City’s Hottest Startups To Compete At The TechCrunch Barcelona Meetup

Tomorrow we’ll throw a TechCrunch Mini Meetup in Barcelona, one of the most internationally-minded cities in Europe. Below you’ll find out schedule, agenda and here you can grab a free ticket to the party] as the main free event is now full. It’s because of its diversity that the city has managed to attract a burgeoning number of startup entrepreneurs wooed by the ability of the city to attract talent, in part because of the climate and lifestyle. When you can live just about anywhere and create an Internet company, you may as well do it in a fun place to live. It’s a trend we’ve seen even San Francisco succumb to, as startups move back form the rather bland campuses of the Valley to the vibrancy of the SF’s city living. And Europe’s flexible corporate laws now allow startups to be based almost anywhere.

The #TCBarcelona Meetup is now sold out (tickets were free and were widely previewed such as here) and we will be assessing 15 pre-selected startups that submitted] their credentials first in a session involving investors, and finally in an open pitching competition for the finalists. We’ll also have panels discussing how Barcelona can capitalise on its position. If London, Stockholm and Berlin are hot right now, how does Barcelona – which really is “hot” – join the party?

And it’s already got the building blocks. Initiatives like District 22@, the Barcelona Tech Bridges to Silicon Valley networking events, and Barcelona.IO, have been creating a booming networking scene. That’s why we are putting together a TechCrunch Mini Meetup there. Here’s our schedule for the day:

LOCATION:
Barcelona Activa, Carrer Llacuna, 162, Barcelona [Google Map]
Please bring your ticket and photo id. The main event is completely sold out. We’re not able to let anyone in without a valid ticket (which were free).

About 7 or 8 of these 15 pre-selected companies will pitch for a place to pitch in public tomorrow:

bizzonia
Bizzonia
“Bizzonia is a professional discovery tool that tells you in the HERE and NOW what professionals and business opportunities (events, job-offers) you have around you. With only 4 months in existence, it was already named by FORBES as 1 of the free apps that all entrepreneurs should use.”

cognicor
CogniCor
“CogniCor revolutionizes the way large enterprises handle customer complaints by providing automatic and instant resolution using patent pending Artificial Intelligence technology. Our software is a cloud-based resolution as a service that integrates directly with the client’s website. Our clients are large enterprises in service sector industries (telecom, airline, insurance, utilities) with high volume and low value complaints. Enterprises save up to 80% operational cost compared to current methods and reduced customer churn. By providing faster and more accurate resolutions we create a win-win for our clients and end users. Scalable to international markets, we aim to be the global provider for complaint resolution. CogniCor is a Wayra accelorated startup, winning first place in Wayra Barcelona Startup Competition in 2012. We are scheduled to deploy our software with Telefonica, Spain’s largest telecommunication provider, and RACC Insurance this month.”

Dinobe
Dinube
“Dinube is a real-time payment network in the cloud enabling payment from any Internet-connected device. As the first merchant-based payment platform, Dinube solves the problem of high transaction costs and securely processes remote M/E-commerce payments as well as proximity payments at the physical point-of-sale. The Dinube platform has been designed to work on any Internet-connected device and is also ready for NFC (Near-field Communication) Contactless payments via mobile phone. Users of Dinube can easily and safely sync loyalty points, offers, cupones with their purchases. Dinube is the first cloud platform with propietary privacy algorithms that incorporate a customizable privacy control dashboard. Dinube is a Spin-out of the MIT MediaLab and has its head office in Barcelona. The Dinube team is made of MIT Computer Scientists and Sloan MBAs, with deep domain expertise in security, strategy and software development. Our advisory board and shareholders are experts in UX, GUI and have worked at companies like Telefonica R&D, SmartDesign and PayPal. Dinube is currently in advanced discussions with major merchant groups and has an agreement with a leading European payments integrator to prepare rollout.”

feebbo
Feebbo
“What we do is online market research that help companies understand their markets and customers. Also Feebbo is a great tool to get new clients for your business. In less than 15 months we have 50.000 users and more than 1.500 surveys created. Our users earn money thru our VISA card and we have delivered more than 25.000.

