PeerReach: find and understand social media influencers

PeerReach is a tool to find the influencers in a topic, language and geographic area. But it does more than help you find them, it helps you understand their main areas of interest and influence in each one of them.

You probably thought of other tools that are stablished in the market- like Klout, PeerIndex and Kredly- that already do something similar. These competitors are focused on their ranking number and are not so good in defining the right areas of interest and influence.

When I first saw my profile in PeerReach and those of a couple friends I was impacted by the quality and relevance of their categorization.

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The service is free for regular users, and business (marketing agencies, communication professionals, etc.) can pay for an API to integrate PeerReach with their own tools.

Nico Schoonderwoerd is the founder of an international team directed from Amsterdam. They have recently raised €250 000.

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kwiqly: improve the energy use of your building withouth installing hardware

kwiqly wants to help you save energy money by using the data from your utility provider and combining it with the weather information. There’s nothing to install, no need to buy any hardware.

James Ferguson, has presented the company at the startup competition at LeWeb and they are one of my candidates for the final.

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Be-Bound: surf the internet without WiFi or data connectivity

Be-Bound is the great world changer of the startup competition at LeWeb. They propose a smarphone app that relies on the standard mobile phone networks to allow for Internet use. How do they do it? By sending sms to and from their servers.

To use it you buy prepaid credit and every action (reading an email, forwarding a message, updating your Twitter timeline), costs from one to three credits.

This application can really be useful on areas with no data coverage and for people traveling to other countries that don’t want to pay the hefty roaming data fees. They have already negotiated the access to all mobile networks in the world.

Albert Szulman is the president of Altheia, the company that has developed it.

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Update: they did make it to the final (the only company of the three I chose) but ended up second, in a decission critiziced heavily by the jury members themselves.

Smarter than Siri: Jini, a proactive personal assistant on your smartphone

Jini is an application for smartphones that proactively sugests you things to do based on other applications usage (like RunKeeper) and the sensor information from your phone (location, speed, light…)

Filip Maertens is the founder of this Belgian startup that can really change our mobile world. A good example of what Jini does: when he arrived to Paris to present at the Startup competition at LeWeb, Jini sugested a route to go jogging close to his hotel.

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They are also building an API and SDK so that other developers can tap on Jini’s intelligence to offer even more useful services.

They are my favourite startup to win the competition at LeWeb.

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TUZZit: the CheckThis of online project management

TUZZit is a very promising online project management tool that focuses in ease of use and visual appeal. There are no save buttons and it allows to present ideas and task just like we would do in a whiteboard, with a visual organization instead of a date or alphabet based presentation.

When Christophe Fruyter showed it to me at the Belgian Startups stand at LeWeb, I inmediately thought of CheckThis, the online tool to publish your internet posters. Both are very product oriented and focused on the user experience. They want to make their use easy and appealing.

Christophe is launching his startup from the south of Belgium, and has a developing global ambition.

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Belgian Startups at #LeWeb12 (aka #beleweb)

For the second year on a row there will be a unified Belgian startups stand at LeWeb. On this occassion there will be 15 startups participating from the three Belgian regions: 14 as part of the Startups.be #beleweb delegation and one in the startup competition (Jini). I will also be there as an official blogger, writing mostly for the Spanish internet business blog Loogic.