Hot on the heals of the top 20 entrepreneurs to watch, here are my top 20 UK Startups to watch in 2012. Their really are some great companies coming out of the UK right now and these 20 are no different.

Pay As U Gym

Founders: Jamie Ward, Mike Blake, Neil Harmsworth

Gym memberships can be expensive especially if you have to sign up to an annual contract. Well no more is this a problem, Pay As U Gym does ‘exactly as it says on the tin.’

The website allows you to purchase discounted pay as you go gym passes. Although launched only in London at the start of 2011, Pay As U Gym now has over 250 gyms across the UK with no membership, no fees and no inductions.

2012 could be a big year for Pay As U Gym.

Tribesports

Founders: Jenna Anians, David Hickson, Steve Reid, Andrew McDonough

Tribesports is a social network aimed at helping to motivate people to do more in their sports. Setting and sharing goals and having a peer network helps users keep improving on their sporting achievements.

Users in the community can set challenges and users join tribes dedicated around a chosen sport.

Created for sports enthusiasts and powered by sports enthusiasts, Tribesports delivers a social platform supported by a refreshing mix of affiliate marketing and social integration to the under-serviced active sports market.

Picklive

Founder: Tim Morgan

Picklive is a live Fantasy Football game where users make bets in real time. Users can play for free or for cash and basically choose a team and can see live stats for players as they pick up points. The game is split into 5 minute sections and so you can win multiple sections to win overall.

In what is an entertaining and addictive game it can certainly become a big hit as the quickness of the game and continuous live scoring and sections means that users are engaged throughout the game whilst not distracting from the game.

Starting of in football Picklive hope to expand into other countries and sports as they grow. As word spreads I can see Picklive picking up many sports fans over the coming year and expanding into other sports.

Housebites

Founder: Simon Prockter

Housebites allows you to order gourmet takeaway from great chefs in your local area. Any chef can start selling their home cooked meals (after being vetted) on Housebites and even make a living out of it. And all of this can be delivered to your door for the price of a pizza delivery.

The ease of the takeaway, but with the quality of a restaurant meal, delivered to your door, not bad. It also allows you to rate chefs and it’s delivered to your front door via a Housebites courier.

It’s a very cool idea and is backed by Paul & Michael Birch, who sold Bebo for $890m, the startup could take off massively this year.

Adzuna

Founder: Andrew Hunter, Doug Monro

Adzuna is a job search engine. It aggregates jobs from across multiple networks so you can search and apply for jobs from one site. But Adzuna is more than a massive jobsite, it integrates your social connections so that you can leverage your connections to give you an advantage when looking for a job.

Adzuna raised $300,00 from Passion Capital last summer to ramp up and start them on the way to becoming the biggest and best classifieds search engine globally.

Duedil

Founder: Damian Kimmelman

Duedil is a free database of information on companies in the UK.

Drawing on data from Companies House, Intellectual Property Office, Google, Social Networks, basically scraping the internet to pull in multiple data sources to build a company profile with financial records, litigations, director profiles, company credit check, stock information & more.

The fact that it is free and so simple to find so much aggregated data for companies it makes it informative & addictive for those looking for company information. It also has a ton of features and can already claim to be the largest database of free company financials in the world!

Blippar

Founders: Ambarish Mitra, Steve Spencer, Omar Tayeb

Blippar was launched in the summer of 2011 and already it has seen it’s augmented reality app put into the spotlight as they have teamed up some big brands for some cool interactive campaigns. Blippar allows brands to create interactive ads to engage audiences in a way which is more fun than the usual billboard or poster.

Augmented reality regularly comes up as one of the future next tech trends and Blippar is getting on the potential augmented reality advertising bandwagon early.  As it’s popularity increases and more brands take up the idea Blippar is in a good position to grow rapidly as well.

Hailo

Founders: Jay Bregman, Russell Hall, Caspar Woolley, Gary Jackson, Ron Zeghibe, Terry Runham

Hailo was founded in 2010. It’s a network that matches passengers and licensed taxi drivers. I have the app myself and it has been brilliant.

It uses your GPS to find where you are and locate the nearest taxi to you. From there you can hail the  taxi at the touch of a button and choose how you want to pay. The taxi will then get your, umm ‘order’? and come pick you up. When I used it, the taxi driver called me straight away to confirm where I was and that he was on the way.

Jay Bregman partnered with 3 taxi drivers as co founders, as well as two other internet entrepreneurs, and looks to change the way we hail taxis in London, and eventually other cities as the company grows.

Jay has already created a great business in eCourier which will be valuable in making Hailo a similar success.

MarketInvoice Limited

Founders: Anil Stocker & Charles Delingpole

These two university friends escaped the city in 2010 to startup their own company. Anil & Charles launched Marketinvoice, an innovative new cloud-based working capital platform, which enables small businesses to flexibly raise cash from a network of global investors.

They look set to disrupt an industry which has generally been lagging behind when it has come to innovation and have made some great strides in 2011 and the two young, smart entrepreneurs hope to take it to the next level in 2012.

We interviewed the guys back in June, you can take a look here.

UberLife

Founder: Sanchita Saha

With people socialising more and more online Sanchita founded UberLife to help people meet online in order to enable real world community and connections, in what she has coined an ‘Online2Offline’ service.

UberLife allows you to arrange a hangout when you’re doing or want to do something & see who’s free to come join you or you can simply join a hangout.

As we go more and more social online I think this will translate into more offline meetings and Sanchita’s creation, UberLife could go big in 2012 making this happen. It is already getting a large number of the tech startup scene using it, who tend to be the influencers of these kind of apps.

Find out a little more abut Sanchita here.

