London-based entrepreneur Juan Cartagena, the 30 year-old CEO of TraitPerception, an online tool to measure personality traits through crowdsourcing, has won the inaugural Bizcamp Tel Aviv start-up competition, held last night at Google Campus in Shoreditch, London
Juan, who started his company just six months ago, beat stiff competition from three other UK finalists, who were each given 10 minutes to pitch their business to a formidable panel of judges, which included: H.E. Daniel Taub, Ambassador of Israel; Debu Purkayastha, Principal of New Business Development for Google; Gilad Novik, Chief Technical Officer at small business investment specialist Horizon Ventures and Jamillah Knowles, UK News Editor, The Next Web.
Juan joins nine other winners from different European countries, who will travel to Tel Aviv next month to gain valuable insight into how Israel, a country of just 7.8 million people, earned the nickname, the “Startup Nation”.
Juan said: “I’m absolutely thrilled to win the place at Bizcamp. It’s going to be great to mix with the other entrepreneurs from Europe, visit the inspiring places and meet all the inspirational people in Israel. I’m hoping it will open some doors for the way for my business to develop.”
Organised by the city of Tel Aviv and Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Bizcamp’s ten day itinerary (14th-24th October) is formed around a schedule of business meetings and workshops with Israel’s most successful start-ups, entrepreneurs, tech investors and leading multinational tech firms. Seminar topics covered during Bizcamp include strategy formation, financing models, intellectual property and pitching. Bizcampers will also win exclusive “access all areas” visits to R&D centres in Tel Aviv, such as the Google Incubator, Microsoft Accelerator and the eBay Social Centre, where they will get to see up close what these global firms are developing next.
The four finalists were chosen from dozens of promising young British entrepreneurs from right across the UK that entered the competition. Each finalist was given a ‘Dragons Den’ style grilling by the panel expert judges.
H.E. Daniel Taub, Ambassador of Israel to the UK and competition judge, said: “The variety and quality of the entries speaks volumes about the burgeoning young tech startup scene in the UK. It was very tough selecting one winner, and we hope the runners up will all go on to make resounding successes of their businesses.”
“Juan showed the same type of passion and commitment for his business that is often evident in Tel Aviv’s most successful startups. I hope the combination of a great idea, great Bizcamp training, and the energy of Tel Aviv will help him go on to achieve great things.”
Juan, who comes from Madrid and now lives in London, became inspired to create Traitperception after meeting his current partner online. He said: “When I wanted to arrange a meeting I realised there was no way of convincing her I was an alright guy – we had no shared friends to act as an intermediary. The idea grew from there into a place that people go to check reputation before they do all kinds of transactions, meet potential flatmates, car share, or hire new employees.”
Users and their friends complete an online personality test at the Traitperception website. The website then eliminates bias using statistical tools and a version of an algorithm designed to expose online video gaming cheats. The result is a set of crowdsourced psychometrics such as pro-activity, emotional stability and creativity that can be used to judge personality and viewed independently or integrated into existing social websites.
To track the Bizcamper’s progress during and after the event, please go to www.bizcamptelaviv.com and follow us on twitter @bizcamptelaviv.
Editor’s notes
Bizcamp 2012 UK Competition
Bizcamp Tel Aviv’s UK judges included highly experienced people from the start-up community, including successful entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, business angels, finance/legal professionals. Judges evaluated the entries based on official criteria in two rounds, first to eight semi-finalists then to four finalists.
Finalists:
• TraitPerception – A scientifically based online tool to measure your personality traits so you can learn about your strengths and weaknesses and integrate the results with social networks.
• Eventie – an app to find the most interesting events in your area – recommended for you and by you, based on your likes and events attended in the past.
• Squadify – a sports social network promoting health & fitness for all by offering free tools to find players, create teams and play matches
• Mallzee – aims to make shopping more social online. Users make their own mall based on their favourite stores, our software finds products suited just to them and then their friends can provide instant feedback and help them shop.
Judges:
Debu Purkayastha, Principal, New Business Development, Google
Debu has a wide mandate at Google spanning several key strategic focus areas across EMEA, India & other regions. Until very recently Debu was Google’s Principal – Corporate Development spearheading its M&A and investment efforts in EMEA and other regions including the acquisition of ITA Software (travel search), DailyDeal.de (offers), Gizmo5 (VoIP), Phonetic Arts (text to speech), Green Parrot Pictures (video image processing), Zynamics (security software) amongst several others. Debu was also a key member of the Google team behind the recently launched “Campus”, a seven-storey co-working space for start-ups in East London’s Tech City.
