The third edition of VentureConnect will take place Monday, June 20 at Hotel Intercontinental, Rapsodia Room. For this VentureConnect gathering we have selected 14 projects, coming both from Romania but also from Europe: StockPodium from Bulgaria and Lime&Tonic from Czech Republic.
We are delighted with the results and honored to present our fourteen (14) winners. They have demonstrated continuous dedication and determination in perusing their entrepreneurial ambitions and proven to be worthy and most of all prepared for the VentureConnect pitching session.
Project: Airswipe
Entrepreneur: George Dita & Radu Dita
Description: AirSwipe was planned at the end of 2009 to be a part-time business venture developing products that provide alternative ways for human – computer interaction. This concept has been brought together thanks to the wide acceptance on the global market for alternative computer interaction methods; such as the release of the Wii in 2006 and most recently with the Microsoft Kinect for Xbox (2010); thus proving itself to be an easily and fast adoptive technology. Airswipe allows users to use virtually any display (being projection or hard display) as a touch screen by using a simple webcam. The main differentiator from other similar product is the fact that no dedicated hardware is required, a low end web camera being sufficient for basic functionality.
Project: Appcend
Entrepreneurs: Sebastian Vaduva
Description: Appcend is a “do it yourself” mobile platform. What Appcend does is building fully featured and custom applications while spending just a fraction of the cost and time of normal development. Appcend’s platform responds to the needs of non-technical individuals, skilled developers, as well as large enterprises. The core mission of Appcend is to address the core of the mobile web, the mobile apps development market (valued at approximately 2 Billion dollars) by providing a feasible alternative to the traditional method of „programming mobile applications”.
Project: Acqua Development
Entrepreneur: George Safta
Description: Acqua Development is one of the major software developers in Romania and in Eastern Europe dedicated to the global travel market. Their product is used by more than 100 travel agencies, both in Romania and abroad. At the moment, Acqua Development offers three major products under the brand Q Travel: back-office and mid-office for travel agencies and OTAs (online travel agencies), inventory for tour operators, online solutions for selling flights (regular flights and low cost flights), accommodations, transfers and rent-a-cars, travel insurances and leisure packages.
Entrepreneurs: Gabriel Prodanescu
Description: DataTEK is a software company that has developed its own technology of generating, scanning and validating the unique codes sent by SMS on mobile phones. The name of this technology – mTicket – is representative and clearly defines its area of use: mobile coupons for retail, mobile tickets for the transportation and entertainment industries. Specializing in software applications for the telecommunications industry, especially for the mobile environment, DataTEK Group offers a full range of services and digital applications, including voice and SMS, that can be integrated and used for different purposes such as marketing, sales, internal management communications, and database administration.
Project: AIRA – EvoSoft Media
Entrepreneurs: Emil Voica
Description: Right now, around the world, it takes 4 professional recruiters, 1 full-time working year to screen and select each 20 new employees (representing 150.000 Euros in related costs).
AIRA (the Artificial Intelligence Recruitment Application) shortens the screening time needed to aproximately 2 minutes (allowing HR staff to focus on quality and core competencies, rather than on the time-intensive pre-screening process) . It is the core of a 360 degrees platform created by Evosoft, able to disseminate job descriptions through a proprietary job board, collect applications, sort, screen, rank and predict which applicants will make the final shortlist in the recruitment process. It aims at substantially reducing the cost per hire (CPH), by assisting the HR staff and recruitment agencies in selecting the most likely candidates.
Project: Educare.ro 
Entrepreneurs: Radu Alexandru
Description: Educare.ro is a flexible school management application that can help schools worldwide connect with parents, teachers as well as students, while still maintaining their academic & financial information in a secure platform. The basic modules are: student registration & management, grading with multiple grading types, attendance by day or subject, comments in class, financial details with installments, discounts, easy reporting, etc. All this information is accessible, in different formats, by students, parents, teachers and school administrators. The company (Fronema.ro) was founded in October 2007 and has been acting both as a startup and a web agency in order to sustain startup development.
