General Publishers Association picks 5 startups for Renew the Book competition General Publishers Association picks 5 startups for Renew the Book competition
International teams pursue new ways to discover and enjoy books
AMSTERDAM – 5 November 2015 – The General Publishers Association (GAU), the leading representative voice for books in the Netherlands, today announced the 5 startups chosen to participate in the Renew the Book startup competition. The program, the first of its kind for the Netherlands, is focused on identifying and advancing inventive technologies and ideas for the publishing business.
Wiet de Bruijn, Chairman of the General Publishers Association explains: “We were very pleased with the response we got from the startup community - in less than a month we received 56 applications from 15 countries. The ideas touched on a variety of innovative approaches to funding, uncovering and enhancing the book reading experience. Now that the competition is about to begin, I am eager to see what comes out of it. ”
Amsterdam’s Rockstart will lead the competition in an intensive 4-week program bringing experts, mentors and investors together to guide entrepreneurs through a series of workshops and 1:1 mentoring with deep dive sessions about topics specific to each startup. The program culminates in a Leadership Summit on 9 December 2015, where one startup will win 15,000 euros.
The 5 participating startups include:
· Bookabook (Italy) - Bookabook is crowdfunding for books. Readers are able to fund book by buying it in advance as either an ebook or paper. The book will be produced and published only when it reaches enough funding to cover expenses.
· Bookarang (Netherlands)- Bookarang uses the latest in artificial intelligence to analyze books on over 100 content perameters, to help readers discover the books they truly love.
· Crumbled (Netherlands) - Crumbled is a ‘Pinterest-like’ website featuring the content of physical cookbooks. Crumbled makes it easy to look for recipes in cookbooks and you can arrange your recipes in ‘collections’.
· nugget (Romania) - nugget is a highly visual app that helps readers discover, remember and share the best content of business and personal development books.
· Readgeek (Germany) - Readgeek is a website and social network for automated/calculated predictions of how users will like a book. The predictions are based on a mixture of a user based and a content-based recommendation engine.
For more information about Renew the Book, please visit our website and follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
About Rockstart
Rockstart is an early stage investor that empowers purpose-driven founders across three domains: Energy, AgriFood, and Emerging Technologies.
Rockstart invests in early-stage startups from each of the three funds and provides access to capital, market, and expertise by connecting founders with co-investors, mentors, partners, corporates, and the wider Rockstart network.
Rockstart has invested in more than 350 startups and its alumni value to date is more than €1.7bn. Rockstart is an international team of 45+ professionals dedicated to empowering purpose-driven founders to become scalable and drive positive change on a global scale. Rockstart has notable exits such asWercker, Dan.com, Hubs.Com, Bouw7, iClinic, and s and Brincr. The company has offices in Amsterdam, Copenhagen, and Bogota.
Contact details
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- Felipe Santamaria
- Managing Director, Rockstart LatAm
- felipe@rockstart.com
- +57 318 3866940