promising European companies then gives a handful of winners £50,000 euro and three months in London to get their products ready for the next round. Last year, the judges chose five companies, one of which, Zemanta — a blog plug-in that helps you find content relevant to your post — recently raised capital from American investors. This year, the judges chose seven. While most of them were not incredibly innovative, a couple stood out.

Here they are, from worst to best:

In case the world is looking for another mini-blogging site, it now has one in Soup.io. With Soup.io, you can write quick thoughts, post videos, images or files (see: Tumblr), send emails to the service to do the same (a.k.a. Posterous) and make a lifestream of the content you create around the web (à la FriendFeed). Yeah, sorry. Not impressed.

Before they became mass propagators of Facebook applications, RockYou and Slide got their start as slide-show widgets that let you share photos around the web in flashy ways. Stupeflix, whose name may in fact say it all, lets you use some attractive-looking touches to take this concept to a whole new degree of marginal utility. Mostly, these touches mean you can pan and zoom around the photos and use fancy transitions for slight cinematic effect. Next!

Toksta gives social sites the ability to add instant messaging, voice or video chat with a line of code. There’s a company called MangoSpring that’s been doing plug-and-play IM for a few months, but I’m not sure there are tons of sites that want this. I was lukewarm about MangoSpring’s prospects when I saw it, and despite Toksta stepping it up with voice and video chat, I am equally lukewarm now. It really doesn’t help that Meebo is going to offer this same feature very soon.

If I were an iPhone app developer, I’d strongly consider Mobclix, an analytics and advertising service that launched at TechCrunch50. Its consumer-facing side gives the world current and historical data about the usage of all the available apps. For developers that integrate Mobclix, it details how apps are being used, when they crash, which features are being the used the most (or least), and so on. Advertisers, on the other hand, can target ads based on a iPhone’s location, the type of application being used and even (allegedly) behavior. There’s one catch: Pinch Media is already doing most of this, and has been for a while.

BaseKit takes the do-it-yourself website building concept and injects a few doses of superjuice. While market leaders Weebly and Synthasite offer some pre-built applications, they mostly focus on website layout and design. BaseKit does the design thing but also lets you create your own web applications using nothing but drag and drop. Take for example, if you want to create a real estate search site: In the demo, the user takes a Google Maps widget, ties it to a real estate data set, adds a search box and then has the app display results, with property photos and descriptions, in a neat column down the side. Before BaseKit, this would involve writing code to plug the data into Google Maps and then a bunch of more-than-basic HTML. With BaseKit, the process requires knowing which commands to drag and drop onto each other but can be done in under eight minutes once you know how. I’ve seen a bunch of site creators in my day, and BaseKit is the most impressive I’ve come across.

uberVU stands out like a million-dollar diamond. The company has built a one-stop shop for dealing with all of the online content you create. It is simultaneously an aggregator that pulls together everything you’ve uploaded to various services, a content management system that lets you organize it all and a powerful publishing platform that lets you create new content, upload it once and then push it to multiple outlets at once. It also brings anything that’s said about your content to one place and lets you comment right back to the source. This sounds like it would be totally unwieldy, but uberVU’s excellently designed interface makes the whole thing look easy.

[Updated: The original post listed Babuki as one of the winners. Babuki has actually re-branded as Kyko, which will focus on multi-player social games. It remains in stealth mode and will be reviewed when it launches.]

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About the Author, Dan Kaplan

Once upon a time, Dan considered himself a magazine journalist with dreams of "The New Yorker" and a couple of well-reviewed but only mildly successful books. Then one day, life, as it is known to do, decided it was time for rebirth. Like so many things before it, this rebirth was conceived on a mostly-empty plane to Reno. Now, instead of magazine writing, Dan would plunge into the world of New Media and write for Matt Marshall's blog.

It's funny how it goes.

  • Dan, are you not being too harsh? For every 5 startups covered on VBeat, you can bet 3 of them are me-too features. The same goes for every tech blog. It is normal.

