CitySocialising the UK’s leading Socialising Network that bridges the gap between online and offline networking has this week been named as one of the 10 European technology companies to watch.
The list which was compiled for The Telegraph by Brent Hoberman (co-founder of Lastminute.com) and Rogan Angelini-Hurll named the top 10 businesses to track and use over the next 12 months. Along with their PROfounder partners (Micheal Birch, the co-founder of Bebo, Peter Dubens, head of Oakley Capital, Sean Seaton-Rogers, and Jonathan Goodwin, Head of the Media Investment Banking Group at Jefferies) the pair have been scouring Europe for the last year looking for the new pioneers of the dot com industry.
CitySocialising which was named as one of the top companies was founded in 2007 by entrepreneur Sanchita Saha with a loan from the Prince’s Trust. In the last four years Sanchita and the team have grown the events based social networking site and community, primarily aimed at 25 – 40 year old urbanites who want to make new friends and socialise with likeminded people in their city, from zero base to over 100,000 registered users who logon to meet new people in their area. By combining offline social events and activities with online social networking tools and features, CitySocialising successfully bridges the gap between virtual and real world experiences or ‘O2O’ (‘Online 2 Offline’) – a trend which is set to see massive growth across the web.
Sanchita Saha Founder and CEO of CitySocialising commented:
“It comes as a huge compliment to be named on this list, CitySocialising has seen huge growth over the past year so to get some recognition of that and the potential we have amongst some truly exciting ventures is fantastic.
We’ve got a lot planned for CitySocialising over the next 12 months and I’m also interested to see what some of the other companies named have coming up, I’ll definitely be watching them closely.’’
The other businesses named as ones to watch were:
Wonga an e-loans business service which provides small, short-term cash loans to UK consumers.
Playfire a social network for gamers which describes itself as “the new social network designed for gamers, by gamers.”
Everbread is yet to go live but claims it will offer one of the fastest travel search engines, focusing on cheap flights as it integrates a number of low cost airline carriers into its search results.
Mendeley a management and sharing tool for academic knowledge which offers both desktop and web tools focussed around organising academic information with greater efficiency.
GroupSpaces develops technology to help groups offline run their memberships with more efficiency and ease online.
VouChaCha a mobile app that partners with retailers to deliver discount deals within walking distance of a person’s location.
Made.com a furniture retail site that cuts out the middle men and delivers products straight from the manufacturer to consumer at a lower cost.
Mangahigh a games-based learning site focusing on maths for secondary school students which features games that emphasise rapid-fire learning of different maths techniques.
Shazam a mobile music discovery provider which was launched over 10 years ago but has recently seen huge growth thanks to the introduction of their mobile application.