Crowdcube

Founders: Darren Westlake, Luke Lang

Crowdcube is the brainchild of Darren Westlake & Luke Lang and launched in February 2011 to much fanfare. The idea is that entrepreneurs invest in business ideas in an effort to crowdsource funding. It’s crowdfunding.

The benefit of the model is that those who pitch their ideas and businesses on Crowdcube then promote and share it across their networks and look to help get as many people to share it as possible which in turn brings traffic to the site and helps minimize the amount that the guys need to spend on marketing at this early stage.

With Dragon’s Den bringing the concept of angel investing to the masses, Darren & Luke realised that many people will have watched many ideas come out of the Den without any funding and thought to themselves that they would have put in a bit of money into that.

Now they can, with the ability to invest as little as £10 anyone can now invest in a business idea and see it come to life!

Bantr

Founder: Peter McCormack

Bantr is a social network for football fans. Fans can use Bantr to check-in to games, vote on the action, view live stats and as their name suggests, banter with other fans.

With social networks becoming more and more common in our daily lives, niche sites which cover a topic, especially one as popular and team based such as football will continue to grow as users can share and interact with others with the same common interest rather than the general nature of broader social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

That is why I see Bantr doing well this year, especially fans from older sports forums, from the likes of the BBC, are closing down due to streamlining of their services. They have already now expanded into covering Spanish and Italian leagues and I’m sure many more will follow in the near future.

Check out our interview with Peter here.

Editd

Founders: Geoff Watts and Julia Fowler

What happens when you get a fashion designer and an expert at analysing big data? You get Editd, a fashion intelligence startup. The company based in London is able to offer market intelligence and spot trends using huge amounts of data crawled from multiple sources.

Editd offers customised industry trend data to clients which include retailers, merchandisers, designers and buyers.

They already have 10 high street retailers as customers & having raised their first bit of funding, $1.6million of seed funding they will hope to use that to grow further this year.

CloudBees 

Founder: Sacha Labourey

CloudBees allows you to build, run and manage java applications in the cloud letting companies build and test different user interfaces without having to worry about servers.

With more and more companies moving various IT services over to the cloud, the startup founded in 2010 could be in a good position to make the most of the interest as companies look to become more efficient and save costs.

2012 could be a good year for this cloud company.

Made.com

Founders: Ning Li, Julien Callede

Made.com are a online made to order furniture store. Made allows you to order furniture straight from some of the best furniture makers in the world. What’s best is this cuts out the plethora of middlemen that normal take a cut along the way and put prices up.

By cutting out the middleman made.com can offer very competitive pricing for furniture and with original designs, and the chance for users to vote on new designs to see them commissioned, I think once more people find out about made.com they will just have to worry about scaling the business quick enough.

 Pusher

Founders: Damien Tanner, Max Williams

Another cloud based service, Pusher allows developers to quickly and easily add realtime functionality to webapps. This means that people can create collaborative tools, multiplayer games, chat, realtime dashboards and more.

They raised $1million in seed funding in the last quarter of 2011 and can be confident of further funding at some point as they look to help developers make awesome stuff.

Lanyrd

Founders: Natalie Downe, Simon Willison

Social is everywhere right now, even at this conference directory startup Lanyrd. The directory of conferences, events and speakers allows users to sign in with Twitter to see what events their friends are attending and add their own events or even build a personal speaking profile.

It’s an interesting idea which has lots of potential to grow it’s offering in an attempt to make conferences even more social.

Buffer

Founder: Joel Gascoigne

Buffer is a social media app that allows you to store content in Buffer and schedule it to be posted on your social networks through the day. Just add content that you find, as you find it and add it to Buffer, it will then automatically be shared by Buffer and you can see all the analytics from your tweets inside the app.

Lookk

Founder: Gilbert Wedam, Tamas Locher, Andreas Klinger

Lookk connects designers with consumers. Designers can showcase their fashions building their brand and selling their fashions to an engaged audience.

You can support your a favourite designers and help influence what is in the Lookk store. Is this the future of fashion shopping?

The company raised funding last August led by some great investors in Eden Ventures, Dave McClure and Sherry Coutu.

Righster

Founder: Charlie Muirhead

Rightster is a technology and services company which makes distributing, marketing and monetising digital video content simple.

Digital media strategies are becoming ever more important for companies, including ITN, the British news producer, who are using Rightster to manage its online ad sales platform so that it is unified and Rightster will also syndicate all of ITN’s content online.

This is a big step forward for the startup and they will hope to get bigger deals like this over the course of the next year.

———

Who have I missed? Who do you think are the startups to watch in 2012?

Let us know in the comments we would love to hear from you!

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Can you give us some background information about yourself

My background is in marketing. After studying marketing at university in the UK & US I decided to go and work for an agency. Joining a big corporate just wasn’t that appealing and it has been that way ever since. Prior to starting up Concept Cupboard I was working for an awesome advertising agency called archibald ingall stretton, just off Oxford Street. It was a brilliant place to work, with lots of fun talented people.

The last 12 months have been incredible and it’s been a massive learning curve. I’m now Managing Director of Concept Cupboard, one of 30 Marketing Academy scholars in the UK & I also managed to make it into the final 8 of the Shell LiveWire’s Young Entrepreneur of the Year award. I’ve even been to 10 Downing Street. All of which has been made possible by setting up Concept Cupboard.

How did the idea for Concept Cupboard come about

I had the idea for Concept Cupboard while on a train from London to Nottingham en route to a stag do. I had two hours where I switched off my phone and just scribbled down some business ideas and after the weekend was over I asked one of my client’s at O2 what he thought (luckily I didn’t lose my notes). It transpired that he loved the idea and wanted me to meet some of his friends to discuss it in more detail. During dinner we decided to join forces and go into business together. I left my job about 6 weeks later and started working on Concept Cupboard full-time.

