http://yourhiddenpotential.co.uk/2012/01/31/top-20-uk-startups-to-watch-in-2012/ http://yourhiddenpotential.co.uk/2012/01/31/top-20-uk-startups-to-watch-in-2012/#comments Tue, 31 Jan 2012 23:38:51 +0000 Rishi Chowdhury http://yourhiddenpotential.co.uk/?p=12907 If you like this post, why not stay updated to our contents as soon as they are published. Subscribe to our RSS Feeds, Facebook Fanpage and Twitter.

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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.

 

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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!

Follow @rishi_chowdhury

Be sure to check out the YHP magazine and subscribe for news and the latest articles from YHP.

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Each year we take a look at the young entrepreneurs, based in the UK, who we think are set to have a great year, you can see our 2011 list here, and this year is no different.

So here are 20 entrepreneurs, founders and co founders, who you may want to watch in 2012, there are some great companies here and I’m sure you will be hearing a lot more about them over the next 12 months.

Here they are:

Josh Buckley (MinoMonsters)

Josh Buckley is the CEO and founder of MinoMonsters, a Pokemon type game where you can battle and trade pet monsters. Josh is the youngest CEO to have raised funding from investment giant Andreessen Horowitz at 19 years of age.

The Kent born youngster sold his first company at the age of 15. He created ‘Menewsha’ a community where users create whimsical avatars and interact online for fun. He sold this for a six figures sum while still in school.

He then moved to Silicon Valley & participated in Y Combinator to help take his company to the next level and take on Pokemon brand. His USP is it is a game for iOS where Pokemon is not available.

Expect to be hearing more of this young CEO as he ventures into the mobile gaming space with no fear.

Nick D’Aloisio (Summly)

Nick D’Aloisio is only 16 years old but he has already managed to raise $250,00 in funding for his startup, Summly. He created an app that offers a simpler way to browse and search the web by automatically summarising search results, web pages and articles to make content easier to sift to and find what is most relevant to you.

In it’s first 4 days after it reached 17k downloads and is now well over 100,000. Still studying for his GCSE’s he had to get special dispensation to delay his mocks while he traveled to San Fransisco.

So to sum it up, he is one to watch in 2012!

James Gill (GoSquared)

James Gill is the CEO and co founder of GoSquared a real time web analytics service which he started during his gap year. rather than taking the year to travel, he decided to build a web app which people would pay for and by the end of the year him and his co founders realised they had done just that.

James now works on GoSquared at White Bear Yard from which GoSquared got their angel funding and they are surrounded by other great startups which will help them as they look to grow and take on their main rivals Chartbeat.

You can see our video interview with James here.

Lucian Tarnowski (Brave New Talent)

Lucian Tarnowski is the founder and CEO of Brave New Talent, a social recruitment network.  The passionate young entrepreneur loves social media and leverages the sharing and engagement inherent in social networks and applies it to job recruitment.

Lucian has also been honored as Europe’s youngest Young Global Leader (YGL) by the World Economic Forum. He is also the youngest  entrepreneur to join UKTI (United Kingdom Trade and Investment) so age isn’t a factor as he goes about his mission to change the face of job recruitment and skills building.

He is a confident leader and looks set to have a big year in 2012.

Maria Constantinescu (Slick Flick)

Maria Constantinescu is the founder of SlickFlick, which allows you to create storyboards on the iPhone using your photos. An ex lawyer Maria left law to start Curious Quests and the Slick Flick app.

Maria is trying to take creativity to the masses and has been get the app out into the film industry and creative industries to get support and name out amongst a sector which will find it used by most. Being based in the heart of Shoreditch she is surrounded by creatives in every direction which should serve her well.

Having secured an association with Apsmart, they have a great partner which can help them continue to improve the app and add weight to their proposal when they go for funding.

Ry Morgan (PleaseCycle)

Ry Morgan (right) is the founder and CEO of PleaseCycle, provides products and services for organisations to encourage cycling within the workplace.

Ry went from being an intern at CURB media (a really cool startup by the way!) to founding PleaseCycle with the founder & CEO of CURB media, Anthony Ganjou (left). A born entrepreneur Ry has gone from top student, to graduate to founder & CEO.

He has a great drive to grow PleaseCycle massively and his determination and vision has helped him build a great experienced team which will in no doubt help see them progress rapidly in 2012.

Find out more about Ry from his guest post on YHP.

Michael Korn (KwickScreen)

Michael Korn is the founder of KwickScreen, a portable, retractable, room divider which provides isolation or privacy solutions. Initially the design was meant to be used in hospitals to act as a privacy barrier between patients and it was perfect for this. It’s small size and easy and quick set up was perfect for the hospital environment.

