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Now that I would like to write more for TechCrunch, I face a problem. I have the articles written, ready and sent for a review, but the editor has fallen silent, and news are getting stale.

So I now have to double my writing efforts just to get some points across. So yes, the winner is MySugr, the only Austrian startup at the Startup Week Vienna competition. Compared to all other companies who are set to increase productivity here, profitability there, these guys aim big! They are to increase the lifespan of diabetes patients (55 million in Europe alone) by up to 8 years. The team achieves that by creating a simple way of tracking the level of sugar and physical exercises for diabetics.

Off they go to the Silicon Valley then, to network, raise funding and spend the Austrian Media award of 30 000 Euros they have received at the Startup Week.

The guys who did not win, but were highly praised by the judges are MyKoob and Pocketguide.

Pocketguide is actually a great tool, it gives you directions to the beginning of your tours, navigates you throughout the tour while offering voice instructions. Once you’ve completed your tour, taken pictures and videos, those too are integrated into the 3D map. Here is a demo video.

PocketGuide promo from Pocketguide on Vimeo.

The idea came to the founder of the company Martin Retai as he was paragliding. The tour costs 5 Euros to download and does not charge roaming as all data are located on the phone. One must be organized enough to have the tour before going on the trip, otherwise the rich muldimedia content download will cost you much more than the price of the application.

Mykoob… Mykoob I liked from the start. The company offers value to parents and school kids via its cloud-based (read: easy to deploy and use) information management system and a social network. This demographics is often forgotten by tech entrepreneurs, who are perhaps too young to think about the needs of families with kids. Mykoob system is used in 10 percent of Latvian schools. Their nearest competitor is focusing on universities: different values, user base and pricing model.

Mykoob makes money on charging parents for the analytical data of their child’s performance compared to others. School students use that as well to know how well they are doing.Here is their video.

DoubleRecall, a Y-Combinator company which improves efficiency of web and mobile advertisement, has already secured half a million dollars from venture investors including Yuri Milner. They did not win today, but they didn’t really have to.

What they do is add interactivity in the ad. For example, the visitor to a freemium content website can answer questions offered within the ad and obtains one day access to the premium content in return. Here is an example.

DoubleRecall Intro from DoubleRecall on Vimeo.

Then there were companies which did not make it to the finals, but whose products I nevertheless find useful. Newswave, for example, increases traffic to the content websites by 10 percent by allowing editor understand and react to the comments.

Booklikes from Poland solve the problem the book readers have: storing, sharing, recommending and buyin books online. Now, that LivingSocial closed its facebook app Visual Bookshelf, this is the solution I turn to. The business model is based on the comission from the online book sales.

Also, quite frequently I use Mediatoolkit, a Croatian creation. This is also a tool for editors and bloggers, to show them which content gets the most Facebook shares, and the ones whic h are being shared fastest, hence predicting the news. Daniel Ackermann from Mediatoolkit told me also about his new two-week old venture called Socialnumbers, which shows the Hall of Fame of the facebook fan pages. Daniel plasn to offer this tool free to help promote other products, such as Mediatoolkit.

That”s it for now. My long wait at the Amsterdam airport is over and I have to catch my next flight to Bremen. And while I am at it: KPN customer service is atrocious.