Some of the key things you’ve learnt along the way

I’m learning all of the time. There is no guide for running a business and so you make it all up as you go along. Getting advice from other business owners is a massive help, and you often find people are experiencing similar difficulties. But every business is different and the way you approach problems will never be the same so ultimately it is your call. It’s quite scary but also extremely liberating.

The biggest lesson I’ve learnt so far is to focus. I am very clear on the things that will drive the business forward and I ensure that they are prioritised above everything else. AS you can imagine it also helps the team know what they need to do.

A difficult period starting the business and how you overcame it.

We haven’t had any real difficulties to date (touch wood). I think they become more common as you grow and stop being a startup, e.g. when you have 30+ staff. We aren’t quite there yet, but hopefully soon.

The business now: your plans for the future?

We’ve had a good first year winning a number of business awards, including being named as one of the 20 best UK startups of 2011. That’s given us a nice confidence boost and helped shape our plans of where we can go with Concept Cupboard. We are coming up to our first year anniversary so that is a great milestone in itself. It is crazy to think that about 12 months ago Concept Cupboard didn’t exist in the public domain.

Later this year we’ll be launching Concept Cupboard globally as well as adding new services & features to the UK site. Watch this space.

Advice to young entrepreneurs starting out.

There isn’t a better time to start your own business, especially if you are leaving school or university. Startups are in vogue in the UK at the moment, and investors & the media are looking out for the next big thing. It’s a perfect environment for young new companies to thrive in.

My advice to anyone starting out would be to as follows:

- Have a clear idea of what the business is and how you will generate revenue. I personally don’t think you need a 20-page business plan but you do need a document that sets out your vision. If you can do that in a few pages then great, but put energy and effort into making it as good as it can be. You can always update it as you go.

- Develop a thick skin quickly. People will say no. Some might even say that your business won’t succeed. By all means listen to constructive criticism and don’t ignore feedback because that can be dangerous. They might have some good points, but you’ll meet people who don’t have the vision you do. Don’t let it get you down.

- Pick up the phone & get out a meet people. It is really easy to just sit behind your computer and get a business started, but to create partnerships and generate word of mouth recommendations you need to get out and meet people. Go to relevant events, call up potential partners/customers, set up meetings etc.

- Enter business awards. There are so many business awards programmes out there so even if you have just started you can find competitions to enter. They are so good for PR and raising your awareness, especially if you enter competitions specifically for young people. Competitions like Shell LiveWire not only offer cash prizes, but really do give you some credibility.

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It was back in the Summer of 2010 when I had just finished the first year of my BA Hons degree in Media and Communications at Birmingham City University, that I had the idea for my business. As a vegetarian I and had become increasingly concerned by some of the ingredients in many well know High Street beauty products and cosmetics. Animal fats, crushed beetles and pig placenta are common ingredients as well as harsh alcohols. These ingredients are used predominantly because they’re cheap and they’re used as fillers but are clearly not ethical or good for the skin.

Over the summer I started to research halal products as I found their stringent criteria matched my own beliefs. I then found that actually there was a demand for these products not only from the Muslim community but also from vegetarians and vegans. In Islam, ‘halal’ means permissible or what is allowed in the Muslim faith. Where beauty products are concerned animal ingredients, animal testing and haram alcohol is forbidden. Halal certification is a strict process whereby the products are tested and certified halal meaning they comply with Islamic law. I was convinced that there would be a demand for these type of products.

Initially I was going to run the business online and thought that maybe I would be able to combine business and studies. One day whilst shopping, I came across a very small but perfectly usable unit in The Pavilions Shopping Centre in Birmingham. The unit had been empty for many years basically because it was too small for most businesses. I managed to get the unit at a very good price and with the help of friends and family painted it and did it up myself to keep costs as low. I soon realised that I had created something very special and was determined to dedicate all my time and energy into the business in order to give it a chance to grow.

There’s no way I could have combined both the business and studies so I made a choice and put my degree on hold. I believe I made the right decision and I found that I had learnt many useful things on my degree course that were very much transferable to the world of business, so my studies were certainly not a waste of time. At first there were so many new things that I had to get to grips with. Everything seemed so confusing; corporate tax, vat, rent and business rates, importation duties, my head used to spin with it all. As time went on though, I did plenty of research and sought advice from people like business link and my local chamber of commerce and things became a lot clearer. Everything in business is a learning curve and every day presents new challenges and obstacles to overcome. Pure Halal Beauty is a unique concept and the first store of its kind that sells solely halal certified beauty products.

When our store first opened in December 2010, we received a lot press features and articles from around the world from national press, international press, local press, bloggers and we were even on television.

As the months went by I realised that some products although they are halal are not particularly natural with regards to their ingredients. I knew we could improve on the products that were available which is when I decided I wanted to create my own natural, halal collection that was completely ethical and eco-friendly.

In the Autumn of 2011, just before we reached our 1st birthday, we launched The PHB Collection- the worlds’ largest range of natural, halal and vegan beauty products. The collection includes, skincare, body care, hair care, cosmetics and men’s and baby products also. Most of the collection is made by hand in the UK, and our packaging is 100% recyclable.

I am incredibly proud of the PHB collection and we have had some amazing reviews and feedback about the quality and efficacy of the products. We did a lot of research before finding a manufacturer that we were happy with and who could offer us what we needed with regards to the ingredients and ethical stance of the products. I didn’t want to use any chemicals, parabens or petro chemicals which are common ingredients in many beauty products, mainly because they’re cheap. We researched and selected ingredients that are gentle, natural and effective. For example rosewood, gardenia and rosehip have some fabulous anti-aging properties, so we use these in our Elixir of Youth range. Whilst ingredients like grape-seed, rose and aloe-vera are used in our Pure & Natural range for Very Sensitive skin because they’re incredibly kind to skin. Also it is important to me that none of our products or ingredients are ever tested on animals or contain any animal ingredients. The halal certification and vegan society registration serve to add extra assurances to my customers.

