Our 2008 application zeitgeist post exactly one month ago generated some attention, which is why when it was suggested we do a follow-up for our finalists I was a little hesitant. There’s a fine line between a useful device and a gimmick, and I feared we might stray into the latter territory (like how Chubby Checker amazingly managed to maintain his credibility following “The Twist” with “Let’s Twist Again”, but succumbed to hubris and released “Slow Twistin'”, his ultimate undoing). After actually performing the analysis though, I see there are some interesting contrasts: “mobile” has dropped off the top of the “what are you creating?” list to be replaced by “travel”, “advertising” is less of a top-line panacea (and yes, we realize the tautology of “revenue” as a way to make money – thankfully it was substantiated a bit more than that), and Amazon has replaced Google as the cloud solution of choice. There are other differences as well – which is why I’ll cease my yammering and leave you to draw your own conclusions.

 

Q3: What are you creating?

All applicants:

Seedcamp Week finalists:

 

Q10: How will you make money?

All applicants:

Seedcamp Week finalists:

 

Q16: What tools will you use?

All applicants:

Seedcamp Week finalists:

PS: I this time I manually hyphenated “open-source” so it would appear as one phrase for the “tools” question – if only Mr. Checker had learned from his past mistakes as well.

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At the heart of Seedcamp is our network of advisors. Yesterday we announced the advisors who, with a bit of luck (and many frantic emails), will soon be making their way to UCL in London for Seedcamp Week 2008.

So, (drum roll please), here is the list of advisors attending Seedcamp Week 2008.

The mentoring process is an invaluable opportunity for the Seedcamp 22 to learn from the collective wisdom of these eminent experts. Meeting in small groups, the advisors give one-on-one guidance to the teams on all aspects of growing their seed of a business.

Last year, this mentoring process was a huge success, and the title of Seedcamp Advisor has become a respected one. (Perhaps as a result) the list of this year’s advisors is a long one, with over 220 individuals confirmed! let me walk you through some line-up highlights:

Founders & CEOs • Michael Birch, fresh from Bebo’s $850m sale to AOL • Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL • Kevin Cornils, CEO of Buy.at • Jyri Engestrom, founder of Helsinki based Jaiku, now acquired by Google • Lorenz Bogaert, CEO of Netlog, an Alexa top 100 site. • Joe Cohen, Seatwave founder and CEO • Lukasz Gadowski, Spreadshirt founder • Martin Stiskel, Last.fm co-founder and CEO • Richard Moross founder at CEO at Moo • WAYN founders, Peter and Jerome

Product Experts • Taavet Hinrikus, Director of Product Strategy at Skype • Matt Ogle, leads web development at Last.fm • Adam Seifer, founder of Alexa top 20 site Fotolog • Ryan Carson, Carsonified • Matt Jones, founder of Dopplr • Menno van Slooten, from eBuddy

Marketing Experts • Michael Arrington, TechCrunch • Jason Goodman, Albion Founding Partner • Donna Sokolsky, Spark PR CEO • Obi Felten, Google UK, Head of Consumer Marketing • Blake Chandlee, UK commercial director of Facebook • Brent Hoberman, Mydeco.com and founder of Lastminute.com • Jamie Kantrowitz, MySpace – SVP, Marketing & Content International

Technical Experts • Jaan Tallin, Skype lead system architect • Mike Shaver, VP of Engineering at Mozilla • Matt Biddulph, Dopplr • James Aylett, Tartarus • Stefan Magdalinski, Moo CTO • Christian Heilmann at Yahoo • Simon Willison, co-creator of Django • Michael Jackson, ex Director of Ops at Skype • Martin Buhr, Amazon Web Services

Investment Experts • Charles Grimsdale, Eden Ventures • Aydin Senkut, Felicis Ventures, Founder • Robin Klein, TAG • Andrew Weissman, Betaworks • Anil Hansjee, Google • Tal Barnoach, Speed Up • Danny Rimer, Partner at Index Ventures • Fred Destin, Atlas Venture

As you can see, Seedcamp Week 2008 will be populated with some amazing figures from the European tech world. But, it won’t just be the Seedcamp 22 who will benefit in the sage advice of these mentors. Log on to Seedcamp.com all next week for videos, pictures, articles and blogs giving you all the highlights of Seedcamp Week 2008.

A lot of the teams whose applications we read and whom we saw in person last week were objectively great teams, but just not the right fit for Seedcamp. As we’ve been monitoring the range of reactions to our finalist announcement it seemed worthwhile to try and explain why briefly.

Fit is a word bandied about often by VCs, and many others, as a catch-all – sometimes out of expedience and other times as an act of purposeful ambiguity. Its meaning varies based on when, why, and by whom it’s being used, resulting in a large variety of particular definitions for a large variety of particular contexts. That’s why many of the companies we regrettably turned down to get to our final 22 might be wondering what we meant when we employed that dreaded f-word.