    As users, we cannot have one startup that offers a unique product. Competition is needed or else companies can get cocky and not care about users as much as they should.

    Google was a me-too startup. Venture Beat was at one point a me-too blog, but here you are today with hundreds of thousands of loyal readers.
  • Competition is essential for spurring innovation. I'm just not sure it makes sense to devote resources in areas where the payoff is questionable to begin with.
  • Additionally Babuki, at least in that form, was not one of the winners. The name was Kyko with, I believe, a different concept. They're still in stealth mode, though.
  • Noted. Their website is still listed as Babuki. Kyko is looking at multi-player social games. FIxed.
  • Zee
    Dan, you don't know what you're talking about... Soup.io as worst? Man, Soup.io would beat nearly the majority of tc50 companies in innovation & attention to detail. Your rankings here are enough for me to completely abandon your posts entirely. What a joke.
  • It would be helpful if you could point out how they are innovative. For the record, I was not particularly impressed with nearly the majority of tc50.
  • you might not agree with the ranking, bout there is no doubt, they are winners.
    they went out, competed on a european wide level and they made it. the get exposure and if they use it wisely, like zemanta, a former seedcamp winner, the will do well. maybe there are hundreds of similar ideas out there, but only the entrepreneurs will make it, which will also sell their idea properly, and seedcamp is quite a good way to sell.
  • All I can say is http://this.isfuckingaweso.me. Just like soup.io but not as cool and no one is using it. It's perfect for that certain hipster who doesn't want to be followed.
  • This is a well-written post which works in parts but suffers from the usual blogger blind-spot of not actually being at the event you're writing about...
  • Indeed, I must work with what I have.
  • rob
    I like UBERVu too, looks like it's definitely one of those disruptor apps that comes along every once in awhile and shakes up the space. This'll make a big difference to a lot of people.
  • Dan, as Mike indicated had you been at the event you might have got clued in to the fact that TickerTXT actually operates with Internet technology outside the Internet cloud. This I personally consider about as different as you can get. I challenge you to indicate any sense in which TickerTXT was a copycat of any other company at Seedcamp 2008, except that we were there.
  • Andy, I referred only to the winners I saw, not the whole group of finalists. Feel free to drop me a line if you want to talk about what you're up to.
  • UberVU will do just good, if not very good. I can't speak for other startups but knowing the guys from uberVU I know they will leave the mark on the Web 2.0 landscape.
  • jake
    I'm reading this and thinking about what everybody is saying about new ideas vs. competition. Just thought this site might interest some of you as the subject matter is mildly similar. unleshingideas.org
  • andraz
    Hi,

    being at Seedcamp for the whole week I can say that all startup teams there got one of the best advice that they could get from the industry, but now it is up to them to run with it and make great things.

    UberVU could actually be pretty big since there is definitely the space for the "me" service, they just need to execute properly.
    Ah, the soup.io. It might be strange to americans, but someone can easily do the tumblr thing for europe/central europe and be pretty successful with it. They already have non-negliable number of users.

    Dan, you were a bit harsh, but seriously, almost everything is a "copycat with a twist" nowdays. And for companies that are a bit more locale-specific than the ones listed, regional VCs over here actually love copycats with proven business models and unsaturated markets.

    Oh... and this just came to my mind: VentureBeat should get a writer from central europe! Things are really getting interesting here.
  • Ben
    Hey, thanks for covering us!

    You can check out our toksta video instant messenger live at www.myHappyPlanet.com.

    Stay tuned for our upcoming multi-user chat room application (featuring text, audio/video).

    toksta will be available in 25 languages soon: blog.toksta.com

    Cheers,
    Ben

    P.S. If you have any questions, please don’t reply to this comment but send an E-Mail to support [a t] toksta [ d o t ] info
  • I believe they get exposure and if they use it wisely, like zemanta, a former seedcamp winner, the will do well.
  • edhardy622
    British law student sues Abercrombie-Fitch for disability discrimination.
    http://www.abercrombieonsale.co.uk