SciFlow awarded as Content Start-up of the Year 2020
The decision has been made: SciFlow has won the final of the CONTENT shift-Accelerator as “Content-Start-up of the year”. The German founder Carsten Borchert and his team beat four competing business ideas in the final round of the support program of the Börsenverein Group. Their platform is a collaborative online text editor with which scientific texts can be created, edited, and formatted as a team. As the winner of the competition, the start-up will receive 10,000 euros in funding. The final was recorded in the Frankfurt Haus des Buches and broadcast online via the Frankfurt Book Fair’s THEARTS+ platform.
Carmen Udina, spokeswoman for the jury, head of Business Development and Cooperations at Verlagsgruppe Oetinger and spokeswoman for the Digital Interest Group of the German Publishers & Booksellers Association, gives the following reasons for the decision:
“SciFlow is the future of scientific publishing. Carsten Borchert and his team simplify the collaborative creation and qualified evaluation of content. The team has developed enormously in the course of the funding program. With their convincing business model, they have won renowned research institutes as customers and created another business model for open publishing offers within the competition. The start-up also succeeded in networking with the industry and establishing partnerships within the mentoring program. In doing so, they demonstrate a high degree of professionalization and take the idea of the CONTENT shift-accelerator into account in the best sense. On behalf of the German Publishers & Booksellers Association and all partners, we would like to congratulate them!”
Carsten Borchert, the co-founder of SciFlow, is grateful for the experience:
“With the CONTENTshift-Accelerator, we have received a lot of valuable feedback on our product from absolute industry leaders. Building on this, we were able to further develop our offer and enter into concrete cooperations with partners such as Cornelsen and Lehmanns Media. I can only recommend other start-ups to take advantage of this opportunity and apply next year.”
The other four start-ups in the final round naturally also provided exciting impulses for the book industry: Automated text summaries and compilations for media companies and regional organizers (artificial connect), a hybrid of book and tactile learning toy as a barrier-free medium for blind and seeing children (PlusPlural), the digital acceptance, management and analysis of submitted manuscripts based on artificial intelligence (Scriptbakery AI) and wooden storage boxes that bring together analog and digital travel memories via cloud folders in the cover (Questlog).
All five business ideas were selected in June 2020 from 39 applications for the sponsorship program of the Börsenverein Group. Over the past few months, they have gone through a further round of decision-making (shortlist) as well as individual coaching and consulting sessions with the jury and other experienced experts* in the industry.
In addition to Carmen Udina, the jury this year also included: Sabine Haag (Wiley-VCH), Hartmut Gante (Wiley-VCH), Nina Hugendubel (Hugendubel), Per Dalheimer (Hugendubel Digital), Leif Göritz (Thalia), Olaf Carstens (Cornelsen), Detlef Büttner (Lehmanns Media) and Ronald Schild (MVB).
The CONTENTshift-Accelerator will be continued in 2021. Companies can participate as investors in the program and thereby gain a place on the jury as well as direct and exclusive access to all start-ups applying.
About the CONTENTshift-Accelerator
Along with the CONTENTshift startup club and icebreaker events, the CONTENTshift Accelerator is part of the Börsenverein Group’s CONTENTshift initiative, which promotes innovation and new business models in the book and media industry.
All details on the website: www.contentshift.de
About the Börsenverein Group
The German Publishers & Booksellers Association is a lobby group and central service provider for the German book industry. The group consists of the German Publishers & Booksellers Association and its business subsidiaries, the Frankfurt Book Fair, MVB, media campus frankfurt, and the Holding Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels Beteiligungsgesellschaft.
