Startup Europe Awards

Tag: SEUA17 Macedonia

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SOLE COMMUNICATION NETWORK is the Macedonian winner of IoT category

Country: Macedonia

Category: IoT

Project Aim: developing a platform that gives SMEs the opportunity to develop a tailor-made solution faster and cheaper than if it would be developed by an IT company.

What is the problem to solve?

Imagine you are running a company which is in purchasing a business application. You have two options: developing your own custom-made solution or implementing some of the existing out-of-the box applications.

If you decide to develop a customized solution, you will face two problems:

  • Development process is very long and therefore you will get a very expensive offer.
  • You will have significant costs for maintaining and upgrading the system.

Because of this, the custom-made applications market is an exclusive club of bi players, and SMEs simply cannot afford such solutions.

What SOLE COMMUNICATION NETWORK do:

We developed a platform that will give SMEs the opportunity (by themselves, with our help or with the help of third party consultant) to develop a tailor-made solution at least 10x faster, and thus a minimum of 10x lower initial costs than if it would be developed by conventional IT company.

Our solution SOLENET is a SaaS platform with an integrated app builder that allows fast development of tailor-made apps simple as stacking lego blocks.

The client ultimately receives an integrated application that fully meets its needs, available on all platforms, supported by all languages, easily upgradable and with zero maintenance costs.

Our market is costum-build software, a market that is experiencing a real boom with a growth of 33% per year, reaching in 2015 to 136B USD, and representing 3/5 of the total application market in US.

The market we want to focus on is SMEs regionally, US and EU.

Revenue will be generated:

  • Customizing application or order.
  • Monthly subscription per user and device.
  • Pay-as-you-go subscription to used services according to the price list.

Costumers will be acquired:

  • Direct sale.
  • Global distribution network .

CEO’s testimony:

StartUp Europe Awards is a chance for us to promote our solution in the heart of Europe, in front of people who share similar values and with ability to help our company to fulfil our mission and vision for open and digitally connected business world.

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Macedonian Honey, Macedonian winner in Climate Category

Country: Macedonia

Category: Climate

Project aim: By creating a new way of beekeeping and inventing a new hive -Elle Hive- Macedonian Honey work for one common goal: survival of the honeybee. Their bees become stronger, and their genetic material provide future bee generations easily to deal with predators and climate changes. Protecting endangered honeybee is not an altruistic venture – they are attempting to safeguard our own future. Honeybees as a major pollinator, are essential for the plant and ecosystem biodiversity. Climate change and biodiversity are inextricably linked.

What do you do?

We have created a new way of beekeeping and invented a new hive-Elle Hive. Everything that conforms to the natural habits of bees. We aimed our work toward one common goal: survival of the honeybee. Our work resulting in stronger bees with strong genetic material that provide future bee generations easily to deal with predators and climate changes.

We use no chemicals, no antibiotics, no acids, no fungicides, no artificial materials inside or outside the hive, no agricultural activities in 8 km radius around the hives. Our hives are sited 1600m up to the mountain where the wildflowers are pure and untouched We leave our bees alone to do what they naturally do best. We then collect all the surplus honey and place it in Tbsp size Honeystick´s.

Why do you decided to create Macedonian Honey?

Maybe you could stand to live in a world without honey, but could you stand to live in a world without chocolate, coffee, apple pears, avocados… Bees are responsible for 1/3 of all our food because bees are pollinating 70 percent of the crops that provide most of the world’s food including the alfalfa eaten by dairy cows. So, milk, butter, cheese, whipped cream and ice cream could all be missing from future tables, if bees are missing from this world.

Unfortunately, bees are dying at unprecedented rates — millions of bees are dying off across the planet each year. Scientists point to several causes of the bee die off, including climate change (recent wet summers have prevented bees from doing what they do best, searching out pollen), parasites, a class of bee-killing pesticides known as neonicotinoids and growing of monoculture crops to feed the world population.

Alas, these pesticides end up in the honey too, as bees buzz from pesticide-sprayed plant to plant, gathering tainted pollen and nectar, returning with it to the hive.

A world without bees would be devastating for food production and decreased biodiversity can lead to increased transmission of diseases to humans and increased healthcare costs. Our ecosystems sustain us and our economies – purifying our drinking water, producing our food and regulating our climate. We are in danger of approaching “a point of no return”.

The only species that will survive this mass extinction will be those species that benefit from our presence. We need to seize the opportunity to stop the damage to nature and biodiversity.

Climate change and biodiversity are inextricably linked. Preserving bees will therefore benefit all kinds of pollinating insects, animals and people. Protecting  endangered honeybee is not an altruistic venture – we are attempting to safeguard our own future.

