Last March we held the 2nd edition of our Seedhack hackathon where we brought together top-notch hackers with big players from the financial services industry to create innovative solutions in FinTech. The results of Seedhack FinTech surpassed our expectations and motivated us to keep on going. We’re excited to announce that we’re back with the third Seedhack on the 8th, 9th and 10th of February and again we’re ready for disruption!
This time the hacking will focus on fashion and online retail as we are seeing a lot of innovation in this area and are sure the teams will start building some great companies over the weekend. The Seedcamp Family already includes disruptive teams in these areas such as EDITD, BRANDiD, Nuji, Poq Studio, Sayduck and ERPLY who will be sharing their knowledge and experience at the event.
We’re bringing together many more big and innovative players from the fashion and online retail industries to speak, provide their APIs and help hone ideas to jumpstart the projects so keep an eye out for further announcements coming soon.
As you might have read on TechCrunch recently, hackathons are a great testing ground to get ready for pitching VCs. Seedhack’s goal is building new companies so a great place test your ideas and turn them into viable companies over a weekend.
The idea behind Seedhack is to create new companies. As such, we are looking for people to come up with ideas over the weekend, rather than pitching an existing company’s idea. All roles are needed to build a successful company so we’re not just looking for developers but also for designers, marketeers, product managers and biz dev folks to enable the startups to be formed.
The whole event is free and open to anyone interested in hacking fashion and online retail. We do however need to make sure that we have the correct ratio of skills so you can complete this form to express your interest in attending. We’d love to have everyone attend but unfortunately space is very limited so sign ups will be accommodated on a first-come-first-served basis. If we can’t accommodate you, we’ll let you know over email as we approach the date.
Seedhack will run from the evening of Friday the 8th until Sunday the 10th of February at Google Campus in London and will be a whirlwind weekend of brainstorming, hacking and product creation. We’ll be bringing together hackers, companies and API experts with the aim of solving real world problems to create real companies. The schedule of events will be further clarified at a later date, however the rough outline is as follows:
Are you a brilliant hacker with a penchant for showing off your skills, but no ideas? Maybe you’re from a company with a real industry problem that has hit a wall? Or perhaps you’re a business person interested in fashion or online retail? If you answered yes to any of the above, then you need to register here for Seedhack and start thinking of ideas!
Any existing companies interested in being involved as mentors, sponsors or providing their API can get in touch with us here.
What does a bank designed for the needs of a six year-old have in common with an iPhone app designed to help you donate money to a religious organization and a system to help spot issues with legal documents? Well, they were all spawned out of Seedcamp’s recent Seedhack FinTech which took place 30th, 31st March and 1st April. We had over one hundred energetic and entrepreneurial hackers register to take part in the event in the purpose-built Campus by Google and enabled by our generous sponsors: Paypal, Domain.me, and 10gen.
Friday night’s kick off was led by a keynote speech from Michael Rolph, Director at Anthemis Group, a leading Financial Technology investment firm. He highlighted how a key part of the financial tech investment opportunities involves bringing additional transparency between those that manage capital and those that invest or use capital. The old model of a few people exploiting inefficiencies in information are over as new startups increasingly democratize the information necessary to make better financial decisions.
After the keynote, we had our API speakers present what their companies did, as well as how their technology could be used within the context of a new project. Our API presenters were:
Following the talks from our speakers, the attendees had the chance to mingle, eat some great food courtesy of @centralworking and bounce ideas off of each other. Once done, the group headed back upstairs to go into a pitch rally of ideas. After the pitch rally, everyone settled in for a late night of hacking away on their respective ideas.
By late afternoon Saturday, 16 companies had been formed and were mentored by our Judges which included:
What’s amazing is that in spite of having little sleep, the companies had tons of energy and were still struggling with how to make certain ideas work and getting their MVPs ready until late into the evening.
On Sunday, crunch time started at 4pm as all the weary-eyed hackers commenced their final pitches. Below is a summary of the top three companies formed (that presented), what the project was about, and who the members were. The best Demo award went to Holy Light, with the runner up position being split evenly between Sayvd and Minipots, both showing how awesome a product can be built in just slightly over 48 hours. The company that was given a fast track to an upcoming Seedcamp event was Business Semantics, which worked on a project to help alleviate the burden of legal document review.
Business Semantics
Using semantically-rich terminological dictionaries/ontologies and linguistic analysis to identify and remove ambiguities in contracts which by their nature constitute litigation risk.
HolyLight A CRM solution for churches to manage churchgoers + mobile & social app to allow anyone to donate anywhere via PayPal.
MiniPots Are creating a casual social game to help friends bet each other about the topics they care about.
Sayvd Sayvd is a social mobile app giving you an easy way to save small amounts of money and stick your savings in a safe place for bigger purchases later. Save 2,5 on a coffee towards your snowboard.
What’s clear after the Seedhack FinTech event however, is how much innovation still needs to happen in the space. Many of the conversations that the attendees had with each other as well as during customer validation calls circled around a huge dissatisfaction with current payment systems, credit card processing systems, security, and even banking. We truly hope to see much more innovation coming out of this space!
