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This past weekend, 100+ hackers descended upon the London Business School campus to take part in our first ever Seedhack.
We launched Seedhack to stimulate entrepreneurship, by bringing company leaders to talk about problems plaguing their industry as a whole or their company’s value chain in particular. The idea was to catalyze company creation and thinking about how hackers could come up with cool solutions to problems that had yet to be tackled; by combining both industry and API speakers, our hope was that this would ‘spark’ everyone’s creativity regardless of which idea they ultimately decided to pursue.
On Friday, we started the evening with API talks from:
And then followed by Industry Talks from:
Healthcare –
Big Data –
“Great weekend at #seedhack with @brunopanara, @dhs and the rest of the team – very good experience” – @petenixey
“@richarddstubbs really enjoyed your presentation at #seedhack on Friday. Great insight into some of the business challenges that you face.” – @ballantine70
“It truly was a blast! RT @ukd1: #seedhack class of 2011 http://t.co/70QLB39k” – @lfittl
“I can officially say, in my experience, #seedhack rocks! Had an awesome weekend! Massive thanks to everyone who helped, attended & organised” – @farhan
“#seedhack was probably the most fun thing I’ve ever done in the uk – next to showering and sleeping – cheers guys” – @rjzzleep
“just finishing up the whole #seedhack experience, it was beyond anything I could have expected 🙂 @seedcamp FTW!” – @wildemorgan
Knotank:
Kontank is group email knowledge. It allows people to discover what’s already been said on email, and to gain access to knowledge otherwise tied up in individual inboxes.
Overseer:
Rafał Bromirski – @paranoida
Błażej Kosmowski – @stevo84
Michał Czyż – @cs3b
Simon Jackson – @saimeng
Project “Overseer” is designed to solve the problem that SME professional services and consulting companies in not being able to quickly and easily aggregate, process and analyse the management data they need to understand the profitability of their businesses. Overseer interfaces with their accounting systems and workflow and time-tracking systems and creates a series of interactive dashboards for each level of the company – MD, partners, project managers – that provide clear and intuitive metrics to aid better decision-making.
Credstream:
Thomas Paulmichl – @fix4everything
Michaela Wood – @t3chforchange
Jose Castro
Reza Jelveh – @rjzzleep
Credstream provides real time credit risk scoring of corporates based on analysing the real time web. This enables financial institutions as well as corporates to monitor their debtors from a credit risk perspective, allowing them to react faster on credit risk deterioration than traditionally possible.
Tribeshot:
Alan Hodes – @alanhodes
Gerald Speers – @gerald_speers
Tribeshot sends an automated telephone call (in any language) reminding someone of a healthcare-related appointment and requiring a keypad-based reply. Replies are logged on a web interface and any “No’s” or “Maybe’s” trigger an email and/or SMS notification to the appointments clerk. The aim is to help reduce costs associated with missed appointments in the healthcare system.
SoCal:
Pedro Marques – @SmoothMarx
A social calendar that makes it easy to see when your friends are free, and then meet up with them in real life.
MailMe:
Gabriel Pickard – @werg
Reza Jelveh – @rjzzleep
Jay Ahmed – @j_unlocKing
Evgeny Sitnikov – @evgeny
High-profile figures online receive way too much email to process. Imagine Fred Wilson’s inbox each morning. At some point, dealing with all the incoming email becomes an uphill battle, and the people and ideas that Fred would actually be interested in hearing about become obscured. MailMe aims to reverse this process, by getting would-be contacters to wager that Fred would be interested in the message. If he isn’t, then they lose the wager, and the money goes to charity.
InMyCal:
Peter Nixey – @petenixey
Directions to your events, directly in your calendar.
Instatrad:
Umberto Prandi – @UmbertoPrandi
Joris Van den Broeck – @jvandenbroeck
Deepak Jhamb – @deepakjhamb
Samir Bhana – @samba2804
Robert Kyle – @robtheforager
Trung Huynh – @trunghlt
Our unique value proposition will be a buy/sell recomendation based on a proprietary algorithm that seamlessy integrates classic technical analysis with sentimental analysis based on data generated form social networks.
Opportunity Dashboard:
Morgan Wilde – @wildemorgan
Opportunity Dashboard surfaces relevant moneymaking opportunities.
inCliqu.es
Farhan Rehman – @farhan
Florian Rathgeber – @frathgeber
Simon Funke – @SimonFunke
Atif Paracha
Alex Nechoroskovas @AlexNecho
Our round-up of the media coverage Seedcamp Week 2011 so far. We received an incredible amount of coverage this year; yet another sign of Seedcamp’s growing reputation around the world, including coverage from The Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and Techcrunch.
