Surely, there are other companies which won their respective Europa nominations, but here is why I wanted to note these two.
It is perhaps obvious why Nordeus, successful Serbian game developer has been named a winner in a category Best Game. Its Top Eleven football game beat FIFA in popularity. The company has recently released a mobile version for Android devices, and is working on its iOS one.
Lookk, which connects designers with consumers via its glossy website, is less obvious choice to be written in a blog about eastern European innovative companies. But Seedcamp, which has incubated the company, refers to Bulgaria as its origins. Whilst the founder and CEO of Lookk Tamas Locher is originally a Hungarian (but was brought up in Germany and Austria and now lives in London), the CTO of the company Stefan Kanev is Bulgarian, and this is where the technology guys are based.
Other 40 or so nominated companies have not won, but for example Polish GammaRebels has been commended for its accelerating activities (HardGamma, the Polish venture fund has also deserved a special mention).
But if you must know, Peer Index, backed by Stefan Glänzer amongst others, has won the Gran Prix. Interestingly, the objectives of Peer Index is to distinguished real experts on the web from wanna be amateurs by algorythmically mapping out the social web. Sounds like a major problem which needs addressing.
