Every year, Product Hunt organizes the Golden Kitty Awards – an occasion to celebrate innovative products and their makers around the world. 2021 welcomed the 7th edition of the awards with more than 13.8K nominations, predominantly in Web3, Productivity, and Mobile apps. The Recursive looked at the 2021 list of finalists and winners and highlighted how the Eastern and Southeast Europe regions were represented.
Teams from Eastern and Southern Europe in the final of the Golden Kitty Awards
Company: [Flow]OS
Category: Winner of Work from Anywhere Tool of the Year
Based in: Romania
The product: Sessions – a web-based conferencing and communication tool that helps design, plan, and manage meetings in advance, integrating different tools and content types. Within the meeting, participants can access various native features called “Artifacts”, including sharing slideshows and videoshows, participating in Q&As, forms, and smartboards, and taking private notes automatically sent via email but they can also revisit all the resources stored in previous meetings.
“We built Sessions because we were wasting too much time, energy and focus switching between apps and accounts when organizing complex remote meetings,” says Radu Negulescu, founder and CEO of [Flow]OS, one of the winning makers of innovative products.
Company: Terra
Category: Finalist in Health & Fitness Product of the Year
Based in: UK, with Greek founder
The product: Terra – An API for developers to help connect apps to users’ data from wearables and sensors. Integrates with wearables such as Oura, Fitbit, Google Fit, and Peloton.
“As users of so many wearables over the years, we found it impossible to connect our data to apps. Terra is an API that makes it easy to connect your app to your users’ wearables and sensors. Plug in to our API, and start speaking with all wearables and sensors,” says Kyriakos Eleftheriou, co-founder and CEO of Terra.
Serial Maker: Csaba Kissi
Category: Finalist in Best Community Member
Based in: Slovakia
About: Csaba Kissi is an entrepreneur and developer, owner and CTO of Elerion, an agency in Slovakia creating web and mobile applications.
Company: Uizard
Category: Winner of AI & Machine Learning Product of the Year
Based in: Denmark, with Greek team of engineers
The product: A tool for collaborative design and prototyping, enabled by machine learning and computer vision, and aimed at designing mobile apps, web apps, websites, and desktop software in minutes.
Company: Jotform
Category: Finalist in No Code Tool of the Year
Based in: California, US, with founders and team from Turkey
The product: Jotform Apps – a no-code app builder where you can add forms, widgets, links, and branding fast, starting from more than 300 templates.
Company: JRO
Category: Finalist in Mobile App of the Year
Based in: Turkey
The product: Veganzone – an app dedicated to vegetarians and vegans where users can find restaurants, recipes, news, events, a calculator and a barcode scanner.
Company: Kommunity
Category: Finalist in Community & Social Tool of the Year
Based in: California, US, with founders from Turkey
The product: An all-in-one platform to help event organizers better manage virtual, hybrid, or physical events. Features include email and RSVP collection, ticket selling, forms, broadcasting, and more.
“At Kommunity we tried to merge all of the most needed features to create an ultimate combination of communication, event organization, and community management experience,” says Emir Karşıyakalı, founder and CEO.
Company: Omnicourse
Category: Finalist in Education Product of the Year
Based in: Delaware, US, with founders from Turkey
The product: A mobile platform for audio courses that helps lecturers get paid by the minutes listened. It includes audio courses of up to 4 hours, and learnbits of 5 to 15 minutes.
Company: Brickit
Category: Winner of Children & Family Product of the Year
Based in: Russia
The product: An app using ML that helps users build new creations from Lego bricks. Users can scan their bricks and receive guidance to build new models.
Company: Loóna
Category: Winner of Health & Fitness Product of the Year
Based in: Delaware, US, with founders from Belarus and Russia
The product: An app offering experiences known as “Sleepscapes” using 3D, color therapy, sound ambiance, and storytelling to help users prepare for sleep.
“Our work involves long hours and international travel and we noticed how hard it was to switch off and wind-down, especially in stressful times. The idea with Loóna was to use technology for good – to boost people’s wellbeing by helping them prepare for sleep,” says Eugene Nevgen, Co-Founder of Loóna.