Hotelninjas
Hotel Ninjas
“Hotel Ninjas is a cloud-based SaaS platform that helps hotels solve big pains they have with current technology. Our base product consists of a Property Management System (“PMS”), affordable, cloud-based and easy to use. Hotel Ninjas offers a great alternative to the old systems currently in use in many hotels.
Being a platform, we will offer premium modules such as Revenue Management, Channel Management and more. Currently the long tail of hotels have problems working with good technology at a good price.”

mambocar
MamboCar
“MamboCar is a P2P car rental startup, but we’re focused in bringing tourist drivers to the car owners. We are from Spain and we’ve launched with 300 cars from private owners in several cities in Spain, and we are offering them to UK visitors, tourists and travellers. Most P2P car rental companies try to clone the Zipcar model with cars from people, focused in rental by hours to people in the city. We’re different, we want to disrupt the model of Europcar or Budget, with cheaper prices, more flexibility and a different experience, much more personal. We will expand to France and UK soon, with cars in this countries.
We’re the alternative car rental, company for travellers.”

iceburgs
Icebergs
“Icebergs – Smart visual organisation. Research is an action that everyone does on a daily basis: Writing an article, planning your holidays, decorating your apartment or just looking for some inspiration. Tools to save and collect all types of content have been a growing need since users tried to select and curate those parts interesting to them: Images, articles, videos, files, etc. But when you think about it, the real problem comes, not when saving, but when going back to that content. How you use, organize, share and understand that content is what matters. That experience is what makes the real difference. Its time to start to enjoy your research, projects and inspiration like you never did before. Icebergs is Co-Founded by Albert Pereta and Cesar Isern. After working between New York and Barcelona consulting and helping startups we decided it was time to ‘burn the ships down’ and start our own. The first Beta of Icebergs is going to launch on late January with an 8 members team. We have our HQ in Barcelona and London, as well as an advisor in New York and another one in San Francisco.”

KnokMedium
Knok
“Knok is a new generation home swap community. Knok takes a great idea, traveling on home exchange, one step further: a technology platform that suggests your ideal exchange partners based on your profile. Knok combines a very easy-to-use site with a smart search algorithm; reinforces the trust in the community through friends’ and members’ reviews; offers an insurance that covers members homes while swapping up to $200.000; integrates Facebook to discover your social connections; and provides a seamless exchange experience, protecting and verifying the identity of members. Home swap is going to be the third common alternative for travel accommodation, after hotels and rentals. Home swappers save on accommodation (for example, 2.500 € can be saved during a 2-week home exchange vacation in Paris), stay in a real home (a bigger and more comfortable space than a hotel room), and enjoy the local knowledge of their exchange partners. Knok is available in 5 languages and is the fastest growing home swap community in the web, with 14.000 members in 147 countries. ”

Teleport
Teleport
“Teleport is the new way to share content with your friends and your devices. With Teleport you can send and receive files faster and easier than ever. Here are a few of our key features.
– Send files to your friends and your devices.
– No uploading to the cloud, just direct connections.
– Audio and video streaming.
– Choose where you want to download the content.
– Crossplatform (Pc, Mobile, Tablet).
Raul and Joan are the founders of Teleport, two veterans on software development and file streaming ninjas. Teleport is a very young company based in Barcelona looking for the first round investment.”

marfeel
Marfeel
“Marfeel automatically converts any web into the best reading experience for different moments of the day in devices such as the iPad or smartphones. The Marfeel experience encourages a natural, continous and very fluid reading, with no distractions, where content is king. The reader is engaged by discovering interesting content. That makes our metrics soar: 5x avg. reading time, 4x social sharing, 3x revenue increase. All that in no time and no pain. We’ve even prepared a demo for your site: go to “”enjoy.marfeel.com”” from an iPad to check it out. We are a really balanced team of 6 people with experience in Adobe, Microsoft, BBC, Financial Times, etc. We also have the business side covered with a recently joined member who has previously created and successfully exited 2 companies and is also a business angel. We have our product up & running for iPad. We are currently developing versions for other platforms and also acquiring clients. The top spanish economics newspaper is already a client (expansion.com) and we will launch before yearend with around 7 more.”

nutrino
Nutrino
“We have bad habits! We live in an era of abundance, where careless food consumption is the number one cause of many chronic diseases. Nutrino is a food recommendation engine that learns the user’s preferences, and provides a personalized meal plan for optimized wellbeing. While everyone else is focused on tracking, we are focused on recommending, we are not another tracking tool! Nutrino utilizes amounts of personal data from the user’s profile, habits, eating preferences and social environment to create a personalized plan, enabling users to devise their daily diet, lifestyle and enabling to shop its grocery list online. We created the first scalable service that provides real personalization for users seeking nutrition advice and support. Using our patent pending optimization, crowd-sourcing technologies, and intelligent scraping from across the web to get appealing content, we are giving our users the ultimate health experience. Our Business model? We’ll bridge between users, nutrition supplements and online grocery retailers; providing cost effective sponsorship to F&B brands and restaurants; using the data collected for consumer product companies or health insights. Nutrino is a Israeli/Spanish diverse and talented team of 7 full time employees dedicated to this product working from our headquarters in Israel & commercial in Europe. Nutrino is seed funded and we plan to launch our MVP early 2013.”