Project: Idealist 
Entrepreneurs: Mariuca Macovei&Tavi Anghelus
Description: IDEALIST | Regarding brands is a Romanian agency specialized in online and offline creative services. With a three years experience, IDEALIST | Regarding brands has worked for clients such as Groupama Asigurari, Timisoreana, Rigips, Eurogsm, Kinder, Apa Nova and others. Their creative services range from on-line and offline identity to web development, 3D works and production crafts. IDEALIST | Regarding brands is all about helping companies become prosperous.
Project: Lime & Tonic Prague
Description: Lime&Tonic is a fresh City Guide‐ helping locals discover new places to eat and cool things to do in their town, then rewarding them for repeat visits. The hybrid model combines a city guide, special offers and stackable rewards to create a sustainable promotional platform for local merchants/businesses, challenging the widely popular “Daily Deal” model. Lime&Tonic aims to introduce our members to merchants, and then convert them in to repeat clients utilizing our increasing reward program.
Project: MatSoft Technologies
Entrepreneurs: Mircea Digulescu
Description: Matsoft Technologies is a high-tech software company, focusing primarily on Research and Development in the Business Process Management Systems and Distributed Computing (especially Grid architectures) fields. The Company’s leading product suite is the MAT Business Suite (under development), including MAT Business Server and MAT Modeler. Matsoft Technologies aims to market an integrated BPM Suite – Grid Services Infrastructure to mid-sized and large organizations across the spectrum (especially in the Energy, Process / Discrete Manufacturing, Financial Services & Banking, Retail and Distribution, Services, Utilities and Government verticals) either directly or trough implementation partners (IT firms integrating or build a solution on top of the MAT SOFT TECHNOLOGY BPM/Grid Stack).
Projects: Metropotam 
Entrepreneurs:Dragos Novac
Description: Metropotam is a website launched in 2006, owned by a group of private investors, two of them entrepreneurs still working for the company. Metropotam started as a publishing website which transitioned towards a platform for young people engagement. Metropotam’s strategy is to create a strong brand – by means of which they have employed the online environment – and then leverage it into segments with lucrative opportunities. Their objective is to create a large network of engaged users, differentiated by user experience, and defensible through network effects.
Project: Orpheus Capitals 
Entrepreneurs: Cristian Dascalu
Description: Orpheus Capitals is an Investment Consulting Company. The core mission is to Revolutionize the world’s understanding of time and build research solutions around it. The Alternative Research methodology includes Price fractals, time cycles, technical analysis, sentiment and statistical research.
Project: StockPodium 
Entrepreneurs: Chris Georgiev
Description: StockPodium is an online marketplace for stock images. StockPodium assists customers in finding the right image with the help of visual similarity in addition to standard keyword search. Starting with the initial idea to be an aggregating/meta-search engine for micro-stock photography, it is now an agency selling the aggregated images directly on its site, in partnership with one of the top players in the micro-stock market, acting together in co-opetition. StockPodium offers a combined approach utilizing our visual similarity and image understanding technologies. Customers are empowered to search using not only keywords but also based on visual criteria. They can use some of the images they’ve got as result of a text querying and use it as an additional visual filter during the search process, or they can search using uploaded image or an outside image defined by its URL. This greatly reduces the time people spend trying to reformulate the search quires and narrow down results.
Project: Squeeqly 
Entrepreneurs: Alexandru Rada
Description: Squeeqly is a global Internet company based in Eastern Europe, Romania. The company’s sole focus is to provide the best solution for online merchants to grow their business over social networks. The team brings together cutting edge technologies and innovative ideas to exceed customer expectations and to become a key reference in social shopping area.
Squeeqly can be regarded as an extension of online merchants marketing department, complementing their internal resources with minimum involvement and maximum outcomes. Their core value is customer orientation, always putting the customer in the first place.
Project: Wegetthere 
Entrepreneurs: David Nagy
Description: Wegetthere.com helps people travel more, through a crowdfunding platform dedicated to travelers, explorers and adventurers. Travelers can raise funds for their trip from their family, friends, the community and even companies. They can also add information (text, audio, video, etc) about their trip, set the money goal and also some groovy rewards for the people who will support them and share their experience with the whole world via Social Media platforms. If travelers of the platform reach their goal, they received the acquired funds and can start their travelling.