Thursday night was The Europas - an awards ceremony congratulating the great and the good of the start-up industry for being awesome.

It was also the scene of some of the most full-on networking I’ve ever seen - at one point the speed at which Moo cards were being handed out made me wonder if they were going to search your bag at the end of the night, and dispose of you if you had any business cards left.

There was, of course, champagne, which swiftly turned to wine and beer after the initial ‘drink reception at the Europas’ photos had been taken. A wise move, it would seem, since this crowd can drink. The plentiful alcohol created somewhat of a boisterous mood for the actual events, which lead to one of my favourite moments - Robert Scoble, ‘the Scobeleizer’, arguably the founding member of the Twitterati, taking to the stage and indulging in a three minute monologue about how disrespectful it was to talk during an awards ceremony.

Booya. Take that, talkers. You have been remonstrated by The Scobeleizer. How d’ya like them apples?

What’s that? You don’t care? You’ll hush for about 90 seconds, and then resume your loud chat, possibly discussing the fact that Robert Scoble does not have the kind of booming deep voice you’d always assumed he had by looking at him?

Oh.

As for the awards themselves, they went off relatively hitchless (we won’t mention the incident with the lady in the blue dress, who seemed to have indulged in one too many white wine spritzers before presenting an award. Mainly because we were in the toilet at the time, so only have the stories of other people to go on and story people can be *so* unreliable. Poor lady in the blue dress. We hope we haven’t needlessly tarnished your reputation).

I don’t know everyone in the start-up industry, so can’t comment on every single winner, but here’s a few, as well as a quick explanation as to why you should care:

Best start-up founder

Spotify

Who doesn’t love Spotify? It took me a while to convert from Last.fm, but the ability to make collaborative playlists and check out loads of new music before committing to *ahem* legally purchasing the album is wonderful.  On an unrelated note, I do find the award category a bit odd. ‘Best founder’? Does he bring his staff doughnuts every morning? Is he a bit rubbish at running a company after the first 18 months? It raises more questions that it answers.

Best B2B start-up

Huddle

If you’re running any kind of project, you need Huddle in your life. I use it for communicating with my business partner, and it means we can share and work on documents, keep a log of our discussions and keep track of our various trains of thoughts, links and lives. But since the basic package is free, and I’m a massive productivity geek, I’d be tempted to set one up if I was going on holiday with friends, trying to arrange a a shared birthday party or co-ordinating birthday present buying with far away siblings.  Ooh, I’m getting shivers just thinking about it.

Best mobile application

Spinvox

Spinvox takes your voicemail, and converts it into a text message using voice recognition technology. C’est awesome. I will avoid voice messages like the plague, but for some reason, I am perfectly able to handle them in text message form. It also automatically converts read out phone numbers into dialable numbers, and provides much amusement when it converts a perfectly innocent message from your boyfriend into ‘I know you’re fat...’. So yeah, not perfect, but definitely usable.

I feel at this point, I should mention the representation of women, so here you are - The Europas in Numbers section:

Obscenely sexist comment overheard: 1

Number of unbelievably glamorous and amusing women: loads. Seriously, loads.

Number of men: Loads x 3, roughly

Benefit of there being a shorter queue for the toilets as a result: 0, they were unisex

Number of times I went in one and the toilet seat was up: 2

So, there you have it. A room full of people with funding, looking for funding or giving away funding. A room full of people with some pretty cool ideas and businesses. A room full of business cards.

Image via Mike Butcher