2 min read

Seedcamp 2008 was fun

Taavet on panel

Spent a day at London [Seedcamp](http://seedcamp.com/) Week’s [Product and Marketing Day](http://seedcamp.com/pages/weeks_program#2008) again. Hit quite a jackpot on the mentoring group selection lottery and got to spend time with four out of the total seven winners of this year:

  • Kyko – online multiplayer gaming by the creators of [Babuki](http://www.babuki.com/mainpage/), with a neat angle of tapping into existing social/IM networks to build their userbase.

  • Stupeflix – French startup generating time-synced video clips out of static images and music. [Animoto](http://animoto.com/) competitor with a strong technical performance edge.

  • [Toksta](http://www.toksta.com/en/liveconfig/) – whitelabel web based IM client for social networks from Germany.

  • [uberVU](http://www.ubervu.com/) – my personal favourite, coming from Romania: crawler based harvesting of comments to and discussions around your content from wherever it get syndicated to. Think of seeing not only the comments to your video directly on YouTube, but also on any random blog that this video got embedded to or any twitter post referring to that video with a tinyurl.

[Decisions for Heros](http://decisionsforheroes.com/) whom I also met have found a very sharp niche of catering the dataporn needs for rescue teams, and I just loved their founder Robin´s passion. Wish them all the best even if they didn’t win this event.

All-in-all and with a few exceptions, I was more impressed by the people and their passion rather than the specific business ideas. Of course, it sort of has to be very hard to differentiate a great company from an utterly silly one before it gets off the ground, otherwise we would all be angel inverstment gazillionaires in a blink. Judging people and their characters is a much more natural task – and I really did like most of whom I met.

In addition to the roster of enthusiastic startups, I am also very happy about making some new friends among [fellow mentors](http://seedcamp.com/pages/mentors), such as [Robert Gaal](http://www.linkedin.com/in/robertgaal), co-founder of [Wakoopa](http://wakoopa.com) (which I have been a user of for a few months) and [The Next Web](http://thenextweb.org/). Chatting with guys like him is very energizing and raises hopes about the vision of Europe as an innovation hub. Which was Saul’s point of creating Seedcamp after all, wasn’t it?

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