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I believe that the Romanian entrepreneurial community, backed by the entire Eastern European environment, is constantly growing: more dedicated meetings, more dedicated professionals working on generating real interest, doers and not dreamers putting their minds and hearts in creating useful and insightful learnings. And Bogdan Iordache is one of them: pragmatic doer with an ambitious goals: how to tech, how to business, how to scale, how to learn, how to grow. In all, How to Web.

This autumn, the entrepreneurial community can mark some important milestones such as: How to Web, Girls in Tech, Startup Weekend, Startup Live, EMN Annual Conference: Sustainable Micro-finance in Europe, and Venture Connect. How to Web is an important tech conference not only for Romania, but for the entire Eastern-European region. I have worked and attended How to Web for two years now — 2010 and 2011 — and the changes have been remarkable. This year, when you have the CEO of Evernote coming to Bucharest, one can only imagine that Bucharest will become a tech mecca for the region.

However, although the conference is something else — the LeWeb for Eastern Europe —  what I would like to focus on is StartUp Spotlight: program designed for 32 early-stage tech startups from Central and Eastern Europe.

Applications for Startup Spotlight are open until October 13th 2012. 30 teams will join the program following the evaluation of the online applications, and 2 teams will join the program after going through a competition organized by IXIA together with the University Politehnica of Bucharest.

The program is dedicated to web and mobile startups, with less than 2 years of activity, having at least a working prototype that can be demonstrated on stage and which have not received funding bigger than €100k. The agenda starts with a full day of practical workshops on product management, agile development and business development. The teams will also go through a pitching workshop held by School for Startups Romania, where they will learn how to deliver a successful pitch, they will get to exercise the pitches to be delivered the following days and get feedback and advice on them.

The best 8 teams will be presenting on the main conference stage in front of the whole conference audience. The other 24 teams will be pitching on the stage specially dedicated to startups, where representatives of 12 great accelerators will also be presenting their programs and where panels on startups financing will take place. Teams going through Startup Spotlight will also be competing for a total of $20k cash prizes and will be receiving vouchers and other gifts.

The mentors of the program are also impressive, such as: Sitar Teli – Managing Partner, Connect Ventures (United Kingdom), Max Niederhofer – Partner, Accel Partners (United Kingdom), Jure Mikuz – Managing Director and Partner, our Radu Georgescu – founder of GECAD and Avangate (Romania), Irina Anghel – Secretary General of South Eastern European Private Equity  or Andrei Pitis – President of the Romanian National Association of the Software and Services Industry and active investor (Romania).

Such initiatives - both local and international, such as How to Web, School for Startups, Business Mentoring Program, Intel Business Challenge, Pioneers Festival, or Web Summit in Dublin should not be missed. The teams working on such events and conferences — and trust us when we say that it takes months of preparations — are highly motivated in changing the tech world. And so far, they have been doing a great job!