We started Seedhack with a simple question. If we combined top-notch hackers with leaders from different industries, would we see the creation of innovative solutions for organizations or sectors that desperately need them? Could this format help foster great new startups that address untapped needs? Well, we tried it, and it did… you can read about how it went here.
Friday
Sunday
Six months ago, we had our very first Seedhack event. The idea was simple, what if we could combine top-notch hackers with leaders from different companies? What if we could bring talented developers from all over Europe to create innovative solutions for organizations or sectors that desperately need them? Could this format help foster great new startups that address untapped needs? Well, we tried it, and it did… read about it here.
We are now getting ready to release the next version of Seedhack with new features and a new focus: Financial Technology. We expect to be blown away by the awesome ideas and solutions hacked together for the Financial industry.
We have a great set of relevant speakers, API’s and startups including:
More big names will be announced in the run up to the event, and we’re really excited about working with our event partners – both current and future – to bring something new and interesting to the FinTech space.
So if you want to be a part of disrupting the Financial technology, please register here.
The event will take place at a location in central London. The schedule of events will be further clarified at a later date, however the rough outline is as follows:
The purpose of Seedhack FinTech is to create disruptive solutions to problems that exist in the Financial sector. As such, if you are an idea person, a developer, or have some skillset that is useful for a new company, then you should apply!
Please note however that this isn’t an event designed to cater to startups wanting to hire developers, please go to our friends at the Silicon Milk Roundabout for that. Additionally, if you are already employed, but want to start a new company anyway, make sure that you are not bound by any non-compete or other intellectual property limitations.
We look forward to see you there, register now!
Follow @sc_seedhack for updates!
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
Back in early June, we shared our idea behind seedhack. Our idea is simple, what if we could combine top-notch hackers with leaders from across different companies? What if we could bring talented developers from all over Europe to create innovative solutions for organizations or sectors that desperately need them? Could this format potentially form great new startups that address untapped needs?
Well, Seedcamp would like to find out, and to do that, and thanks to our event sponsors, The London Business School, Facebook, and .me Domains, we’re going to be running our first seedhack event on September 23rd-25th at the London Business School campus. We plan on bringing companies, startups, and developers together to find out if something great will come out of it. It’s for the community and it’s totally free to attend and participate (space permitting).
READ THIS UPDATE: We’ve just posted the event’s FAQ.
REGISTER YOUR INTEREST: Registration for the inaugural Seedhack is now closed, however register your interest here and we’ll let you know when applications for the next Seedhack event open.
The schedule of events is outlined further below, however the rough idea is as follows:
On Friday, everyone will meet up to hear some talks led by company leaders who will either talk about problems plaguing their industry as a whole or their company’s value chain in particular. The idea is to catalyze thinking around how we could, in aggregate, solve these problems. However, you are more than welcome to hack around any industry, topic, or idea you may have. Our confirmed speakers so far include Vladimir Oane, founder of Ubervu, on Big Data and Mohammad Al-Ubaydli, founder of Patients Know Best, on Technology in Healthcare
Shortly after the talks, we will have a brief overview of some of the other companies that are attending and have APIs which could be of use for the development of any of the ideas that people may come up with. We plan to have these engineers around throughout the weekend to help out with any integration issues.
Once all presentations are finished, we will have some networking time for people to freely discuss any ideas with the speakers or others before presenting any potential ideas to the general group. We will then have two Idea Presentation and Discussion sessions. During these sessions, people with ideas will present them to the whole audience and then people will join these individuals to form groups to discuss and work on the idea before having an opportunity to perhaps move to another group after a second set of Idea Presentations 30min later. Ideally, teams are made up of no more than 5 collaborators and involve folks from different disciplines to result in a fully fleshed out project.
Once teams have been formed for the evening, everyone is free to either stay at our location or move anywhere else to work on their idea for the Sunday presentations. On Saturday, we will have mentors around to answer questions around business and API related issues.
Lastly, on Sunday, we will be having our presentation event where all companies will showcase their efforts.
Friday
|
Start |
End |
Duration |
Description |
|
17:30 |
18:00 |
00:30 |
Registration |
|
18:00 |
18:10 |
00:10 |
Introduction |
|
18:10 |
19:40 |
01:30 |
Tech Presentations (APIs, etc) |
|
19:40 |
20:40 |
01:00 |
Teammaking |
|
20:40 |
23:00 |
02:20 |
Group Finalization & Start Hacking |
Saturday
|
Start |
End |
Duration |
Description |
|
10.00 |
10:30 |
00:30 |
Coffee |
|
10:30 |
12:30 |
02:00 |
Hacking |
|
13:00 |
14.00 |
01:00 |
Lunch available |
|
14.00 |
16.00 |
02:00 |
Hacking – and mentors on site |
|
19:00 |
20:00 |
01:00 |
Pizza! |
|
20.00 |
< |
Late |
Hack until late |
Sunday
|
Start |
End |
Duration |
Description |
|
10.00 |
10:30 |
00:30 |
Coffee |
|
10:30 |
12:30 |
02:00 |
Hacking |
|
12:30 |
13:00 |
00:30 |
Working lunch – Time to complete final touches |
|
15:00 |
16:00 |
02:00 |
Pitch training and presentations |
|
16.00 |
16:30 |
00:30 |
Wrap up |
The purpose of this event is hopefully to create new, really innovative startups and product & solutions. As such, if you are an idea person, a developer, or have some skillset that is useful for a new company, then you are the right person!
