Seedcamp Week 2011 – meet the finalists, the winners and one good Samaritan

As I wrote last week when Seedcamp made a flurry of announcements, including fresh funding and ambitious plans for international expansion, I spent some time in London last week to get acquainted with a bunch of interesting European startups.

Below is an overview of all 20 Seedcamp Week 2011 finalists, starting with the 3 (well, actually, 4 winners).

But first, it’s worth noting that Seedcamp, which had already financially and otherwise backed 16 of the 20 companies that presented their wares during Seedcamp Week 2011 – over and over, I might add – held interviews with the four remaining startups and decided to inject some seed capital into them, too. So, in a way, they all sorta kinda ‘won’.

Furthermore, The Accelerator Group (TAG) has made investment offers to five Seedcamp startups, although it’s unclear to which ones, and how much they offered to invest, exactly.

On a personal note, I genuinely found the quality of most Seedcamp startups amazing.

These are the top three winners of the competition:

Vox.io (websiteCrunchBase profile)

Vox.io is a simple service that lets you make voice and video calls straight from your browser. No downloads, installations or firewall configurations are required.

Transferwise (websiteCrunchBase profile)

TransferWise is an online currency exchange service that essentially allows people to exchange currency using mid-market rates, for a flat fee.

GrabCAD (websiteCrunchBase profile)

GrabCAD is a services marketplace that connects manufacturing and product development companies with CAD (computer-aided design) engineers around the world.

GrabCAD won the Gold investment prize (€25,000 in seed capital). However, the company decided that, since it has recently raised enough funding from investors like Matrix Partners and Atlas Venture, they should ask Seedcamp to invest the money in another startup, Farmeron. Good karma.

Which brings us to the fourth top winner:

Farmeron (websiteCrunchBase profile)

Farmeron helps farmers across the world manage their farming data online, do farm-performance analysis based on aggregated statistics and collaborate with other farmers.

And here are the remaining 16 Seedcamp Week 2011 finalists, in alphabetical order:

AppExtras (websiteCrunchBase profile)

AppExtras is a cross-promotion network for mobile app publishers. The idea behind the startup’s service is that mobile application developers and publishers can get more downloads, new user and extra revenue for generating installs within the network.

Bilbus (website – no CrunchBase profile yet)

Small businesses often don’t understand their cash flow, but rely utterly on it. A kind of “Wonga for SMEs”, Bilbus lets them borrow $10 million to $50 million based on their cash flow.

Bilbus effectively helps matching borrower needs to lending preferences and provides all the key information in one place, thus making it easier for commercial lenders to lend to businesses.

Blossom (websiteCrunchBase profile)

A project management tool for ‘lean startup teams’. Software for agile development if you will.

If “Lean is the new agile” then the tools are missing for lean project management and issue tracking, so Blossom wants to correct that. Competitors cost $25 per user per month, so they will offer it free.

Campalyst (websiteCrunchBase profile)

Campalyst is social analytics software that measures the revenues and conversions from Facebook Pages, and helps brands understand whether their fans convert into customers.

It sounds implausible, but the startup claims that its software measures the full conversion funnel from a status update on Facebook to the purchase on advertiser’s website.

The team says it has already delivered working product and got customer traction. The software is available to agencies and in-house social media teams on a monthly subscription basis.

Compilr (websiteCrunchBase profile)

Compilr is a dev tool which allow programmers to write code through their web browser. Think Google Documents for programmers.

It has 60,000 registered developers. The average user is a 23 year old male from the US – sounds about right. It claims to be the only online IDE that actually compiles code. Cloud9 is their biggest competitor, but then it has $45.5 million from Accel and Atlassian.

Crashpadder (website – no CrunchBase profile yet)

Crashpadder.com says it is the UK’s largest peer-to-peer accommodation network, along the lines of Airbnb. And to be fair, at least in the UK, you do tend to hear about it a lot more than the latter.

But where Airbnb allows someone to rent out an apartment on their own (sometimes with dire results it turns out), Crashpadder hosts stay in their place and of course, meet the person who’s Crashpadding.

Launched in 2008 when P2P accommodation took off, they ‘hard launched’ in January 2010. They claim 16,000 hosts in 1,800 locations in 93 countries, and 25,000 users so far.

Crashpadder.com earns a 10 percent commission on every booking, plus a £3 admin fee.

Crowd (websiteCrunchBase profile)

Crowd is an aggregation and search service (mobile app + Web-based widget) that helps people visualize the stream of public geotagged and timestamped photos taken at every instant, all over the world.

Crowd basically when to give people a feeling for what is going on, right now and anywhere.

The Efficient Cloud (websiteCrunchBase profile)

This startup enables hosting providers to offer cost-effective cloud hosting for Web applications based on PHP and Ruby on Rails. Efficient Cloud offers a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution that consists of a cloud computing backend, admin dashboard, provisioning system and an easy to use end-user control panel.

Fractal (websiteCrunchBase profile)

Fractal validates HTML emails across all major email clients and can automatically fix known email quirks.

Holvi (websiteCrunchBase profile)

Holvi aims to replace bank accounts with a service that offers a smart checking account for group activities.

The account and budget are shared by multiple people from groups, offering full transparency.

Mopapp (websiteCrunchBase profile)

Mopapp tracks and analyzes mobile app sales across multiple application stores, and helps developers and publishers gain insights by generating easy-to-understand reports.

Oust.me (website – no CrunchBase profile yet)

Oust.me is a ‘geolocation game’, which turns locations into territories based on data provided by Foursquare, Gowalla and Facebook Places platforms.

Psykosoft (websiteCrunchBase profile)

This French startup has developed Psykopaint, Web-based software that turns photos into stunning art.

Rentlord (websiteCrunchBase profile)

Rentlord gives people everything they need to start, manage, renew and end a tenancy or flatshare over a social network custom-made for tenants, flatsharers and landlords.

Sportlyzer (websiteCrunchBase profile)

Sportlyzer is a fun and social online workout application, where a digital coach advises workouts and raises exercising motivation.

Zin.gl (websiteCrunchBase profile)

Zin.gl aims to match singles with other singles that have a lot in common with them, based on their Facebook, Foursquare and other available online data.