Talasim Wins at Seedcamp 2009 - The IV Holdings Blog

The IV Holdings team offers a huge congratulations to Talasim's founders, Zeid Koudsi and Sabri Hakim, and their exceptional team on their being selected as a winning startup at Seedcamp in London. The week has been moving at lightspeed for them at Seedcamp, and it has certainly paid off, with their achieving a phenomenal feat, going into the heart of Europe and walking away as one of this year's top 6 startups.

We could ask for no better examples of Arab and Jordanian innovation, and they certainly rose to the occasion. The hard work continues for the Talasim founders and team, but we wanted to congratulate them on this milestone, and share our belief that if they continue to persevere as they are doing, Talasim will redefine self expression and humor in the Arab World.

Mabrouk to Talasim, and below is the official announcement from Seedcamp (www.seedcamp.com) and the link is right here ( http://blog.seedcamp.com/2009/09/and-winners-areseedcamp-congratulates.html ):

Friday, 25 September 2009

And the winners are….Seedcamp congratulates the 2009 winning teams

What an incredible week.

Seedcamp set out in 2007 to help build a cohesive network which promising entrepreneurs could leverage and tap into to build great businesses that as Fred Wilson said yesterday, adopt the Silicon Valley mindset and “go for it”.

This year, we’ve hosted 22 stellar teams in the time zone between London and Amman. They’ve been mentored by 350 world-class advisors. The quality of teams just keeps improving and as the Seedcamp network grows, the capacity to build great companies keeps improving.

So, without further ado – we’re thrilled to announce this years Seedcamp Week 2009 winners (in alphabetical order):

• Boxed Ice (Birmingham, UK - Server monitoring for all website owners.

• Brainient (Bucharest, Romania) - Helping video publishers monetize on the increasingly growing video content.

• Codility (Warsaw, Poland) - First line of testing of programmers, saving employers a time and money.

• Erply (Tallinn, Estonia) - ERP on the web. Comprehensive CRM, accounting, billing and inventory management for SMEs.

• Patients Know Best (Cambridge, UK) - Revolutionizing how patients ineract with doctors as a start to better provided care.

• Talasim.com (Amman, Jordan) - The Comedy Channel of the Middle East, providing a space for self-expression and sharing humour.

These teams will all receive a €50k investment from Seedcamp and active support over the next 3 months to help develop these companies into world-beaters.

All 22 teams demonstrated outstanding performance and growth throughout the week. They listened to the wisdom of serial entrepreneurs like Hjalmar Winbladh and Brent Hoberman about the rollercoaster of startups, learned about pivoting and continuous deployment from Eric Reis, product/market fit from Sean Ellis, how to swear (and something about metrics!) from Dave McClure and to fail fast, think big and build great businesses from Fred Wilson. On the way they had practical advice from the great successes of the tech world like Google, Yahoo, last.fm, Twitter, Microsoft, eBay and Skype.

What impressed us the most was how the teams processed this torrent of feedback and evolved not just their pitch but their business and thinking between Monday’s and Thursday’s presentations. Shortening the loop between listening and learning is so critical to sustainable startup success and every team showed they had this in spades.

Seedcamp is not a one-week event and most of the teams in London this week were folks we’d met at one of the 7 Mini Seedcamp’s we ran this year. Building this localized network is core to our vision and we want to take this chance to call out Kwaga (Paris, France) and Platago (Vienna, Austria), both of whom Seedcamp has invested in this year from our Mini Seedcamps in Paris and Berlin.

We’ve always believed the start-up world doesn’t revolve around one location but we love the Valley. Last year, we went out West with the Seedcamp alumni and this cycle we’ll be going on the road again, this time taking in New York as well as San Francisco. Immersing yourself in the US market is something we always advise to startups – learn, make contacts and then go back home and code ☺

So joining us on this year’s Seedcamp on the Road, we are also inviting these talented tourists:

• Advertag (London, UK) - Advertag extracts data and creates tag cloud based on the advert.

• Fabricly (London, UK) - A web-based solution for fashion labels to manage their supply chain.

• Pearl Systems (Bristol, UK) - A web-based solution for SMEs to customize billing, CRM, accounting, business improvement software.

• Joobili (Budapest, Hungary) - A travel website offering inspiration specific to your dates and interests. You say when, Joobili says where.

• VouChaCha (London, UK) - A location based mobile discounts for consumers. A usable platform for brands to engage with their customers.

Finally, we’d like to thank everyone who contributed to this year’s Seedcamp Week including all the amazing mentors, Seedcamp investors, Tim Barnes from UCL for being an awesome host and our numerous Seedcamp supporters – without whom, we could not function.

Thanks again to the teams for converging on London for the week where we hope your experience was life changing and you continue to grow, network and emerge as successful entrepreneurs.

Please keep in touch and come see us at one of our Mini Seedcamps over the next 12 months.