However, please note that this isn’t an event designed to cater to existing startups that want to hire developers, please go to our friends at the Silicon Milk Roundabout for that. Additionally, if you are already employed, but want to start a new company anyway, just make sure that you are not bound by any non-compete or other intellectual property limitations.
Image via Wikipedia
But I already have an idea!
If you already have a recent idea for a startup you’d like to bring to the table, that’s great. Be ready to share your idea openly so that others can choose to join you in a group to work together. Bring any materials that would be helpful in explaining it, such as a presentation or mockups.
BUT: please be open to alterations, pivots, and any other changes to your original idea, as this is what the open form of the event is all about.
Can I just attend?
Well, we’d love to have as many people attend, but unfortunately space is very limited. As such, we will be accommodating signups on a first-come-first-serve basis. If we can’t accommodate you, we will let you know over email as we approach the date.
In addition, we will have to make sure to have the right ratio of developers, designers, and business folks there to enable startups to be formed. We will try and make sure to enable as much participation as possible, of course.
I don’t have any tech skills, can I still join a team?
We don’t expect everyone to be on the development side, but be aware that you may not necessarily have a guaranteed place within a group either. Ultimately each group will decide what skills they need.
Where can I work from? Can I work from home over the weekend?
You can work from anywhere, but you’d miss out on half the fun if you weren’t at the venue. Plus, there’s Pizza. Everybody loves Pizza.
What if I don’t come up with an idea?
If by Friday evening you haven’t come up with an idea to pitch, you are more than welcome to join another group that is looking for help.
What if I don’t manage to join a group on Friday?
If you neither have an idea to pitch to others, nor you manage to join another group to help with their idea, you can either work alone on an another idea that you may come up with the next day or you can always donate your time to Charity Hack which takes place not too far away in Richmond.
If I can’t make it to this Seedhack, can you let me know about the next one?
We will be announcing future Seedhack events across many channels so its unlikely you will miss an announcement. Make sure to follow us on Twitter and to keep an eye out on our blog, too.
What if I want to pitch my current Company’s idea?
The idea behind Seedhack is to create new companies. As such, we are looking for people to come up with ideas over the weekend, rather than pitching an existing company’s idea (unless you really only came up with it relatively recently and want to share it with others).
As noted above – be ready to tweak, pivot, and change your idea over the course of the weekend, too.
What if I’m already employed but just want to come to hack?
We would prefer that you didn’t unless your company was really cool with you creating a startup and leaving them.
What if I want to present my Company’s API to the community?
That’s great – get in touch with us about what you would like to pitch and please have an API engineer available throughout the weekend. You can reach us on our website:
http://www.seedcamp.com/contact
or twitter via:
What if I want to come to Seedhack to hire developers?
Seedhack’s not the place for that. Please go to Silicon Milk Roundabout instead because it’s an awesome forum for just that.
What if I am turned away at the door or via email because of capacity?
We will be having a first come first serve selection and will make sure to get the right mix of people in the room.
Do I have to pay anything?
Not as of now. Our generous sponsors are taking care of all the costs. Say thanks when you see them!
Am I going to get fed?
It’s no gourmet. We should have snacks though (pizza).
How good is the internet connection?
Our hope is that it is good enough for anything short of everyone streaming videos at the same time. Please leave your torrents at home.
If we come up with something over the weekend, who owns it?
The team members do. It’s all up to you what you will do with ownership, etc, but to make it easier, we will have some suggestions for documents that will make sure everyone is rewarded fairly.
Is there a Seedcamp investment for the winners?
Nope. This event is just to get your company off the ground and running.
Is there any kind of award for the winners?
Other than recognition from your peers, no – but if you build a company out of the idea, the world is yours.
Can I bring friends?
If they can participate, sure they can sign up themselves as well, but not just to observe.
Can we come as a group?
See above.
Will my idea be treated confidentially?
It’ll be very hard for your idea to be treated confidentially as you will be discussing it with your other group members, mentors, and API owners. Everyone is there to build great things so professional etiquette is observed.
Can I take a shower?
Yes and no. Yes you can take a shower, no, not at the venue.
Can I sleep over?
The venue will be open 24 hours, so if you want to hack around the clock Bill Haley style, feel free!
What else should I do?
Tell others about it, tweet, blog about your idea, get early feedback, find out who else is coming… and if you’re really adventurous, go ahead and see who the API partners are to get thinking about the possibilities.
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