Wednesday's European final of the Startup World Cup global startup competition, which took place as part of the Startup World Cup & Summit in Prague, was completely conquered by the Czech projects Tatum and Readmio. The first offers a platform that simplifies the creation of blockchains in a revolutionary way. The second, through a mobile app, makes reading more engaging for children by adding sound effects to the storytelling in real time. Startup Tatum won the jury's main prize and with it the title of European champion. Readmio won the top audience award based on the vote.
Both projects followed up on their success from the previous day, when regional competitions for the Visegrad Four region also reigned supreme. This earned them a ticket to the continental finals, where a total of nine startups from all over Europe fought their way from other regional rounds and associated startup competitions. Each project had four minutes to present itself, followed by another four minutes of questions from the judges.
This time, the five-member jury had a rather difficult time finding agreement when determining the winner. "Within the V4 regional round, the victory of the Tatum project was completely clear. In the continental final, however, we considered other candidates - for example from the field of medicine - until the last moment. In the end, pragmatic investor reasoning decided which project has the greatest potential to evaluate our potential investment. Tatum is the furthest along in this regard, other interesting projects still have to mature a bit." explained judge Václav Pavlecka from Air Ventures, which together with another organizing company UP21 will offer the winner the possibility of an immediate investment of half a million dollars.
"The possibility of an investment is tempting, but even if we don't agree on it in the end, the victory is extremely valuable to us. Blockchain technologies have been on the fringes of interest until now, so the fact that we beat the other finalists is a satisfaction not only for our 30-member team, but also for the entire industry after years of intensive work. the moved director of the Tatum project, Jiří Kobelka, evaluated the success.
Steve Wozniak revealed his business plans
The program of the Startup World Cup & Summit was far from just a startup competition. During the day, a number of interesting speakers, panelists and mentors spoke at the event. One of the main personalities who captivated the audience was a journalist and teacher Esther Wojcicki – often nicknamed the “Godmother of Silicon Valley”. The author of the bestseller about raising successful people talked, among other things, about how she once mentored Steve Jobs' daughter and how Steve Jobs he often attended her classes himself.
He was another bright personality Kyle Corbitt, the president of Y Combinator – one of the largest startup incubators in the world, and the author of a software solution that can connect ideal startup co-founders, like Tinder. Kyle later also sat on the competition jury.
However, the company's co-founder was by far the brightest star of the day Apple Steve Wozniak.
In an unusually open video interview, he recalled the early beginnings of Apple, and then revealed his plans for the newly founded company Privateer Space in more detail for the first time. Through it, he would like to clean up the "mess" in outer space.
"If it goes just a little, we would like to work with Woz next year as well. He still had to be online this year due to the pandemic, but if it's possible, we want to bring him to Prague physically as well," concluded SWCSummit director Tomáš Cironis.
This year, due to the ongoing pandemic, the event took place in a hybrid format. Spectators who could not physically get to Prague's Stromovka could watch a live online broadcast from the main stage all day long. On Youtube channel of SWCSummit it is also possible to view the recording retrospectively.
