seedcamp
pitch, learn and share.
It’s official. we’re one of the 20 finalists that’s been selected to participate in the Mini Seedcamp event in Helsingborg, Sweden, the 5th of May. It’s nothing less than exciting. We’re looking forward to meet all the other teams, sharing experiences and ideas. It’s going to be a great event at a very cool venue, SHIP in the center of my home town. Here you find the list of teams, and below is an extract of the official Seedcamp site describing the event.
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Mini Seedcamp Helsingborg
Mini Seedcamp Helsingborg will connect 20 top quality, early stage web tech startups with over 50 regional and European esteemed, sought after and highly experienced entrepreneurs, investors and developers that will blow your socks off.
Applications are now open for Mini Seedcamp Helsingborg, being held in Helsingborg at the über cool Helingborg SHIP on 5th May 2009, along with the help of Oresund Entrepreneurship Academy. While we are on the lookout for teams from Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Iceland and Norway, we encourage any startup from the EMEA to apply who are ready to wow us with your product or idea.
We are looking for strong, quality startups that have the talent, drive and capacity to fully embrace the opportunities that participating in a Mini Seedcamp brings. Which is receiving quality advice from top industry leaders and start building those key relationships to help drive your business. Relationships that normally take years to build, you’ll have access to in one day. Mini Seedcamps are not a conference, but an entrepreneurial ecosystem of support to strengthen and catapult your ideas into a viable business.
Tuesday May 5th Mini Seedcamp – Helsingborg
09:00 – 18:30
The main event. Here the 20 local finalist get to connect and learn from prominent entrepreneurs, investors, developers and other web technology experts.
The day consists of; 5 minute presentations by the teams; a panel discussion; and four 1:1 mentoring sessions. The format is designed to maximise interaction between the teams and mentors, and has proved popular with mentors at previous Seedcamps.
Read more on http://seedcamp.com/pages/sweden09
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We’ll keep you updated during the event, sharing with us the whole experience. You can follow us on Twitter.com/ambadoo and the event goes under the hashtags #seedcamphbg, where you’ll be able to read everything about it. Also, be sure to check out the official Seedcamp Helsingborg site.
See you there!
first round.
soft loan // IK2
Being a start-up you’re constantly moving between your vision – which to most people is something dreamlike and unreal, and reality – which is struggling to find financing to realize your vision. It’s a very frustrating situation because you know that if you only had that money you could take that concept of yours and go build it.
There’s obviously many ways of financing a project, and all of them has got pros and cons, and strings attached. The most viable option for us was to to go for a soft-loan as a first step to get going.
In Sweden there are quite some option for this kind of financing, all depending on where you are in your progress and what kind of project you want to pull off. We’ve been discussing both with Teknopol and IK2 and they’ve both been very positive to our project.
I contacted IK2 back in October when I first aired the idea to some people. I met Johan, the Head of Innovation of Almi, and we started to discuss how to move from that stage, to next. He’s been a great supporter ever since and in the beginning of this year he suggested that we’d apply for their soft-loan to make things happen. So we did.
In late February we filled in the loan-application, which very much resembles a business-plan. Customers, Market, Strategy, Financials etc.. you know the deal. Well, many lines later and some complementary market-strategy-plans it’s now in harbour.
I remember the call from Johan, when he me told we got the loan. It’s amazing how happy you can get, to receive the news that you’ve got another batch of money to pay back. I couldn’t stop smiling though. The fact is, that it’s a sign that we’ve been working hard, we’re in the right direction, and we’ve got something that’s worth investing in. I’d like to express my gratitude for the belief in the project, and all the help that we’ve received so far from the people of IK2, Teknopol and everyone else that’s been around – advising us on the way towards a realization.
It’s an amazing time we’ve got in front of us, and here’s a quote from Johan @IK2/Almi on the matter.
“we believe that ambadoo has an exciting time ahead. The need of a good contact system escalate in pace with the development of the media, in combination that the world is becoming smaller and our network is becoming bigger, and the increasing impact of the social networks around” – Johan Olsén, Head of Innovation of Almi Företagspartner Skåne