I wanted to give some airtime to Telenet Idealabs Accelerator in Antwerp, partly because Antwerp has the most beautiful train station in the world and the world needs to know about it but mainly because there are always alternative options for funding with some really good smaller, creative accelerator programmes for Startups that do not secure funding from larger programmes.
The Telenet accelerator is a 4-8 month program which is part of the Digital Agency Linkman who are able to provide the creative workspace, resources and seed funding to push ideas to the stage where the program can release further funds and they recently opened the creative minds of the successful applicants by packing them off to Amsterdam.
The current program has 10 Startups engaged out of an initial 450 applications that can expect a structured path through to demo day in October 2015 which includes shaping, building and launching the product in the first four months in order to pitch for a further €50,000 in funding on top of the initial €25,000 investment.
Participants for the current program are deep in development mode at the moment so there is not too much information about the projects but here’s a brief description of who they are and what they do –
- Pith.li – The yellow marker for the digital age.. because yellow marker pens don’t work on screens.
- Salesflare – Analytics for b2b sales communications making sure that no sales leads slip through the net amongst all the noise.
- Hoplr – A platform the allows local neighbourhoods to organise everyday life by relevant real time location based information
- Geckomatics – Produces up to date street panoramas for use in industries like government, real estate, utilities and insurance.
- Scriptbook – Predictive analytics for the film industry allowing producers to see what the return will be on their investment based on story lines.
- On Air – Probably my favourite idea, allows people filming in the same location to collaborate on small movies together.. one for the social media age.
- Dot – What Wikipedia does for what something is, Dot does for where.
- Campr – An online platform which allows campers to find camping spots and people with outdoor space to offer campers a pitch. AirBNB for grass maybe..
- Apprentus – Find teachers in your local neighbourhood.
- Intuo – An interactive education solution that takes learning to data- driven heights allowing learning to be highly personalised.
