New Business Idea 2012 competition winners announced

The Final ceremony of the annual national competition of startups New Business Idea in IT and e-commerce took place in May, 24 at the Central House of Entrepreneurs. Processing center PayOnline together with ISA SUPPORT OF RUSSIA and educational center CareerLab organizes the competition for the second year in a row. The top 10 projects were assessed by the largest Russian experts of financial, technological and investment companies.

Pryaniki project, the first place winner, received a cash prize of 200 K RUR from the organizer (PayOnline) and sponsors (Photobank Laurie and National Association of distance selling). Also, all the finalists received the following awards from the contest partners: connection to PayOnline website services, domain and hosting from Reg.RU, a mini-audit from the VBO Consulting, books from the Alpina Pablisher, a certificate for advertising from the Blogun.

The expert council representatives also awarded the projects they liked. Leonid Markovic, the head of MegaFon-Moscow design and development of mass market services department presented 4G modems to RealSpeaker, Transportation TV and Krechet teams’ representatives. Anton Belousov, the Softline Venture Partners Fund expert, presented certificates for a year of free Copiny customer feedback service use to the teams YouDo and Spice, 1 year of free hosting from ActiveCloud company and the opportunity to start using the customer loyalty management service Client24.ru (email, sms mailing, events information support). Sergei Eremin, project manager for the development of technological entrepreneurship of the Microsoft Russia strategic technologies department, invited the YouDo project team for training Start in Garage.

According to Catherine Shokhina (Business and Finance and New Business columns’ editor), the representative of the contest’s general information partner, www.expert.ru, New Business Idea Competition not only provides investment for business development to the winner, the project Spice, but also creates an effective communication platform for startupers, business, venture capital and investment companies. The educational aspect of the project is not less important - this year the contest organizers held the first free educational conference for small IT business.

In addition, the Expert Council brought together representatives of the largest Russian investment organizations: Softline Ventures, Bright Capital, Fast Lane Ventures, JSC Moscow State University Science Park, eVentures Russia, InCube business incubator. The representatives of the National Association of distance selling and association E-money expressed their opinion of the finalists’ projects.