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Sun Sponsors Office Space for 2008 Seedcamp WinnersOctober 27

Already six weeks has passed from Seedcamp Week 2008 and the teams have submerged themselves into growing their business here in London. This could not have been achieved without the help of Seedcamp supporters like Sun Microsystems and their Startup Essentials programme which helps startup companies grow and scale. They have kindly sponsored desks for three months to both UberVU and Basekit at one of their own start-up companies, Huddle, within the trendy Bermondsey area, a perfect set-up to access and mingle with the brightest minds coming out of the UK today.

Mini-Seedcamps 2009October 24

We are very excited to announce the dates of this year's mini-Seedcamps!

Tel Aviv - February 2nd 2009
Paris - early March 2009
Warsaw - mid-March 2009
London - mid-April 2009
Berlin - 5th May 2009
Stockholm - 19th May 2009
Kiev - 9th June 2009

The motives of our mini-Seedcamps are the same as those of Seedcamp Week (in summary attending a Seedcamp will give your start-up team enormous validation and access to a world-class network of advisors to help you with every aspect of your business, plus a direct route to seed and venture capital.)

By going on the road we hope to amplify Seedcamp Week's activities all over Europe's local geographies.

So keep checking our site for more details on how your team can apply. Or, if you are overwhelmed by the prospect of Seedcamp coming to your town and want to get involved NOW give me a shout Alasdair[AT]Seedcamp.com

Al

State of European startups and fundingOctober 22

Saul was just speaking at the Web 2.0 Conferencein Berlin today on the topic of today's state of European startups and funding. You can see the full presentation here

I recently sent a note to all the Seedcamp companies urging calm and patience in light of volatile market conditions. Saul gave similar advice and thought I would put it below as well

Main points I'd like to reiterate are:
My top 3 tips for doing that
1) Focus, focus, focus and don’t let the volatility distract you. Focus on product development and your vision of the problems you are trying to solve

2) Have a legitimate plan of how you are going to bring in Revenue and how quickly you can get to break-even

3) Continue to work hard. It's a 24-7 game as we know. Reach out to mentors, advisors, everyone you believe can help. Worst someone can say is No!

Good luck and keep growing!

Our Seedcamp Week 2008 winnersSeptember 19

We're happy to announce our seven Seedcamp winners for 2008.

• Basekit, Chepstow, Wales, England – www.basekit.com – a service for making building complex websites easy
• Kyko, Oxford, England – a service for multi-player social gaming
• Mobclix, San Francisco, US – www.mobclix.com – rich analytics and targeted advertising platform for the iPhone
• Soup, Vienna, Austria – www.soup.io – simple way for anyone to share and publish experiences online
• Stupeflix, Paris, France – www.stupeflix.com – platform for turning photos into shareable videos in real time
• Toksta, Berlin, Germany – www.toksta.com – IM and video chat for social networks
• uberVU, Bucharest, Romania – www.ubervu.com – service for tracking and analyzing conversations across the web

You can also read our official press release (PDF).

As you can tell from the length of that list we've exceeded our original target of five teams - by 40%. Stretching our rules that far is a clear signal of just how strongly we feel about this group.

It's been a productive w

Zeitgeist redux: finalist editionSeptember 13

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: