Jason Ball's TechBytes

Technology & Venture Capital. Early stage venture capital news mixed with personal views and comments

May 10, 2011 • 6:42 pm 2

The European start-up scene. It’s finally working.

What a difference a year makes.

Last April, I posted that:

Europe has always had problems gaining start-up momentum – there’s no epicenter, there’s no critical mass- and there are no Heros.

The Wired 100 list has gone a long way towards making 100 heroes visibile. Big applause for the Wired team. This year’s Wired 100 is on stands now – one person I was happy to see on the “bubbling list” – John Taysom. He’s an awesome guy. I’ve got a few other personal favorites that aren’t on the list yet, but I’ll cheer for them in silence… oh, and obviously congrats to everyone that’s on the list.

Europe *has* a start up scene now – and fortunately for me – most of it revolves around London. Spotify, Mind Candy (Moshi Monsters), Soundcloud – all amazing companies are doing well on a global stage. Young startups like Groupspaces or Lightbox (go David, go Thai) are popping up and getting funding from tier 1 investors.

I could count on one hand the number of hot European startups two years ago. I can count them on two hands now. I might even have to throw in a toe or two as well.

Silicon Roundabout is real now – thanks largely to initiatives like techhub. Seedcamp continues to expand it’s footprint and pulls together the who’s who of the European start-up world during seedcamp week each September. There’s an event this weekend spear-headed by Songkick for developers – silicon milkroundabout. Sign up for it here. This just wasn’t happening 2 years ago…

There’ve been some interesting companies getting acquired -M&A activity is picking up significantly - and money is getting returned to investors in Europe. But, we need to see more high-profile European IPOs. Skype is grabbing for the ring, just got bought by Microsoft for a cool $8.5bn, Daniel Ek at Spotify is (rumored) to be gunning for an IPO. (That would be awesome if you did Daniel.)

All of this is coming together to make London a hot spot. It’s a great time to be here… (plus the weather’s really great this year). One more turn of the wheel and I think we’re there -

Filed under: Europreneurship, Events, Conferences and Panels, Mergers and Acquisitions, Venture Capital

September 15, 2009 • 8:24 pm 1

Entrepreneurial Leadership Speaker Series

Hussein Kanji has organized a venture capital and entrepreneurship lecture series starting in October, which will be held at London Business School. Current speakers announced are:

Robin Klein, The Accelerator Group, Thursday Oct 1
Stan Bowland, Icera, Thursday Nov 5
Stefan Glaenzer, Last.fm, Thursday Dec 3
Bernard Liautaud, Balderton, Thursday Feb 4
Jos White, MessageLabs, Thursday March 4
Herman Hauser, Amadeus, Thursday, May 6
Mike Hedger, KVS, Thursday June 3

Other speakers will be announced in the near future.

If you're interested in venture capital and entrepreneurship; then this is the series of speakers you need to get to…and it's FREE. It's a stellar lineup, and the price is right. Full details and bios available at the London Business School website or on Hussein's blog.

See you there.

Filed under: Europreneurship, Events, Conferences and Panels, Venture Capital

April 16, 2009 • 7:56 pm 0

European Startups… Still alive and kicking

Just in case you thought innovation was dead (or maybe non-existent) in Europe, the guys over at Mashable have pulled together a short list of European startups. If you missed the The Next Web conference and are interested in monitoring the space, The Next Web is a great resource (with pretty swell twitter too).

Filed under: Events, Conferences and Panels, Venture Capital

February 3, 2009 • 5:51 am 0

Pitch your startup: VCIC 2009

I've been a judge for the VCIC competition held at London Business School for the past few years. The school is actively looking for entrepreneurs willing to pitch to a room a VCs and MBAs learning to be VCs. The venture funds present (previously) were Accel, Atlas, Amadeus, Balderton, Doughty Hanson, et al plus corporates like Microsoft and Qualcomm Ventures.

London Business School is currently recruiting Entrepreneurs to pitch at either of the competitions- general requirements are: 

  • Actively looking to raise capital
  • No previous institutional funding
  • Has product.  Preferably has customer traction
  • Available to present on 20th /21st February and/or 27th February

 
It’s an opportunity for your start-up to present to several top VCs in one shot. If you are interested in pitching at VCIC please contact ccarrillo.mba2010@london.edu and/or for more information regarding pitching click here.

Filed under: Events, Conferences and Panels

January 29, 2009 • 11:47 pm 1

Amazon Web Services Meetup- London

I received this in an email today, in case anyone is interested in learning more about Amazon's services in Europe:

Amazon Web Services Technology
Evangelist for Europe Simone Brunozzi and Cohesive co-founder Alexis
Richardson will be hosting the next AWS Meetup in London on Cloud
Computing and AWS, with details on S3, EC2, CloudFront and the other services!

Details of this free evening event are as follows:

When: Wednesday
4th February, 6.30pm
start – as usual afterwards we will go to the Crown for drinks and further
discussion
Where:
Skills Matter, 1 Sekforde St, Clerkewell, London EC1R 0BE

Format:
Simone and Alexis will each speak for 20-25 minutes and there will be time
for some Q&A after that.

