selected: 9 startups
from: 4 countries
meet them: right now!

CEE summary: AirBeacons, millions for bitmovin and more

Have you already heard of Polish startup Ifinity? The company is looking into one of the biggest problems of present beacon technology, the need to change batteries regularly to make the devices run smoothly. While solving this issue successfuly, their beacons also became somewhat smaller than the current industry standard. They are now called AirBeacons, and the power source does not have to be connected to the beacon physicaly.

“We figured out the way to power-up them periodically with an external power device (e.g. power converter or router) nearby,” Ifinity’s CMO Krystian Cieślak told TechCrunch. “They are able to harvest power through ambient electromagnetic waves emitted by the device. One power device can source many AirBeacons.”

Because of these features, AirBeacons can be used at many places where other similar devices would be hard to manage. The new shiny product is currently in testing, with estimated release date being fourth quarter of this year.

Austrian bitmovin got funded

Austrian startup bitmovin was founded in 2012 as a spin-off of the Alpe-Adria University. The current team of eight people is focusing on streaming solutions for various array of clients, mostly other companies – things like cloud-based transcoding and streaming services. With its streaming client bitdash and the cloud-based platform bitcodin, bitmovin makes it possible for users to view videos on different smart devices, while the quality is dynamically adapting to their bandwidth so videos will not get stuck or buffer too long.

Bitmovin got money from early stage fund Speedinvest, Constantia Industries AG and also AWS and KWF. Speedinvest and Constantia are long time mentors of the startup, and since they have grown strong ties with the team, the financial deal was a natural next step for all involved parties. The deal, specified only as a “seven-digit dollar investment”, should help Austrian startup to establish itself on European and US markets.

Startup jobs in Slovenia, Croatians in TechStars, startup school in Romania

Other recent news from the region are also worth mentioning:

  • Internet Week Slovenia recently announced the launch of a job portal StartupJob.si that is specifically dedicated to startups and young IT companies. Site is mostly focused on Slovenian market, but since it is in English, workers and entrepreneurs from anywhere can visit and try to derive some value.
  • Estonian Fleep, messaging app built and backed by a number of ex-Skype engineers, set off on the monetisation path. About a year after public beta launch, startup is introducing a freemium revenue model. While users paying €3 per month will get access to unlimited files and message history, free users should only be able to access messages from the last 30 days.
  • Codeanywhere, a Croatian startup founded by Vedran Jukic and Ivan Burazin in May 2013, joined Techstars as part of the fall 2014 Boston batch. Company offers its customers cloud based code editor and a development and collaboration platform. These tools want to make programming in the cloud easy, comfortable and effective.
  • The Start Me Up school of entrepreneurship can help all aspiring founders and businessmen to commence with their dreams. One week bootcamp planned its third edition for 14th to 20th September at Speranţa Hotel in Predeal, Romania. If you are interested, there is still time to apply. There is no prerequisite to be from Romania nor to already have your own startup.