Europe Votes for Knowledge: Mendeley and Myngle Win at Plugg Competition

Yesterday the European internet conference Plugg saw new winners announced at its Start-ups Rally, a pitching competition for European startups. So I wanted to give some words to both of them – the one chosen by the jury and the one voted for by the audience – especially since it is interesting that the two winners are both related to knowledge.

The first and the main winner is Mendeley which is a tool for academics to handle their research papers. Basically the idea behind the startup is that every academic should be able to find relevant research papers on just about any topic in the world as well as share his or her own well for others to discover and use the results of published research in their own work.

Every scientists in the network gets a profile with a CV and mentions of the research area. Management of documents shared by scientists is handled via a web application and a desktop client as well and it is possible to determine who you are going to share the papers with so it is possible to only use Mendeley to keep your own research library in order.

Less than a month ago they grabbed $2 million in early-stage funding which is a very good amount for a European startup as venture capital is much more difficult to get here than it is across the ocean in the Silicon Valley (and in recession it is obviously even more difficult) so they must have plenty of time to continue building functionality for scientists to be happy about.

In fact, Mendeley is operating in a very competitive environment where there are quite a number of applications geared towards helping academics in research by providing tools to manage their libraries and building references and citations.

And while the business model is nowhere to be seen for now, the team promises some premium features to be added in the future. And the existing funding is probably enough for them to keep working and attracting more academics to participate and use the service and hope to eventually upgrade them to premium users. But of course this must mean that Mendeley should be the best in the field to eventually manage to build a solid business on charging people who are so good in research – after all, their research could easily result in finding a better competitive application as well.

The second winner was voted for by the audience present at the pitching hall – and it is Myngle, a language learning tool. The site works my connecting language teachers with people who want to learn foreign languages and once they decide a course is possible, the student will pay to the teacher a fixed price per lesson while Myngle will earn its nice 18% in commission fees. Since students are asked to pay EUR 300-400 upfront, chances are they won’t stop after the very first lesson and will continue their studies (and generate revenue for Myngle in the process).

I think I am known as a strong proponent of everything related to foreign languages and as a native speaker of Russian I am always grateful to people who bother to try and learn my native language (or at least a few words in Russian) as it always seems to me that in this manner people demonstrate their respect towards the Russian culture.

And since I think it must be true for every language, I can’t help but feel grateful to every startup built around helping people understand each other by learning each others’ languages. Keeping in mind my former experience as a teacher (not very extensive, honestly) I have decided to register myself as a teacher and I can tell you that chances are that students will actually get here a good quality of teaching. First of all, the registration process took me about 15 minutes and even as I am writing this I have not completed it: they will have my profile reviewed by their education department first and will also contact me for a 20-minute introduction to Myngle to make sure I understand how it works when my first lesson is booked (which will hardly ever happen given my very limited teaching experience).

In addition to functionality of learning and handling classes there’s another interesting resource here as Myngle also offers a library with materials to read, listen to and watch but this part is currently limited to five languages only – English, French, German, Arabic, and Spanish – with the list hopefully broadened in the future.

All in all, there’s nothing particularly new about what Myngle offers though it would have been interesting to see how lessons are actually organized and what interface they offer for students and teachers to communicate. The idea is not particularly new but the site runs pretty smoothly even though I have discovered some flaws (which is fine given that I don’t think I’ve ever seen a new startup without any bugs) and they also have a business model solid enough to survive when (or if) they manage to bring enough students to use their services.

But the general conclusion is pretty funny: now that we are in the middle (hopefully it’s not the beginning any more though I am probably way too optimistic) of a terrible financial crisis people are turning to learning and research and both the jury and the general audience at Plugg voted for a startup related to knowledge. In fact, I think this is a trend already: some people losing their jobs and having enough money now choose to wait out the crisis mastering a new degree in order to get an even better job once the crisis is finally over. Probably not the worst option of all.