The team at Seedcamp just announced the top 21 teams who made it as finalists for Seedcamp Week 2009, an intensive week-long event held in London every September, that targets young entrepreneurs from across EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa).
Among this year’s finalists is Jordanian startup Talasim, an online social network and photo sharing service for comedy/funny content, which was founded by Zeid Koudsi and Sabri Hakim, and is one of the projects leading Arab UGC portal Jeeran invested in and incubated.
The focus of Seedcamp week is around providing an incredible experience for the selected teams, with a diverse mentor network helping the teams put together the foundations of a viable business. The aim of this week is to collapse the time it takes startups to make and develop these critical relationships from months to a week and establish an unrivaled foundation on which the business can be built.
With this selection, Talasim joins another 20 startups from around Europe, the Middle East and Africa, to compete to receive one of the 5 investments worth €50K that will be made at the end of the Seedcamp week.
The three months following Seedcamp Week and the investment, is when the winning teams with the Seedcamp team begin building the product and company together in London, and provided access to services worth 2-3 times the invested €50K, with the goal of helping grow and nurture the teams, and putting in-depth focus on developing the product and business.
During the course of the three months, the groups will have an opportunity to take advantage of the same ecosystem of experts which participated in the Seedcamp event through weekly dinners, topical lunches, conferences, and continued mentorship on various issues. They’ll also get to demo their products to other groups from Seedcamp as well as potential investors in two events along the way.
Previously, the only other startup to make it to Seedcamp from the Arab region was Content Syndicate, that participated in Seedcamp Week 2007, and was nominated as one of the top 10 startups out of 260 participating startups from 40 countries.
Talasim was also selected as one of the Arab world’s top ten investment ready startups at the 6th Investing in Technology Forum that was held in Cairo, Egypt, earlier this year.