As in the previous years, the 2013 IDCEE conference attracted to Kiev, Ukraine earlier this month an impressive number of investors, startup entrepreneurs and IT professionals from over 45 countries (see videos).
The core topics of this year’s conference were online education, e-commerce, and entrepreneurship in Brazil. The event – which took place in a huge sports complex – featured over 70 outstanding speakers, 50 keynotes and 8 panel discussions from the industry leaders across the globe.
Presentations by Intel Capital on investment in the CEE region, Project A Venture on the lessons of next-generation e-commerce and UFO Start on how to crowdfund a startup were of particular note.
AVentures, a leading Ukrainian fund, offered an insightful overview of the local IT and Internet scene.
“We try to choose the most trendy topics which are important both for global and local communities”, says IDCEE organizer and TA Venture Managing Director Viktoriya Tigipko in an interview earlier this month with East-West Digital News.
Food for the brains and the stomach at IDCEE 2013
Asian startups in the limelight
The Startup Alley featured more than 150 startups, the majority of which (2/3) were from Ukraine, with others from Russia, the CIS, CEE, US and around the globe. Popular categories were SAAS, e-commerce and mobile apps. In comparison with the previous year, there were more online education startups and fewer social network projects.
IDCEE’s startup competition’s top two prizes went to Asian startups, while a Ukrainian company won third.
IDCEE’s Startup Alley featured more than 150 startups
Ubertesters, an Israeli startup, won the €15,000 cash prize for Best Startup. This cloud based mobile app testing tool platform offers building, distribution, bug submission and management/monitoring tools and keeps the project manager in control of the testing process.
The second prize of €10,000 was taken by Singapore’s KreditAja. This startup has created a web and mobile marketplace for personal loans and credit. The platform allows borrowers to compare and lock-in personal finance offers from multiple lenders with one simple application.
An Ukrainian team, Backendless, came in third place and was awarded €5,000. Backendless develops a cloud-based SaaS platform targeting mobile application developers. The platform enables the development of mobile applications at speeds two times faster and significantly reduces overall development cost.
Other awards were taken by three Ukrainian startups: Hashtago, which develops a hashtag marketing solution, AstraFit, which offers a service to help people choose the right size of clothing online, and Kabanchik, an online marketplace that helps busy people and small/medium business outsource their small tasks.
The next edition of IDCEE will take place in Kiev on October 16-17, 2014. It will focus on e-health, charity and media, while continuing to screen such fields as e-commerce, mobile apps and others.
