The online edition of the Financial Times has published a special 6 minute video report about the IT potential of Cluj-Napoca. Chris Bryant, Central & Eastern Europe Business Correspondent for Finacial Times has paid the city a visit and has given a fresh point of view concerning the business context here.
The video material is called “High hopes for Romania’s IT hub” and presents the city’s potential for IT outsourcing and entrepreneurship in a very positive tone.
The star of the video is the 27 year-old Romanian online entrepreneur, Sergiu Biris, the founder of Trilulilu.ro. Trilulilu is Romania’s YouTube, a video sharing friendly platform who draws 3 million visitors a month and has more than 700 000 registered users.
The video material certainly brings hope to the new wave of Romanian IT and online entrepreneurs and to the Transylvanian student town as a promising entrepreneurial hub and centre for IT development.
It seems like there is a lot more to hear from Estonia as far as the online business is concerned. Erply, the ERP on the web, is one of the most successful European startups at the moment and it is coming from the baltic country. Some say that Erply will be the new Skype and it will do for business software what Skype did for the telecom business. We certainly do hope so and look forward to hearing a lot from these Estonian guys in the future.
Erply is a business software company founded by Kristian Hiiemaa
in Estonia in 2008. The new Estonian software start-up is a web-based on demand business suite, consisting
of a powerful ERP, software for comercial retail inventory, invoicing and e-commerce that handles data across several sales locations, online stores and offices and provides real-time dashboards with relevant data. Erply means to offer its users an extensive set of business modules: CRM, full featured financials, inventory, POS, billing and webshop software. Due to the currrent economic context and to the need to focus on productivity, Erply is based on cloud computing technology, thus providing the convenience of computing capacity on-demand over the internet.
Erply won the 2009 Seedcamp and its clients number is growing rapidly, the business being already profitable. The client focus of Erply is very strategically thought as they are focusing on small businesses and requesting smaller business fees, unlike their competitors SAP, Microsoft and Oracle.
So far, Erply has raised $2 million in funding from Redpoint and Index Ventures, Marten Mickos, Zack Urlocker (both formerly of MySQL, Kenny van Zant (SolarWinds), Aydin Senkut, David McClure and the Accelerator Group. Erply will invest this funding mainly in marketing activities and team development.
Web innovation is global nowadays. It has never been easier for web innovators and entrepreneurs all over the world to get out in the open. I would dare say that nowadays web truly is a global language. However, Eastern Europe’s focus on this area is unexpectedly low and very few EE startups are launched eevery year. Nevertheless, the few international success stories seem to be proving that inspite of this small numbers of daring EE entrepreneurs, Eastern Europe’s got the web talent it needs.
The Slovenian Httpool, the Estonian Skype, the Romanian Interakt and Gecad, the Czech NetBeans and GoodData are all good examples of Eastern Europe’s web know-how. Zemanta, Codility, Erply, UberVU, Brainient are also a wonderful proof of Eastern Europe’s drive and energy.
According to Reshma Sohoni, CEO Seedcamp the EE entrepreneurs are: “Very talented from a technical standpoint. I find Eastern Europe’s entrepreneurs really driven and dream big. Many of them display the sense of urgency that is really critical for a startup entrepreneur to have“.
As a matter of fact this is exactly what the Seedcamp competition is all about. Seedcamp believes that Europe has the talent, the role models, and the capital founders it needs to succeed. That’s why Seedcamp is trying and, based on the success stories, it is also succeeding to empower web entrepreneurs all over Europe, including EE.
So, Eastern Europe has got the energy, the skills and the opportunities to make web things happen. But it no longer has any excuses.
According to Loic Le Meur, founder and CEO of Seesmic.com and LeWeb Europe tech event, “the fact that the largest investor in Facebook this year is a Russian company says a lot about the Internet industry in eastern europe, I am expecting entrepreneurs from the east to build more international leaders very soon“.
Alex van Someren, UK IT Entrepreneur, states the exactly main idea: “I’ve met a lot of exciting and imaginative entrepreneurs and technology businesses from Eastern Europe recently, and I think How to Web looks like a great opportunity to meet and spend time with even more of them!“.
So… do you speak web? Then, what are you waiting for?
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Mission
 How to Web aims to support Eastern Europe’s grounbreaking tech experts into becoming web trendsetters, developing the next world-changing, innovative web products. |
How to Web Conference
 The How to Web Conference, organized once a year in Bucharest, Romania, reunites hundreds of entrepreneurs and tech professionals with great speakers and investors from Europe and beyond. |
How to Web Blog
 The How to Web Blog aims to become an important source of information for and about the Eastern European startup scene, covering news, offering useful pieces of info, tips and advises. |
Contact
 How to Web is a project by Wembrio. E-mail: news@wembrio.com. Address: Stelea Spatarul 21, Bucharest, Romania. |