Here are the top vote-getters in our annual search for Europe’s most promising young businesspeople

By Jennifer L. Schenker

                   

          The public has spoken. Each year, BusinessWeek.com asks readers to nominate promising young European businesspeople age 25 and younger for our annual entrepreneurship contest. Then we talk to the nominees, eliminating those who are too old, who ask not to be included, or whose companies aren’t going concerns. We then put the final candidates to a vote among our readers. 

 Aodhan Cullen

StatCounter

www.statcounter.com
Dublin, Ireland
Age: 24

          Aodhan Cullen calls himself a born entrepreneur. He has been running businesses since the age of 12, when he set up his own résumé-typing business. As a young teen, he dabbled in Web site design, and it was this experience that gave him the idea to launch StatCounter, the company he founded in 1999 when he was 16. When Cullen started designing Web pages, his clients repeatedly asked him whether anyone was visiting their Web sites. So, Cullen formed StatCounter and came up with a way to measure the number of hits on Web sites, the geographical location of visitors to sites, the various pages a visitor views on a site, and the keywords they use to find a site. StatCounter currently has more than 1.5 million members and tracks more than 9 billion page views per month across its network of more than 2.2 million Web sites. The company, which is profitable, claims to be signing up 1,500 new members per day.

Boris Kolev & Bilyana Hristova

JT International

www.jt-bg.com
Sofia, Bulgaria
Ages: 18 and 20

          Boris Kolev and Bilyana Hristova met in a club for alumni of Bulgaria’s Junior Achievement program. Both had already started their own companies: Kolev’s specialized in information technology, Hristova’s in marketing. The two clicked. So when they finished school, they decided to put their heads and their businesses together, forming JT International, a Sofia-based company offering IT and marketing services.

          JT International, which was launched a few months ago, is divided into four units: One concentrates on designing innovative new products for the Bulgarian market; another focuses on Web design, graphical design, and software; a third does brand promotion; and the fourth does public relations. To date, the entrepreneurs have snagged 15 Bulgarian customers, including the company responsible for the country’s airport security clearance. The next step, says Kolev, is to go global.

          In their spare time, Kolev and Hristova organize Forums League Bulgaria, the country’s largest amateur football tournament. Together, they unite the biggest Internet forums in Bulgaria into a football championship that runs the whole year. Every week, more than 500 participants quit their computer keyboards and meet on the green to play football.

Robert Gaal and Wouter Broekhof

Wakoopa

www.wakoopa.com
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Ages: 22 and 23
 

          Robert Gaal and Wouter Broekhof, two prominent Dutch bloggers, are the founders of Wakoopa, a social network for software users. Their goal: making it easier to track, share, and find software. After signing up on the Web site, users install a small application on their PC or Mac that tracks what software they use for a variety of applications, such as music players, office software, and photo editing. The information is used to create a profile of each user’s software usage so that members and their friends can track how long they have been using a program. Participants can add or invite friends and immediately know what cool games or programs they are running. The site also allows users to see what new versions have come out of different types of software and check out how other people rate software.

          Wakoopa launched on May 1 and has already signed up 6,500 members. The company has received around $135,000 in funding from DCIF, a Dutch investment fund founded by the three biggest media companies in the Netherlands, Ilse, IDG, and De Telegraaf.

Rajeshwar Anand

Kwiqq

www.kwiqq.com
Brighton, England
Age: 25
 

          Rajeshwar Anand, an entrepreneur with degrees in computer systems engineering, computer science, and artificial intelligence, is behind Kwiqq, a four-month-old company that creates customizable social-networking Web sites. Kwiqq’s Web-based software creates online social networks tailored to the specific needs of a company’s customers or user base. The pitch is that niche-market social networks help strengthen companies’ brands, develop customer loyalty, expand their customer base, and grow revenues. Target clients include sports, media, and travel businesses. Among the first to sign up was First Choice Travel, which is using the product with its 2wentys and Holiday Village brands across Europe.

          Anand first floated the idea behind Kwiqq during a competition at Cranfield University. After he was selected as one of six top entrepreneurs, he decided to take his idea a step further and develop a business. His work is already grabbing attention: Kwiqq was recently invited by an educational organization called the Hansard Society, on behalf of Britain’s Parliament, to be one of 50 stakeholders to contribute ideas for improving the role of information and communications technology in democracy.

Thomas Mylonas

Dot Kite

www.dotkite.eu
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Age: 23
 

          Greek designer Thomas Mylonas has proven as fleet-footed with footwear as he is with furniture. He designs sport shoes for well-known clients such as Fila and Puma, clothes for Britain’s Hannah Marshall, and has created his own furniture line, under the SoHo brand, called the CrossLink collection. His company, under a branch called Dot Kite Lab, additionally offers branding, communication, and strategy services to big-name companies such as Best Western. In less than one year, Dot Kite Lab has opened offices in Amsterdam, Athens, and Rome.

          Mylonas decided he wanted a career that would embrace both creativity and business while growing up in Athens. He relocated to Rome to study industrial design and eventually went to work for Fila in its design department in Montebelluna in the Italian Alps. It was there that Mylonas conceived of the Dot Kite brand and started his own company. The goal for the brand, he says, is to assume “its boldness from its mountainous landscape, its fluidity from the Mediterranean coast.”

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