“As winners of the national Startup Europe Awards, we will continue to fight against bee decline and create a worldwide network with others beekeepers that will embrace our beekeeping method and Elle hive.” Elena Fidanoska, Macedonian Honey´s CEO

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CULTUS, the winner in Edtech category in Macedonia

Country: Macedonia

Category: Edtech

Project aim: E-learning project portal promoting online education. Is an unique blog posts from education sphere, useful content about education topics, press releases and news from learning industry and options to get affiliate programs via its pages.

How Cultus emerged?

Cultus, the e-learning portal established in 2013, was created to serve the community of educators and learners in their endeavours to find useful news, insights, product reviews, resources, events, training and consultation on education technology that will improve teaching, learning and education activities. The mission of Cultus is to enhance the relationship between the education and its consumers.

What are the future plans?

The next step of this project will be creating of www.learners.news, a new hub where RRS news from e-learning industry will be aggregated, in addition to the wider affiliate program e-shop establishing and continuing of the blogs posting, all from only e-learning sphere. The necessity of having e-learning information compiled at one place rises since this type of information and resources is the future of learning and these resources are available in literally millions of web pages, without consumers really being aware of the advantages and value of content being offered.

This will minimize the time of web search established by Search Engine Optimization rules, which have different criteria of ranging the content relevance.  This new e-learning tool for e-learning community will be of an international character, as its content will be in English, with future options to upgrade it in other languages.

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Take Away, the winner at Gastronomy category in Macedonia

Country: Macedonia

Category: Gastronomy

Project aim: Producing and selling packed ready-to-eat food and satisfy the customer´s needs.

 

What is your idea?

People in Macedonia is consuming a lot of unhealthy food, more than 50% of the entire population has some problem with obesity. In addition, there are a lot of restaurant, grocery stores, supermarkets in Macedonia, however, in Macedonia, the employers have only 30 minutes for lunch, so is a little bit complicate to buy something. We want to give them the option to buy food, as they want easy.

What makes you different to other?

We understand that some people have a choice when it comes to what the can and cannot eat, and we also understand the severity of allergens However, we want to ensure that customer have control over what they eat, while ensuring they still have delicious option when it comes to our food. All the clients can choose wat they like and what not. We have vegan, vegetarian or gluten free diet. Also, we prepare especial foods for allergies and we have got nutritional and dietary options to help the accomplish all of our clients health and fitness goals.

“This event is very important for me as a CEO of the company because I am led by one famous quote “Work hard in silence. Let your success be the noise!”. My dreams come true”  Ilija Kjiroski, Take Away CEO´s

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Alho, the Macedonian winner for e-Health category

 

Country: Macedonia

Category: e-Health

Project aim: is a company based in Macedonia that aims to produce phone cases capable of emitting waves of heat and cold to provide a more comfortable use for phones, and to help people who suffer from Raynaud’s Syndrome.

How did you come up with this idea?

We are a startup company based in Macedonia that formed around September, 2017. Through a storm of ideas we didn’t come up with anything, but after finding out 2 of our members have Raynaud’s syndrome, we researched it a little bit and it turned out that it is a fairly newly discovered disease which has little to no treatment and no cure at all. So we looked into treatment for this disease, and as it turns out, even if there are very simple and effective ways to treat this disease, people are not utilizing them to their fullest extent. Not because they don’t want to, but because it’s futile. Unfortunately, being a newly discovered syndrome, with no cure and little treatment, Raynaud’s syndrome is very unknown. A large majority of the people that have it are completely unaware they do. It’s not very profitable for people to produce and sell treatment and medication if it’s just going to sit on the shelf. That’s where we step in. Inspired by this unawareness and ignorance, we aspire to not only create a profitable product which will help us further our cause, but to also put in a lot of effort to raise awareness for this syndrome.

What did you make with his idea?

We produce phone cases capable of emitting waves of heat and cold to provide a more comfortable use for phones, and to help people who suffers from this illness. We are aware that everyone likes to be comfortable always and we know that the ALHO case can provide that comfort at any time in any place.

What are your future for the future?

Because more than 10% of the world population suffers from this syndrome and a whole lot of them are unaware of its effects and causes, and are also unaware of how to treat it. There are also absolutely no estimates as to how many people who suffer from this syndrome are unaware that they do, so we believe that if awareness is raised, there will be a spike in the count of people diagnosed with this syndrome. We are currently in our assembly phase. Our project is moving along quite well, and by the time the international finals roll around we will have a working prototype, if not an already finished model of the ALHO phone case.

“We are very happy to be attending this competition and it means a great success for our collective and our community that we get to present our product to the European masses, and hopefully succeed in grabbing attention for our product to be funded and available at an earlier date than expected.” Stefan Manecski, ALHO CEO.