Postcards from Europe: Case Study, Fastest Growing Top Ten!
Welcome to the content from our series "Postcards from Europe" that ran between the 14th - 19th of July 2014. On this page we showcase the top ten fastest growing start-ups in Europe. The data was collected from Deloitte Technology Fast 50 for Central Europe. Find out about our "Postcards" series HERE
#10 Infinum from Croatia is our final growth start-up in Central Europe sitting at number ten on our list and we have to say it is one of the most exciting. Why? Because it is in the business of designing and developing Apps for a market that is going to be worth billions in coming years. Portio Research (March 2013) estimates: 1.2 billion people worldwide were using mobile apps at the end of 2012. This is forecast to grow at a 29.8 percent each year, to reach 4.4 billion users by the end of 2017. Much of this growth will come from Asia, which will account for almost half of app users in 2017.
mobiThinking note: 1.2 billion apps users is a large number, considering that analysts estimate that there aren’t much more than a billion smartphones worldwide, and that apps development in recent years has largely focused on smartphones (mostly just one or two types of smartphones), but it is still only a minority of phone users. There are 6.8 billion mobile subscriptions worldwide, according to the ITU (February 2013) – that means approximately 17 percent of mobile subscribers use apps.
Now that is a lot of potential in anyone’s imagination right?
And you only have to look at the company’s founders to understand the potential. Founder by Tomislav Car and Matej Spoler at the age of 19 it was while Tomislav was in his first year at college that he thought “why not?”. In his own words:
“I'm a 28 year old entrepeneur who's never actually had a real job in my life. When I say "real job", I mean - I was never employed anywhere, other than at my own business.”
“We produce software, mostly mobile apps (iPhone, Android, HTML5), web apps using Ruby on Rails and a couple of other cool technologies. We built some fairly complex mobile projects ranging from popular media outlets (24sata, Soundset), traffic information (HAK), mobile banking (Erste mBanking, RBA na dlanu), telecom solutions (Moj Vip), mobile insurance (Tilia) and others.”
“I'm actually a computer programmer and my forte is web development on various open-source technologies. I also dabbled with design, writing, project management, sales and a couple of other different work areas at various points in my professional life.”
“I would describe my job today as growing the company at a sustainable rate.”
The company has been operating for nine years and has survived the all-important first five where many start-ups and small businesses fail.
Keep an eye out on this very interesting little company!
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Check them out online HERE
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Pull quotes from LinkedIn page of Tomislav Car
#10 Infinum (Croatia) App Design and Development