Since the release of the PHB collection we’ve been inundated with interest from around the world and had a number of exciting opportunities. We’ve had a lot of enquiries about potential distribution and franchise opportunities in the UK and Internationally – so this is something exciting that we are exploring. We hope to expand our number of store in the future also, as we are constantly getting calls from customers who can’t wait for us to open up shops in London, Manchester, Leeds, Bradford etc. So overall 2012 looks like being a very busy and exciting year for Pure Halal Beauty!

For more information visit: http://www.purehalalbeautyproducts.co.uk/
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This is what we talked about.

Hi Churchill, great to have you on YHP, how are you doing today?

I am doing fine though a little sleepy didn’t have enough sleep last night.

Can you give us some background information about yourself?

I am Churchill Nanje a Cameroonian software developer turned entrepreneur based in Buea, Cameroon. I have been doing software and web related business for the past 8yrs.

So Churchill, tell me about yourself growing up? What was your ambition? Were the entrepreneurial – making a quick buck type?

Growing up I have always been the inquisitive type and I always wanted to know how everything works. My dad was a scientist (Civil Engineer) and my mom is a midwife which means I have always been surrounded by sciences and science inclined conversations. My ambitions have always been to do great things in my community and set examples for others. So my drive is mostly doing amazing things that will push the people around me to wonder and also try to do similar.

Let’s talk about your latest startup, Njorku, how did the idea come about?

Njorku was born out of frustration. I have been trying to employ and keep great talents in my ventures but the solutions available for me to do this easier and faster where nonexistent so I decided to fill the void and develop tools that will help job seekers and employers find just the best match including me.

That was not the only reason as the high rates of unemployment in Africa has been a great catalyst in the Njorku journey.

What is Njorku?

Njorku means elephant in my native language (Dikome Balue, Cameroon) but Njorku.com is a job search and career platform for Africans world wide. Its a platform that will host a series of technologies (web, mobile and enterprise) to help the job seekers and employers relating to Africa.

How have you been able to finance the business so far?

Njorku was initially self funded then I brought in a co-founder Betrand Kima based in Baltimore,MD. Who has been financing alongside me till we have successfully raised seed funding from Tchepannou Inc in Canada. So right now we got seed funding covering the servers, marketing and technology.

What’s your business model?

Our business model is a mixture of alot of things and there is no clear cut model right now we will try a couple of things which we are doing right now and by 2013 we sure will be making some profit. For now I can say our model is based in HR solutions, Hr services, subscriptions and advertising.

Is the business profitable?

Njorku is 9 months old and its not yet profitable but it shows alot of potentials

What has been some of the most crucial things you have done to grow your business?

I have spent sleepless nights brainstorming on options
I have written codes for long hours (16hrs) nonstop without a break or food (sort of fasting )
I spend a minimum of 2hrs every morning pondering about Njorku and every step that has to be taken and analysing steps and errors.

What three pieces of advice would you offer entrepreneurs starting out today?

Research is very important
Devotion, persistence and strong belief in yourself and your ideas
Marketing is as important as programming and even more important when starting up but less when growing.

What plans do you have now to expand your business further?

We plan to take the business into every African country and serve millions of job seekers and thousands of employers within the next couple of years

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The UK entrepreneurial scene is certainly coming together, with all its inadequacies – Investment, Billion dollar exits etc. It is certainly coming together.

In a year where other businesses have been forced to close down, others have being unable to keep up with competitors. It’s always good to take some time to reflect, praise and encourage those startups that have done a great job in remaining resillient, competitive and profitable.

2012 is already gearing up to be an even more successful and exciting year in the UK startup scene, we are already seeing a lot of exciting companies starting up.

As the year gently comes to an end, I decided to put together a list of companies who I thought came out on top this year.

This is in no particular order.

OneFineStay

Imagine being able to rent some of central london’s elite houses (which cost up to £1 million) for the price of staying in an luxurious hotel. If you’re someone that prefers that homey feeling whilst travelling then this will certainly appeal to you. Onefinestay allows you to stay in a beautiful home while the owner is out of town, while enjoying all the convenience and comfort of a hotel.

Earlier this month, the company added seven new Central London homes to their growing list of properties.

Onefinestay was founded by Greg Marsh, Demetrios Zoppos and Tim Davey in 2009.

Mixcloud

Themed after their launch as the “YouTube of radio” – Mixcloud allows its users to connect to great radio content and helps content creators promote their radio shows and podcasts.

If you are a DJ, broadcaster or run a podcast show, Mixcloud gives you the platform to reach hungry music and audio content consumers.

The startup was founded by Nikhil Shah and Nico Perez in september 2008.

Shutl

Why would you ever wait around for a courier if you could get your shopping delivered to you in a matter of minutes… or at a time chosen by you? Seriously, why would you?

This London-based internet start-up aggregates a platform of thousands of small courier companies to collect online orders directly from high street stores, instead of a distribution hub, allowing it to deliver quickly to customers’ homes or workplaces.

In August, Shutl expanded to Glasgow, Edinburgh, Leeds and Manchester

The company was founded by Tom Allason the founder & former CEO of eCourier.co.uk in 2008.

Struq

Struq is the leading specialist in Personalized Retargeting; a powerful new alternative to standard/static display advertising. Their technology A.R.T. technology (Advanced Retargeting Technology) enables brands to identify and retarget only the most profitable in-market users with completely personalized ads optimized in real-time using scientific principles.

