And Wozaik was selected as the winner of the afternoon session !

The Pitch slam competition consisted of a 5min pitch in front of an audience of local investors, entrepreneurs, executive and media and a judge panel (the composition of the panel is here).

We have had a really good time there and we were astonished by the high quality of the pitches and of the startup presented. Being selected as a finalist was a really good surprise and all the team is very proud of it. We also received high quality feedbacks and are waiting for the Innovate100 to send us our G/Score !

The other startups who presented were :

AM Session

• Tellmewhere (Runner up)
• Leetchi.com (Runner up)
• Novapost (Runner up)
• Allmyapps
• Beezbox
• Bookioo World
• COORP
• Hop-Cube
• Openchain
• SubMate

PM Session

• Ulteo (Runner up)
• Tryane (Runner up)
• EcoVadis
• Flipstory.com
• Gekko
• Intelen
• Silentale
• Sparkom
• Stupeflix
• Yatedo

You can also see the impressive pitch of Vincent below :

(By the way, thanks for the typo. Woziak ??? it’s Wozaik ! Grrrr…)

We also updated the event pictures taken by @olivez and @rougefrog during the event on our Facebook page. Thanks to them for covering the event.

Be a Wozaik Ambassador: make your friends know Wozaik. Explain them how you use it personally and share with us their feedback. We need you to spread the Wozaik buzz to your friends :

• On Facebook
• On Twitter

If you are interested to write a guest post on our blog and share your use of Wozaik with the community, let us know.

So what is new in this release ?

We have extremely improved our web clipping technology. Bookmarks load faster, update more frequently and are much more robust. We have simplified the Wozaik interface to make it more intuitive and user friendly. You can now directly search in your bookmarks thanks to the dedicated search engine or organize them into pages with tags. We are still in Alpha, and you may run into some bumps along the way. Please let us know of any problem you encounter.

We also released an iPhone version of Wozaik and a new sharing feature! They will be described in upcoming blog posts.

The Wozaik interface has been tailored to the device to make it easy to browse and access your bookmarks. Bookmarks are much more readable on small screens than full web pages and provide you with a direct access to the information you are looking for.

When you first access Wozaik with your iPhone, you will be asked to log-in to your account:

Once logged you can browse your bookmarks scrolling down:

You can zoom in with two fingers and filter your bookmarks with the tag button.

You can also search through your bookmarks using the search engine.

My favorite use of Wozaik on iPhone is for cooking. I cut a recipe I like on my computer and while preparing the meal, I use my iPhone to look at the recipe.

We are releasing new versions on a weekly schedule with upgrades and bug correction. Do not hesitate to come back often checking for new stuff.

On the business side, we have been selected to present Wozaik to investors during the 11th session of Tremplin-Entreprises.

Tremplin-Entreprise is a invetor-startup meeting located in the prestigious building of the French Senat. The meeting is organized in partnership by the ESSEC business School and the Senat. On the first day we presented Wozaik in a room of ~50 investors in the morning and demoing our product on demo pit in the afternoon. We had a top class lunch inside the “Salon Boffrand” where we had the opportunity to pitch VCs. The next day was dedicated to the award ceremony.

Adrian and Vincent demoing Wozaik

Thank you very much for your support and please spread the word !

Actually an advice we often get is to start our start-up global from the beginning. Okay I totally agree with that statement… But how to put this into practice ? I mean it is easy to translate your product or service in different languages and to think you are global. I wish it were true! However, I am affraid that starting a business globally is much more than that.

First, even if you are building a killer ap, you need people to talk about it… Influencers. Well, some (few) of them are global, but the majority have a strong influence in… their countries. So if I want to start global I should know who these guys are and make sure they test my product.

Then let’s say your product has launched globally and you get users from everywhere. In which language do you think your users will give you their feedbacks, hmm ? They access to your services using their mother tongue, so it is likely that they will use the same language to communicate with you ? And what about the language you use to communicate with them ? When we started to post on this blog, we had messages from our French alpha testers telling us that they would like to participate to the blog (leave comments etc…) but they were not comfortable enough to write in English. I imagine then that if you want to get the maximum from your users you need local people to manage your local communities.

Finally, being global also implies to be aware of what is happening in your sector…globally. That means being aware of the new local trends, local emerging competition, local partnership opportunities… And I don’t mention the challenges in being global in sales…

That is why I am convinced that all the actions taken to gather and build this European community are very important. They create the bridges that are needed to bypass the limits of location, culture and languages to makes it possible to access to our huge European market. They give the opportunities to meet the local people that will help you in being global.

