A pair of Slovenian computer programmers, a stonemason from London and a Dutch-American based on a boat in Amsterdam are among the winners of Seedcamp, the week-long event to foster European entrepreneurial talent.

The organisers decided to invest €50,000 in six of the 20 teams that took part rather than five as had originally been planned due to thee quality of the entrants.

Saul Klein, Seedcamp founder, said: "Seedcamp is about helping as many promising companies get off the ground as possible and we felt that for this year six was the right number."

These include Kublax, a personal finance website that not only aggregates different bank accounts and credit cards, but can ensure that each is updated with new transactions automatically. It aims to improve on the kind of services provided currently by Microsoft’s Money software, creating a considerable competitor from day one.

Other winners have similarly bold ambitions.

Rentmineonline, created by Amsterdam-based Ed Spiegel, aims to do for the rental market what eBay has done for buying and selling items.

The Dutch-American spent time in the private equity industry in Silicon Valley before moving to France to study at Insead, where he met his team of Bulgarian software developers. He claims to have had his idea while sailing a boat around Amsterdam and wondering why so many craft were sitting idle at the side of the canal.

Buildersite.co.uk is a web marketplace for construction workers, where consumers can find tradesmen who have been recommended by others.

Ryan Notz founded the company after finding problems himself getting private work as a stonemason and roofer in Bristol. His website already has more than 2,700 tradesmen registered on it and Mr Notz believes the market in the UK alone is worth about £10bn, a figure that evidently impressed the Seedcamp judges.

Project Playfair, which aims to rival Microsoft’s Excel product with a way for spreadsheets to share their data online, was highlighted for particular praise by Saul Klein.

"Project Playfair has made a night and day improvement this week," he said. "It is almost a classic seed investment because it is massively risky concept … but you have got to want to encourage these people who are trying to do for numbers what hypertext did for text."

Seedcamp has been criticised for a lack of female entrepreneurs although the organisation’s CEO, Reshama Sohoni, is a woman. A minority of the teams at this week’s event were female led, but none of those were given funding.

One of the elements that particularly impressed those who took part in Seedcamp this year was the quality of the people who attended, which included the founders of Skype, the internet telephony business, and other leading European start-ups as well as senior executives from Microsoft, Oracle, Google and Yahoo.

Seedcamp itself is a start-up venture, having been created just four months ago. It has funding for a further three years and intends to hold a similar event to the one in London in 12 months time as well as smaller networking activities at key technology start-up conferences across Europe.

Here is the full list of winners:

Zemanta, from Ljubljana, Slovenia, which has created a service to automatically provide pictures, links and other enhancements to website text, such as blogs and news.

Kublax Financial Technologies, from London, UK, a personal finance management service.

Rent Mine Online, based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, which provides an online rental market through social networking sites.

Tablefinder, a Swedish aggregator of restaurant booking websites.

Buildersite.co.uk a UK-based marketplace for tradesmen.

Project Playfair, a UK-based software company providing online communication between spreadsheets.

September 7, 2007 11:58am in Tech | Comment