Working On Next Google or Yahoo? Seznam.cz & StartupYard Are Helping Data, Search and Analytics Projects In 2014

One of the most influential Czech companies, Google’s competitor for the Czech market, Seznam.cz  has been keeping busy in cooperating with start-ups for the past few years. Their 3-year-old support to StartupYard has recently presented a new, interesting level of cooperation – opening a part of its text search technology to all start-up teams with an interesting project that needs pre-crawled data from the Internet to start their business.

Data, Search or Analytics startups days in Prague

Cedric Maloux, Managing Director of StartupYard explained that their 2014 goal is simple but ambitious – attracting  the most promising European data, search or analytics projects and accelerating them towards becoming viable businesses.

To achieve this, we rely on our specialized mentors – we’ll fly founders to Prague to work in person with a wide range of experts and advisers, providing them with accommodation for 3 months. Seznam.cz is adding tremendous value to the package we offer to future teams and I can’t wait to see what projects our start ups will be able to create using this technology.

New projects coming to life

Pavel Zima, the Seznam.cz General Manager explained what a challenging project this is for them. Their development of a full text search technology provided Seznam.cz with 30% of its revenues of up to 1 billion CZK (40 million EUR) in 2012. Still, they have shown their interest into partly opening their full text search to teams all over Europe which have decided to apply for the next year’s StartupYard project entry.

We have done so because we believe the data we can provide can help the teams to come up with very useful projects. We hope new projects, for example media monitoring, predictive marketing tools etc. will come to life next spring.

A call for new teams

Marek Nový, Head of Business Development at Seznam.cz said they have made a basic analysis for each webpage in the cluster in order to provide each team with introduction to their own content, derived with many parameters such as the used language and meta-descriptions.

We have data about all the back links and forward links and many other attributes about the webpages. All of the documents in the cluster are regularly updated and more parameters and content can be added if the teams request them.

Entry is due January 31, 2014, so if you have projects covering Data, Search and Analytics, feel free to apply here. All teams will have an access to a test cluster of up to 100 million documents from the Internet and they will all be sorted into entities such as domains, web servers and URLs. Stay tuned on Netocratic for the news about the chosen projects and teams heading to Prague in 2104.