We are taking the opportunities to all these actions to be part of this emerging community (many thanks the very active Seedcamp team that organized amazing events all accross Europe and to Mike Butcher and his initiative of Techcrunch Europe) and will make all that we can to help to create, reinforce and tighten it.

PS: By the way you can find below my pictures of the event.

The coffee pitch

The day started at 9:00 am at the Microsoft Technology Center. We were welcomed by a small breakfast and got the “team” flag stuck on our chest. Tagged like that, we had no other solution than to experiment our coffee pitch.

The goal of this one is to awake your future audience (coffee is there to help you !) to get its attention during the coming elevator pitch. It is also the occasion to practice and correct your first mistakes (hoping that your target won’t pay to much attention to it due to the early hour).

The elevator pitch

On the stage, you have 5 minutes (and no extra sec) and you want that these 60-70 people to remember you during the whole day (and even longer!), and get a good opinion of you and of what you do. The challenge is even harder when they already heard about 18 other start-ups and had no break for almost two hours. You should definitely practice a lot for this one.

The lunch pitch

Now, if you got it right, people remember who you are and what you do. They have in head the single message you wanted to pass them (that you and your startup rock) during the elevator pitch, and they come to you to get deeper information. The lunch pitch is a difficult one: you have to keep talking and pitch your interlocutors, while trying to grab food everywhere to refill your batteries. If you fail eating at this time, you won’t make it until the end of the day… but it is the opportunity to have a privileged contact with the people that felt the most interested in your project.

The mentoring pitch

During the rest of the day, we had four mentoring sessions with a panel of 5-10 advisors. 40 minutes shared between two teams to pitch and ask for advice. You better get prepared also for this one, knowing who are the people you are talking to. The difficult but most interesting part comes from the questions. You have to be prepared to answer to specific questions on your business, and believe me: these people are smart and quickly point out the strength/weakness of your project. You better perfectly know these points to get as much as you can of these short discussions.

The restroom pitch

Time to fresh up… But it is likely that the very famous guy you unsuccessfully tried to talk to during the whole day is the one washing his hands next to you. You can not miss this opportunity… pitch him!

The wrap up pitch

The day is almost over, it is 9pm and your throat feels like dry paper, having pitched the whole day. You feel exhausted, and these cups of champagne seem to be the definitive answer to your throat issues. You think you have succeeded, as you have been among the five winners. But it is not over yet. The wrap up pitch is the opportunity to gather the feedbacks of your day pitches. It is also the moment when you can engage in more passionate discussions, being more relaxed and show that you might also be a pleasant and sympathetic person.

The night pitch

This one was between me and powerpoint preparing the tomorrow 8am investor committee pitch.

The investors pitch

The day after, we were asked to pitch in front of the Seedcamp Investment Committee. OK, it seems that they liked our service and the team, but the question here is “should we put money in this project?”. Of course they want to go deeper in your product, understand the problem you are trying to solve and the solution you propose, understand where you are in your development road map and what and when do you expect to launch. But they are also very interested on the value that their investment would procure: what are your expenses, your funding history, and how much do you need their money. You get here into much further details than you got before, and have to be pretty convincing as you will be highly challenged.

The Techcrunch pitch

We were then invited to pitch during the Techcrunch talk held in La Cantine during the afternoon. It was almost the same format as the elevator pitch. However we only had 3 minutes to present Wozaik. This is a “media” kind of pitch; the goal is to convince potential users. They must feel that you are building the killer app and must be eager to test your product. I think the success of this kind of pitch should be an exploding beta invite queuing list.

So how to pitch?

Even if we had extensive two days practice pitching, I am still a young beginner pitcher (and I must confess that most of the time Vincent was pitching ). However, in a discussion with Laurent Chiozzotto, we agreed that a good early stage pitch should answer the 5 following questions in that order:

• What problem do you solve?
• Who will use your service ?
• How do you solve the problem? (your product/service)
• Why are you doing this?
• And finally, who are you?

We are definitely going to follow this advice to prepare Mini-Seedcamp Berlin pitches!

The four other winners are:

• Art & You
• Brainient
• Kwaga
• MxM

We will soon write a full report on the event with our complete feedback, but it was a really unique experience!

Wozaik is among the 20 start-ups selected through France, Spain and Benelux.

During this day, we will have the opportunity to connect with entrepreneurs, investors and top web technology advisors to present our service.

We are very excited to participate in Mini Seedcamp Paris and already waiting to leverage the experience and advice provided by the many industry top mentors and investors.

Stay tuned, we will post on this blog our feedbacks about this event.

This video will give you a quick idea of what Wozaik offers you.

Discover it right now, it’s just down here!