Mentoring Seedcamp
I love giving back to the entrepreneurial community. I even volunteer on LinkedIn to help advise companies in the education space.
One of my favorite activities every year is mentoring at Seedcamp, an international start-up incubator based out of London with strong companies coming from Europe. Silicon Valley and the SF Bay Area is blessed with all the knowledge of how to build a successful company well distributed across so many people that you can’t help but absorb some good info. These folks come from around the world to get in front of investors and hopefully get some good advice on building their company.
SeedCamp Highlights for Education:
Sparkeo is a video service that has some capabilities that make the video more user friendly in education, including interacting with the video, asking questions and making comments into specific moments in the video. This can be used by instructors.
Publisha is a digital content publisher that puts content online and on mobile devices, including iPads, and helps with distribution, subscriptions, and monetization. This can be used by university publications, especially alumni magazines.
My Favorite Companies from SeedCamp 2011:
Vox.io is making an incredibly usable Skype competitor that works completely in the browser. They’re from Ljubljana, Slovenia my favorite city in the world. So that makes them super cool.
GrabCAD is a (physical) product design and engineering marketplace (like an ODesk for product design and engineering) where you can take an idea, get it modeled, engineered, and produced. All you need is an idea and the confidence you can sell the product. The founder is from Estonia, which I hear is a great place to visit. The nightlife is supposed to be cool, and the vodka plentiful.
Garmz allows indie fashion designers to create their own lines. Unlike ModCloth, which focused on creating an online store for fashion designers, Garmz allows the designers to get their portfolio online, build a following, get discovered and produce their fashion lines easily. My Design School peeps will love this.
GIS Cloud is an ESRI competitor totally based in the cloud. About time ESRI had a real competitor. IDRISI wasn’t keeping up.
Anyway, I had a good time, and all the companies were fantastic. Feel free to give me a shout if you want to sync up and talk start up.
Namaste.
