I just met with Adil the other day and realized boy I gotta keep more on top of the great entrepreneur events happening in London. Between the Facebook Garage on the 11th, Open Coffee which was great to be at today, there are a lot of high intensity events on in London. Even in some tought times, folks are finding creative ways to keep powering ahead.

One event coming up this weekend is run by Adil, a former SeedCamper from EnTrip, called Launch48 in which many SeedCamp mentors are participating too. Folks like Rachel Bremer of SparkPR, Simone Brunozzi of Amazon, Pascal Finette of Mozilla, David Lundblad of the very cool We are Swede, Chris Morton of Balderton, and Jerome Touze of of WAYN, Bindi Karia of Microsoft, and George Hadjigeorgiou until recently at Yahoo.

In a nutshell, the aim is to bring together a bunch of people from different backgrounds but associated with web technologies to plan, build and launch a web app/apps in one weekend – 48 hours.

More than a 100 participants are scheduled to attend the event and the mentors will talk/interact/advise the various teams and share their industry knowledge and insight.

I’m keen to watch the progress over time b/c I believe they are going to follow up with an event in March. I’ve mentioned to Adil that it’d be great if one of these projects develops into a team/company and becomes a part of Seedcamp. I’ll be watching this space closely.

More details can be found at Launch48

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Applications for Mini Seedcamp in Paris close midnight Feb 9th! I’ve been getting a lot of questions about whether teams outside France can apply. To that I have one overwhelming response, we especially want teams across the region to apply not just to Paris but to any of the different cities. As you know, Seedcamp is completely pan European and moving beyond the Seedcamp Week in London, we are going across Europe to bring Seedcamp to local regions and connect the various mentor and startup communities more deeply. So, this year in 2009 we’ve selected cities such as Paris, Warsaw, Ljublijana but in 2010 we are looking at other cities as well. These events are not purely for a specific country but open to all who are ambitious about building great companies in Europe.

Startups – The advice I would give is pick the city according to when you believe you are in the best position for your startup to take advantage of the Seedcamp platform. Maybe it’s Paris or maybe it’s Berlin or maybe it’s Scandanavia. Mentors will largely be from the region but many others are also coming from outside the particular city. The common thread is that you will be meeting extremely experienced people who are there to help you succeed. That’s what is critical to keep in mind.

On that note, good luck with your applications and we hope to see a nice mix and variety of countries and regions represented across the Mini Seedcamps

Please apply for Paris here

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At Mini Seedcamp Tel Aviv Reshma Sohoni, CEO of Seedcamp moderated a lively and educational panel discussion featuring (left to right in the below picture):

Discussion immediately turned to the economic crisis portraying a positive, optimistic outlook. Comments drew attention to:

Product was the next topic of conversation. Tal Barnoach kicked off with some proverbial words of wisdom, “Don’t sell Pizza and Falafel in the same restaurant”. Focusing on one core competency is obviously a clear element of Tal’s restaurant choice.

There was also general agreement that it is key to launch your product early and iterate to best match your customers’ key requirements quickly.

Saul Klein emphasised the importance of metrics and referred to the definitive text on the subject, Dave McClure’s Start-up Metrics for Pirates. He stressed that you need to know what you are measuring and why, this will provide a criteria for success and builds confidence with investors who want to see measurable progress.

Gigi Levi emphasised that you should keep a close eye on your customers’ behaviour, he elaborated thus:

What do investors look for in a team/investment?

Tal Barnoach likes to see a team interested in a long term investment and a product with a key selling point for the user. He also advised teams to improve their presentations by making them an emotional experience, addressing the needs of the user.

Gigi Levi is interested in seeing smart teams who know their market. He wants them to be able to name ALL their competitors and demonstrate why they are better!

Saul Klein encouraged teams to leverage the investors, as at an early stage they should be a key member of the team. Use them to open doors to countries, hires, scaling and crucial expertise.

Avichay Nissenbaum recommended that it isn’t worth talking to investors until you have polished your pitch talking to everyone else. You should also take references from your investors to check what they are like to work with.

Thanks to all the panelists for taking part!

Our Mini Seedcamp tour this year has made a great start in Tel Aviv, with super strong and impressive teams and quality mentors. We could not have done this without the likes of Yaron from the.co.ils for all his support finding teams and mentors, Liat and the IDC Herzilia for hosting the event and connecting to teams, Ezra for showing us what makes Israel tick, and all the mentors and teams for attending. A massive thanks to all!

Now to the winners…they are, (drum roll):

Clear Applications
Devunity
SimilarWeb

Besides the benefits of the Mini event itself, all 3 teams receive the following:

• All 3 teams are invited automatically to the Mini Seedcamp of their choice in Paris, London, Warsaw, Slovenia, Berlin or Helsingborg, to further connect them with other like-minded teams and broaden their entrepreneurial scope
• A special bundle of Amazon Web Services credits

We’ll be posting a full trip report shortly, which will include some interesting stats, general overview of the events, with a focus on the panel discussions.

Thanks again Tel Aviv!

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