We are excited to officially announce our partnership with Athens Tourism. As you can see from the video, we feel pretty lucky to be working with such a dynamic destination. The team from Athens is really eager to jump headfirst into marketing their destination online and through social media. Joobili will be promoting Athens’ top events and festivals, as well as boosting Athens’ activities on Facebook and Twitter. Government back tourism agencies have a bad reputation for being the last to adopt new technologies, but Athens and a few others stand out to us as few examples where this reputation just doesn’t fit. Just another reason why Joobili loves Athens.

Joobili was recently invited to present our company at ITB Berlin, more specifically during the PhoCusWright summit on March 10 . For the uninitiated, this is the leading global trade show for the travel industry. Our slot is titled “5 Minutes of Fame” and is designed to highlight up and coming travel startups. The title made me laugh thinking about  Andy Warhol’s famous quote, “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” Well, I guess we’ll settle for 5 minutes for fame…for now

Seriously though, it is a big honor for us to be invited to present our ideas to such a distinguished crowd (we are sandwiched between keynote presentations from the Global Director of Bing Travel and the CEO of FareCompare). I will be sticking around for a few days to catch the rest of the Expo so if you will be at ITB Berlin as well and would like to meet up just drop me an email or leave a comment.

I recently returned from spending a week in San Francisco and Silicon Valley alongside my fellow European Seedcamp Finalists (check out the write-ups by Don Dodge and VentureBeat ). The guys over at Shout’em gave a nice day by day summary of events, so I’ll just jump to my conclusions.

Seedcamp put Joobili in front of some incredibly smart entrepreneurs and VCs, 95% of whom are altruistically focused on helping startups reach their potential (the other 5% come to meet fellow VCs or look for a job). Mentoring is cool, but mentoring alone would not be worth the transatlantic flight. Remember, Seedcamp is a platform. It is validation that some smart people from Seedcamp thought Joobili was interesting, and therefore other smart people should take a closer look at us. That’s it! But that’s also enough.

With the Seedcamp endorsement in hand, Joobili was able to get meetings with Founders and CEOs of 9 travel websites including some really dynamic entrepreneurs like Gregg Brockway from TripIt, Mike Cassidy from Ruba, Josh from NileGuide…the list goes on. The result was a lot of good advice specific to online travel, a few partnerships and some potential deals. The willingness to share sensitive information and open up personal networks is why The Valley will continue to have an innovation edge on the rest of the world.

Some of the meetings were facilitated by mentors we met in London, others were through our own network. The point is that, like most things in life, Seedcamp is what you make of it. It is a foot in the door, a good excuse to send an intro email, but ultimately it’s up to you to make it happen.

Speaking of making it happen…applications for Mini Seedcamp Prague have just opened. I encourage startups needing validation (read everyone), especially those from CEE to apply.

I still don’t know if Twitter is an effective use of my time, but I do know we have Twitter to thank for Joobili being featured on the BBC this weekend. BBC presenter Carmen Roberts was doing some research for her upcoming segment on the best travel websites. She posted a tweet and Darren Cronin from Travel Rants responded by recommending Joobili. I happened to meet Daren at a travel conference and we’ve exchanged tweets a few times over the past year. He has no financial motivation for promoting Joobili, it’s was just a case of Daren being a helpful guy. To make a long story short, the conversation was picked up on my Twitter search and before I knew it I was talking with Carmen directly and Joobili was featured on the BBC. The point is that on the one hand it would have never happened without social media and on the other hand I could never replicate this “success” or measure its exact cause. Herein lies the contradiction of social media that people find so frustrating. For me, I just accept it for what it is and enjoy the “ROI”…whatever that means!

Click on the link below to view our BBC debut. Joobili appears near the 2:15 mark on this video.

By the way, if you haven’t already checked out the holiday-inspired site decorations you should do it now before they go away forever (or at least until next year).

Now I have no idea how popular this show is so I would be curious to hear from anyone in the UK whether this is a popular show or a late-night space filler. [UPDATE: Found out this shows airs on Monday nights at 8pm and has a viewership of over 1 million] Either way, it sent a big enough wave of traffic to Joobili.com last night that the site crashed and we had to scramble to get it back up again. So without further adieu I present Joobili’s television debut:

Joobili on The Gadget Show

While I’m on the subject, we also received high scores from the Daily Mail as the Website of the Week.

We did not walk away with an extra 50k Euro in our pockets, but we did earn a spot among the top 10 European startups invited to join Seedcamp in NYC and Silicon Valley in a few months to pitch our businesses.  But more valuable than any of this was being able to come out of Seedcamp with a clear plan for future growth. Prior to Seedcamp we were trying to juggle 10 balls at the same time and the event helped us focus on the one or two areas that will have the most impact.

Keep coming back to the blog to get updates on some of these new developments we’ll be releasing in the months ahead. In the meantime, here is the video from our Seedcamp pitch on Day 1:

(you can clicked the back button on your browser now)

Things have heated up here in Joobili land as we were in London last week along with 40 European startups competing to be invited to Seedcamp week.  (I blogged about the Mini Seedcamp event back in March). This is an incredible opportunity for us to meet some of Europe’s top entrepreneurs and investors…the people who have actually been down this road a dozen times and can help us avoid expensive mistakes. You can imagine how  excited we were to be selected as one of the final 21 teams who will spend next week in London.

The craziness continues as we prepare to make the most of our week, but I wanted to take a moment to jot down a few reasons I think Seedcamp is worth the effort (and believe me, it is a lot of work to do it right).

Support: When I lived in the San Francisco I could not walk into a coffee shop without seeing a group of hackers huddled over a computer or a poster for a tech meetup. The idea behind such frequent gatherings was not so much to meet key contacts, but rather to act as a support group of people who understand the roller coaster we are all riding. Let’s face it, the path we’ve chosen is not easy and it helps to see other people suffering alongside us, right? Seedcamp acts as one of these vital connection among European startups.

Focus: Last week we had to pitch Joobili in 3 minutes (idea, biz model, competition, achievements, etc). Not a lot of time to summarize ideas that have been swimming in our heads for 2 years. We had to strip away everything but the absolutely essential. It was a painful process that we probably wouldn’t have done on our own without Seedcamp. The result was that suddenly a 5 minute pitch suddenly felt easy (kinda). It’s like runners who train at high elevation to make a normal run feel easy.

Exposure: One of the problems with European startups is we tend to have more difficulty getting exposure beyond our home market. It is always “A Hungarian startup…” or a “British starup…” despite the fact the offering is pan-European. Winning the Mini Seedcamp event in Warsaw really propelled our launch. We are seeing a similar boost in interest as a Seedcamp Week finalist and the interest is all coming from outside our home market.

These were just a few advantages and I know there are many more. Expect a follow up post after Seedcamp Week. Wish us luck!