On average, for every £1 a retailer spends, they get £19 in revenues in post-click sales.

Struq was founded in 2008 by Sam Barnett

Songkick

If you’re a music fanatic, especially when it comes to watching your favourite artists perform live then you will understand why over 1 million people are addicted to using Songkick.

Songkick offers music enthusiasts a place where they track their favorite bands and receive email alerts when a tracked band plays a gig nearby and also providing personalized news about live music events.

Singkick was co-founded by Ian Hogarth, Michelle You and Pete Smith in October 2007.

BraveNewTalent

BraveNewTalent are a social recruiting platform where employers can form and manage an engaging relationship with candidates in advance of the job application. We build targeted talent communities based on the employers needs. Users are given a simple management tool to see and engage with people within their community. Candidates get a way to keep up to date, educate themselves and be better matched to companies and roles.

BraveNewTalent was founded by Lucian Tarnowsk in 2008

GroupSpaces

Thinking about starting up a society or currently looking for ways to manage your existing one online with tools to maintain your mailing list, update members, and receive payments – Group spaces makes administration of groups more effective.

GroupSpaces is an online platform that provides technology to help real-world clubs, societies, associations and other groups manage their membership and activities, and promote themselves online which help improve members communications and saves organizers time.

GroupSpaces recently hit two million memberships on the website. GroupSpaces was co-founded by David Langer and Andy Young in October 2007.

Huddle

Huddle being in the list has nothing to do with the fact that Rishi works there, but everything to do with the fact that they kicked serious ass this year, you will need to have serious balls to be going head-to-head with microsoft (sharepoint). Lets not forget the controversy surrounding them telling Google to remove Google+ feature called Huddle from their platform.

Huddle is a cloud collaboration and content management platform for enterprise, it allows companies to share files, organize meetings, and collaborate even when they are not operating within the same firewall.

The company was founded by Alastair Mitchell and Andy McLoughlin in 2006.

ParkatmyHouse

Getting a parking space can sometimes be such a headache, especially when you’re looking for a parking space in London during peak times or sometimes you find out that the parking prices are just too expensive. And then on the other hand, you have property owners that have free parking spaces either because they have no cars or use their cars during the day for work etc.

ParkatmyHouse allows property owners to rent out their parking space either long term or just for a few hours. For those people who are looking for a parking space all you do is enter the postcode or address in the search engine and the website will give you a list of potential parking spaces which you can use in negotiating with the owner.

The company has 125,000 drivers registered with its service. The site has helped property owners make more than £1m from renting out their driveways, spare land and parking spaces.

The company was founded by Anthony Eskinazi in September 2006.

Skimlinks

If you run a blog, forum and any other sites that deal with content distribution and you are looking to make some revenue through it – this is where Skimlinks comes in handy.

Skimlinks turns links on content sites into their affiliate marketing link equivalents on-the-fly, so publishers can focus on creating quality content rather than creating and maintaining affiliate links with no technical or admin effort.

The website was co-founded by Joe Stepniewski and Alicia Navarro in 2006.

Moonfruit

I can still remember the first time I used moonfruit, one of my friends in school had just started his music career and was really excited to share his new music with all of his friends on msn, me included, this was way before myspace and other music sharing platforms started to spring up. I ended up creating a page using a tool called SiteMaker for the sake of it under 20 mins.

I am pretty sure almost everyone had a go making their mini-websies on moonfruit when it first launched. A lot has happened since then, the dotcom bubble etc.

The company is still growing and for those newbies still wondering what moonfruit does, it allows less tech savy individuals to create website with ease using their website construction tool called SiteMaker.

The website was founded by Wendy Tan White in 1999

Bookingbug

If your business is offering a service and looking for a system where you can manage all your booking, enquiries and reservations – Say hello to BookingBug.

BookingBug enables businesses to share their availability – by hour, day, week or as classes, courses or events – and take bookings and enquiries online. The system is both realtime and distributed in that it’s booking and enquiry widgets can be embedded onto other sites, or affiliate partners and through social media.

The site was co-founded by Greg Bock and Glenn Shoosmith in November 2009

Brightpearl

Brightpearl is an integrated end-to-end web based solution that helps companies streamline the management of core business processes: accounting, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), stock control and order management, customer support and e-commerce.

Brightpearl offers its customers exceptional functionality around ERP for SMEs, particularly for businesses who are e-tailers/retailers, distributors, wholesalers, as well as businesses who are billing time.

Customers are able to pick and choose any of the available modules to address individual business needs and challenges.

Bristol-based Brightpearl was founded by Chris Tanner and Andrew Mulvenna in 2007

Basekit

Especially with the demand of website services, it is unimaginable that any business does not have a website nowadays, It’s very much like your company identity. Not every business owner out there know how to build a website, most of them more concerned about the business side of things than the technicality of getting a website up and running, certainly dont know how to get their hand dirty with some html and css.

Basekit allow people with little or no web expertise to build their own website, without the need to hire expensive developers. A business which would generate attractive, captivating websites using templates and drag-and-drop.

BaseKit is based on a flexible layout structure and allows users to create a site directly from a Photoshop design, or customise a pre-made site themes to get online faster.

The company was co-founded in 2008 by Simon Best, Richard Best and Richard Healy

Smarkets

Smarkets is changing the traditional way of betting, so instead of betting against a bookie, you are now able to bet against other members with smarkets. Smarkets allows traders to agree odds amongst themselves. Smarkets also offers betting on sports, current affairs and popular culture.

