Almost Best Social Innovation – The Europas
July 10, 2009
Yesterday evening the first Techcrunch Award “The Europas” took place. Shortly after 6pm people were standing in line to enter the trendy event location Delfina. Once inside, everybody grabbed a glass of Champagne or a beer and started networking.
The event started at 6.30pm with a short intro by Mister Techcrunch Europe Mike Butcher followed by six short pitches by relatively unknown competing startups. The most impressive pitch was by only 18-year old James from GigLocator.
After the pitch competition there was a panel discussion on “Where is Europe standing and going”. The speakers were Stefan Glänzer (last.fm), Michael Birch (Bebo), Brent Hoberman, Tariq Krim (Netvibes, Jolicloud), Sarah Lacy (Techcrunch).
After a short refreshment and networking break the real highlight of the evening started at 8.30pm: the awards!
The first exciting category was Best Bootstrapped Startup as I was holding thumbs for my friends at Doodle. The awards presenter always mentioned the second place (“highly commended” and of course the winner. Doodle made second place and soup.io won.
The next exciting category was Best Social Innovation because Amazee was a finalist! We didn’t make it to the top, but also made second place right behind Mendeley. Also good ☺
Further (almost) Swiss (almost) winners were Amiando, who made the second place in the category Best Web Application or Service and Poken who won in the category Best Real Life Gadget. Congrats to all!
You can find all the finalists and winners here:
http://uk.techcrunch.com/2009/07/09/the-europas-the-winners-and-finalists/
All in all the evening was perfectly organized, full of great people. Apart from the panel, personalities such as Craig Newmark from Craigslist, Robert Scoble and many more showed up at the Award Ceremony. As you see below I also met a lot of nice girls of other startups!
The evening was great fun, I was able to make interesting new contacts and am quite proud of the second place of Amazee and the good Swiss rankings!
One Response to “Almost Best Social Innovation – The Europas”
Seems to have been a great evening! Congrats on your second place!
Arnaud