Michael has now seen the product, which took 4 years of design iterations to get it ready for release, enter new markets and is being used in universities, exhibitions, offices etc…

It is a well thought out design and the ideas has already received recognition. Michael was named Shell LiveWIRE Young Entrepreneur of the Year 2011.

Look out for KwickScreens popping up near you in 2012.

Emi Gal (Brainient)

Emi a young Romanian entrepreneur started Brainient in 2009. Brainient is a a video advertising technology company, based in London’s silicon roundabout, and currently has two products. First an interactive video advertising product and second one is a personalised video retargeting platform.

Emi has a lot of experience with startups at his young age, having previously founded two and has also been an advisor or helped out on various other tech startups.

This experience will hold him in good stead and help as Brainient looks to grow further in 2012.

Check out our video interview with Emi here.

Damian Kimmelman (Duedil)

Damian founded Duedil in April 2011 with the aim to make business more transparent, helping executives and entrepreneurs make well-informed business decisions, by allowing users to easily find company information for free.

Damian has pivoted Duedil from a people recommendation system, like a ‘Yelp for people’, to it’s current state as a database of companies.

He has also overseen Duedil raise funding from some of the investors behind Skype, LastFM & Yahoo as well as being chosen as a Microsoft Bizspark company which should help his disruptive startup make big strides in 2012!

Kevin Flood and Mike Harty (Shopow)

Kevin & Mike started the company, a social shopping engine and community, straight out of university raising £830,000 in angel funding.

Founded in early 2010, it was launched in May 2011 and currently works directly with over 22,000 online retailers to help give them the most accurate price comparison.

Currently available in the US & UK they look to grow further in 2012 and with the social nature of the site and strong community it has the ingredients to  rapidly accelerate growth as members share recommendations across there networks.

The company is expecting to surpass £3million in revenue in it’s first year has already seen it’s popularity abroad with 50% of revenues coming from overseas.

It has been dubbed the ‘Facebook of shopping’ & the two founders have already been named in Growing Business Young Guns.

Chris Prescott and Daniel Noz (Fantasy Shopper)

Fantasy Shopper is a social shopping game, only launched in October 2011 and has already seen massive interest. Users spend fantasy currency to buy clothing & create a virtual wardrobe full of different outfits from over 300 real high street shops. It’s a bit like creating a wishlist but what’s great is you can then buy your virtual outfits from the real life stores.

It’s a fantastic idea that Chris dreamt up one night and has proved very popular to date. apparently it is very addictive and it shows. Within 2 weeks of launching, the platform was seeing a fantasy sale every 14 seconds.

One feature that brings users back for more is that every hour you gain more credits, so users login multiple times a day to collect their virtual paydays.

The fact that it is linked to your Facebook also helps increase awareness of it to your network and this social sharing will greatly help with it’s growth.

Chris has come up with a great idea and is described on the Fantasy Shopper site as “having all the traits of a mad inventor… i.e. he’s a little bit nuts!” Which is good right? Even better is he is backed up by Dan, the tech guy who ‘get’s stuff done’.

All this will help Chris & Daniel take Fantasy Shopper to the masses in the next year.

Fiona Wood (Naturally Cool Kids)

As a mum Fiona has had to deal with all sorts of skin allergies which led her to search for natural skincare products for her kids, but to her surprise found a lack of natural skincare products for kids.

She entered the ‘Barclays Take One Small Step’ competition, where she was one of the 10 regional winners, after mum’s across the country voted for her idea. She started the company in July 2010 and has not looked back since.

Fiona spotted a gap in the market and is taking full advantage of this. She has the passion and determination to see her products being sold across the world. After her initial plans to launch two skincare products, she actually launched with six products and has already seen them in over 20 retail stockists, including John Lewis & Tesco Nutri centre, as well as online.

She has big plans ahead and look out for her products across the UK this year as she looks to further expand the number of stockists.

Luke Hood (UKF)

Luke Hood is a 19 year old from Frome, Somerset who is taking Youtube by storm with his UKF channels. After starting putting up his favourite dubstep tunes up on youtube and showcasing fresh new music he found his subscribers rocketed and he was soon over 1 million!

What started as a hobby has become a business. He is super passionate and since this was what he was passionate about in the first place it will help in growing it as a business.

He has started expanding into events and live online events as well so youngsters into dubstep and drum n bass who can’t get into these events can view it from online.

There is lots of scope to grow and he already has the subscribers, maybe in 2012 he can do what Jamal Edwards has done in 2011.

Jack Smith (Vungle)

Jack Smith is the founder of Vungle, a mobile app user acquisition platform focused exclusively on video ads. The company helps those with apps to show the apps full potential through video advertising rather than just text descriptions and user reviews. Using video to help acquire quality users.

Although just 22, Jack has a fair bit of experience having started his first company at the age of 15 and then while at uni, set up ideabox an undergraduate business ideas competition and was MD at Mediaroots.

