Most people think of Silicon Valley in the United States when they think about technology and entrepreneurs – the European Commission wants young Europeans to be inspired by home-grown entrepreneurs, so their bright ideas start and stay in Europe. With help from the creators of Spotify, Angry Birds, Tuenti, Skype, SeedCamp, HackFwd, London’s Tech City and TheNextWeb, the Commission is creating a platform for star entrepreneurs to tell their stories of inspirations and frustration, to wake-up young Europeans and leaders to the potential of entrepreneurial careers.
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Boletus is a deals marketplace for Android and iPhone which has been launched in Bilbao and is rapidly expanding to other cities in Spain. Kepa Apraiz, the founder of this startup, is an engineer who got quite successful investing in real estate and is now transferring his commercial know-how to the Internet. Boletus provides a clear service to merchants and mobile users who want to find the best hotels or restaurantes while travelling.

TicketBis is a 3 year old startup that leads retail ticketing buy-sales in Southern Europe and Latin America. It gets 25% of all operations taking place in its marketplace and last year its revenues totaled 13.5 million euros. Is is expanding to new countries and has even opened a shop in the US, where it allows North American customers to buy and sell tickets for concerts or soccer matches in Europe.

Fab.com is a great place to buy flashy furniture, but it’s not easy to find regular decoration stuff on the Internet. This lack of information is what Decoramus wants to fill with its online community and marketplace for furniture. “We make it easy for furniture shoppers and we charge shops a monthly fee and commissions by click, lead or order. We also sell coupons which you can redeem in stores”, explains Ruth Guerrero, founder and CEO of Decoramus.

Do you want to become a professional in-company trainer? If you have a high knowledge of a certain field and want to train people in companies, you can use iTrain Global‘s web platform in order to offer your services. “It’s a very quick way for companies to find the trainers that they need”, explains Carmen Muñoz, founder of this Internet startup which is applying the sharing economy to education.

Iñaki Bartolomé, CEO of Ideable, is the man behind Eldersarea, a platform for tablets designed specifically for elderly people. Based on Android, it has big buttons and simple functionalities and it’s designed to videoconference and share photos, videos and music. “A tablet is the best device for elderly people”, explains Bartolomé, who came out with the idea while trying to connect his parents with a brother who lives far away from them. The next step is to sell it all around the world and open the platform to other developers.

HiThru is a new mobile app designed to help people meet people during events. “We think that places connect people”, explains Asier Arranz, its main promoter. Born in Bilbao, Spain, the project is currently based in the Wayra incubator in Madrid, where the promotores received a short investment from Telefónica in order to finance the first 6 months of the project. If it gets a certain volume of users, they will get more money.

Tapquo is a company with a big knowledge and talent in html5 and which is focusing in desighning mobile user experiences. Their starting point is that the Internet is moving towards new devices, mainly mobile, and they want to develop the best products with the easiest interfaces for these new tools. They have also created their own mobile framework, lungoJS, which uses the actual features of HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript. “Smart TV is our nex step”, adds José Manrique López, Tapquo’s CEO.

Alejandra Apraiz is one of the entrepreneurs behind Pink Moments (so far, invitation-only), an app that will allow women to manage plans, such as weddings, births or gifts. The company is already generating some revenues, thru advertising and cross-selling, and they plan to make money out of the transactions made with their app. Backed up by business angels, they are now searching for new investors.