Debu also sits on the Boards of Fon (wireless) and Mobile Planet (mobile apps) and the Advisory Board of Sadara Ventures (VC Fund).
Prior to Google, Debu headed Sabre’s Corporate Development/M&A team in EMEA and in a past life was a Telecoms/Media/Technology M&A Banker with Salomon Smith Barney/Citigroup in Wall Street, Silicon Valley and London. Debu has a MBA from London Business School and is a qualified Chartered Accountant.
Gilad Novik, Chief Technology Officer, Horizon Ventures
Gilad has over 20 years of international experience in the technology, telecommunication and Internet worlds. Having joined the Hutchison Group in 2000 and taken on several senior roles for Orange Israel, he moved to Hutchison’s Global Technology Group in London in 2006 as the Group Head of Innovation and Research. His role involved keeping up to date with the latest market and technological trends in order to identify key innovations and asses them on behalf of HWL 3G, which the operating companies (UK, Ireland, Austria, Australia, Denmark, Sweden, Hong Kong, Italy, Indonesia) also known as ’3′. Mr. Novik was involved in significant projects such as the introduction of Hutchison’s open mobile internet proposition X-Series and development of the Skype mobile phone. Gilad holds an Engineering degree from Tel Aviv University and an MBA.
Gilad is currently also a board member on the boards of Wibbitz and PlayMyTone.
HE Daniel Taub, Ambassador of Israel to the Court of St James’s
With over two decades of experience in Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, H.E. Daniel Taub has played a key role in a wide range of diplomatic, legal and political arenas.
As Principal Deputy Legal Adviser of Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ambassador Taub served as legal adviser to Israel’s missions to the United Nations in New York and Geneva, and represented Israel in many multilateral fora.
Ambassador Taub was extensively involved in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, helping negotiate most of the agreements reached between the two sides, and heading the Israeli side of the Culture of Peace track of negotiations. He was also an active member of Israel’s negotiation team in the Israel-Syrian negotiations.
Ambassador Taub is a much sought after lecturer on Middle Eastern issues, international law and negotiation theory. He is frequently invited to appear on television and radio, and lectures widely in universities and policy institutes in Israel and abroad. Within Israel’s foreign ministry he developed and taught training programs for Israeli diplomats in negotiation strategies and communications skills.
Jamillah Knowles, The Next Web, UK Editor
Founded in 2008, The Next Web is one of the world’s largest online publications that delivers an international perspective on the latest news about Internet technology, business and culture. With an active, influential audience consisting of more than 5.1 million monthly visits and over 7 million monthly page views, The Next Web continues to expand its global presence on its website with the addition of new channels and content partnerships, as well as through events in North America and Europe. You can hear Jamillah on BBC Radio 5Live’s Outriders and the Global Voices podcast. She’s based in London.
Eze Vidra, Head of Campus, Google
Eze heads up Google’s dedicated co-working, event and incubation space for startup companies in London launched in March 2012.
Prior to leading Campus, Eze was a strategic partnerships manager at Google, spearheading commerce offerings and product launches in Europe. Previously, he held leadership positions in a number of tech companies: he was Principal Product Manager of AOL Search in Europe, Senior Product Manager at Ask.com in San Francisco, Product Manager at Gerson Lehrman Group in New York and Team Leader at Shopping.com in Israel. He co-founded a technology startup in Israel in 2003 and is a passionate writer on startups and venture capital on his blog VC Cafe.
Eze holds an MBA from London Business School and a BA in Business Administration, IT Management and Entrepreneurship from the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) in Israel. In his spare time, Eze serves as a mentor to several European startup accelerator programs, including Seedcamp, Springboard, Emerge Labs, Oxygen and is on the advisory board of BBC Worldwide Labs.
Israel
Israel has more than 4,000 active technology start-ups. R&D centres for world-renowned technology giants, including Intel, Google, Apple, and Microsoft, all call Israel home.
Israel also has more companies listed on New York Stock Exchanges (NYSE, AMEX, NASDAQ) than any other country except the United States and China, and counts IT security company CheckPoint among its home-grown successes. Other companies with their roots firmly in Israel are, ICQ, Kinect inventors PrimeSense, web community-based GPS system Waze, and face recognition API Face.com, recently purchased by Facebook.
Tel Aviv
Many of Israel’s youngest and brightest start-ups are based in Tel Aviv. The city has become a genuine hot bed of innovation for creative and knowledge-based industries. Cities around the world are attempting to emulate its model, which provides a supportive eco-system for entrepreneurs to try to turn their ideas into business reality. The diversity of its economic fabric covers a vast array of hi-tech industry clusters and the full spectrum of the hi-tech life cycle, from grassroots start-ups to multinational superpowers.