The second Startup Island conference was held in the city of Hvar under the sponsorship of the Croatian President prof. dr. sc. Ivo Josipović. The conference was organized by Zagreb Entrepreneurship Incubator in association with the london Seedcamp and with the support of the sponsors Erste Bank, CRANE, LAUNChub, HAMAG-Bicro, MINPO, Tech.eu and Pasadena.si. The conference was attended by respectful Croatian and foreign speakers who gladly accepted the invitation to be presenting their work in one of the most attractive and sunniest conferences in the region. After all the participants, around hundred of them, had arrived, the conference program started and lasted until Saturday evening. Under the leadership of Carlos Eduardo Espinal, there was a Mini Seedcamp held at the begining of the conference. The teams presented the following ideas:

• HockeyCoachVision, an app that makes it easier for the hokey coaches to work in the way that they enter the excercises and tactis into tablets or mobile phones which would  be used by the players to study them and train them.

• Kickshops, a platform which is used to make quality web shops for all kinds of devices. The payment is performed in the form of a small fee after each successful sale.

• Restoranko is an online booking system which makes it easier to choose and to book a table in a desired restaurant.

• Sportie is a social network which gathers all the perspective athletes and connects them to sport managers and increases their chance for success.

• Vipbit is an app which provides the possibility of service payment and products with bitcoin currency.

• AuThink is an app which presents a solution with only one goal – to help autistic children and their parents by using modern technology.

• Colombio is an app which makes it easier for journalists to find new information. It also gives the users the opportunity to earn by publishing their own news and photos which journalists buy for a small fee.

• GuestEngage enables quickly and efficiently for hotel managers to organize the booking activities regarding the hotels.

• Uplug is the new generation of designer electrical plug-ins that, except of the classic plug-in , also have two USB connectors intended for charging the gadgets.

The foreign speakers like Collete Ballou - the CEO of Ballou PR, Vitaly Golomb – the Keen.com CEO, Jeff Lynn – the co-founder of the Seedrs.com platform, Michael Backes – the initiator of the Liquid Labs incubator and other reputable names gave many valuable pieces of advice to the teams which attended the conference during their presentations. During the conference the panel discussions were „Innovation from Corporates to Startups“, „Governments and Startups“, „Changing Face of Investment“ during which the ZIP founders together with the speakers  discussed the topics and gave suggestions for the certain problems which appeared in segments described during the discussion.

Furthermore, the foreign investors showed the interest for the most tallented startups from the region. Except for Seedcamp which is one of the leading global accelerators, the conference was attended by Nenad Marovac – founder and CEO of British-American VC Fund DN Capital, Christian Thaler-Wolski from one of the most powerful european funds Wellingon Partners and Stanislav Sirakov from the Bulgarian Fund Launchub. The startup initiators had an unique opportunity in pleasant surrounding of this conference to speak to the investors about their projects.

Also, mStart Ultra Hackatition  was announced at the end of the conference which presents the hackathon and competition in one. The goal is for the young teams to show the maximum of their skills and offer the solution which would lead them to valuable rewards.

The general impression of the participants and partners was that the conference was more than successful. ZIP is now expected to throw even better one for the year 2015.