Smarkets is a web-based, person-to-person betting exchange platform built on the fusion of social networking and trading technology. Unlike traditional methods of betting, online betting exchanges remove the bookmaker by allowing users to bet directly with other users.

Smarkets was founded in 2008 by Jason Trost and Hunter Morris.

Peerindex

Imagine every decision, interaction that you make online being tracked? PeerIndex measures your online influence by gathering data on your activity, audience and authority to either maximise your online relevance and insight or just tell you how bad you’re doing. Authority measures how relevant your activity is to the community. The Authority measure is boosted whenever others like, comment and/or engage with your activity.

The london based company provide these analytics based on users activities on social media services such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Quora.

PeerIndex was founded in 2009 by Azeem Azhar, Bill Emmott and Ditlev Schwanenflugel.

Mendeley

I’m unsure if the discovery of mendeley would have done my researching and courseworks any favours during my time at university, maybe it might have helped, who knows? I guess if you’re doing any academic research and finding it hard of where to get quality research done with the ability to network with academics, then i guess mendeley wouldnt be a bad place to start.

The website allows users to manage and research papers – discovering data and collaborating online.

The website was co-founded by Paul Foeckler and Victor Henning.

People per hour

With the high increase in unemployment constantly rising in the UK, no wonder job seekers are switching attention to online job listing sites for a way out and thats what exactly People per hour offers: The websites connects people looking for work with jobs, that simple.

In more details, Clients are able to post ads on the website looking for part-time, a bit like what gumtree does, but i guess in a more professional and structure online environment, I guess they are currently doing what you would have expected gumtree to do, most clients post jobs for freelancers, mostly part0time, sometimes full-time but to get those jobs, you had to bid and whoever bids came successfully got the job/contract.

The company was founded by Xenios Thrasyvoulou and Simos Kitiris in September 2007.

Sports New Media

Think about the countless number of athletes around the world, the number of tournaments being watched by sports lover across the globe, crazy right? Now think about those individuals and associations and their need for social presence, with the growing presence of facebook, It’s not hard to understand why big corporates would be paying big bucks in order to be connected directly with their brands through facebook.

The start-up manages Facebook pages and campaigns for athletes, sports agents, sporting governing bodies and associations.

Their in-house technology allows them to automate much of the process of providing relevant and timely content to fans across social networks, and to monitor a brand’s activity within those networks.

The company was founded by Jae Chalfin and Nick Thain in April 2008

Brainient

If you’re looking to make some money from your video online. Brainient makes it easier for advertisers to get the most out of their video campaigns through interactive video advertising and personalized video retargeting.

Brainient was founded by Emi Gal in 2009

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2011 has seen some fantastic startups really making a name for themselves in the UK, but also in the rest of Europe.

I have made a list of whom I believe to be the top 10 European startups of 2011.

Now I know there are loads missing I could of made this list the top 100, but it’s not. So let me know in the comments of those that I’ve missed.

And FYI I have included Israel as a European country since it is recognised as part of Europe by FIFA & Eurovision; that’s good enough for me!

Plus they have some great startups, would be a shame to leave them out.

So here they are, in no particular order:

Fon - Madrid, Spain

Fon has a goal to provide free wifi to the whole world.

How?

By signing upto Fon you agree to securely share a little bit of your wifi bandwidth with Fon. Think of it as crowd sourcing wifi, if you will.

This year Fon has seen its users hit 4 million, doubling their userbase in 12 months. They also raised €10million in funding and secured a number of large partnerships with the likes of Belgacom, Belgiums largest telecommunications company, Skype & Nintendo so 3DS owners can make use of free wifi across Portugal.

Soundcloud - Berlin, Germany

Soundcloud Is probably one of the more better known startups on the list.

Having been founded in 2007 by Alex Ljung and Eric Wahlforss to ‘unmute’ the web. It is a sound platform that allows anyone to capture, create & share sounds across the web. Almost like the YouTube of sound.

2011 has seen Soundcloud raise $10 million Series B funding round from Union Square Ventures and Index Ventures.

They also past the 8 million user mark about a year on from their announcement that they had past the 1 million user mark.

They also announced partnerships with both Songkick & Foursquare and they won the audio and media category of the Telegraph Start-Up 100 awards.

The startup is growing rapidly in the past 12 months & shows no sign of slowing down in 2012.

Waze - Tel Aviv, Israel

The Israeli startup provides GPS maps of countries which are entirely crowdsourced. Users create and edit roads to ensure a continually updated map which has integrated real time traffic alerts from users which is actually a really cool feature.

The product has a gamification aspect to it to further entice users to update maps in real time.

In 2011, the company, which plans to monetize through location based advertising and to expand into Asia, hit 10 million users, up from 2 million in 2010. In fact December alone has seen them gain 1.5 million users.

This year the company also announced it had raised an additional $30 million in funding. This is on top of the $25 million in 2010.

6wunderkinder - Berlin, Germany

Another from the German capital, 6wunderkinder, a multi-platform productivity solutions for individuals, groups and businesses.

The company’s flagship product Wunderlist, task management software, hit the million user mark earlier this year and are releasing their latest tool which looks to offer a more comprehensive productivity tool.

They also raised $4.2 million in funding from Atomico, the investment firm started by the founders of Skype.

Of the 1.5million registered users around 40% are based in the US showing, double that of 2010, showing it’s fast growing popularity & international appeal.

Tradeshift - Copenhagen, Denmark

Tradeshift was founded in 2009 & launched in 2010. It has been a rapid rise for the company that offers an online invoicing tool for businesses to build a network of partners online for easy sharing of invoices.

2011 saw the company raise $7million in May and announce deals with both the French & Italien governments, which is a massive win for the company and has helped it grow further.

