Skolkovo supports Pioneers Festival for startups in Austria

The Skolkovo Fund will support one of the biggest start-uppers’ events in Europe - Pioneers Festival to be held on October 29-31, 2012 in Vienna. Austria's capital will meet leading European investors, entrepreneurs, young companies, and many other community members, who will discuss the global technological trends in the Internet, IT and mobile technologies.

Offering a unique opportunity for professional networking, the festival will hold a contest for the best start-up project, which could be won by Russian companies too. 2500 guests are expected to come in total.

850 projects from 58 countries filed their applications for participation in the Festival. The top 50 start-ups will make presentations to the jury investors on the 29th of October. The company, which presentation will be recognized as the most impressive, will receive a prize from the organizers. The Skolkovo Fund will be represented by TOYTEMIC Inventions, last year's winner of the competition Skolkovo Innovation Award with the support of Cisco I-PRIZE.

TOYTEMIC develops an innovative system of spatial positioning. The technology allows multiple self-propelling objects to determine the point of each other's locations, to act as a team and navigate the space without external detectors. This technology is in demand of toys, robots and consumer electronics manufacturing.

Eugene Smetanin, the CEO of TOYTEMIC Inventions, says that during the Pioneers Festival they hope to establish contacts with investors that could be interested in the proposals about the production of interactive toys made without using the developed technology. He also adds: we believe it is necessary to prepare the base by releasing a series of relatively simple products before we bring our breakthrough technology to the market.

There are more than 60 entrepreneurs, investors and business gurus among the speakers and participants of the conference to be held on October 30 and 31, including Wordpress founder Matt Mullenweg, the co-founder of Siri Adam Cheyer, the chairman of EDventure Holdings Esther Dyson, the creator of Angry Birds Peter Vesterbacka, the creator of Startup Genome project Bjoern Lasse Herrmann and a startup guru Sean Ellis.

There also will be discussions, presentations and interactive workshops on topics related to entrepreneurship, innovation and technology in addition to the main sections of Pioneers Festival.