WebReady, a contest organized by Ingria, a St. Petersburg-based technopark, took place in St. Petersburg last week. One of the Russian startup scene’s most notable competitions, the event included a startup exhibition, elevator pitches, conferences, and a Venture Capitalist Corner as well as a variety of other networking opportunities.
Featuring Internet and mobile sections for the first time, Web Ready attracted 500 visiting guests and participants. A total of 584 startups had applied from 90 cities and 13 countries.
The winner of the Internet section was a startup from St. Petersburg, Qbaka, whose technology allows web agencies and developers to monitor JavaScript mistakes – which can be critical to their business. The project is currently in its beta version.
RealSpeaker, from Kazan, walked away with second place. This startup, which focuses on speech recognition technology, dubs itself “the first visual extension for audio speech recognition systems in the world.” RealSpeaker’s team is applying parallel analysis of audio and video streams to avoid common problems like low accuracy or fragmented speech.
RealtimeBoard, from Perm, got 3rd place. This cloud service promises that its users will “enjoy effective visual collaboration in real time.” Through virtual boards, users can download, create and manipulate pieces of information of different types, and they can collaborate and comment on them with other participants.
In the mobile section of the contest, Moscow-based Penxy walked away with the first prize. This startup has developed an iPad app for wirelessly sharing slides and broadcasting them synced with audio including voice.
Second place went to by MedM, a startup from St. Petersburg whose core idea is to make health monitoring ubiquitous, using a variety of sensors to transmit health data to healthcare systems.
The third place of the mobile section was won by NormaSugar, an online service that helps those suffering from diabetes. Developed by a Moscow team, the startup was noticed this past May at the 42 Conference and Startup Exhibition held in the Russian capital.
