European Technology Entrepreneur Award

Technopreneurs out there! The European Tech Tour Association (ETT), luxury watchmakerAudemars Piguet & Cie, and Weber Shandwick Worldwide, are inaugurating “The Changing Times Award” to name the European Technology Entrepreneur of the Year in 2006.

The award will be presented to the European Technology Entrepreneur whose private company has had the biggest impact, on the largest number of people, in the least amount of time. The names of the finalist companies will be announced in November.

The event will take place on November 30, 2006 in Geneva. Invitation only.

If you believe, YOU are the European Technology Entrepreneur, please apply at Johdi@techtour.com

New Energy Forum – Looking for exciting presenters!

If you are into cleantech and as excited about this new emerging sector like myself, there is an interesting event coming up in December. E-Unlimited is organizing the New Energy Forum, taking place on December 5th, as part of the European Venture Summit (includes a Tech and Bio-track for those of you not so much into Cleantech ;-)).

I have the pleasure to chair a session at this cleantech event. We are still looking for one or two exciting speakers or companies, which want to present themselves infront of a European audience. Let me know if of interest!

1st TrendSlam a great success!

Congratulations to Monty and his team for organizing the 1st TrendSlam in history. A well attended event of top media experts and entrepreneurs was challenged to present in exactly 5min their ideas, trends and thoughts about the future in “new media”. Top speakers at this well attended event were i.e. Felix Petersen from Plazes, Anina and Florian Forster from Fon (have you seen their recent announcement to give away routers free-of-charge?), who all presented a compelling story and value proposition. The next TrendSlam is supposed to take place in New York with a focus on US trends. Well done all together!

Interesting conferences / events

Two very interesting conferences for entrepreneurs, start-ups and investors are coming up this fall:

Alpha Summit (Nov 29 – Dec 1 2006): In its third year and initiated by Munich Network, this has become one of the top-events for entrepreneurs. Top speakers like Orna Berry have already announced their participation. This is a must-attend event – especially for DACH start-up – looking to connect with the venture community. This year a special Open Source track is on the agenda in order to highlight Germany’s / Europe’s leading role in this important trend.

European Venture Summit (Dec 4-5 2006): This international event tries to attract 100+ start-ups as well as leading European entrepreneurs, investors, etc. this year in Lisbon. For the 1st time, besides Tech and LS, a new track called “New Energy Forum” will pay tribute to the increasing traction within the Cleantech sector.

Congratulations to the RedHerring 2006 Winners – Germany coming in only at 4th place!

Congratulations to the winners of the RedHerring 2006 contest. Some remarkable winners worth mentioning from Germany are (in no particular order): Actionality, OpenBC and Spreadshirt. A positive surprise from a German side is clearly PV Crystalox Solar, examplifying Germany's competitive edge in the cleantech space. Other European companies who made it on the list this year and which have earned high respect and acclamations at the show (just to name a few): Sulake/Habbo Hotel, Cognima, Netvibes (well done Tariq!) or FON (Big plans ahead of you Martin!).

Takeaway: UK is the clear winner this year with 28 selected companies. France and Israel are both runners-up with 17 selected companies. Then, finally (!) Germany is sharing place number 4 ex aquo with Switzerland (Thanks Valerie for putting them up already). Although this list is a good indication on where technology oriented companies are based, it probably doesn't give enough credit to the great start-ups we have here in Germany….

Recommendation: Hey Germany! We can do better than that next year!

RedHerring 100 Event – Recap

I am just on my way back from the RedHerring 100 conference, which took place in Paris this week. Definitely one of the top events here in Europe, where you can meet the best VCs and start-ups in Europe. 100 “start-ups” from technology and life sciences got awarded there and had the chance to pitch their story to the audience. The event has revealed that Europe has a strong and remarkable crowd of entrepreneurs and business managers who are as successful as their US counterparts, however, please excuse that I name just a few “stars” who presented there and whom I consider particularly interesting and amazing:

Stan Boland, CEO from Icera. Icera is a fabless IC company aiming to revolutionize the next generation of mobile handsets. Stan, a serial entrepreneur, explained his vision, strategy and how to build a great and successful company. He clearly has very ambitious plans with this company as he outlined in his presentation.

