
SeedCamp Finalists Chosen (The European Y Combinator-like seed fund) - transburgh
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/08/30/seedcamp-finalists-chosen-battle-to-final-five-next-week/
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palish
As a little experiment, here are some predictions:

ArtFlock - "ArtFlock.com aims to be the foremost online destination for the
sale and promotion of original art and craft by the worlds' freshest artists
and makers". _Fail._

Avenue7 - "An online community for 12 - 17 year old girls to share ideas on
the latest fashion trends & products, as well as their own personal styles".
_Great chance of success. I'd put all my money on this one._

Buildersite - "Buildersite is a web-marketplace for construction services. We
aim to provide homeowners and tradesmen with the largest and most trusted
venue for transacting business online." _Fail, people don't go to the internet
to build a house._

Content Syndicate - "Helps content providers and buyers commission,
distribute, buy and sell content, that's exclusive, customised and
personalised for their requirements". _What? Epic failure._

Debatewise - "Debatewise will enable people to compare the collective wisdom
of one side of a debate with the collective wisdom of their opponents, to help
them make up their mind about anything". _Fail, people don't care about other
people's opinions, except to argue about them._

Facecontact - "Facecontact.com is a simple and effective tool for referral
tracking and reward administration for referring job candidates, clients,
investors and other prospects". _I don't know, but I'm leaning towards fail.
It would be hard to get enough people to start using the service for the
service to be useful._

KillSushi - No description. _Uhhh.._

Krogos Software Development - Software development boutique. _Erm..
Consulting? Possible success if they do it correctly, but consulting doesn't
scale._

Kublax - "Online personal finance management service". _Too little information
given, but a system to manage micropayments would be great, if that's what
they're doing._

Maple and Leek - "A social networking site aimed at inspiring like minded over
50s to build an online community of friends and fellow explorers". _Fail. You
can't build a social network from "X subset of myspace" and have it succeed
without a niche goal._

OpenEra - "Online real estate information systems provider and the developer
of the new and exciting Reavia portfolio collaboration service". _Cut away the
market speak. Fail._

Project Playfair - "Our game is hypernumbers which will do to numbers what
hypertext did to text". _No, it won't. Fail._

Price Delivered - "The place for consumers to discover and share genuine
bargains". _Bargains change too fast for the site to be very useful. Have to
go with fail._

RentMineOnline - "Trusted online rental market". _Anything over the size of a
movie is extremely hard to rent through the mail, plus this requires a huge
amount of capital to start, so fail._

The School of Everything - "The place to come to find independent teachers and
classes in anything and everything". _When many adults don't even read books,
getting them to watch online lectures seems futile. Successful only on a very
small scale, and only at music, art, and writing classes._

Tablefinder - "Tablefinders' mission is to aggregate the world's online
bookable restaurants through an awarding and open community". _Fail, too many
moving parts. It won't be useful until everyone participates, so it won't
happen._

Tickex - "Tickex is a search engine for tickets to live events - concert,
theatre and sports. In one search, Tickex aggregates results from all the
major primary and secondary brokers". _I'm not sure this is very useful.
People buy tickets by hearing of a specific event first, not by randomly
looking for events to go to. And since they already have a specific event in
mind, it's very easy to get tickets for it. Fail._

Wall Street Docs - "A provider of a sophisticated web-based document
automation solution for complex capital raising transactions with a feature
set tailored to the needs of issuers and banks". _Only successful as
enterprise software, so it depends on how good of salesmen they have. Since
they only get $50,000, I'm going with fail._

Zemanta - "Content intelligence platform to automatically enhance content,
making it web-ready". _What? Fail._

It seems like SeedCamp may be going about this the wrong way. Instead of
collecting good teams and iterating until they get an idea correct, they're
banking everything on the idea and hoping the team follows.

What're your predictions?

~~~
utnick
These predictions are spot on mostly

But... I have to disagree with your artflock prediction, I think there is a
market for this. A few weeks ago I was trying to buy art from local artists on
craigslist for my new apartment, it was a pain though, because I had to click
on each link to see the painting, I couldn't search very easily on genre or
artist, and I had to wade through a bunch of postings for van gogh posters
people bought from posters.com etc

Not sure if this is where they are going with that service, but a craigslist
for art would be helpful to both artists and buyers.

~~~
rms
There is also <http://www.etsy.com> which is for anything handmade, which
includes art.

I browsed Artflock and saw an artist saying "Email me at x@y.com so we don't
have to pay the Artflock fees." That's a bad sign.

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jsjenkins168
If this is seed funding, why are they announcing what all of the companies are
doing a priori? So competitors can be aware and get a one-up on them before
they release? I would feel uncomfortable with that personally.

~~~
brett
Yeah. This appears to be a very bad sign.

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rustartup
What SeedCamp does is merely getting hype in hope to succeed as a
investor2startup intermediate and promote its <http://www.opencoffeeclub.org>
network.

So they pick up ideas that will draw most of attention.

Just my thoughts. source: <http://blog.seedcamp.com>

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vikram
These guys aren't the finalists, they are invited for a one week interview
only 5 get the cash.

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vlad
These are really, really terrible ideas.

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cellis
a poorly executed knock off of the eminent Y Combinator

