14 great businesses coming to VentureConnect
By Alexandra Dumitru on November 20, 2012
This autumn has been an impressive ride for entrepreneurs and for the VentureConnect Foundation. We have ventured in a great deal of projects, from mentoring sessions to online communities. And, now, to complete the autumn session, we’re a few days away from VentureConnect.
This autumn, we have received 34 projects from 5 countries and have selected the 14 best. Here is a short description of each of them. Enjoy and see you on November 27th at HUB Bucharest!
Pintilie Broker de Asigurare
The company was launched at the end of 2006, putting all its bets on the power of the Internet, constantly optimizing their website www.rca-ieftin.ro, so that calculating a quotation for car insurance can be as simple as ever, with just a few steps to be completed until the final purchase.. By doing so, the business has been growing constantly; therefore, 6 years later, Pintilie Insurance Broker grew from being a small one-bedroom apartment business to a full mature SME company, with over 60 people as staff, enjoying now a spacious headquarter in the city center, with 7 other branches in Bucharest’s main shopping areas.
Today, their website www.rca-ieftin.ro is the most important information source for all the visitors, having more than 750.000 unique visitors (around 25% of the total car market) in the last 12 months and more than 100.000 active clients.
Finzoom
FinZoom Corporation operates leading financial comparison portals in Bulgaria (www.moitepari.bg), Romania (www.finzoom.ro) and Turkey (www.finzoom.com.tr), and the leading mortgage brokerage company in Bulgaria – Creditland (www.creditland.bg). FinZoom’s mission is to empower millions of consumers to make well-informed decisions about their personal finances. Started in 2005 in Bulgaria and 2006 in Romania and Turkey, the portals are well positioned as aggregators and providers of transparent comparison information on all financial products and services, including consumer loans, mortgages, credit cards, pay-day loans, auto-loans, business loans, deposits, mutual funds, current accounts, savings accounts and others. Because of the highly focused, quality visitor traffic FinZoom is well established as a lead generation and sales channel for its partners. Revenues are generated from 3 main sources: 1) display advertising, product positioning, branding; 2) referral fees, which are either per lead or per success, and 3) mortgage and credit brokerage fees from consulting customers.
ShopMunk
ShopMunk boosts foot-traffic in retail stores by giving users real-world rewards and bonus points for entering and exploring venues. With ShopMunk, we serve the process of shopping rather than the process of buying. Therefore, we influence shoppers by stimulating them to explore and interact with brands, rather then making them purchase at a lower price. We achieve this through gamification, a process of stimulating people to be actively involved in brand interaction. We deliver to our users a combination of universal bonus points system, virtual- and real-world rewards.
CarsCup
CarsCup is the first social car game built for men: it offers epic goals, it is competitive, it doesn’t require a lot of time to play and it is connected with your real life car.
Nexi.me
Nexi.me brings the offline referral programs in the online era. We offer a platform where employees can easily refer any of his friends from Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter and we help him in the referral process by offering great suggestions. Together with our new endorsement feature we offer recruiters the possibility to reach the best candidates.
Traderion
Traderion is a virtual reality game simulating the international interbank markets through an authentic trading engine. The project started offline over a business summer school in Sibiu, 2011, organized by one of the founders and received a great feedback from the participants. Later that year, an improved version of the game was successfully organized for students in ASE. Encouraged by the participants wish to continue playing, the founders decided to create an online version of the game. That’s how Traderion was born.
Flobe!t
Social Strategist and imaginator, Giovanni Giro, has created the first social platform that fosters feelings, not posts news. Flobe!t is a visual social engagement app enabling users to foster feelings – with anyone, anywhere, by uploading emotions, not just pictures, and receiving an affirmation in heartbeat (360 seconds). This is the key element to making Flobe!t unique. It delivers immediately with immediacy. Flobe!t gives people exactly what they are searching for today–a reaffirmation of their humanity.
2 Parale
Affiliate network – a marketplace for performance marketing – we track traffic and sales between online shops and publishers. Today 2Parale is a proud member of Leo Burnett Romania Group, having a portfolio of more than 230 advertisers and 14.000 affiliates.
KeenSkim
KeenSkim helps people to learn more by reading less – it fixes Information Overload by creating automatic summaries for news & web articles. KeenSkim is a disruptive Web product that aims to solve the Information Overload problem. It does this by creating summaries for online news & web articles. It’s simple & concise. Works fully automatic with 1-button click. It’s most beneficial for heavy information consumers (decision-makers & innovators) but is something that can be used by anyone online (everybody is an information consumer).
Entrio
Entrio is the simplest, social online platform for selling tickets, with rich event promotion and integration options and great UX for customers. Entrio enables event organizers, such as festivals, concerts, seminars, conferences to start online ticket sales in a matter of minutes. Entrio provides unique Facebook shop app, mobile web and other integration options to ensure ultimate web visibility to the organizer. Discount codes, real‐time control and monitoring and our new Check‐ in app are some of the great Entrio tools which provide significant time and money savings. On the other hand, we do our best to ensure seamless, frictionless and fun ticket purchase process for the visitors.
SimplioLabs
Simplio Labs, Inc., based in Florida, USA, is a web development company that in short time managed to penetrate the US market. Synappsio is a set of development tools to create online shops as native applications for iPhone and iPad using web interface (to manage the store) and a markup language (SYNML). Using only an iPad and minimal knowledge of XML, developers can create custom online store, with integrated payment methods very quickly.
CashCow
This is the first Romanian cashback website. When a customer makes a transaction online, instead of visiting the retailer directly, he may choose to follow a link from a CashCow.ro website to generate a monetary reward for products or services he purchases.
Tribegarden
TribeGarden will help you to choose and buy the perfect gift, alone or with friends. Our solution finds the gifts that will be most appropriate for him or her and the occasion they are for. It does this by crawling your friend’s social stream and then based on data mining and machine learning algorithms it determines suggestions. When your friend’s birthday approaches, you will be notified and given suggestions about possible gifts. Then you can start funding one of these ideas. Funding is not a one-man thing, others will contribute as well. We will encourage this by suggesting people that will be more likely to contribute.
Glittio
Glittio name comes from English verb “to glitter” that means “to shine”. Glittio.ro wants to shine both in fashion, but in e-commerce field also. Glittio.ro is a fashion online store, launched in November 2011. The founding members are two young and enthusiastic persons, with more than 15 years of experience in different business fields.
