Central and eastern Europe is surprisingly vibrant when it comes to startups and accelerators.
The Czech Republic scores highly on AngelList, and business accelerators are doing well in the country, managing to attract startups from elsewhere in the world. It has been a while since we covered startups hosted by local incubators.
Let’s have a look at some of the best startups they’re hosting now. It’s worth noting that in addition to these, Telefónica’s startup incubator Wayra is promising to open an incubator in Prague, having already successfully launched 12 academies in 11 countries supporting 170 startups around the world. Disclosure: I am a mentor for the StarCube and InovaJet accelerators.
StarCube
The Brno-based StarCube hosts currently dozen of startups out of which I find particularly interested the following :
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CAVER – a biotech software tool for analysis and visualisation of tunnels and channels in protein structures. CaverSoft placed among the top projects in the Best of Biotech 2012 international business plan competition in Vienna.
OrganizeTube lets you organize and view your videos easily in one simple interface. This Internet application lets you make your own playlists, folders and list your favorite video sources, without any technical skills.
Jobote claims to be a revolution in online employment. The tool leverages social networks, making referrals trackable. The idea is that a company’s HR department will always know which employees deserve hiring bonuses for new crew members.
ORM Designer promises to increase productivity up to 70% thanks to a focus on modelling and not wasting time writing definition ORM files by using default ERD techniques.
StartupYard
Also accelerators in the Prague ‘Silicon Valley’ district Smichov have some promising startups on their books. In its 2013 class, StartupYard hosts these startups I like:
HowDoITutorials is an interactive tool for website owners to create tutorials and guides in a few minutes. It’s billed as an extremely easy solution that will imporove your web users’ experience and cut the support costs.
StartitUp, founded by ex-CEO of Taiwan Groupon Edward Liu, is a step-by-step startup guide with action items based on the Lean Startup, Growth Hacking, and startup secrets from experts. The mission of StartitUp is to create a virtual incubator/accelerator thathelps startups build and grow.
Works.io is a career tool for professional fine artists, enabling them to keep portfolios and CVs up-to-date with ease. Founded by Abe Han and Patrick Urwyler from Canada, the project is building the ‘LinkedIn and IMDB for contemporary art’. They catalogue and show works and CVs, while also easily sharing artworks with art institutions and art lovers all around the world.
Travelatus strives to simplify travel to music, sport and other events. The solution promises to improve the user’s travel experience by offering relevant events of interest and enabling booking of all travel-related services via a simple one-window sale system. Travelatus was co-founded three entrepreneurs from Russia.
NODE5
NODE5 also hosts great startups:
Click2Stream, founded by NODE5 co-founder Petr Ocasek, lets you take live video and sound from your webcam in seconds and to embed it easily to your website. The service is currently used by more than 1,000 cameras in 32 countries. Ocasek plans to launch a cheap video analytics service, including face, gender and age recognition soon.
RealPad is a mobile application for the real estate market. It’s a simple yet powerful sales tool used by sales teams at real estate developers. It’s an iPad and Android app that helps to sell more and reduces costs.
Rozecti.se, which has won several local startup competitions, offers an online speed-reading course that teaches you to read both faster and more effectively, and it’s claimed that the average improvement achieved exceeds 100%. “The full package tailored in cooperation with reading experts provides an ebook, 20 interactive lessons packed with various exercises, videos and more. Rozecti.se is currently not a competition to the personal trainers but rather an additional service they can offer since the team is open to partnerships,” says the founder Michal Zwinger. Three new languages are on the agenda for 2013. Similar projects in English are QuickEye, RocketReader and Eyercize.
InovaJet
The mission of InovaCentrum is to support scientists from the Czech Technical University to transfer new inventions to market. Its InovaJet program hosts several interesting startups. These include ImageMetry, which offers innovative imaging solutions for mobile devices, with over 25 million AppStore downloads so far. ImageMetry works with clients such as Bank of America, Visa and eBay. The firm claims its solution helped cut costs of a leading US insurance company by 0.7%.
Image credit: Thinkstock
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