So I now have to double my writing efforts just to get some points across. So yes, the winner is MySugr, the only Austrian startup at the Startup Week Vienna competition. Compared to all other companies who are set to increase productivity here, profitability there, these guys aim big! They are to increase the lifespan of diabetes patients (55 million in Europe alone) by up to 8 years. The team achieves that by creating a simple way of tracking the level of sugar and physical exercises for diabetics.

Off they go to the Silicon Valley then, to network, raise funding and spend the Austrian Media award of 30 000 Euros they have received at the Startup Week.

The guys who did not win, but were highly praised by the judges are MyKoob and Pocketguide.

Pocketguide is actually a great tool, it gives you directions to the beginning of your tours, navigates you throughout the tour while offering voice instructions. Once you’ve completed your tour, taken pictures and videos, those too are integrated into the 3D map. Here is a demo video.

PocketGuide promo from Pocketguide on Vimeo.

The idea came to the founder of the company Martin Retai as he was … Continue reading

Dennis Turpitka, the founder of Ukrainian software development company Apriorit, is looking for beta-testers for his new venture, Hypertection. Hypertection is an antivirus software application for virtual environments, which dramatically increases the security of virtual machines whilst reducing the cost of antivirus licenses by an order of magnitude. Here is how:

Hypertection is installed not on the operating system level of the virtual machine, but on a lower level closer to that of software. This level is called hypervisor, and is the key element of any virtual system. In this way, the antivirus software for the virtual environment is hidden from the viruses and can effectively neutralize them.

If this makes you scratch your head, keep reading.

As servers become more and more powerful, virtualization technology is on the rise. With the help of virtualization applications such as … Continue reading

CEE Panel at Startup Week Vienna 2011

Today is the first day at the Startup Week in Vienna, and here is my alas an incomplete report.

It is hard to get through the crowd of participants at the Startup Week Vienna, this is how full it is. During the presentations this morning there was no spare seats and many attendants had to stand at the back of the room.

The event takes place at the heart of Vienna, in a beautiful building of Haus der Industrie. In fact the stateliness of this palace is hardly suitable for tech entrepreneurs who looked much better against a background of a scrapyard at the European Pirate Summit in Cologne. Not that I think that a place for entrepreneurs is on the scrapyard, but the opulence of Haus Der Industrie is almost overwhelming.

My objectives during these three days is to meet Eastern European entrepreneurs and to connect with tech investors in the region.

Here is a quick summary… Continue reading

Piano Media, online subscription-based media content payment system, announced last week that it has received €300,000 in Series-A funding from Jan Jenča and Ivan Štefunko at MONOGRAM Ventures, bringing Piano’s total market valuation of the company to nearly 1 million Euros. This investment round will be used primarily to expand into new European markets and solidify Piano’s Slovak market share.

Piano’s initial project is in Slovakia where nine publishers have agreed to put their online content behind its pay-wall. “Piano has proven remarkably successful for participating publishers. We have increased their online subscription revenue while having only a small impact on readership ” said Tomas Bella, co-founder and Chief Executive of Piano. “This first round of funding enables us to examine market possibilities and expand beyond Slovakia’s borders while we strengthen our position on the Slovak market.”

Piano netted over €40,000 in its first month of operations in Slovakia and has experienced steady active subscriber growth since it launched in May, 2011. Nine major Slovak publishers participate in Piano’s common payment system offering more than 44 different sites and services.

Here is an older article by WSJ Emerging Europe on Piano Media plans earlier this year.

Russian recommendation engine Surfingbird announced that it has raised $2.5 million from Russian and French business angels.

Surfingbird allows users to rate websites, add links and rate existing links available in the system. Based on the user’s preferences, the tool, which is powered by complex algorithms, makes recommendations on content that might be of interest to the user.

The founders, the CEO of the company Sergey Shalaev and its CTO Dmitry Shalashov  compare the company with Stumbleupon in terms of value proposition although the engine behind it is unique.

The company was established in 2011 when the founders discovered that such a service was not available in Russia and many other European countries.

The founders have collective working experience at Yandex, Mail.ru and Parallels, the most well known Russian technology and internet companies. They met their angel investor … Continue reading

It is just that I am just great believer in the eastern European engineers and their capacity to innovate. So I think that the world should know more about what is going on in this region. Here is a link to my post ‘Eastern Europe creates waves at HackFwd event‘.

Since this post is about TechCrunch, I thought it would be useful to share this video created by another Russian blogger, Daria Batukhtina. This is a video interview with Lukas Zinnagl who writes for TechCrunch Europe (longer than me!) about how to get a post published on TechCrunch. I know less about it, as out of my three submitted posts only one was selected.

Today news broke that Slando, the classified ad website which has 11 million users in eastern Europe (with 81% of them located in Russia and Ukraine), was sold. The buyer is Naspers, a South African Holding, which also owns classified websites in eastern Europe.

The deal is covered in mistery. My contact, who is no longer working in Slando, but has close links with its management, said that everyone is under strict non-disclosure agreements and can not comment much about the transaction, but here is what we know.

The company has been set up by Britons Simon Crookall and Michael Pennington in 2005 after they have successfully exited their other venture Gumtree, property advertisement website focusing on people moving to the UK from abroad.

Slando has been established from the outset as a free classified website focusing on the eastern European markets. A few years ago I have helped the team find software development resources (in eastern Europe, of course). According to “Otkritie Capital” Alexander Vengranovich, based on the website traffic the value of the company might be … Continue reading

Macedonia, Sveti Jovan Bogoslov Kaneo Church

The software development outsourcing industry in Macedonia has emerged as one of the most dynamic sectors of the economy in the past decade. With a growth rate of 38% in 2008, it has become an engine of growth, innovation and competitiveness. Due to the massive impact of the economic crisis, 2009 and 2010 were not the best years for this sector.

“The most common concerns regarding the issue was, whether and how the crisis affected the demand in this sector,” says Branka Bugariska, marketing manager of Seavus, a Swedish software consulting and development company in Macedonia. “In our experience, it is evident that it did, in a positive way… Continue reading

The next week is time for the much anticipated Startup Week in Vienna. Among the Eastern European startups which were selected to pitch to the investors were many interesting ones. Below is my take on them.

Romania

• 123ContactForm is an online form builder. The idea is definitely not new. So where is the twist? The judges will find out. The remaining Romanian companies are probably readying themselves for How To Web.

Croatia

• Ademptio develops Codeanywhere, a generic code editor. It competes with cloud-based integrated … Continue reading