IDCEE 2012 - Day One

On October 18, the international conference IDCEE started in Kiev. This year, more than 2,000 participants arrived at the Investor Days in Central and Eastern Europe, including 150 startups, 300 investors with sacks of money worth $ 30 billion. It turned out such a TechCrunch, almost with home delivery, that is, to Ukraine. The event turned out to be quite pathos, very noisy, but interesting. Its main goal, of course, is to establish contacts between startups and investors, or, as they say in common people, “networking”.

What happened interesting read under the cut.



In fact, IDCEE had three zones: a relaxation zone with lulling speakers and color music, an open space for negotiations, where startup stands were located, and a business hangout in the buffet.

The main stage of the conference was that relaxation zone. It was dark in the hall, beautiful gears circled on the walls, various reports and panels were alternately held with the participation of investors, businessmen and startups. The conference was opened by Vice Prime Minister of Ukraine Sergey Tigipko, part-time husband of the organizer of the conference Victoria Tigipko. Out of habit, he told the audience how good it would be when the tax system would be improved in the country, and then went to the people, where he immediately talked to the startup Jelastic .



About Jelastic wrote a lot on Habré,and the company does not need additional introduction. I don’t know what the Deputy Prime Minister told them about the new taxes, but the guys already have offices in Moscow and San Francisco, so the question of taxes is not so important for them. Following Tigipko I went up to the stand to learn more about the company and its plans. First of all, I was interested in PHP recently announced for cloud. As I was informed, in a month beta testing will be open, for this period the use of cloud will be completely free. And this period will be quite long, maybe even a year. I’ll tell you how the service will be useful. Using it, you can use the web interface (or svn / git) to instantly deploy to multiple machines at once. It will be easy to deploy the project, while developers will be provided with standard storage options: MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, MongoDB, Memcached. But I did not understand about storage scaling, most likely, with replication of the same MySQL, the system will not help us (I hope for a refutation). What else interested me was whether some lightweight console utility would be made to perform the deployment from the local machine (like capistrano, or webbynode). It turns out that such a system already works for projects on the Play Framework, but is not planned for PHP.

Then I got lost in startup stands. I will list those with whom I managed to talk:

TicketForEvent - a system for selling electronic tickets. You can pay for tickets in any available form, receive a ticket with a QR, or bar code. And most importantly, you need to pay for such a service only 7% of each ticket, without a monthly fee or connection fee. The company has offices in London, Russia, Ukraine, in a month an office will be opened in Turkey.

Two startups were focused on the cinema industry. The first is Kinolife , a social network in the likeness of linkedIn, but exclusively for film lovers and professionals. What is useful for this service is the ability to find a team through it, the necessary equipment, and find locations. The second movie startup, it's TheTakes- project management system for film production. Script, production, joking list, all included. To the question of how their service for $ 30 per month differs from the free Celtx, one of the founders showed me many useful features that were simply absent in Celtx, but were absolutely necessary. In addition to the web application, there will be an application on the iPad, which will replace the famous clapper board for takes, and will also work as a prompter. The project will be launched in the US market for two years in the near future.



Amazed by the appetites of the Noosphere project, offering a platform and service for branding and promoting TV channels on mobile platforms. Now they have six customers in Ukraine, among them one national television channel. The project is only 7 months old, and investments in the amount of 500 thousand dollars have already been received, the next round is expected. They plan to develop into European markets. The guys have extensive experience in the media segment and I hope they succeed.

There were projects at earlier stages, which I will mention in passing. Skwibl- Positioning itself as Basecamp for web and video designers. There are three designers in the team, they say what is needed, and the team realizes their wishes. At the startup’s presentation, Sergey Belousov from Runa Capital (who played the role in the judicial chair, which at one time belonged to Julia Guzman in KVN), praised the project as an incomprehensible wunderwafle (my short translation). To the credit of the project, I can say that in this way he evaluated most of the projects, looked gloomily at the speakers, worked with a smartphone and periodically shook his head, as if telling everyone what I am doing here.



Only one startup from Poland could get him out of melancholy - Sotrender. It was truly the best presentation of the first day of IDCEE. The speaker even jumped onto the table in front of the judges to show the growth of his project. The idea came to him 3 hours before the performance and he decided for a long time, but it turned out spectacularly, and probably effectively. But this did not convince Julius Gusman Sergey Belousov. He asked how this startup in the field of social marketing differs from its competitors, having heard "as a whole we and they have similar features," Sergey made a conclusion: "well, it means nothing." To which the Pole recalled that on the differences he had built the whole presentation, and briefly repeated all its theses, almost yelling at the judge. After that, Sergey Belousov’s face got fit, and a smile suddenly appeared on his face. Probably, this was exactly what he lacked for the whole day. To a standing ovation, the Pole left the stage.

Of the early stage projects, there were also MyTeamVoice - an analogue of TeamSpeak with an unobvious competitive advantage, Best.ua - a catalog and rating of the workshop of the best institutions of Ukraine, Casual.io - project management with a mind map, where tasks can be combined into trees and even graphs. An interesting open-source store is Taberna , where the authors do not want to take money for the platform and for the support (in principle).



I also talked to investors. In general, they positively evaluated the projects, some are ready to invest in them (and I have described far from everything), but they still look at some with skepticism. Many are interested in real indicators, but not the fact that “we launched yesterday”. There were many angels, there were many venture capital funds, so startups were not deprived of attention.

The event was closed by singer Jamala with her jazz band. For those tired of long networking, ice cream, cognac and wine were offered.