Further to this in October, Tradeshift announced it had raised a further $17million in funding bringing the startups valuation to $137million.

It has used this fresh round of funding to expand into new territories and now boasts 5 offices including its Copenhagen HQ.

iZettle - Stockholm, Sweden

iZettle let’s anyone make card payments anywhere, anytime via an iPhone app and mini chip card reader that can be attached to the phone. It is basically Europes answer to Square

iZettle takes a cut of each transaction which can be consumer to business or consumer to consumer.

The company was founded in April 2010 & came out of beta this year. It has gone on to raise €11.2million in Series A funding.

They already claim that they had grown the Swedish POS market 5% in 90 days before November and signed up over 10,000 users during their beta phase.

It’s an area which is taking off quickly & they are looking to change a massive industry in payments & having only one real big competitor at the moment (Square), they are getting in early.

House Trip – Lisbon, Portugal

House Trip launched in 2010 and is an apartment booking website where anyone can book an apartment or villa and property owners can put their places on the site. It’s similar to the AirBnB concept.

This year has seen House Trip raise two rounds of funding. $2.7 million from Index ventures back in April and more recently in November they raised $17 million Series B funding led by Balderton Capital.

This year they also expanded beyond Paris, London & Berlin into the whole of Europe and have also made inroads into the rest of the world with close to 60,000 properties on the site, which has increased from 8,000 in march. They have also seen over 500,000 nights booked so far and have grown from 20 staff to 70 full time employees.

Radionomy - Brussels, Belgium

Radionomy enables people to create and listen to radio stations online free of charge and share a personalized radio show complete with music programming, jingles, commercials along with custom reports and podcasts, with friends and the rest of the world.

The Belgian based company has grown rapidly in 2011 announcing that they are now streaming 30 million hours of online radio a month. That’s around 1 million hours every day, quite incredible. They are also currently finalising a funding round of $15 million with the help of French investment bank Bryan Garnier.

Radionomy have also been working on a massive new product in 2011 Streamonomy which will essentially open up its platform to external radio stations and help boost its growth further. This is expected to be released in early January.

The company already has 30% of its users in the US, a tough place to crack, but they seem to be doing well over there and with a fresh round of funding they aim to truly establish themselves in America and the rest of the world.

Wooga - Berlin, Germany

Another startup from the heart of Germany, wooga is an online social game developer & yes it’s wooga all in lower case, because they’re cool like that! They have so far released 6 games that attract over 32 million active players each month.

It has been a whirlwind year for the startup founded in 2009. January began with a bang as they officially became the leading European social games developer and they sat in 7th place in the world with 15 million a month playing a wooga game at the time.

By the end of this year they have moved into third spot in the world, with popular releases this year, Diamond Dash & Magic Land pushing them up the charts and doubling the number of monthly players.

During the year they also won two awards at the European Games Awards for Best Publisher and Best Game (Diamond Dash).

Wooga (short for ‘world of gaming’) also raised $24 million, in what was its second round of funding, in May. This was used to further grow the team and build more games and will help them to further move up the ranks and challenge the juggernaut that is Zynga for that number 1 spot. Not quite at that level yet but who’s to say they can’t emulate their US competitors, after all Zynga is 2 years older than wooga, maybe in a couple years wooga will be where Zynga is now!

Wix - Tel Aviv, Israel

The Israeli startup Wix allows users to build flash websites. It is easy and simple for anyone to use (seriously even my dad made a Wix site) and even though the sites are flash based they are SEO friendly.

The company addressed an important issue in 2011 which was mobile access, releasing a free mobile site builder early in the year.

They also created a Facebook application called WixYourPage which allows users to create customised Facebook fan pages.

The startup has grown to over 13 million users and raised a massive $40 million in March to help grow the company further and improve the Wix mobile and WixYourPage features.

——

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Brainient is a Shoreditch based startup started by Emi Gal in 2009. Brainient makes it easier for advertisers to get the most out of their video campaigns through interactive video advertising and personalized video retargeting.

We caught up with the company’s 25 year old founder and CEO who started his entrepreneurial journey as a 10 year old creating business cards for the teachers in school.

In the interview below you find out more about:

What Brainient does

Video Advertising

How they got investment

Seedcamp

Most important asset to a company

Biggest Mistake

Tips for aspiring entrepreneurs

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Michael Tyrimos is co-founder at Synups and the Cypriot Enterprise Link. He was awarded as the “NACUE President of the Year 2010”, and as a “Leader of Tomorrow” at the 41st St Gallen Symposium. Michael is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and an Associate of King’s College London.

In September 2007 I was enrolled as an undergraduate at King’s College London. After serving in the military for two years, I was finally moving away from the Friday inspections, the combat training, the virtual minefields and drills to join university, 2000 miles away from home. This new chapter in my life did not only matter in virtue of the academic knowledge that I was about to receive, but also due to the horizon of opportunities, which I was hoping to access.

The university environment intrigued me to set my ideas into perspective and apply them. Was I entrepreneurial before? Maybe, if trading balloons for chocolates with the kids in your neighborhood at the age of 5, or renting out IRC bots and BNCs to your classmates at the age of 14, counts as entrepreneurship. What really mattered now, was my need to create something that could make a real impact.

With that in mind, I devised “Mindsquared” towards the end of my fresher year. Mindsquared was an online platform, which enabled my classmates, as well as students from other courses, to exchange study-notes. Although it recruited more than 10 volunteers and had some success, it ultimately died out. Nevertheless, it alerted Zain Jaffer (currently co-founder at Vungle.com), who was then launching the King’s College London Business Club (KCLBC), to invite me on board as a vice president.

