MediaMatters has organized its first international event. At the conference of MINDS International, a network of a large number of news agencies, MediaMatters facilitated 'speed dating' with startups. 8 startups and scale-ups from 5 countries presented themselves to the 21 news agencies present at the World Trade Center in The Hague, including host ANP.

Less than 2 hours was available for the whole event, so there was considerable time pressure. After the 3-minute pitches, a total of 56 individual talks of 10 minutes took place between the startups and news agencies. A logistical challenge that ultimately ended just in time.

(Graphic above: the schedule for the matchmaking talks at the MINDS conference)

MediaMatters organized this 'Media Match' together with its partner Next Media Accelerator from Hamburg. MediaMatters has a cooperation agreement for some time with this German accelerator.

For the startups it was a unique opportunity to talk with so many international media companies in a short time. Among them were major news agencies such as Associated Press (US), AFP (France), DPA (Germany), EFE (Spain) and Kyodo (Japan).

The startups were very pleased with the event. For example, EzyInsights from Finland expects that the talks with the news agencies will lead to several contracts. For MINDS, the speed dating was a first. But the response was very positive, so the event could become a yearly event.

The 8 participating startups were: 23degrees (Austria), Contentflow (Germany), DeepBI (Poland), EzyInsights (Finland), Frameright (Finland), Utopia Analytics (Finland), Videodock (the Netherlands) and Vixy (the Netherlands).