One of the more interesting things I did over the past week was to help judge our Barca Starta competition in order to choose the finalists to pitch in Barcelona during Mobile World Congress week.

I was impressed by the quality of the entries. I don’t want to single any out for special mention, for fear of prejudicing the final judging process, but as ever, I went from a state of near-dread before we started, to one of sheer joy when I started reading the entries.

The dread comes from the fact that when you judge any competition like this, you know you are going to have to wade through a lot of words – and a lot of bullshit in some cases – plus videos, PDFs and PowerPoints, and then somehow come to an informed opinion at the end of it. Anyone who claims it’s not an imperfect process is either lying, or has never judged anything, and I never tire of saying this to anyone who doesn’t make the cut in any competition I’m involved in judging. On another day, with a better-prepared entry, or a judge in a different state of mind, the outcome could have been different.

In this year’s Barca Starta competition, we discounted half a dozen entries because the entry form had been left half-complete. But that said, if I was a three-man band with two competing deadlines, one to impress a potential backer or client, the other to finish a competition entry form, I’d probably go with the half-complete entry form too, in the hope that even in that state, it would probably be more complete than a lot of the entries. Only an hour ago, one of the finalists, who knew from the start that being available to pitch in Barcelona was part of the deal, got in touch to say they might not be able to attend because of how much the business has kicked on in the four weeks since they entered. Such is the madcap life of a startup.

Fail points
The entries that failed to make the cut in this year’s competition, as last year’s, failed on one of four counts for me. Either the numbers in response to the ‘Scalability’ question were just not credible. Or the big idea was not big enough to get excited about. Just because you can create an app that will teach your hamster to speak French, it doesn’t mean to say the world needs it.

At the risk of stating the obvious, this is a made-up example; the idea of this piece is not to poke fun at any of the startups that entered the competition and who are obviously passionate about their idea. I just think that in some cases, they need a bit of tough love.

A third fail point for me was where the idea had some merit, but was a point solution dealing with one specific issue that is already more than capably handled by any number of apps that are more ambitious in their scope.

Finally, you had those ideas that sounded great on paper, but when you downloaded the app and put it to the test, the reality didn’t live up to the promise.
So much for the ones that didn’t make the cut, what of the ones that did? You can read about them here, but in order to avoid favouring any one finalist over the others, perhaps we can take a moment to look at some of last year’s finalists.

We saw Rednote, an HTML platform that lets users insert audio into text messages, which got a big shoutout in last year’s final, and has since had $1.2m of funding. Another, Big Launcher, is an Android interface which replaces the usual interface with, as the name suggests, an alternative one with big, bright buttons in order to make smartphones easier for the visually impaired to use. And OpenSignal, the crowdsourcing app that measures customers’ experience of network coverage.

And last year’s winner, Tellyo, which at the time was an app that enabled TV viewers to grab great bits of action and share them with their friends. It has since morphed (possibly for reasons tied up with IP, possibly not), into a widget-based platform that broadcasters can incorporate into their own apps so that viewers can share their content with the broadcaster’s permission. Tellyo’s ‘Share the Moment’ widget has since been incorporated into TV shows from Spain’s largest broadcaster, RTVE, and MTV in Finland.

This year’s finalists show an equal measure of innovation, ingenuity and disruptive intent. I can’t wait to hear their three-minute pitches in Barcelona, but even before we get to that point, I can’t wait to see what crazy, mad, beautiful ideas next year’s competition will give up.