Erply

The winners of the business summer school show that the diversity of startups improved this year – and with it the quality.

This year the business summer school Seedcamp was taken over by the Eastern European startup scene – and when that was announced, everybody applauded. Three out of five winning teams come from Poland, Romania and Estonia. The UK-based winners were Boxed Ice, situated in Bromsgrove, where the founder David Mytton started to work on a server monitoring application named Server Density while studying law at Birmingham University; and Patients Know Best from Cambridge, who work with the NHS to connect patients with doctors in a better way.

Including the additional winner Talasim from Jordan, a comedy community for Arabs online, these winning teams not only receive an investment of €50,000 each but also the opportunity to work from London for the next three months. Here they will receive active support in exchange for a 5 to 10% share of the company. With oportunities like this, Seedcamp showed again that London is the most important hub for startups in Europe.

The businesses were as diverse as the background of the companies. The quality of the new businesses seems to have improved as trends have dropped away. The winning teams impress with precise ideas about the needs they serve. They solve problems. Branient from Bucharest, Romania, is an open source video project that lets publishers put links within videos and helps them make money. Codility is a software and service from Warsaw, Poland, helping customers figure out which developper they need to hire. And Erply, from Estonia, offers business software targeted at smaller businesses for inventory managment, billing and invoices. It is already used by 200 companies and runs break even.

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2009/sep/25/seedcamp-winners-2009