During Seedcamp Week 2010 we also had the opportunity to interview another one of our main speakers: Christopher Grew, partner at Orrick. Chris told us that he thinks Eastern Europe has got a lot of web business potential and that he is looking forward to meeting Eastern Europe entrepreneurs at How To Web 2010. During his presentation at the conference, Chris Grew will explain to you how to ensure that you and your technology business are suitable for investment in a few easy steps.
Past articles
Codility – smart Polish start-up
Codility is the programming skills automated assessment solution from Poland that saved recruiters time and money by filtering underqualified job candidates. The 3 start-up founders won the 2009 Seedcamp Week and received 50 000 € for developing their solution.
Codility is dedicated to helping companies hire better technical talent by providing automatic assessment tests that can test programmers in a very effective way. Codility’s target audience are software development companies and corporations with high IT demand (telecom, finance). By using codility recruiters will save a lot of time and money that t
hey were previously spending for recruiting software developers. One of the great advantages of the Codility tests is the fact that they provide on-the-job technical skills assessment and are not only a proof of the theoretical abilities of the developer. Another great advantage of Codility is the fact that it can be used by non-tech recruiters, thus saving the time that CTOs and Senior Developers in corporations spend assessing and recruiting new colleagues.
The founders of Codility are Grzegorz Jakacki (CEO & CTO), Tomasz Walen (Principal Developer) and Tomasz Blaszczyk (Technical Advisor). Codility was founded in Warsaw in 2009 and was one of the Seedcamp Week 2009 6 winning teams. After winning the start-up competition the company Codility Limited was founded in London, UK and received 50 000 € seed funding from Seedcamp.
The idea for Codility has originally come to the founder Grzegorz Jakacki during the time he spent working as a Senior Software Engineer in Beijing, China at Exoweb.net. During that time he spent long hours recruiting programmers, testing their technical abilities and running tiring interviews. Greg then decided that the process needed improvement and worked on developing an automated evaluation method. The automated evaluation method he then came up with had saved around 4000 hours of his time in 2 and a half years. That’s how the idea for Codility came up and, of course, Exoweb became Codility’s first customer generating more than 1200 evaluations per month.
Codility is also recognised as one of the smartest UK’s small businesses in 2010 being announced as one the Smarta100 2010 edition winners.
AdTaily – fast growing self-service advertising platform from Poland
AdTaily is a self-service advertising platform which has managed to build a network of more than 16 000 publishers and 3000 advertisers in a bit more than a year. AdTaily provides publishers with an easy way of selling advertising space directly to their readers, many of which would like to sponsor a website and reach its audience if only the process were less difficult.
The success of AdTaily is obvious as the website has reached in less than a year a number of 1 billion impressions a month in both Polish and English version together. AdTaily was selected as a finalist of London Seedcamp Week 2008
and was launched may 2009. The founders of AdTaily are Marcin Ekiert and Jakub Krzych, while Marcin Grodzicki is the current Business Development Manager of AdTaily.
The mechanism that AdTaily provides is a very simple one. It develops a self-service widget that lets online publishers sell ads directly on their websites and have full control over the price of the ads. AdTaily is targeted mainly at bloggers, forums, online communities, local businesses and services and iPhone of Facebook applications as it proves to be a very convenient advertising solution for them. The surprise is that AdTaily charges no commission for the purchases made directly through the widget as one would expect. How do they get their revenue then? Well, from it’s AdStore and direct sales to corporate customers.
The usability is one of the main advantages of AdTaily. The sales widget enables readers to buy ads in less than 3 clicks. What’s more is that readers don’t even have to upload the banner if they don’t want to. The alternative of generating a custom banner based on any entered text is also available. The company currently sells 30 000 ad units every month and is currently used by Canon, Ford and Nestle.
n June 2009 AdTaily received $314 000 in seed funding from the publishing group AGORA. As far as the future plans of the company are concerned, AdTaily is focused on becoming an ad-network in itself.