by Startupbusiness special correspondent Carlo De Micheli
We left off the previous article [LeWeb London Part1] on ‘what investors look for in modern startups’.
The easiest examples to use are the three startups who won LeWeb’s startup competition.
At the third place is Teleportd, an application that lets you find real-time pictures taken by the smartphone crowd around the world. At second place we find Hojoki, it takes activity feeds from different cloud apps such as Dropbox and Google Docs, letting users work on different platforms seamlessly without letting anyone fall behind. The startup that won the competition is called Blippar and we’ll use it as example to understand what the judges, and investors, found interesting about it. Why is Blippar so cutting edge? How is it different from the other startups? The technology behind it is no joke. Augmented reality is a field that is really difficult to tackle, as you need a high quality product to create a unique user experience. Like Steve Jobs used to say, if technology is advanced enough, it will look like magic.
Blippar, at least from the demo, managed to do this. It’s a mix of high-end technical background and new ideas that brought this team to success. Let’s now take a look at a company that was at LeWeb, which already has a user base in rapid expansion: Uber. Like many companies nowadays, it is completely based on mobile. It’s simple to use, you just have to click ‘Pick me up’ on your smartphone and after a few minutes a driver with a luxurious car will pick you up. Surprisingly, the cost of the service is close to that of a normal cab. As we said for Blippar, if the technology is new and it works, it will look like magic or ‘like in the movies’. These two examples should be enough to understand that a new product isn’t enough, money isn’t enough, what is really needed is a pleasant user experience, which in turn is directly or indirectly the source of income.
To sum it up, if you want to do networking, if you’re looking for investors or looking for startups in which to invest, LeWeb is the place to be. The next edition will be held in Paris in December (4-6), don’t miss it!
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