The conference season (this week) is officially open! So here's my report about it.
It started by accident last evening with a warm-up event sponsored by Twilio at betahaus Sofia. I had the pleasure to have a long chat with Lisa from Twilio over a few beers.
Today was Day #1 of DigitalK which is the leading SEE technology event. I've also visited the event last year and must say that this time it is bigger. The main hall was totally packed. The WiFi connectivity has been improved since last year but still sucked. I had more success using my 3G instead.
The most interesting part of Day #1 was the mini Seedcamp session which presented 10 startups. In order of appearance they are
Viblast, Stepsss and Talkie were the 3 finalists who also presented at the main hall. Needless to say the coolest one from technology point of view is Viblast, which is a peer-to-peer video streaming platform, utilizing WebRTC. They were also strong at the presentation and look very strong at the business level as well. I wish them good luck.
Stepsss is essentially a shoe sole with sensors paired with smart-phone apps to give runners more info and feedback. I like it because they are a hardware company although there's lots of competition in this space. I'd like to beta test their product and see what happens when I go dancing all night long :).
Talkie is an educational app for children which helps them learn new languages. I had the pleasure to see it in action before the actual presentation. The design is very cool and the app does seem usable and complete. However I don't see much of a technological challenge here and I'm not sure how will they deal with the strong competition in the ed-tech space. We'll have to wait and see.
From the rest ScaleWhale and Smartoken do seem interesting but I really failed to get how things will be organized on the technology side. Both ideas are run by a single person team, which is a recipe for disaster (judging from my own experience).
Tomorrow is Day #2 of DigitalK and on Saturday I'm moderating one of the rooms at Bulgaria Web Summit. Expect more reports soon.
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