Investors, entrepreneurs, policy makers and other key players will join us to discuss howLondon’s startup scene is evolving. Eric Van der Kleij (CEO of the Tech City Investment Organisation) and Sherry Coutu (Serial Entrepreneur, LinkedIn Board Member and Angel Investor) will join us in the discussion.

We will present our main findings and our top 20 London startups to look out for. Drinks and Snacks will be available for the networking after the keynotes. There will be a showcase of some of the most interesting London startups too.

Join us at the Innovation Warehouse (63 Souht Poundry Avenue, ED3F 2PC) on the 27th of October. 

If you have any queries contact us on events@startupintelligence.net. We hope to see you on the 27th!

IBM is hosting a networking event for startups and investors. The IBM Smartcamp will take place in Istanbul on the 4th/5th of October and is focusing on startups working towards a Smarterplanet - ie, companies with innovative solutions in analytics, energy, healthcare, cities, transportation or security, for example.

Our report gives a brief intro to the booming online scene in Turkey.  The country benefits from stable economic growth and increasing private consumption and foreign investment.  Six to nine million users have spent $16.3b in the ecommerce market in 2010 only. The country has a high penetration (60%) of credit cards and is massively keen on social media, being the third largest audience on Facebook.

The young population (70%  is under 30 years old) is the perfect driver for tech innovation. Government has been promoting tech entrepreneurship with increasing public spending in R&D and tax benefits for startups. Investors like Inventures and Hummingbird Ventures have an eye – and a stake – on the local market. Other European and American investors are flying to Ankara or Istanbul to dig into the local scene.

You can read more about our report here. Or take a look at the startups to look out for in the Balkan region. If you’re interested in any of these local markets we would love to delve into more detail, just let us know

The new dashboard will include not only the SI score, but many other metrics and financials for thousands of early-stage and growth companies. Until then, we won’t be posting our daily top performing startup.

Meanwhile, we have been busy researching and writing about local tech startup scenes all around the globe, from Turkey to China, passing by Brazil, Portugal and London. More details on that soon…

The mobile application uses camera devices to recognise an object, which has content associated to it. Users then see the extra content around the real object, which can include extra information on the product, maps, ads, 3D games or videos.

Blippar’s technology works with any camera and on all kinds of object, which opens up many possibilities for brand advertising, marketing and PR, beyond the more traditional QR codes. The best thing however is that it comes without the 6 figure price fee that might be expected of such sophisticated technology.

Founded in London in early 2010 by Ambarish Mitra and Omar Tayeb, the company is looking for further investment to hire more staff and open new offices in the US.

Other major players in the augmented reality sector include Junaio and Aur­asma -from the software giant Autonomy.

According to research company Gartner, Augmented Reality is one of the current Top 10 strategic information technologies and forecasts that the AR industry revenue is set to reach $1.5 Billion by 2015.

But the trick lies in getting users to download the app. Incentives such as daily deals or other discounts will be necessary in order to stimulate users to actually engage with this kind of application.

To see how Blippar works, check out the video below.

Mobile Augmented Reality by Blippar

The journey for Ex.fm began in 2010 as a Google Chrome extension named ‘Extension.fm’. Since then, it has evolved into a music discovery tool focusing particularly on new bands and the alternative music scene.

The experienced founders include Dan Kantor, Charles Smith and Marshall Jones. The tam of seven is based in New York.

Ex.fm has raised $1.25m in two rounds of investment. Spark Capital Partners, Betaworks, Dave Morgan and Founder Collective are the main investors. The company is using the recent $750,000 to develop its features and expand its user base.

The startup has 50,000 users but is now shifting its focus from being a universal music player to a community-based tool with a narrower yet more engaged audience.

Ex.fm faces competition in the online music industry from startups such as Turntable.fm, Dubset and Broadkastr. Established mainstream rivals like Spotify, Pandora or Grooveshark also play a significant part in the market.

The application is free and available on the iPhone. It will soon be available for Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer and Android.

Which music players do you use? Which ones are the best?

The London based company analyses online reputation based on social networks. It crawls through millions of online profiles to establish individuals and companies’ social capital in terms of audience, activity and authority.

It is currently looking mostly at Twitter, but LinkedIn, Facebook, Quora profiles and a maximum of three other blogs or websites add to the weighting.

