This Thursday, we will be bringing over 70 of our best mentors together on the banks of the Danube to meet 20 of Europe’s top startups for Seedcamp Budapest. After a full day of presenting, mentoring and networking, the winners will be the first teams to join the Seedcamp class of 2013!

When our first Hungarian team, Antavo, joined us after Seedcamp Tel Aviv, we knew we had to pay attention to one of the hottest entrepreneurial cities in Central and Eastern Europe and host an event in Budapest. The response has been phenomenal; we received hundreds of excellent applications and had the very difficult task of selecting only twenty to attend the event. Out of the twenty selected, we are pleased to announce that five of the teams are from Budapest and will be presenting on home turf. As always, the others represent ten different countries from all over Europe and will be traveling to join us for the day in Hungary.

Please meet the twenty selected teams for Seedcamp Budapest and take a look at the great companies they are building:

Our gratitude goes out to our Event Sponsor, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, our Event Partner, the European Entrepreneurship Foundation and to Corvinus University for hosting us. We would also like to thank our yearly sponsors Google, Bizspark, Qualcomm, Paypal and Facebook for their on-going support.

Be sure to follow our blog, Twitter and Facebook accounts to stay on top of the action in Budapest!

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Deutsch: Paris: Eiffelturm und Marsfeld

Deutsch: Paris: Eiffelturm und Marsfeld (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Our final Seedcamp of the year traditionally takes place in Paris to coincide with the fantastic LeWeb. This week in Paris is always a key date in most startups’ and investors’ calendars, so there’s no better time to meet great people in town. This year, Seedcamp Paris is taking place on Monday 3rd December. Once again, Orrick are kindly hosting us in their beautiful office and we’re proud to have the support of SoftLayer and Yammer as our Event Sponsors.

Last year in Paris, we met great startups like Bluefields and Sush.io, who are now part of the Seedcamp Family. Over the last year they have made immense progress. We also have some of our stars like Teleportd, Stupeflix, Kwaga, Sparkeo and Psykosoft originating from France, so there is no doubt that the local talent is strong!

As always at Seedcamp, we’re on the look out for hugely ambitious founders who think big and whose aim is to disrupt the status quo with their cutting edge technologies. Take a look at our ever-expanding Seedcamp Family to get a feel for what excites us. Whether it’s fashion focused too photo sharing apps, making exchange rate savings or streamlining car repair garages – we want to know what it is you’re building.

We will help you take your company to the next level – giving you access to funding, an immense network of relevant mentors, exposure to both the European and US investor community, and of course the Seedcamp Team itself.

During Seedcamp Paris, 20 of the most promising startups will join us to present, network and be mentored by over of 80 of our triple A class mentors. Some describe the experience as gaining €100k worth of top-level consultancy in a single day. It truly catapults you to a different level and sidesteps months of A/B testing various strategies and the time it takes to build up such a powerful network if going solo. Meeting 19 peers and even going through the application form thinking about the growth of your business can be an invaluable experience.

Following on from Seedcamp Paris, we’ll make the most promising teams our standard offer, (€50k for 8-10%) to join the Seedcamp Family. You’ll then join our year long programme consisting of 3 month office space at Campus London, monthly learning days, a 73 strong peer network to bounce ideas off and gain invaluable insights from. Access to our great network of over 2,000 mentors across Europe and the US, and to top it off, a Founders’ Pack worth more than €150k containing offers such as $25k AWS credits, access to Microsoft Bizspark, the Softlayer Catalyst Program, and many more.

If this all sounds exciting make sure that you don’t miss the deadline of 6 November to apply for our last event of 2012. We can’t wait to see all the great entrepreneurial talent from across Europe and beyond.

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Now that Seedcamp Week is over, we are looking forward to our events in Budapest and Lisbon later in the year.

One none-Seedcamp event we are very proud to be involved with is the Pioneers Festival in Vienna. Besides their Startup Challenge, which allows startups to win  more than 25.000 Euros in support, the team has put together an incredible line up of speakers – no doubt topping the great event they have put on last year.

In both our own program and at our events, we take he view that startups can best learn from operators and successful entrepreneurs by hearing about the real work they do. We try and talk about not just the success stories and good days of a startup, but also about the trials and tribulations of building a startup. Startup Academy, a learning focused track at Pioneers Festival, is designed to drive home exactly those lessons.

Speakers include amongst others long time Seedcamp mentors Tom Hulme of IDEO, Colette Ballou of Ballou PR, Sean Ellis, Rob Fitzpatrick and stars such as Ash Maurya, Peter Vesterbacka, and Alex Osterwalder, the inventor of the Business Model Canvas.

We hope to see you in Vienna for Pioneers Festival – Philipp will be visiting and will of course answer any questions you have about Seedcamp, our process, and how to get involved.