Seedcamp has some structural constraints we’ve intentionally put in place to prevent emotional attachment from sabotaging our long-term goals. We won’t do ourselves or the community any good by flaming out after a few years, so we do need to keep afloat financially as a means to our long-term end of helping start-ups bloom in Europe and beyond (in keeping with the horticultural connotations of our name). The result is that sometimes we’ll have to forego inviting a company to Seedcamp Week that has just the right set of people, technologies, and ideas, and which would be perfect for us in our role as advisors, but which isn’t perfect for us as investors.

Sometimes it’s the wrong stage of a company’s life – either too soon or too late (given our focus though, usually the latter). We have fairly inflexible investment requirements and one of the reasons we’re so transparent about them is to prevent ourselves from caving. We’ve made a public standard against which we can be openly judged. If a company doesn’t feel those requirements will work for them we have to let them go, amicably.

Other times we might feel like the market being targeted is still a tad early in its development. It’s ironic coming from an organization with young companies and emerging technologies at its crux, but we do need to strongly consider the potential for, and timing of, growth.

Of course there are a number of additional reasons as well. None of them, nor those I’ve mentioned above, preclude a company from being a great success – in fact we think many of those that won’t be coming next week have a very bright future in store.

In particular there were some teams that really made us think about bending our rules – teams with exactly the right kind of moxie, motivation, methods, and mastery to succeed but that for Seedcamp this year unfortunately weren’t, well, the right fit:

We’re listing them partly as a kind of honorable-mention for our competition, but also because there are undoubtedly other organizations out there with different constraints from ours with whom they might fit quite well.

Best of luck to them all, though we suspect they won’t need much.

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We’re happy to announce the final 22 teams that will be participating in Seedcamp Week 2008. We couldn’t be more excited to welcome them to our main event next week.

We’ve posted a full press release as well for those of you hungry for more info: Seedcamp Announces Finalists for Seedcamp Week 2008 (also available in PDF format).

You might have noticed that the teams we’ve chosen have names skewed towards the end of the English alphabet. This was not intentional, but for laughs I plotted it against the dictionary distribution (it’s obviously not fair to compare names to all words, but we’re pretty busy right now):

 

We’re now one step closer to our final Seedcamp Week 2008 teams.

This Wednesday we held our short-list interview day at the sleek modern facilities of eOffice London, interviewing just over 40 teams from 8:30 in the morning to 7:30 in the evening. With the exception of a few coffee breaks and a quick lunch our selection panel saw great presentation after great presentation, and over the course of the day must have followed up with hundreds of questions. Before we knew it 11 hours had flown by in a snap – the result of some pretty dynamic and interesting material. We saw teams focusing on travel planning, semantic analysis, 3D design, eye tracking, dating, social media tracking, rescue operations, ad networks, social gaming, video APIs, low-barrier blogging, and embedded chat.

Then came the hard part.

Meeting our short-list teams was the beginning of the three-week culmination that ends with our main event on September 19th. It’s a chance for us to get to know better some of the teams we’ve been reading about, hearing about, and in some cases even meeting at our events across Europe throughout the year. That’s undeniably a good thing – but there’s a downside. Taking that group of 40 and narrowing it down to the 20 invited to Seedcamp Week 2008 means that half of the teams we’ve gotten to see and know all too briefly won’t be able to come. I have to say it was personally difficult to attempt professional detachment when writing back to those who won’t be joining us the week after next. Luckily it’s a very promising group, and they should have a bright future ahead of them even without our further involvement.

Despite the tough choices we did eventually come to a decision, and will announce our group of 22 finalists this Tuesday. It promises to be a very innovative set, with a diversity of tackled problems and approaches thereto as large as their geographic origins. Seedcamp Week is already looking to be every bit as exciting as last year.

Special thanks go out to all our stellar judges – representatives from Accel Partners, Amadeus Capital Partners, Atlas Venture, Balderton Capital, DFJ Esprit, Eagle Ventures, Eden Ventures, Index Ventures, NESTA, Partech International, and Wellington Partners – and eOffice for the perfect event space to host the day.

I took a shamefully meager number of pictures, but you can at least get a taste of the day with our short-list day set over on Flickr. If you were there and have any of your own to contribute, just tag them with SC08_shortlistday.

Thankfully I was blithely ignorant of just how much time returning individual feedback to each applicant would take when offering to provide it – otherwise I might have thought twice.

We’re in the midst of poring over your emails and our application results, so I can promise you that while you might not have received anything yet you will at some point. We’re very sorry for the delay.

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