Three DEMO 08 companies chosen for Web Mission 2008
Trying to figure out how to attract U.S. customers and venture capital, 20 UK companies, including three recent DEMO 08 alumni, are coming to Silicon Valley April 19 to 25 as Web Mission 2008, an effort sponsored in part by the government-supported UK Trade & Investment Group. Other sponsors are banking giant HSBC, international law firm Heller Ehrman, LLP; and British Telecom.
Chosen from more than 100 applicants are DEMO alumni companies Hubdub Ltd., the Edinburgh based news aggregator/predictive model Web site; Huddle.net of London, an enterprise Web collaboration application; and Silobreaker Ltd. of London, a search and aggregation service for news and current affairs that does a deep dive finds information much like a person would. All three introduced products at DEMO 08 in January.
“We launched Hubdub at DEMO 08 in Palm Springs just six weeks ago, so this really is a golden opportunity for us to return to the States to show what we’ve achieved since the launch, and to pick the brains of some very impressive people," said Nigel Eccles, co-founder of Hubdub.
Others joining Web Mission 2008 are Byteplay, whose dotHomes site is a real estate search engine; Coull, an interactive video platform; edocr, which makes business documents interactive; Exabre, whose Web site The Filter lets users recommend music and download playlists; Groupspaces, which makes Web-based tools for groups; Tioti, a social network about TV; Zogix, an employee services platform; Trampoline Systems, an enterprise software application for harnessing social behavior; WAYN (Where Are You Now), a travel and lifestyle social networking community; TrustedPlaces, a venue recommendation network; Slicethepie, a Web site that enables bands to raise money directly from their fans; Mydeo, an application for storing and sharing video; Skimbit, a research and share-decisions site; Rummble, a mobile social networking and recommendations application; Zebtab, an Internet TV application; Kwiqq, a social Web site builder; and ShortFuze, an online movie-creation tools for social networks. Companies were required to have at least a two-year sales track record to be considered, Barrett said.
"By going as a group we'll have more impact and get more attention. I have a hunch that as individuals, companies wouldn't achieve the same access to Silicon Valley companies," said Oli Barrett, serial entrepreneur and co-founder of Web Mission 2008. Barrett and executives at Polecat, the other co-founder of the mission, are still lining up meetings with venture firms and Internet companies such as Facebook, AOL's Bebo, and YouTube as well as public relations firms and attorneys. The seven-day tour includes attending the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.
Since launching at DEMO 08, Hubdub has garnered a following, with around 50,000 unique visitors to date with some users are spending several hours a day on the site where users speculate about the outcomes of news events and to challenge their friends in fantasy league style competitions. “We’ve been blown away by the response from our members," said Eccles. “We’ve had more visitors than we could have possibly hoped for, and the quality of the debates they’re having is staggering. People are so competitive on the site - I’ve even had some members email me asking me to close their account because it is too addictive.”
Meanwhile, Silobreaker was recently selected to join Microsoft's sought-after Startup Accelerator program, which is made available only to a small number of high potential startups.
"We set out to provide a search service that delivers intuitive search results, so people can spend more time learning from the web and less time searching it" said Silobreaker CEO Kristofer Mansson. "Since our launch at DEMO 08, we have been very pleased by the response, and to get Microsoft's recognition, support and access to their world leading product and market expertise will be invaluable as we continue scaling our business."
And Huddle.net, an online collaboration application with more than 10,000 users, is going after 60 million users of Facebook with its free Facebook virtual team work spaces introduced in January.