Worldco
Worldcoo
“Worldcoo it’s a crowdfunding website with a new business model.
Our main differences are:
– We link companies to the projects, so companies get also linked with the crowd.
– We don’t take any amount of the crowd donations. We receive a fee from companies.
– We are globally born, centered only in cooperation.
– We are fully integrated in social media, and due to this we can evaluate the CSR impact of our sponsoring companies using our own metrics.
– We only work with top NGOs. Currently we have agreements with Oxfam and Red Cross.
Now we just launched a beta version, so we are collecting the first data. Also we are in contacts with some companies, and we look forward closing a deal very soon. Worldcoo was founded in August 2012. Now we already raised some seed capital, and we may need a first round by mid 2013. Worldcoo is managed by a team of 3 founders, a student in internship and a wide Advisory Board. Also we are building a team of ambassadors, now in more than 15 countries.”

Smadex
SMADEX
“SMADEX is a Mobile Demand Side Platform. We help advertisers and agencies place Display Ads in smartphones (either Apps or Mobile Webs), with incredible targeting capabilities to deliver the best possible advertising performance and full transparency in the media buying process. We are connected with international mobile ad exchanges, and are able to buy advertising space via Real Time Bidding.
We are experiencing strong sales growth, and are currently serving mobile advertising campaigns with companies like Groupalia, Privalia, H&M, Lancome, Lacoste, etc., in countries like Spain, Italy and Chile.
With our proprietary technology, we are achieving incredible advertising performance results in terms of download and lead generation for our advertisers. We expect to grow internationally both throughout Europe and Latin America during 2013.”

lhings
Lhings
“Lhings is the social network of you Things in the Cloud. Lhings is a cloud platform designed to provide access to your things where ever they are and let you manage, share and interact with them anywhere, when you like. Through Lhings you will not only be able to hear what your things say, but also speak to them and give them orders, so that you can effectively act remotely on the physical world. The data generated by your things and devices could be send to any service of your choice (e.g. Cosm, Twitter, Open Sense, among other) and even remotely reprogram them to send the data to more than one service at the same time or change the way your things behave. Imagine a washing machine where you can add new washing programs best suited for your delicate garments. Imagine you could add new sound effects to your loudspeaker and make it reproduce internet music. Lhings can make these possible.”

AGENDA FOR THE DAY

Time: Doors open for ticket holders at 5:00pm for a 5:30 pm sharp start! (All tickets to this free event have now gone – there are none left)

Session 1: Panel – Barcelona’s Entrepreneurs
We have a number of great people joining us. We are delighted to announce the following two people on the panel:

Mauricio Prieto @mauprieto

Mexican in Barcelona via San Francisco. In Internet ventures since 1995. eDreams cofounder & Odigeo CMO. Angel investor. Open water swimmer. ODIGEO is the largest online travel group in Europe, with HQ in Barcelona.

Albert Armengol @albertarmengol

Internet entrepreneur / Business Angel in many Barcelona companies / Doctoralia cofounder & CEO

Eva Villaro @evavillaro

Co-founder at Tiendeo

Session 2: Panel – Investor panel

Patrick de Zeeuw (@patrickdezeeuw)

Founder of Startupbootcamp

Marcel Rafart

Founder and partner at Nauta Capital

Session 3: Pitch Competition (the best BCN startups will compete)
We will have 7 screened companies pitching for the audience.

7:30 pm Wrap up.

8:30 pm TechCrunch Barcelona Meetup After Party (until late).

We have sold out already for daytime event!! After less than 1 day we have sold out for the TechCrunch Barcelona meetup tickets. If you are a company that wants to pitch, you still have a chance to get in by submitting your company to present at the event. Otherwise, please feel free to get tickets for the after party which are listed below.

AFTER PARTY

It will be at the coolest new bar in Barcelona, Ocaña, in Plaça Reial. We will be providing the first few beers thanks to our sponsors. This is where we will kick off from 8pm, and where the networking will take place. Ticket holders will be able to grab a free beer. Others are welcome to turn up, just won’t get a free beer. DJs wil be kicking off at 10:30pm to fully celebrate the Barcelona Startup scene. All people who have a ticket for the official meetup proceedings will be able to reuse that ticket for the after party. If you have a ticket already from the daytime meetup, you do not need another ticket for the after party.

A huge thanks to these companies for hosting us:

BarcelonaActiva
Barcelona activa logo

GetApp
GetApp logo

CloudWork
CloudWork logo

MyTaxi
myTaxi logo

Moritz
Moritz logo

EasyPromos
easypromos logo

JobFluent.com

Mobile Jazz

Robot Media