Twitter:
According to twitter analytics tool Topsy.com, the #seedcamp hashtag was used 2,109 times during Seedcamp Week, and was mentioned 318 times in the 23 days leading up to Seedcamp Week.
Mainstream media:
BBC News
Starting a new company requires inspiring early co-founders to join you in your efforts and then quickly establishing an environment of trust where everyone works hard and fairly shares the upside of any success.
To that end, we’re launching the Seedhack Founder’s Collaboration Agreement (download here) which is designed for a newly formed team to agree on what each founder’s shareholding should be as well as how to make sure that each founder puts a continued effort throughout the lifetime of the company in order to keep their equity stake.
The hope is that this document will not only help events like Seedhack, where collaboration amongst team members is key, but also any ‘back of a napkin at a cafeteria’ brainstormed startups where people put a lot of sweat equity in even before they think about forming a ‘formal’ company.
A big thank you to Tina Baker from Brown Rudnick for drafting the agreement.
Supporting Organizations:
Usage of the document:
Treat this doc as a starting point for discussion. Yes, feel free to use it as-is, as we believe it covers 80% of what you should consider, but feel free to modify it as you and your founding team need to. Also, the items in brackets [ ] are to either be filled in or amended as you see fit.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Seedhack Collaboration Founders Agreement by http://www.seedhack.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at www.seedhack.com. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.seedhack.com.
Both Seedcamp and Brown Rudnick LLP expressly disclaim any and all responsibility and/or liability for any loss or damage whatsoever arising out of or in connection with acts or matters done or omitted to be done in reliance upon any document, information or opinion contained on this website. The documents, information and opinions on this website have been prepared for general informational purposes only, may not reflect the most current market and legal developments and may not address all relevant business or legal issues; accordingly, such information is not promised or guaranteed to be correct or complete. Further, the documents, information and opinions on this website do not, nor are they intended to (a) constitute legal advice, (b) create an attorney-client relationship or (c) be advertising or a solicitation of any type. You should not rely upon any documents, information and opinions on this website for any purpose without seeking legal advice from licensed attorneys in the relevant jurisdiction as each situation is highly fact specific and requires a knowledge of relevant laws. Certain parts of this site link to external internet sites, and other external internet sites may link to this website. Neither Seedcamp nor Brown Rudnick LLPis responsible for the content of any external internet sites.
Today, we’ve closed our latest Seedcamp Week with a bang – another 4 investments for Seedcamp in 2011, and of course the winners of our first Seedcamp Week competition.
While most of the teams (16 of 20) were already Seedcamp Winners of Mini Seedcamp events, 4 teams (Appextras, Blossom.io, Crowd, and Rentlord) were in London this week to convince us to make them part of the family. With to-the-point pitches and well-ran mentoring sessions they did just that, so we decided: All four of them are now Seedcamp companies:
Since the other teams were not competing for investment as in previous Seedcamp Weeks, we had decided before the week to introduce a competition: a total of 50.000 Euros in splits of 25, 15, and 10 thousand Euros would be offered as an investment prize for the best team of Seedcamp Week, as voted by mentors, investors, and the teams themselves.
The most liked company was GrabCAD, started in Estonia and now based in Boston, who have joined Seedcamp January of this year. GrabCAD has since moved to Boston, participated in Techstars, and raised a round from awesome investors like Atlas Ventures, Matrix Partners, and Highline Ventures. When Hardi, the CEO of GrabCAD heard he was selected for the top prize, he decided to do what lots of mentors and investors had done to help him move his business forward: GrabCAD gave up the first price and decided to let FarmerOn, one of the newest additions to the Seedcamp Teams, take the stage for it. A truly inspiring story, which was highly appreciated by everyone in attendance. In his own words: “So many people have helped and shared with us at GrabCAD, so it’s time to give a little bit back: We’ve raised a lot of money already, and I am sure FarmerOn can put the prize to great use”.
The second and third prize went to Vox.io, who recently moved their team to San Francisco to disrupt the Telco market, and TransferWise, who are building an ingenious solution for peer to peer currency exchange.