For more details about the event and speakers
please visit http://skillsmatter.com/event/cloud-grid/amazon-web-services-meetup

Registration is open and places are filling fast so register now at http://skillsmatter.com/event/cloud-grid/amazon-web-services-meetup

Filed under: Events, Conferences and Panels

July 3, 2008 • 8:34 pm 0

All things mobile @ Mobile 2.0 Europe

Mobile2logo_160x20

Who knew, my old alma mater, ESADE, has gotten hip and is hosting this year’s Mobile 2.0 Europe conference. If you haven’t looked at who’s attending, here’s a comprehensive list.
And hey, be sure to catch the often quoted, Dr Maximilian Niederhofer at 11:45….

Filed under: Events, Conferences and Panels

April 20, 2008 • 2:57 pm 0

Web 2.0 Expo Party List

We2expo
If you’re in the Bay Area for the Web 2.0 Expo, here’s a list (which has a public Google Calendar as well) of updated, collected, filtered, processed, pre-selected, recommended expo-related events.

Enjoy.

Filed under: Events, Conferences and Panels

April 1, 2008 • 10:44 pm 0

Ireland Venture Capital/Startup Events

Continuing with the Startup Events theme, I thought I’d start posting what I’m seeing around Europe. Conor over at Argolon gave me the low-down on what’s happening on the green isle:

Dublin has traditionally been the mobile dev centre here (Movidia, Newbay, Xiam, Puca, S3, Rococo etc etc) and I think that is still the case. Scattered around the country you have start-ups like Cubic Telecom and YouGetItBack in Cork, VoiceSage in Limerick, Nubiq in Waterford. We’re only just dipping our toes into mobile/wireless etc in LouderVoice with SMS reviews/customer feedback. Medium term aim is full LBS functionality along the lines of Socialight or Whrrl.

We had the big success with DemoBar last autumn and there was supposed to be a follow-up in January but it hasn’t happened yet. TechLudd is a new monthly meetup but it is mainly concerned with the web (and techies). The OpenCoffees in Cork, Limerick, Waterford, Galway, Belfast and Dublin are still pretty small (we average 15 or so in Cork) but particularly strong mobile presence in Limerick. They are also kicking off a BarCamp there pretty soon. Web2Ireland is still probably the best place to keep an eye on for events. The TechLudd guys have also recently started http://irelandstartupevents.com/ which looks good. Finally, Mobile Monday Dublin seems to be a bit quiet at the minute (http://www.momodublin.com/)

I found out via irelandstartupevents.com about the upcoming Adobe Air developer day here in London (too late, now full)…

What other resources/upcoming events should the budding europreneur know about? Post any thoughts in the comments…

(+ I’m planning a trip to Denmark in the near future- anything I should be sure to catch?)

Filed under: Events, Conferences and Panels

February 24, 2008 • 10:48 am 3

London Venture Capital Events

A comment was posted earlier in the week asking what events are relevant for new arrivals in London looking to get involved in the venture/start-up comunity. I was looking for the same in 2004 and posted a short list in 2005. Here’s a revised short list of VC-related events in and around London, no particular order:

Regular events:
Internet People (no link)
Open Coffee
City Zone
Chinwag
Mashup events
Mobile Monday
Geek Dinner
Second Chance Tuesday

Conferences:
FOWA
Symbian Smartphone show
Paid Content UK events
Library House events

Mike Butcher over at TechCrunch UK tends to post lists of upcoming events on a regular basis. Latest list here.

Any events I’ve left off, feel free to add them in the comments section.

Filed under: Europreneurship, Events, Conferences and Panels, Venture Capital

February 16, 2008 • 4:31 pm 4

World Mobile Conference- The Year of the Browser

The number one thing that jumped out at me during the conference was Google’s report that there are 50x more searches originating from the iPhone than any other mobile handset.

Just to put that in perspective there are 4 million iPhones in the wild compared to 3 billion other mobile devices. This goes hand in hand with O2′s report that 60% of U.K. iPhone users are sending or receiving more than 25 MB of data a month- which is unheard of on other handsets.

Android was only available on a few booths- AMD, Qualcomm, etc. From the demo I saw, it’s clear that Android will offer iPhone-like touchscreen functionality along with a tightly bundled suite of Google Apps and browser. It’s important to highlight that Android is using WebKit- the same as Safari on the iPhone (and Mac OS X desktop).

Opera was demoing their latest 9.5 release- showing off Opera Desktop, Opera Mini, Opera Mobile and Opera Wii. They’ve created a browser for many, many other non-handset devices (Wii, Airplanes, Archos, etc.) They allow users to sync their profile, bookmarks, widgets, etc across all devices. (This is the exact same functionality that Apple should be offering.)

I didn’t see Mozilla, but Firefox is coming soon.

Great browsers, combined with device specific site optimization (e.g. iPhone) or server-side optimization (e.g. Novarra) mean 2008 could finally be the Year of the Browser on mobiles.

Filed under: Events, Conferences and Panels, iPhone, Mobile

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