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September 22, 2006
This Time Around Europe Is Disruptive
When it comes to telecoms, finance, and Internet apps, Europe is more disruptive this time around. It is one conclusion that you can draw from a feature entitled, Disrupters: Eleven Companies Eleven Big Ideas That Will Change The World, developed by Business 2.0 journalists.
During the last big wave of investment in technology ventures, aka the bubble, we were writing more often about European followers that had innovated to serve the local markets here and companies that had a small part of new disruptive value-chain.
It is looking a little different this time around. Three out of eleven disrupters identified by Business 2.0 are European.
And in our pages here we've covered a few more in areas such as semiconductors, wireless voice and data, and ecommerce. The latest and one (which we haven't covered yet) is Zecco.com, a "financial community" startup founded by Dutch entrepreneurs that says it is going to offer free online trading for US stocks.
But let's get back to Business 2.0's list.
Internet: Netvibes
In the case of Netvibes, and its rivals, it should say "Yahoo's world".
Telecoms: Jajah (the founders are transplanted Austrians) Skype set the trend to shake up the telco voice world. Jajah is there, along with others like Rebtel out of Sweden, the UK's Truphone and Atelplus (Germany) in the mobile market. If telcos don't move really soon to offer competing services, they will be operating in a whole new, much smaller, world.
Finance: Zopa
A few more Zopa clones than Prosper, the only other one we know of, could indeed change the world of companies active in consumer lending.
Posted on September 22, 2006 07:44 AM | Posted to Early stage | Permalink
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