Announcing the buspreneur competition for Europe 2012

Europe’s balance sheet may be debt laden, but that’s not going to stop us from announcing our European competition this year, scheduled to be between November 30 and December 5th.

We will be running six buses, much like the second year of the American competition in 2011. We are doing with a joint venture between our friends at FounderBus (running buses from Germany, France, and UK universties) as well as three under the StartupBus organisation (from London, Spain, and one wildcard to be discussed below).

We are also excited to announce our partnership with LeWeb, the most important tech fixture in Europe. Not only will we have a bus parked at LeWeb and discounted tickets for accepted buspreneurs (at an amazing 75% discount due to the geneorisity of Loic and Geraldine in supporting startups) but the winning team from the competition will go onto the LeWeb Startup Competition as a finalist. For context, last year the LeWeb competition had over 600 applicants, 32 semi-finalists, and 16 finalists with an expected 1000 applicants this year. The winner of our competition in early December will get fastracked to be on the stage of Europe’s most influentual tech conference as one of the 16 +1 (we’re the +1) LeWeb startup competition finalists.

Now what? Apply and vote for the wild card!

Applications are now open, so go ahead and blow us away! Note that our application process is an invite only affair, so if you don’t know anyone that can invite you, make some social media noise to get the attention of the buspreneur community.

Based off the success we had with this with America this year, for this sixth bus it will be a wild card, where we are going to create a competition based on which region can generate the most social media voting (through tweets or Facebook likes). To vote for your region, go to this page.