Peer Index selects topics of discussion and identifies the experts on each topic. In the future, it hopes to grow to the point when you could enter any topic, like “restaurants in London” and find out who the experts are. Then you could follow them, read their opinions on the topic, and possibly even contact them.

The social score system targets marketers and PR agents, who are the ideal clients of Peer Index.
Its biggest competi¬tor is Klout but other competitors on on¬line authority and influence include Traackr, Twitalyzer and Tweet Grader (from HubSpot).

Although there is an appeal¬ing market for targeted advertising, critics point out that it is hard to produce relevant and accurate results, beyond the number of twitter users, retweets or mentions.

The company was founded by Azeem Azhar who has a background in journalism and online media.

Have you tried Peer Index or one of its competitors? Did you get any interesting results? Share your thoughts with us, via comments box, twitter or mail

The startup was founded by Berkeley alumnus Erdem Ovacık and Stanford alumnus Kutlu Kazancı and has seven other team members. It has offices both in Copenhagen – where one of the founders was living when they created the business – and in Istanbul. The team wanted to capitalise their existent network in their home country, Turkey. At the same time, they see Copenhagen as a more suitable location to launch a global business.

After proof of concept, WeDecide launched its 1.0 version in April 2011. It had 15 clients so far, from a 30-people organisation to companies with 2500 employees. The Turkish food ordering website Yemeksepeti.com was one of their customers. They are currently partnering with the NGO YAP – Yeni Anayasa Platformu, a debate portal for public discussion of Turkey’s new constitution. Pricing plans start at $55 for non-profit associations, schools and other communities. Larger corporations receive a quote according to their needs.

We Decide received initial investment from Investures, the seed fund from Turkish company Inveon. The founding team has also invested in the company. They are now looking for further investment to develop their application and expand to new markets.

The startup created a device with the company D-Link – the Boxee box – that connects to TVs displaying shows and movies, through partnerships with content distributors such as BBC, Love Film Netflix and Hulu.

Boxee is available in 20 countries where users can either buy the box for $200 or create their own, by downloading the software for free and installing it on their own computers.

The company was founded in 2007 by Avner Ronen and Idan Cohen and now it has three offices in New York, Tel Aviv and London with 28 employees worldwide.

The service runs on Windows, Apple and Linux, as well as on the Apple TV (through a third party application)

The Boxee Box faces competition from a variety of sources including Apple TV, Google TV and even devices such as Xbox and PS3. But it tries to top these by offering a wider variety of applications and content distributors. It also plays more formats than its competitors and has no membership fee.

Ultimately, content distributors like Net­flix could also be considered competitors.

It handles all the common opera­tions available at a physical branch, but it doesn’t actually handle any cash. More complex operations such as mortgages are not available though.

It was founded in New York by former Wall Street em­ployee Josh Reich and ex-Twitter engineer Alex Payne, who got their inspiration from their negative experiences with personal banking.

The company plans to monetise through interests margins and interchange which will be shared with partnering banks.

The team is still developing the user interface and plans to open to the general public in 2012.

Some features overlap with the expenses manager Mint such as the accounts aggregation and the possibility to set budgets or saving goals, but BankSimple plans to integrate Mint in its features. Mobile pay­ment startups such as Mobank are also competitors as they allow users to execute payments on the go.

The mobile banking market is growing significantly, as technology evolves and smartphone adop­tion increases. In the UK, mobile banking usage increased from 9.7% in 2010 to 20.4% in 2011, while in the US rates went from 11.4% to 21.9%

On the other hand, it targets Taxi drivers by offering a dedicated GPS device where all the information is gathered at a price of £100/month. The startup also offers a customised platform for corporate clients, where they can centralise all their taxi orders, rides, credit and invoices.

The startup was founded in Israel in 2010 by the Russian-born entrepreneur Shahar Smirin and is now aggressively expanding into European markets including London, Paris, Madrid, Rome and Berlin.

Competitors include UK-based companies UbiCab and Taxi Zapp. In the US, TaxiMagic and Cabulous offer similar services.

GetTaxi’s terminal allows users and drivers to communicate and learn about each other before actually meeting and it aims to substitute the existent client scouting platforms and networks.

Have you tried GetTaxi’s application?Let us know your thoughts.