LONDON, UK - August 31 2012 - The inaugural Tech Trailblazers Awards for enterprise tech startups today unveiled Amoo Venture Capital Advisory as the venture capital (VC) mentoring partner for the Emerging Markets Trailblazers category. The boutique advisory firm will work with the winners and runners-up in the emerging markets category.

Amoo's founder and MD, Nzube Ufodike, said: “Starting a business can be daunting - but with the right support, tools and planning, tech startups can launch their innovations into commercial success. Initiatives such as the Tech Trailblazers Awards are a key part of that support network. We are pleased to be an industry supporter and look forward to working with emerging markets trailblazers, who sometimes have many more hurdles to jump to bring their ventures to fruition.”

The founder of the Tech Trailblazers Awards, Rose Ross, commented: “The insights from funding experts such as Amoo Venture Capital Advisory are valuable to all startups, but even more so for startups from emerging markets such as the BRICS region. Having access to Amoo’s specialist knowledge will be a great prize for our winners from the emerging markets.”

The Tech Trailblazers Awards represent the first independent initiative to recognize and reward enterprise technology startups in a global arena. Prizes include business-development products and services worth thousands of dollars, plus expert advice in the form of mentoring from VCs and major vendors’ CTO offices. In addition to emerging markets category, other award categories include: big data, cloud, infosecurity, mobile, networking, storage, sustainable IT and virtualization.

There is a heavily subsidized entry fee of just $50 for a standalone submission to the emerging markets category. Tech startups entering any other categories may also enter the emerging markets category free of charge. For more information, please consult the Tech Trailblazers Awards website.

The judging panel includes the IT industry’s leading figures from around the world, giving little-known startups the opportunity to have their products and services reviewed by eminent influencers. Judges from the emerging markets include Mohit Agrawal, Founder and Editor of Telecom Circle (India); Elise Huang, Partner at WestSummit Capital (China); Mark Hillary, CEO at IT Decisions and Huffington Post blogger (Brazil); Andrew Seldon, Editor of Hi-Tech Security Solutions, TechNews (South Africa); and Monica Zlotogorski, Editor of Inside Latin America (originally from Uruguay but now based in the US).

The prize fund is supported by sponsors and industry partners including MIT/Stanford Venture Lab, the Cloud Security Alliance, Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), Computing, Prezi, Startup America, StartTau, TiE Silicon Valley, RealWire, Lissted, Launchpad Europe, Mynewsdesk, Wazoku, and ExecEvent.

Entry forms should be submitted before the final closing date of September 12th for consideration by the expert panel. For more information and to download an entry form, please visit http://www.techtrailblazers.com/.

To join the Tech Trailblazers as a sponsor, please email [email protected].

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For more information, please visit http://www.techtrailblazers.com/ or follow the Tech Trailblazers Awards on Twitter @techtrailblaze, #ttawards or on LinkedIn at http://www.linkedin.com/company/tech-trailblazers-awards.