Colnect wins Startup2.0 competition!!! nonick 2009, Bilbao, Spain

An astounding surprise, Colnect has won Statrup2.0 competition held as a part of the nonick conference in Bilbao, Spain.

Startup2.0 featured ~160 companies from all over Europe, of which 11 companies made it to the finals. All members of the jury unanimously voted for Colnect! The greatness of the achievement is even more vivid in the light of the grave difference between Colnect and most other contenders. Colnect has never received any funding and has been run solely by its single founder, Amir Wald, also writing this post.

Second place went to Genoom from Spain, a social networking platform designed to build private family networks. Third place went to Twidox from Germany, a free, user generated library of ‘quality’ documents that allows individuals and organizations to easily publish, distribute, share, and discover them.

Official announcements are found here and here.

Colnect's new promotional video, created for the competition, was met with spontaneous ovation from the crowd. Here it is:


Colnect's founder, Amir Wald, receiving the award:


More personal notes about the event will soon be published. Thanks to everyone organizing, participating and supporting Colnect.

Colnect got the the finals on Startup 2.0 2009

Colnect was chosen as one of the finalists to compete on Startup 2.0 competition to be held 24-25/April in Bilbao, Spain.

This year, 157 start ups participated, of which 11 were chosen to present in Bilbao. Three of those will win by a jury's decision. Though I believe Colnect is an extremely unique, interesting and useful project, its lack of any external funding may make it a little rough of the edges and so I'm lowering my expectations (though not my enthusiasm) in advance. Not many stay awestruck and drooling when seeing the intelligent special girl walking on the beach, most reserve their saliva for the fit hottie in bikini ;)

From their site: "
Startup2.0 is a competition of European web 2.0 sites whose objectives are to promote and reward the European startups (either created or willing to do so in the future) that work in the field of 2.0 technologies."

UPDATE: The finalists announced here

Paypal + Unicode - part 2

A previous post here was showing problems occurring by PayPal's inability to receive UTF-8 encoding. Although I still consider it a major PayPal fault, it may be possible to override this bug by setting your site's encoding on your PayPal account. When you find the 'Edit Profile' link under 'Account' tab when logged in, there should be a link to change your language encoding. It's not very noticeable but it's there. I haven't tested it and prefer not to use non-English alphabet in the value part of the input.



Good luck :)