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Analytics and Ad Tech Nominees at The Europas: A Critical Look

ad verificationmobile campaign analyticsadjust.ioaffiliate linksvalue-exchange modelin-game advertisingweb analyticsreal-time dashboardsopen databusiness intelligencesocial data aggregationsentiment analysisInstagram analyticsgame analyticsThe Europas

The Europas shortlist for 2013 dropped recently, featuring 200 companies spread across 25 categories. Digging into the nominations with an eye on advertising technology, analytics, and big data reveals a mixed bag — some genuinely interesting bets and a few that are swimming hard in very crowded water.

What Is The Europas?

The Europas is one of Europe's most established startup awards events, running annually since 2009. The 2013 edition takes place in Berlin on 22 January 2013. Companies compete across roughly 20 categories, spanning category-level startup awards (e.g., Best Social, Mobile or Apps Startup), investor recognition (e.g., Best Exit of the Year, Best Angel or Seed Investor of the Year), and broader ecosystem awards (e.g., Best Service Provider to Startups).

Past winners include brands that went on to become household names in the European tech scene: Codility, Flattr, Seedcamp, SoundCloud, Spotify, and TweetDeck.

Ad Tech Nominees

AdEven

AdEven operates an ad verification and mobile campaign analytics platform under the adjust.io brand. Ad verification and viewability are undeniably hot topics right now — a meaningful shift in that space seems imminent, with real downstream consequences for advertisers, publishers, and the broader ad tech stack.

That said, what adjust.io offers today reads as fairly standard fare. The service is functionally similar to tools that affiliate marketers and ad performance agencies have been using for years — think Budurl, Clickmeter, or MobAffTracker. The mobile framing is timely, but the core capability isn't dramatically differentiated yet.

Skimlinks

Skimlinks automatically converts product names and existing outbound links into affiliate links, giving publishers a non-intrusive monetization layer. Compared to SEO link-trading platforms like inLinks, teliad, or TextLinkAds — which require embedding hard keyword links inside editorial content — Skimlinks works differently. It runs JavaScript on the fly, targeting only product names or links already pointing to supported merchants and converting those into affiliate links. The UX lift for publishers is considerably lower, and the approach doesn't compromise editorial integrity in the same way forced keyword links do.

SponsorPay

SponsorPay is a mobile ad network built around a value-exchange model, aimed at game and app monetization as well as in-app brand engagement. The mechanics are straightforward: users receive in-game points or bonuses in exchange for watching video ads, completing surveys, or interacting with advertiser materials. Beyond that, SponsorPay also offers a form of product placement inside games and apps — branded objects embedded directly within gameplay environments. The value-exchange format has real traction in gaming contexts where outright banner ads tend to get ignored.

StartApp

StartApp is a mobile ad network focused on monetizing free Android apps. By its own account, the platform is monetizing over 5,000 Android apps and generating upward of 2 billion ad impressions monthly. The numbers are solid, and the AppWall format is at least a minor point of differentiation. But beyond that, StartApp is operating in a classic red ocean — an intensely competitive mobile ad market with several well-capitalized incumbents. Scale alone won't be enough to carve out durable ground here.

Analytics Nominees

GoSquared

GoSquared is another entry in the real-time web analytics segment, offering a live dashboard experience comparable to Chartbeat and Woopra. The interface is polished and updates in real time, but the product story is hard to distinguish from what those two competitors already do.

The usage numbers from BuiltWith tell the tale: GoSquared sits at 7,411 websites, well behind Chartbeat (27,834) and Woopra (50,741). Without a hard-to-replicate product or business advantage, closing that gap will be a serious challenge.

There's also a broader question worth raising about all real-time analytics tools: how do these products actually move users to action? Staring at a live visitor chart is engaging, but the real value proposition has to be making data actionable — providing guidance rather than just feeding metrics. That's the problem most real-time dashboards haven't solved yet.

qunb

Winner of the Le Web Paris 2012 startup competition, qunb is a data aggregator pulling figures from public organizations — World Bank, Eurostat, IMF — as well as private and public bodies more broadly. Users can filter, contrast, and visualize datasets across sources, and export via API.

What makes qunb especially interesting is how closely it aligns with an EU Commission initiative from early 2013 — the SME Initiative on Analytics — which sought to establish an Integrated Open Data Incubator. The programme's stated aim:

(…) establish a mechanism for connecting open data demand and supply by systematically contacting European public bodies for their open data and assisting them in the efficient and sustainable publication of such data, if needed with targeted engagements. (…)

The deadline for that programme had already passed by mid-January 2013, but qunb looks like a natural fit for that kind of institutional partnership.

Other Notable Analytics Nominees

Several other analytics companies on the shortlist are worth a closer look:

Bime — A SaaS business intelligence tool that lets users combine data from a wide range of sources: Google Spreadsheets, SQL databases, Amazon DB, SAP, Google Analytics, Facebook, and Salesforce, among others. The value is in connecting and blending those sources to generate coherent reports, rather than working in silos.

DataSift — A social data feed provider that ingests data from Twitter, Facebook, Bitly, YouTube, Amazon, Flickr, and others, then enriches it with metadata including language, sentiment, authority, gender, topic, and location. The enrichment layer is what distinguishes it from raw data pipes.

SocialBakers — A social media analytics platform covering Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. The product suite includes competitive benchmarking analytics (analytics PRO), a social media management and community engagement tool (builder PRO), and Facebook market intelligence (market insights).

Nitrogram — Instagram analytics. The use case is real, but brands and agencies increasingly need a unified view across their full social footprint — not a single-channel tool. Nitrogram looks more like an acquisition target for a larger data player than a standalone growth story. DataSift has already incorporated Instagram into its data sources; SocialBakers had not yet at the time of writing.

Swrve — An analytics, personalization, and optimization platform for web, mobile, and smart-TV games. Already in use by major studios including Activision, HitGrab, and Epic Games. Of all the gaming-adjacent analytics plays on this list, Swrve has the most credible enterprise traction.

Further Reading

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