SeedCamp Finalists Chosen (The European Y Combinator-like seed fund)

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/08/30/seedcamp-finalists-chosen-battle-to-final-five-next-week/

by transburgh • 19 years ago

16 17 19 years ago

If this is seed funding, why are they announcing what all of the companies are doing a priori? So competitors can be aware and get a one-up on them before they release? I would feel uncomfortable with that personally.

brett• 19 years ago

Yeah. This appears to be a very bad sign.

vikram2• 19 years ago

It might be a way to work out which idea is the most promising. I don't get the point of announcing the names let alone what their initial plans are.

palish3• 19 years ago

As a little experiment, here are some predictions:

ArtFlock - "ArtFlock.com aims to be the foremost online destination for the sale and promotion of original art and craft by the worlds' freshest artists and makers". Fail.

Avenue7 - "An online community for 12 - 17 year old girls to share ideas on the latest fashion trends & products, as well as their own personal styles". Great chance of success. I'd put all my money on this one.

Buildersite - "Buildersite is a web-marketplace for construction services. We aim to provide homeowners and tradesmen with the largest and most trusted venue for transacting business online." Fail, people don't go to the internet to build a house.

Content Syndicate - "Helps content providers and buyers commission, distribute, buy and sell content, that's exclusive, customised and personalised for their requirements". What? Epic failure.

Debatewise - "Debatewise will enable people to compare the collective wisdom of one side of a debate with the collective wisdom of their opponents, to help them make up their mind about anything". Fail, people don't care about other people's opinions, except to argue about them.

Facecontact - "Facecontact.com is a simple and effective tool for referral tracking and reward administration for referring job candidates, clients, investors and other prospects". I don't know, but I'm leaning towards fail. It would be hard to get enough people to start using the service for the service to be useful.

KillSushi - No description. Uhhh..

Krogos Software Development - Software development boutique. Erm.. Consulting? Possible success if they do it correctly, but consulting doesn't scale.

Kublax - "Online personal finance management service". Too little information given, but a system to manage micropayments would be great, if that's what they're doing.

Maple and Leek - "A social networking site aimed at inspiring like minded over 50s to build an online community of friends and fellow explorers". Fail. You can't build a social network from "X subset of myspace" and have it succeed without a niche goal.

OpenEra - "Online real estate information systems provider and the developer of the new and exciting Reavia portfolio collaboration service". Cut away the market speak. Fail.

Project Playfair - "Our game is hypernumbers which will do to numbers what hypertext did to text". No, it won't. Fail.

Price Delivered - "The place for consumers to discover and share genuine bargains". Bargains change too fast for the site to be very useful. Have to go with fail.

RentMineOnline - "Trusted online rental market". Anything over the size of a movie is extremely hard to rent through the mail, plus this requires a huge amount of capital to start, so fail.

The School of Everything - "The place to come to find independent teachers and classes in anything and everything". When many adults don't even read books, getting them to watch online lectures seems futile. Successful only on a very small scale, and only at music, art, and writing classes.

Tablefinder - "Tablefinders' mission is to aggregate the world's online bookable restaurants through an awarding and open community". Fail, too many moving parts. It won't be useful until everyone participates, so it won't happen.

Tickex - "Tickex is a search engine for tickets to live events - concert, theatre and sports. In one search, Tickex aggregates results from all the major primary and secondary brokers". I'm not sure this is very useful. People buy tickets by hearing of a specific event first, not by randomly looking for events to go to. And since they already have a specific event in mind, it's very easy to get tickets for it. Fail.

Wall Street Docs - "A provider of a sophisticated web-based document automation solution for complex capital raising transactions with a feature set tailored to the needs of issuers and banks". Only successful as enterprise software, so it depends on how good of salesmen they have. Since they only get $50,000, I'm going with fail.

Zemanta - "Content intelligence platform to automatically enhance content, making it web-ready". What? Fail.

It seems like SeedCamp may be going about this the wrong way. Instead of collecting good teams and iterating until they get an idea correct, they're banking everything on the idea and hoping the team follows.

What're your predictions?

koolmoe• 19 years ago

>What're your predictions?

How can one make any predictions without knowing the teams?

palish3• 19 years ago

Hmm. What are your opinions of the ideas based on the very limited information given?

dfranke• 19 years ago

> Our game is hypernumbers which will do to numbers what hypertext did to text.

If I could understand what the hell that meant, there's a chance I might think it was interesting.

ivankirigin• 19 years ago

Maybe something like referring to the value of a cell in a spreadsheet? So wikipedia could have a page on the number of users of web-app Foo, and that number would live update.

Sounds pretty useless.

Or maybe they're talking about the optimization hack in Python where some values of primitive types in Python only have one copy. If you don't know what I'm talking about, run this in a python console "import sys; sys.getrefcount(1)". You'll get the number of references to the number 1. Another fun trick: plot getrefcount for the first few thousands integers. It doesn't degrease monotonically as you might expect.

utnick• 19 years ago

These predictions are spot on mostly

But... I have to disagree with your artflock prediction, I think there is a market for this. A few weeks ago I was trying to buy art from local artists on craigslist for my new apartment, it was a pain though, because I had to click on each link to see the painting, I couldn't search very easily on genre or artist, and I had to wade through a bunch of postings for van gogh posters people bought from posters.com etc

Not sure if this is where they are going with that service, but a craigslist for art would be helpful to both artists and buyers.

palish3• 19 years ago

Website ideas that are "X subset of Y service" seem to fail a lot judging by how few of them exist. In this case, that would be the "art subset of Ebay".

However, it all hinges on the execution. They may find success in catering to artists better than Ebay or Craigslist can, but that seems much riskier than if they built a new kind of service.

rms• 19 years ago

There is also http://www.etsy.com which is for anything handmade, which includes art.

I browsed Artflock and saw an artist saying "Email me at x@y.com so we don't have to pay the Artflock fees." That's a bad sign.

omouse• 19 years ago

Price Delivered - "The place for consumers to discover and share genuine bargains".

That one could work if they allowed SMS..but even then, it's a long-shot.

whacked_new• 19 years ago

My prediction is that there will be more programs like these with greater global reach.

It's nice to see teams from Russia, Romania, and Dubai in this batch.

vikram2• 19 years ago

These guys aren't the finalists, they are invited for a one week interview only 5 get the cash.

vlad• 19 years ago

These are really, really terrible ideas.

rustartup• 19 years ago

What SeedCamp does is merely getting hype in hope to succeed as a investor2startup intermediate and promote its http://www.opencoffeeclub.org network.

So they pick up ideas that will draw most of attention.

Just my thoughts. source: http://blog.seedcamp.com

cellis• 19 years ago

a poorly executed knock off of the eminent Y Combinator

SeedCamp Finalists Chosen (The European Y Combinator-like seed fund)

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