Seedcamp Week kicks off in London

Record number of attendees converge to win up to $77,000

Seedcamp Week kicked off Monday, with a record number of attendees.

This year's camp - which includes a week-long schedule of courses and pitching events - features 23 startups (out of 900 applicants), with more than 100 mentors on hand to give feedback. The event, which is being held in London at University College, will run through September 17.

Companies at the week-long gathering range from one creating virtual fashion labels to another measuring and analyzing sales data, to one providing a digital publishing platform. 

From the list of 23, we can discern a few trends. Most of these services are for businesses, and not individual consumers. Companies that fall into the "business-to-business" include, Albia, an automated testing platform for software development, Garmz, a site for the creation of virtual fashion labels, Movyloshop, which focuses on mobile shopping outlets as SAAS for long tail retailers,  Offset Options , a service that helps companies integrate carbon offsets into online point-of-sale, Profitero, a sales analytics company, Publisha, a digital publishing platform, Robotmedia a company focused on mobile rich content application publishing, Sparkeo, which hopes to sell expert content through online videos.,Uberblic Labs A data integration service with a focus on Web and enterprise data, Visionect - who make Web-based tablet computers for wireless restaurant ordering  Wordy, a copy editing service using the SAAS model. GIS Cloud  a geographic and business database that uses the SAAS model, Hypezoo, a product news tracker,  Ineze,  a smart comparison engine for business decisions, and iSigned, a secure storage service for documents and contracts. The startups in the business-to-consumer category are Editd, a fashion trends analysis company with a focus on trend forecasting, Financeacar, a site that allows users to compare direct sales, leasing, and other financing options on vehicles, Getagreatboss, which lets people rank their bosses, Nuji - Social shopping platform, and Cognician, software that helps users to create and share mindmaps.

The advertising and promotions aspect are also fairly well represented, with the likes of  Tigerlily  who make tools that can help to monetize social media interaction for brands, Trebax a service focused on mini games in flash advertisement and Mailerlite, an email marketing company.The SAAS model is apparently also of interest right now, since three of the companies depend on it

On hand at the gathering will be a number of mentors with varying degrees of experiences across many industries. Some notable mentors include Christophe Maire from Textr and Atlantic Ventures, Dave McClure, founder of 500startups, Martin Ott from Moneybookers and Petteri Koponen, founder of Jaiku. A more complete list is available on the Seedcamp site. 

For those of you unfamiliar with the event, Seedcamp week is an event thrown by the micro seed fund, called Seedcamp. It's designed to help the Seedcamp organizers to decide whom to invest in. After a large application process, top contenders are invited to attend a week of courses, and given the chance to pitch in person at Seedcamp week.The winners get an investment of between €30,000 and €50,000 (or $77,000) and stay in London for three months to grow and develop their company.

The goal of Seedcamp, which was founded by Saul Klein, Partner at Index Ventures and Founding Partner of The Accelerator Group, is to jump start the community of entrepreneurs in Europe by funding startup's a wide variety of different helpful experts including: product experts, marketers, lawyers, recruiters and HR professionals, journalists and venture capitalists. This makes the program relatively unique in Europe, with the majority of companies funding startups focusing on capital and not mentoring.

Other members of the Seedcamp board come from organizations of note such as,  Anil Hansjee from Google, Bindi Karia of Microsoft, Lori Vokes of Cisco and Mike Shaver of Mozilla.

For anyone interested in following the events who couldn't afford a ticket to London, Seedcamp has set up a Twitter account.