In Minsk for the first time has been conducted the final of Yandex.Start

On Friday, October, 4 In Minsk for the first time has been conducted the final of the Yandex.Start. The winner of the Startup-contest became the project “Mediant”, which creates mobile applications for easy understanding of education material. Its founders Anton Shaleinikov and Dmitry Bud`ko received tickets and payment for one of the mosr important Startup-events of the year - TechCrunch Disrupt Europe 2013, which will be held in Berlin in October, 26-29.

Yandex.Start is a series of events, where young teams present their projects to Yandex managers. This year the contest for the first time has been conducted in Belarus. About 30 Startups have filed applications: both projects at the idea stage, and ready prototypes, and event working businesses. Yandex experts in the course of two voting rounds and long discussions have selected the most interesting projects, which entered the team of finalists.

In the final Startup-teams from Belarus defended their ideas to jury, which included experts from Yandex: chief of personal services direction Anton Zabannyh, director of the company “Yandex.Ukraine” Sergey Petrenko, information architecture Denis Popovtsev, chief of the Minsk development office Aleksey Sikorsky. And also representatives of Belarus IT-industry: Aleksander Bulakh, chief of the Center “Startup Technologies”, Yury Gursky, founder of Sport.com, and Sergey Barisyuk, one of founders of a successful Startup Quoteroller.

The second place in the contest has taken the system of visual feedback for web-development TrackDuck. The project’s team received as a prize two iPhones 5. The cloud service Caspowa for sites downloads is the third winner. Its team received two iPads mini. Audience prize has got the project TurboCRM. The rest finalists have also received valuable presents.

“In Belarus has formed a very friendly Startup-society, says Grigory Bakunov, - director on technologies distribution of Yandex, and jury chairman of the Minsk Start. – Those, who managed to achieve some results, are willingly share by experience with starting colleagues. For example, Quoteroller, who attracted seed investments this year, actively participate in the society life: they have been mentors at the Belarus Startup Weekend, entered our jury. Or MapsWithMe, who work during two years, but already are sponsors of Startup-events. This is a rare enough scene for CIS countries”.

A list of finalists:

I place: “Mediant” – mobile education applications.
II place: TrackDuck – system of visual feedback, which allows noting mistakes directly at site’s pages or web-projects.
III place: Caspowa — cloud service for sites’ download fastening.

BooknGo — service for online-booking of flats.
MetricsCat — analysis tool for mobile applications market.
Superpower VPN — anonymous and secure VPN-service for users (winners of the Startup Weekend Belarus).
Talaka.by — noncommercial platform for realization of socially-important projects in Belarus.
TurboCRM — CRM-system for small business.
UTrailMe — mobile platform for direct online-translation of video.
Vead.me — social network, created around events.