Saul and Robin Klein are not only the founder and founding investor of Seedcamp through The Accelerator Group, but of course our greatest supporters as Chairman and mentor at almost all Seedcamp Events. The Accelerator Group is also one of the most prolific investors in post-Seedcamp companies, having invested in Seedcamp companies of all previous years, and supporting them on the journey to build world beating companies (Robin and Saul Klein are investors in ERPLY, Zemanta, EDITD, and others). This year, they decided to step it up another notch and have offered a number Seedcamp companies of the current batch an investment right out of Seedcamp Week.
Some of the cheque books who will be there include – eBay, Amadeus, Eden, Atomico, Notion, Wellington, Estag, Intel Capital, Wellington Partners, 500startups, AOL Ventures, Fidelity Ventures, Octopus Ventures, Torch Partners, Bloomberg Ventures, Gimv, Pentland Group, Qualcomm Ventures, Apple, M8 Capital, Orange, Estag, Horsley Bridge, Arma Partners, Elaia Partners, Ambient Sound Investments, Reed Elsevier Ventures, Financial Times, NESTA, Vantedge Partners, Hummingbird Ventures, Index Ventures, Hoxton Ventures, Passion Capital, The Accelerator Group, PROfounders Capital, Giza VC, Doughty Hanson, Charlotte Street Capital, T-Venture,
Besides linking up the startups with more mentors and funding opportunities, we are opening up even more avenues for entrepreneurs to build relationships and deepen their engagement with corporates. We want to provide a fast-track for corporates and startups to engage with each other and are working with some of the biggest names in the industry to help them tap into innovation and for startups to access corporates as important partners and customers.
Founders’ Pack
Companies, large and small, work closely with us to provide some much needed services for startups. Of course startups benefit from these services because it lowers their cost of doing business. Anything that lowers their cost means their capital goes a longer distance. And when they are bootstrapping or have raised a small amount of capital, every little bit counts. So, we are excited that Facebook as our Platinum Founder Sponsor along with 33 other companies as our Bronze Founder Sponsors have come together to provide over £50k of value in services delivered. For many of our sponsors, our companies become their long-term customers. It’s a huge win-win.
From infrastructure services (e.g. 3scale and AWS) to analytics (e.g. Chartbeat, KISSmetrics) to advertising (e.g. Facebook, Google) to business services (e.g. Forsyth Group, Rougefrog, Zendesk) there are many services that will help Seedcamp founders save time and money in running their businesses day-to-day.
The full roundup of companies participating is listed here.
Sponsorship
In addition to being Founder Sponsors, we are thrilled that some of the larger corporates have chosen to support Seedcamp’s own operations by becoming Annual Sponsors. We want to specially thank Microsoft Bizspark and Qualcomm for their support. Microsoft has been part of the Seedcamp sponsors for the past few years but we have solidified that relationship further throughout 2010 and 2011. Qualcomm joins us for the first time – both as a Seedcamp Week sponsor and a yearly sponsor for 2012 and we are looking forward to working with them closely.
The sponsorship runs at a deep level as it brings great benefit to Seedcamp companies as well. All our sponsors are an integral component of the startup and developer community and as such they also participate as mentors at every event Seedcamp puts together. Their experts across product, biz dev, corp dev, dev relations, marketing and other functions are very active as mentors. Beyond this, we do site visits at their offices across EMEA and the US where we benefit greatly from the masterclasses run by their different product and corporate development groups. We have seen first-hand the long-term benefit for our startups as they always have a point of contact and assistance into these organizations. It is a great 3-way relationship.
Seedhack
In addition to sponsorship, corporates and traditional industries have woken up to the fact that innovation impacting them comes from many places, often from the outside. As such many are trying to figure out how to tap into this innovation and have approached Seedcamp to help them. In the same vein, many wanna-be entrepreneurs and those with a speck of an idea for helping solve some of the world’s problems are looking to tap into knowledge of those in industry as to what some of the biggest pain points are. They are eager to start a new company and can use some critical insight.
We felt one big way to connect would-be founders and industry is to involve as much of the broad community as possible. A new product we are therefore launching to help corporates, tech companies, and hackers all connect up to solve some major problems is Seedhack. Seedhack will kick-off with a first hacking weekend in September that tackles a few themes around health and big data to name a few. We aim to repeat this exercise a few times a year with other themes. Hack weekends have been a great inspiration for us and we think this unique take on the concept will involve a large part of the community that doesn’t often get to work together.
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