BizSpark Startup Shelby.tv Takes Home Overall Winner at TNW, Beating Out Radiation and Snowboarding Apps

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Shelby.tv recently won the The Next Web Conference in Amsterdam. It's a video web app that puts all your social shared videos in one place. 

Mark Voermans, BizSpark champ in The Netherlands, was at the conference, and he reports on why the judges chose Shelby.tv above all the others.

Judges and startups went through a couple of rounds of judging during this conference, over two days. When it was all said and done, Shelby.tv, which announced a new version of itself, called Shelby GT, turned out the winner, outclassing GPS apps, mobile apps for sharing snowboarding and skiing activity, and apps that help couples stay connected, though distance keeps them apart.

I admit that Shelby.tv is  a BizSpark member but I can’t be accused of bias, because my fellow judges also agreed they were the winner of this session. Shelby is your place for video. It's all the video your friends share, in one place... then Shelby gets smart, to give you personalized video on web, mobile, and smart TV.  Clever stuff. 

They were also the only startup representing New York City to be at the conference. That got them some kudos in this interview they did with TNW TV. 

Judging the Swarm of Startups at The Next Web

Last week, I was delighted to be involved in The Next Web Conference in Amsterdam, where I met with a very influential audience from all over Europe….startups, vendors, investors, press, bloggers, analysts….you name it, and they were there.  As well as sponsoring the event,  we also organized a pitch prep day with our partner Rockstart for the startups presenting at the event, to help them make the most of this exciting opportunity.

And it certainly made a difference – all the startups who took part in the prep day worked very hard and I could see the results when they went on stage!  It was a good reminder that while a lot of startups don’t prepare properly, the ones that do will see the benefit.

But, back to the main event.  I missed most of the keynote presentations because I was so busy judging and mentoring startups, so I’m going to focus on them (and for me, they are always the most interesting aspect of these events anyway). 

Tawkon, SnowCiety, ZapStreak, PlayerDuel and AppMotion made up the First Round on Day One and you can see a theme here -- snowboarding, radiation spotting and gaming on the mobile device. Overall, mobile apps were huge at TNW.  Tawkon helps people minimize exposure to radiation, while Snowciety connects ski-ing and snowboarding friends on the slopes. 

ZapStreak offers a mobile SDK for pushing content to Web-connected TVs(no extra hardware needed) and Playerduel can turn any single-player game into a multi-user game, with minimal effort.  Last but not least, Appmotion builds a framework that streams motion-based content to your smartphone, effectively turning into a games controller.  How cool is that!  SnowCiety took winning position (the giant video screen showing ski-ing and snowboarding was definitely a crowd-pleaser).  

Round two brought BellaDati, Tripl, Waytag, Babelverse and Shelby.tv on stage.

Shelby.tv took home the overall winner, but my other favorite startup was Waytag. Waytag is to GPS coordinates what DNS to IP addresses.  It is so much easier to share your waytag than trying to share a street address or GPS co-ordinate. You name it, your control it and you choose who to share it with.  I love it.

Day Two: It Kept Getting Better

First up on day two was Robin, also a BizSpark member.  Consumers are looking for trust when shopping online and Robin is today’s retailer’s sidekick for delivering that trust, helping to ensure great service, both online and offline.   Other startups who presented on day two included Between, Six3, Hojoki and Nuji.  Again, what a diversity of ideas!  In brief: Between provides a secret online service for lovers to communicate intimately.  Six3 makes it incredibly easy & fun to create and reply to video messages on any device.  I liked the idea behind Hojoki, which is to make all cloud apps work as one, by building one newsfeed that basically creates a productivity dashboard.  Nuji is doing well for itself: with over 250,000 stores and 300,000 products, it is creating a new type of social retail platform (it bills itself as ‘your social wishlist).

A full list is on the TNW website, with winners of the individual categories being:

  • Snowciety – best B2c
  • Babelverse – best B2B and People’s Choice Award
  • Between – best mobile app
  • Nuji – best web app
  • Frommees – most remarkable presentation
  • Beamapp – most innovation

I’m happy to have been involved in an event that shows what a great collection of startups there are in Europe today.  I’m looking forward to “The Next Web - The Next Year”.