Predicting the Seedcamp 08 Winners

The chart above shows the end of the Hubdub Prediction Market for Seedcamp 08 (or SCW08 in txtmode). (Seedcamp 08 being a UK based competition for funding for pan-European startups) The actual winners were (from the Grauniad):

uberVu: This team from Bucharest in Romania are launching in the next month; the service tracks conversation and comments from the web and aggregates them. But he's preparing to move over to London to be closer to the physical community here.

Codename Kyko: This is in stealth, so details are still under wraps. It's a gaming service... more details soon! The UK founder is just 21 and has had some hugely positive feedback during Seedcamp.

Basekit : Simple design kit for websites and applications. Great idea form this Welsh team - and they claim it could mean a site that might takes weeks of code would be put together in a few minutes.

Soup: The Viennese developers have created a multi-publishing system very much like Tumblr, but are concentrating on rolling out mutiple language version in markets outside the US where Tumblr is already established.

Mobclix: These are analytics to help iPhone application designers improve their products. A US firm.

Toksta: Messaging and video service for social networking.

Stupeflix: This French service creates video packages from photos, audio and video clips

Congrats winners, and good luck to all finalists - though after this week that huge reliance on Ad funding all the Seedcamp players seemed to be after is probably going to be a far bigger ask.

As to the usefulness of prediction markets - the results are that it predicted 1 of the 7 winners (Basekit) in its top 5, 2 of them in top 10. Not its finest hour, but I predict this is because there were just not enough "wise crowd" votes cast, more the passionate supporters.

Incidentally, I see on TCUK that Hubdub has won a deal with Reuters - did anyone predict that ? TCUK also covers the Seedcamp winners over here.