This week, I was honored to be a part of the mentor team at SeedCamp, Europe’s answer to YCombinator on Friday, January 22, 2010.  I mentored with Scott Rafer, former CEO of MyBlogLog, Lookery, and now CEO of Mashery, and Harjeet Taggar, Associate at YCombinator and co-founder of Auctomatic.

We got a chance to look at some really cool companies coming out of the UK, Belgium, Austria, Romania, Croatia, Israel, and others.

I spent most of my advisory time focused on early stage customer development, lean startup practices, and iterative inbound marketing.  But we also covered affiliate deals, partnerships, etc (things I know less about).

It was good to see old friends like Kirill Maharinsky from YouNoodle and Richard Price of Academia.edu.  It was also good to run into Valley Gurus like Dave McClure, Eric Ries, and Brian Singerman.  Hanging however briefly with Saul Klein, founder of SeedCamp, Partner at Index Ventures and former VP of Marketing for Skype, is always humbling.  And, the SeedCamp team is really fun.

I think the most interesting start ups were ERPly, Wondergraphs, and Shout’em.  Honorable mention to Yubitech if they can figure it out.

Wondergraphs “Wondergraph is a social platform for business analysis that saves organizations time and money with easy to use visual data exploration, sharing of graphs and and context aware search.  It is a SaaS product that makes data analysis very easy and elegant.”

ERPly “Traditional ERP systems are expensive due to high upfront capital costs, high ongoing maintenance fees, and high costs to customize and upgrade to new versions.  There is now an alternative: ERP based on Cloud Computing.  ERP in the Cloud provides the convenience of computing capacity on demand over the Internet”

Shout’em “A mixture between Twitter, Foursquare, and Facebook as a roll your own mobile social network, Ning style.  ShoutEm provides a simple tool for any niche community to run their own private, controlled social network through the iPhone, Androaid, BlackBerry and a wide range of low-end cell phones.”

Yubitech “Yubitech’s drag and drop wizard and virtualization technology enables companies to smartly port their applications to any SmartPhone OS at a fraction of the time and cost.”

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