We’ve been big fans of Romania since years – besides Seedcamp companies like Brainient and UberVu, there’s a lot of interesting stuff going on  in the local scene. How to Web is one of the CEE conferences we never seem to miss, so we hope to see you there in November. They’re putting together a special startup competition this year, check out the details:

This year, along with How to Web, we’re organizing the Startup Spotlight program and competition, a great launchpad for early-stage CEE startups that need financing, access to accelerators and knowledge. And we top that with 20.000 USD in cash prizes, plus other goodies.

Startup Spotlight is a four-days program and competition, specialy designed for early-stage projects. It includes dedicated workshops on pitching, product management, agile development and business development with international experts, mentoring sessions, public pitching during the How to Web Conference, presentations of 12 great world-class acceclerators and private meetings with accelerators and investors. 32 startups will be partiticipating for free to the program.

However, it’s not for everybody: we’re looking for teams from Central and Eastern Europe that have less than 2 years of activity, have recieved less than 100k EUR funding, are developing a product for an international market and have at least a working prototype, as we want to leverage the tech potential of our community and help them make a big step forward.

Startup Spotlight takes place on 6-9 November, in Bucharest, Romania. Part of its activities are also included on the agenda of the How to Web conference – taking place at the same venue, on November 7th & 8th. And of course, teams also have access to the conference and its infamous parties.

Read more about why you should apply for Startup Spotlight and why we chose to address the program only to early-stage startups from Central and Eastern Europe and apply until October 13th. See you in Bucharest!

Seedcamp Week 2012 is over – the teams are back home, Campus feels like a normal office again (ok, not really), and the inboxes are buzzing with follow up emails. Time to recap our biggest Seedcamp Week ever – if only to remember the craziness of two weeks ago. as every year, Klein and Sons did a great job putting together videos of all days again, make sure to have a look!

Monday – Product Day

Product Day 2012 was focused on understanding the user experience of the individual customers. An introduction to user led design was hosted by the IDEO team, followed by a Masterclass ran by Ciaran Rooney of Skimlinks, who shared his insights on building Skimlinks to scale: today, more than 14 billion API calls are served per month. Later, Des Traynor of Intercom introduced smart ways of measuring users and customers, focussing on new types of metrics. Finally, Christian Hernandez of Facebook introduced ways to use the social graph for viral growth, followed by Cat Mallet of King.com, and Mat Clayton of Mixcloud, who shared their respective views on using Facebook products to drive traffic and engagement.

Tuesday, Founders Day

Founders’ Day 2012 was focused on learning from Europe’s best entrepreneurs about how they built their businesses, scaled their teams, and live their lives in the tumultuous world of startups. Ed Spiegel, the founder of RentMineOnline walked us through his journey from his participation in Seedcamp to a recent Exit. A session on the importance of branding from Dave McClure of 500startups provoked many laughs and gasps from the audience. Finally, Errol Damelin talked about the Wonga story, and was particularly open about how the company is building its talent pool, and how culture and branding are important even to early stage startups.

Investor Day

Investor Day 2012 was focused on exposing the Seedcamp teams to Europe’s best and most active investors to get feedback on fundraising strategy and to network with the best Angels and VCs. We heard a fascinating talk from Nikolaj Nyholm of Sunstone Capital, and Jos White and Chris Tottmann of Notion Capital. The panel was focused on discussing the differences and difficulties of the relationship between founders and VCs, and the misconceptions that make it harder to work together.

Growth Day

The day started with a surprise visit from the Minister David Willett and a selection of London’s leading entrepreneurs and investors who announced the news about new regulations making it easier to take companies public. Growth Day 2012 was focused on taking the teams to the next level – with mentors from giants like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Skype or Asos, Qype, and Skyscanner. Sven Schmidt, serial entrepreneur and now venture partner at Accel, talked about scalable marketing strategies during his Masterclass. He shared insights both from his personal experience and a more theoretical view on where the industry is going. Later, Michael Acton Smith of MindCandy, the makers of Moshi Monsters, shared the trials and tribulations of building a nation wide success.

Demo Day

Demo Day 2012 was Seedcamp’s largest event ever hosted. Our rockstar teams pitched their best demo yet to investors, entrepreneurs and the general tech ecosystem in London. To end the week on a high note, we were honored to have a Masterclass given by Gery Pennell, the CIO of London Olympics 2012. After having all followed the Olympics this summer, it was incredibly informative to see how much technology was involved in delivering the games.

Here’s the recap of Friday:

Out of Seedcamp week – Simpletax joins the family

Like last year, we decided to add another team to our roster for the week to take part in the mentoring sessions, meet mentors, investors, and entrepreneurs, and of course to join us as a new member of the Family. SimpleTax, who was with us at Seedcamp Paris, is now officially a Seedcamp company. They make it easy for freelancers, the self employed, and a host of other people to claim their tax refunds. After a very successful first Tax Season in Portugal, they are now starting up in the UK.