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Tuesday – day two – focused on getting a product to market. That’s an ambiguous concept, and an ambitious one, so we had to find a mentoring group diverse and motivated enough to fit the concept. Luckily we had just such the groups.

The morning consisted of our familiar panel format, with Matt Jones of Dopplr, Matthew Ogle of Last.fm, Taavet Hinrikus from Skype, and Adam Seifer of Fotolog all talking about developing and implementing a product at which users will throw themselves. Ryan Carson of Carsonified moderated and contributed his own valuable take when applicable.

The teams then broke out to separate rooms for small-group mentoring, which if memory serves me right I’ve mentioned is the crux of the entire Seedcamp Week experience. If I have, it bears repeating. By collecting a “dream team” of talent at Seedcamp, we’re able to connect the right participants with the right advisors, fostering not just a good hour-long chat, but potentially a career-long mutually beneficial relationship. Some of the connections from Seedcamp Week, whether the team in question has “won” or not, will last a very long while, and prove to be of great value down the road even when the short-term proposition isn’t immediately apparent.

After a quick lunch we listened to another “fireside chat” with Brent Hoberman and Martin Varsavsky, an engaging one to say the least.

After they chat we were treated to a marketing panel featuring Donna Sokolsky of Spark PR, Obi Felten from Google, Blake Chandlee of Facebook, Brent Hoberman of mydeco and lastminute.com, and Jamie Kantrowitz of Myspace. Jason Goodman of Albion managed to hold the rambunctious group together and inject some topical humor (apologies to the badly-jibed and collapsing global financial system – best of luck landing on your feet!).

Finally we finished off with another multi-hour mentoring session in small groups, which – not to sound like a broken record – is the real reason both our teams and advisors attend.

All in all the several hundred of us had another superb day, and are looking forward to another.

Day one of Seedcamp kicked off with each team presenting briefly to a packed house of fellow teams and entrepreneurs. While some understandable nervousness was apparent as they spoke to the room of over 150, each team made it through unscathed. Our appetites were certainly whetted for the longer pitches on Thursday.

Next up Danny Rimer of Index Ventures moderated a Founders Panel featuring Kevin Cornils (formerly of Buy.at), Petteri Koponen (Jaiku/Google), Michael Birch (formerly Bebo), Martin Stiskel (Last.fm), and Christophe Maire (Plazes/Nokia), together representing some of the biggest European exits in recent memory. With a diverse set of backgrounds (and even the numbers of companies they’ve started and run) their comments were sometimes dissonant, but they answered as a chorus to some important questions, making a clear impression on the teams present.

Following the panel session and an all-too-brief lunch Marten Mickos (of MySQL and now its parent company Sun) waxed managerial, sharing invaluable advice on handling mega-growth and global expansion – not to mention the importance of giving employees space and trust.

The afternoon was taken up by the core of Seedcamp Week: small-group mentoring between our finalists and advisors. This being “Founders’ Day” those in attendance advising the teams consisted mostly of fellow entrepreneurs, which as an umbrella term encompasses an enormous amount of potential experience. To that point several of the teams remarked that the different – and often contradictory – advice they received served as fodder for new avenues of thought well beyond their existing spheres of consideration.

All in all a great start to Seedcamp Week. Our teams’ exhaustion (and that of the Seedcamp team as well) is clearly more than balanced by their anticipation of day two.

After seeing that someone had created a prediction market about Seedcamp Week winners on Hubdub.com, we asked the site’s creators if they might want to comment in a post. Here’s what they came up with –Morland

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest startup of all? Or rather, which of the 20 finalists will win this year’s Seedcamp and be crowned Europe’s hottest seedling? The competition is tough, but to add a bit of fun to the mix Hubdub is running a prediction market to forecast who will be taking the podium. Check it out here.

Seedcamp08: Which company will win overall best seedling?

Users bet play money on the company they want to back and win more if they are right. As well as letting users compete at predicting the future, the site combines everyone’s predictions into a forecast of who will win (as it does for thousands of other news questions like Who will be the next President of the US?, How much will Digg sell for? or Will Britney have a top ten single in 2008? But are the results of any use?

Academic research suggests they are. Prediction markets have consistently outperformed polls in election predictions because of a number of inherent advantages: people can express their confidence by the amount they wager, they output a real probability, and they can react immediately to developing news. In the same way stock prices jump when significant news breaks around a company, Hubdub’s prediction markets change over time as information emerges. This happens because people change their minds, cash out old predictions, and make new ones. For example, the market on which sport the US flag bearer in the Olympics would be from shows a nose-dive for the Swimming option when it was announced Michael Phelps wouldn’t be in Beijing for the closing ceremony. Other markets on certain events occurring by certain dates (a popular format on the site) like this one about Brad and Angelina splitting up often trend gradually towards the correct outcome as the deadline approaches, as you’d expect.

A recent volatile and unpredictable market was the one on the winner of TechCrunch50 – its lead changed several times as new companies pitched or got positive write-ups. Could we see a similar pattern for the Seedcamp market as ideas evolve over the week? Perhaps. Though this information will not be public, research has shown only a small number of people (15-20) are needed to generate accurate forecasts and there will likely be that number or more ‘insiders’ making predictions on the site – not least the companies themselves! So, if you fancy yourself as a bit of a tech pundit who knows how to pick a winning start-up and want to put your virtual money where your mouth is go make your Hubdub predictions. As for the companies themselves, there’s still everything to play for – and all of us here at Hubdub wish them the best of luck.

Hubdub.com is an Edinburgh based start-up that launched in January 2008. CEO Nigel Eccles will be at Seedcamp next week

We’ve temporarily turned our home page into a one-stop shop for keeping abreast of Seedcamp Week. Not only will it aggregate the text recaps we’ll be posting here, the video highlights over on Vimeo, and our Twitter thought-stream, but hopefully also content around the web published by our attendees. Since much of the week involves small-group interaction between teams and advisors we can’t open it up in the style of MIT’s OpenCourseWare, as much as we’d like to – but hopefully this is the next-best thing.

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.

All applicants:

Seedcamp Week finalists:

All applicants:

Seedcamp Week finalists:

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.

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:

• Buzz Diagnostics
• Decisions for Heroes
• MyTripleD
• Realeyes
• SquareClock

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.