He has now seen Vungle expand to the US with an office in San Fransisco and I wouldn’t be surprised to see Jack get funding for Vungle this year.

Joshua March (Conversocial)

Joshua March is now onto his second business, Conversocial an integrated Social CRM and marketing software which helps companies with marketing and customer support via social media.

With social media becoming a mainstay in our day to day lives it is essential for all businesses to be active on social networks and be able to effectively monitor conversations around your business and industry.

Josh saw this and started Conversocial a couple years ago and has developed it too a position where they can expect to grow rapidly as more and more businesses start realising the potential of social media.

Josh previously founded the first preferred Facebook Development company in the UK with Dan Lester and has lots of experience in the social space from it’s early days.

Helen McAvoy and Naomi Kibble (Rocktails)

Helen & Naomi two Cardiff based young entrepreneurs tapped into the huge popularity of cocktails drunk by the population on nights out. Despite this there isn’t a competitive offering for easily making cocktails at home.

These two cocktail fans went about changing that spending over £20,000 developing frozen cocktails in a pouch. Great for consumption at home with friends, the two friends managed to secure a six months trial with Sainsburys which could lead to a wider deal.

Helen & Naomi have already secured a big deal early on in the companies life & are ahead of their forecasts, this should hold them in good stead as they look to expand in 2012.

Mansoor Hamayun, Christopher Baker-Brian & Laurent Van Houcke (BBOXX)

Christopher, Laurent & Mansoor started BBOXX a company which develops methods of distributing renewable energy to developing countries. The three young entrepreneurs have spun off the company from e.quinox, a charity at Imperial College London.

With power consumption growing in developing countries, solutions to cope with the increased demand for energy will be more in demand than ever and these two entrepreneurs are making sure they are in a position to supply a suitable solution in the way of portable solar products.

They will look to rapidly expand on their partnerships in developing countries over the next year.

Emma Sinclair (Target Parking)

Emma Sinclair is a passionate young entrepreneur. She had the high powered, high paid city job but she left it to start Target Parking. After investing in a small car parking firm she set up Target parking which offers services for car parks across Britain. Including cash handling, security & facilities management.

The 29 year old is the youngest person to float a company on the Alternative Investment Market and her business acumen has seen her tie up some big deals which helped the company see revenues of just over £1million and she fully expects that to grow further in 2012.

She is excited to see what the future holds and determined to make the company the best in it’s industry and her background suggests she has what it takes.

Russell Whitter (Rate Your Player)

Russell Whitter (right) is the founder of Rate Your Player (RYP) an online social football network. Having started it after seeing his favorite football forum close it’s doors he has developed the website into a fully fledged social network based around football.

Russell is the brother of footballer Wayne Routeledge (left) and has therefore been able to call on him and his footballer friends to help endorse the site and increase it’s popularity. He was able to call on his friends to help him build the site and keep costs down and hopes to see the site increase in popularity as social networks do. Since this is targeted specifically to football which has more fans than any other sport in the UK he has a large market to tap into.

Russell hopes to expand the network into other sports as well and looks to grow the number of users quickly in 2012 as the social aspect snowballs with more and more users helping it grow further.

Rashid Kasirye – (Link Up TV)

Rashid Kasirye started Link Up TV, an online music and talent platform, straight out of college and has seen it grow from humble beginnings to a strong online community, which sees their YouTube page hitting over a million monthly views and thousands of fans on Facebook and Twitter.

Rashid has already seen the company make music videos for artists on some of the top UK music channels and his popularity is sure to keep growing in the industry. As we journey through 2012 and Link Up TV step up their video production capacity I’m sure you will see even more music videos in the charts made by Rashid and his team.

–

Who have I missed? Who are your young entrepreneurs to watch in 2012?

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

Follow @rishi_chowdhury

Be sure to check out the YHP magazine and subscribe for news and the latest articles from YHP.

If you like this post, why not stay updated to our contents as soon as they are published. Subscribe to our RSS Feeds, Facebook Fanpage and Twitter.

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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Based in Shoreditch in an area dubbed ‘Silicon Roundabout’ Mind Candy has gone from a position of almost going bust to building Moshi Monsters which has seen it’s popularity rocket to over 50 million users and a value of over $100 million. Acton is expanding  the Moshi Monster juggernaut  into areas outside of just online gaming and creating an eco-system with merchandising and TV  channels.

Prior to Mind Candy, Michael started Firebox with co founder Tom Boardman during the dot com bubble, through boom & bust.

Michael talks about his experiences of starting two successful internet startups through the tough times and the good times, as well as giving valuable advice to other entrepreneurs. It’s one not to be missed!

Check out the video interview with Michael Acton Smith below:

Share it with Twitter, Facebook & Google communities & then check out our other interviews on our YouTube channel.

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