Photo by Paul Glader

BERLIN - We attended the Europas awards, the Oscars-style awards for European tech startups Tuesday. TechCrunch and other organizations sponsor the event. It’s a great idea to create a flight to quality in the European tech startup scene. The event took place at the gorgeous Post Bahnhof on the East Side of Berlin Tuesday. Thousands of European tech startups descended on Berlin for the awards. The only grumbling I heard from the crowd had to do with a) the short-term nature of the party being on one night only. b) the arbitrary shut-down time for the hamburger station on the downstairs level of the event; and c) the opaque nature of the judging? How do we know why the winners won? Not real sure.

Nevertheless, the Europas mean something. And here is the roundup of the top 10 European Ed Tech startups at the moment. We congratulated the founders of Berlin-based Scolibri on their win and look forward to speaking with them soon. Meanwhile, we also congratulate runner-up, Memrise. WiredAcademic editor Paul Glader uses and likes the Memrise product. He also likes Babbel.com, which was a top 10 German startup in the Europas and should have been included in the education category. Congratulations, meanwhile, to all the finalists in the education category.

Best Education Startup
Winner: Scolibri
Highly Commended: Memrise

Best Education Startup
Highly Commended: Memrise

24 symbols

24symbols is a service to read eBooks on the internet. It aims to do for books what Spotify does for music and Netflix for films. It allows consumers to read online as many books as they like on an ad-supported site or via a subscription model (freemium). Since launching at 2011Q2 it now has over 100,000 users that read books from over 90 publishers on their iPads, iPhones, Android devices and on the web.

Agile Education Technologies

More and more students are bringing technology to the classroom and yet many struggle with learning the basic concepts of math. Using smartphone technology such as accelerometers, cameras and NFC, we take math out of the textbook and into the real world for students. With low cost apps we provide alternative teaching methods for educators that engage and motivate students to collaborate in learning.

BraveNewTalent

BraveNewTalent is a talent engagement platform for the Enterprise. Organizations such as Microsoft, eBay and Expedia use the platform to build talent communities around relevant topics that attract, engage & develop people from their internal and external audiences. BraveNewTalent is essentially facilitating ‘the virtual University of Microsoft’ and has huge scalability potential via the network effect. The long term value is that BraveNewTalent will map the Talent Graph by knowledge, skills and potential enabling organizations to increase the efficiency of applying human capital.

Busuu

busuu.com provides interactive, fun and engaging language courses in 12 different languages both on the web and via mobile apps. Our members improve their language skills through direct interaction with native speakers within the community via an integrated video-chat application and by peer-to-peer text corrections. As a result, every busuu.com user is both a ‘student’ of a foreign language and also a ‘tutor’ of their own mother tongue.

Eedu

Eedu is going to make a change in elementary education. No longer the education is dependent on access to local school; now everyone can access a gamified Finnish school all over the world. Our product, Eedu elements is a personalized game-based learning solution for mobile/tablet/online users. The method and concept behind the game is based on 10 years of research in educational psychology and neural computing (AI) and the effectivity of the method is scientifically proofed.

Examtime

Examtime is changing the way students learn.
For years students have been using software that has been created for corporate use. The tools and applications that are required for understanding and learning are not the same as the ones that are required for being effective for the workplace. Students need applications that are specifically designed to help learning and ultimately exam success. That’s why we’ve created Examtime. We’ve created a number of specific applications. We call it a personal learning environment. And we’ve integrated them so that every student can now create, share and collaborate their way to exam success!!

Infogr.am

Create interactive infographics and charts with a few clicks, place them in your article, blog post or share with friends. With more than 230 000 infographics created it’s the fastest growing data visualization community on planet.

Lernstift

We produce and sell a pen, that vibrates simply, when you wrote a misspelling!

That is the perfect learning assistance for school kids. The pen (Customer-price 40 to 60 EUR) is also a technically platform and can be extended by sellable software for mobile and desktop usage. Like capturing text and drawings direct to your iPhone or Desktop.

Alone in Germany we have 1,3 Million families with school kids. Perfect for selling the pen because each 3 years this big target group “is renewed”. And the pen works globally!

Winner: Scolibri

Teachers are online and students are online. But when they meet in school, everything is offline. We will fix that broken link by a super intuitive web-app that will change the way teachers and students organize, communicate and collaborate.

Via TechCrunch