Bernard Liautaud, Co-Founder/President/Chief Strategy Officer from Business Objects: BO is a great European success story in the IT/SW industry. Established in the early 90s, the company immediately focused on the US market and went public there soon after. BO has been increasing sales in 13 consecutive years (!!!) and hit the $1Bn revenue mark last year. He provided a very honest insight into the last 13 years, how he built a global company, went through difficult years and how he decided to transition out of the CEO role. Especially the latter topic showed that he is a great European Entrepreneur, who realised that every company is going through different phases of growth and that now the time has come to hand over his day-to-day activities. As he mentioned, he is enjoying his new, more strategic role at BO very much.

Brent Haberman, Co-Founder of Lastminute.com: I had a chance to meet with and talk to Brent, who went through all phases you can imagine in building a company. He started off with a few friends, raised seed money, went public in the late 90s, saw his stock price tumble from 320 pence to 19 pence, rebuilt the organisation and then sold out last year to Sabre for $1Bn+. He is now in a Chairman role at Lastminute.com and apparently looking for his next venture where he can “have fun” and be a real entrepreneur again.

Takeaway: Europe has great entrepreneurs! Of course, there are several things that make it more challenging here in Europe (fragmented markets, different cultures, European work ethics (!), cost per talent, rules and regulations, semi-liquid financial markets, etc.) but nevertheless, the companies mentioned above have made it! Despite all the quarrel, blame and excuses, they have taken the opportunity presented and made a great company out of it. This should encourage us, that nothing’s impossible! We can all learn from these gentlemen and what they have achieved.

Recommendation: Hello start-up out there! RedHerring 2007 is around the corner and this could be your chance to get on the list! It’s not just for fun, it’s a good marketing tool and way to promote your great ideas!

Deutsches Eigenkapitalforum – A great place to pitch your story!

On April 26th / 27th, the "Deutsches Eigenkapitalforum" (DEF) will be celebrating its 10th anniversary with another great conference. Taking place in Berlin this time, the DEF has become one of the most important platforms for VCs and start-ups to network and to pitch their business cases to each other here in Germany.

Takeaway: DEF provides an excellent platform for young companies to learn about venture capital and private equity. It allows pitching ideas and getting feedback from venture capitalists. I heard that some current IPO companies have made their first "steps" at this conference.

Recommendation: Very worthwhile if you are looking to raise venture funding and want to meet a large number of VCs at once. Hope to see you there!

Search and Online Advertising – Big market ahead

Search and Advertising are becoming more and more important. Nielsen/ Netratings recently posted that “Online search conducted across approximately 60 search engines in the

U.S. rose 39 percent year-over-year in January 2006 from four billion searches to nearly 5.7 billion, the highest number of online searches to date. Nielsen/NetRatings reported last month that online search in December 2005 rose 55 percent from a year ago to nearly 5.1 billion searches, corresponding to the aggressive growth in search marketing revenue during the same period.” 

Takeaway: Advertising is getting bigger and bigger after a few years of “unfulfilled promises”. The expectations of the late 90s did not at all materialize, but now the offerings around search and online advertising are becoming main stream. I am sure there is more to come and many start-up opportunities are out there to capitalize on this trend. 

Recommendations: If anybody is interested in this topic, there is a great event taking place next week here in

Munich, Search Engine Strategies 2006. 

Is eBay a market place for successful start-ups?

Various people asked me whether eBay is an interesting starting ground for start-ups. I have been thinking about this question for quite some time now. On the one hand, eBay is clearly a huge market place. eBay has recently opened its APIs to third-party developers in order to spur innovation in terms of sw and services. Clearly, eBay has recognized that it needs help from the IT industry to keep innovation levels high at eBay. From this perspective, start-ups seem to be welcome by eBay these days.

On the other hand, I have some doubts. First, is eBay a large enough market place yet to sustain a large 3rd party business on its own? Yes, starting ideas out of the eBay environment and then growing into other market places or the general eCommerce arena is a good approach, but relying entirly on eBay might not result in a large company per se. Secondly, would eBay tolerate a large company side-by-side? Well there are examples such as Auctionmaster etc., but these are rare examples and I doubt if these companies can grow very big. eBay will clearly keep a close eye on these companies, that they don’t take too much of the eBay pie.

Takeaway: Yes, it’s a valid idea to expect emering, interesting start-ups in the eBay environment. I doubt it, that these companies can only “survive” with eBay as their only market.

Recommendations: A good ground to start looking for “eBay related spin-offs” is eBay Live coming up soon here in Germany. Hopefully, see you there!

Blogging in the Venture Capital World!

If you are interested to know, who else is blogging from a VC perspective, have a look at a recently compiled list of VC related blogs at BloggingVC. Thanks Christian for putting this up. Let’s see how fast the list grows!