Joining KCLBC gave me an invaluable lesson on the similarities that a student society and an actual business could have in common. You see, just like a business, a student society a) caters the public demand through its products and services; b) sets out a plethora of administrative tasks; c) requires funding and strategic planning to operate and progress; and d) is accountable to various stakeholders. On our first year, KCLBC did great. It received a commendation from the NCGE and Enterprise Educators UK and participated in the foundation of NACUE.

Without a doubt, I had some pretty big shoes to fill when I became president. I also had a lot of outstanding issues to attend, in terms raising sponsorship; setting flagship events; defining our media channels and continuing the healthy growth of the society. It is a common phenomenon that if you are launching something off the ground, you often wish to take all the decisions yourself without delegating. Nonetheless, the society was not going to grow if all the decisions boiled down to a single person. This was probably the moment I fully understood why a true leader was responsible to inspire leadership into others.

With the support of my VP, Sarah Chen (President 10-11), we restructured the club into four areas; corporate relations, media, finance, and enterprise. Accordingly, we appointed a leader in each area and asked them to lead as they sought best. What happened? Yasmeen Ghali (CR) secured sponsorships from Microsoft, Accenture, E&Y and other prestigious firms. Daria Kyrilova (Media) and her team led an unprecedented and marketing campaign for our events. Paul Stapelfeldt (Finance) and his team managed our financial matters in the most professional manner; and Jack Smith (Enterprise; also co-founder at Vungle.com) launched “IdeaBox”, the first enterprise competition for undergraduates at King’s College London. They liked what they did, and they did well!

In a recent mention, NACUE stated that I “grew a fairly new society into a mature, high-quality and professional student enterprise organization” – truth is if it wasn’t for the work of my team and the mentorship of people like Harriet Robinson (former manager at KCL Business Ltd), I wouldn’t have made it.

It would also be ignorant on my behalf not to say that I hadn’t made some terrible mistakes or that we didn’t mismanage some serious tasks. Nonetheless the bigger picture is what truly matters in the end… Three years later, KCLBC grew to more than 3000 members, was named “Society of the Year 2011”, spun off various startups and launched its own investment fund thanks to our collective efforts and the stellar team that succeeded us.

My “journey” during my undergraduate years also acted as a milestone to my consequent activities. It gave me the opportunity be a part of the efforts for the development of student entrepreneurship in the UK, through my roles on the student advisory board of NACUE and the student advisory panel at McKisney & Co (for the Entrepreneur First scheme).

It enabled me to inspire leadership into others by delivering keynotes at national leadership events in Cyprus and the UK. It helped me develop strong knowledge on society formation and growth, as to start the Cambridge University Venture Capital & Private Equity Club while doing my Masters degree and to launch it as a member of the Cambridge University Enterprise Network group. More importantly it made me part of a network of extraordinary young leaders that have never stopped supporting my work.

At the moment, I am co-founding a company with three brilliant partners at Cambridge. Synups (www.synups.com) is a social space, where individuals with creative ideas can build their projects, share them with like-minded people and build new teams. In 2012 I will also be launching the Cypriot Enterprise Link, a non-profit organization, which aims to cultivate the entrepreneurial ethos and raise awareness amongst the young people of my generation in Cyprus. In parallel, I am serving as a renewable energy investments research advisor to the CEO of Bioland International, as the acting Chairman of the Cambridge University Venture Capital & Private Equity Club and as a member of the student advisory panel at Entrepreneur First.

Coming to a conclusion, I would like to leave you with a single thought. We often find ourselves petrified by a daunting task or what seems to be an impossible goal. It is important to realize that nobody got to where they are, by taking one step alone. According to the ancient Chinese Philosopher, Lao Tzu, “the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”. In my case, the first step in my journey was made through a student society, KCLBC. In your case, where do you want to be and what should your first step be to get there?

Contact details:

Twitter: @michaeltyrimos
Blog: www.tyrimos.com
Linkedin: in/michaeltyrimos

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Isabel Mattos is a serial entrepreneur, she has what you call the entrepreneurial spirit, running through her veins.

As an 18 year old she managed to get into the prestigious MIT university, even though she only applied 2 weeks before the application deadline. It helped that she received a scholarship or their was no way she would of been able to afford the fees. But she made it & if that wasn’t enough she also managed to get a job at the world’s most sought after company to work for, Google.

Although not from a family of entrepreneurs and no real entrepreneurial connection, she always knew that she would be an entrepreneur. After a short stint at MIT she started WaterAfrica, which developed a solar-powered piping system that enables better water distribution in Africa. After a couple more projects she founded ‘What If?‘ a social site where people can share their what if? questions which people can comment on and share with a gamification side to it as the more comments and likes, the more badges you earn.

She also founded Tisk-Task a a task management tool specially tailored at communities and on top of this she started yet another company. This one is called Talenj, which is a Google labs type of idea. It is made up of fun little websites that are useful and fun. In an experiments type format Talenj is there to try out a number of ideas and see what sticks!

She has a very creative tech focused mind and is always coming up with new ideas as you can tell. But rather than just come up with ideas she goes and makes them happen. Some may fail and some may work but you never know unless you try it.

She gave up the opportunity to have a comfortable job in Google and go it alone. She did plan to go back to Brazil and work on her own startup but after meeting Meyer Malka and Wenceslao Casares, two latin-american entrepreneurs responsible for one of the biggest Latin American startup exits, she was excited by thier idea which led to her latest venture which she joined from the beggining as he head of business development.

The startup is called Lemon and it seems she has made a good move as the online receipt tracking service has just raised $10 million in funding. It helps when raising funding that the founders have a track record of a successful exit.

According to the young 23 year old, Lemon has given her the opportunity to combine the two things she wanted the most: creating a startup, and working with people she admires.

——
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