October 15, 2007
Upcoming events for alarm:clock euro
The press passes are booked for your alarm:clock euro reporter of the first hour, Valerie Thompson, at the following events.
Demo: Germany Tuesday Oct 16
O'Reilly/CMP Web 2.0 Expo, Berlin Nov 5 to 8
European Tech Tour: Web and Communities Summit, Lausanne Nov 14 to 16
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October 09, 2007
One Day MBA For Software Entrepreneurs in Paris
This is not a sponsored post, that is we're not getting paid for this announcement. But we think it sounds like a good deal for alarm:clock euro's French-speaking readers. Next week 'Software Academy' is running a one day business-oriented seminar for software entrepreneurs, organized by Microsoft and GE Capital.
You normally have to be a Microsoft independant software partner to get in free, but a:c euro readers are being offered the same deal (see below for the link). You will have to listen to Microsoft's pitch to founders to join its IDEES program for about 60 minutes, but after that you will get advice from some of the top advisors to startups in Paris - we can say that because we looked at the list of speakers and know of their work.
Get up to speed on things like public relations, patenting your intellectual property, finding partners, raising capital, commercial leasing-financing, and staffing the venture. Free drinks at the end of the day, too.
See the program here. Enter alarm clock in the field entitled Partner ID (Empower ou Certified) (un seul inscrit par société)
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September 26, 2007
Meet CSR, Intel, and PicoChip Execs in Edinburgh
There's a conference on October 30th in Edinburgh that sounds worthwhile going to if you're within a decent distance of the city. We say that not just because we love the atmosphere there: the "closes", the aging elegance, and the high ceilings. And we're not a media partner, it's just that discussions on offer sound pretty relevant.
Called Bridging the Gap, and organized by Scottish Equity Partners, the theme is how do emerging companies target large multinational customers from the early days. Finding the right decision-maker in the right department in the right country is not easy, and selling to them is even harder, so SEP has lined up some big names like Intel and Cisco to bring them a bit closer. It also has others that have actually made that leap like CSR, PicoChip, and MTEM on hand.
Why not visit the city that William Gibson recently described as "singular, in the way that Venice is singular", and get some good business tips too?
View Connect
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July 14, 2007
Upcoming Events For alarm:clock euro
The alarm:clock's European correspondent and reporter of the first hour, Valerie Thompson is going to be at the following upcoming events. If any regular readers would like to meet up on these day, we have lots of time free. Just write to valerie [[ at ]] thealarmclock [[dot]] com
IE-Club Evening event
Paris Sept 22 to 23
EVCA Technology Conference At event all day Thursday and Friday morning
Stockholm October 3 to 5
Tech Tour: England
Fall 2007 TBC
http://www.techtour.com/english07/index.php
Posted at 04:27 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
April 07, 2007
Spanish Startups Wanted
The folks at the European Tech Tour are looking for Spanish startups to present at its two day event upcoming in May.
Startups selected to demo do not have to pay to present, unlike some of the other investor showcase events ongoing in Europe. Deadline for entries is April 15th.
For further information, go to their site or contact us:
You can contact Berggi co-founder Jorge Mata is the organizer for Spain jorge [ at ] techtour.com
Johdi Woodford is the overall marketing contact for the event johdi [at] techtour.com
Posted at 11:21 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
January 23, 2007
Red Herring Still Open For Europe 100 Nominees
The Red Herring conference organizers wrote in to say that they are extending the deadline for the Red Herring 100 competition. Deadline for online submissions is January 29th.
So get your smart balls startup, your smarter interface pioneers, your geotagging and e-rental web innovators-- or any venture that has not already been identified as a Red Herring 100 company -- to fill out the online submission form.
The winners will be announced at the Venture Market Europe Conference, which takes place March 25-27, in Cannes. Please note that only companies that are privately held and headquartered in the EMEA region are eligible.
Additionally, former Red Herring 100 Winners cannot apply again, but will be considered for a Where Are They Now panel at the Venture Market Europe Conference in Cannes, March 25-27.
Posted at 04:07 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
November 22, 2006
Marketing Ammo For Euro VCs
Here's an event for venture capital firms on the fundraising trail. According to Guy Fraser Samson, a former institutional investment, specialized in VC, and investment book author, the alarm:clock euro's venture capitalist readers could get some marketing material if they go to a two day workshop put on by Incisive Media on December 4th and 5th in London.
It will be based to a large part on the tenets from his book entitled Multi-Asset Class Investment Strategy. Fraser Sampson writes that it's "the marketing weapon they have been waiting for. It is basically a worked example of why everyone should be putting at least 20% into private equity."
He's just back from the SuperInvestor event in Paris where 33 participants attended his workshop, almost all from a private equity background but with a handy showing of family offices too.
Read - Incisive Media Multi Asset Class Event Broschure
Posted at 10:29 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
November 16, 2006
Upcoming Event: Mediatech
Library House, a tech business research and database publisher, is putting on a one day confab in London called Mediatech 2006 on November 30, meant to bring together startups, corporates, and investor types.
For a:c euro readers, it could be a chance to get closer to people from Intel, Microsoft, Google and Yahoo - if that is important to your biz. Intel Capital and Intel will have a contingent there led by managing director Ashish Patel, and Microsoft too, headed by Matthew Bishop, (both companies are sponsoring the event).
The Microsoft people will be the ones that are looking for partnerships with young technology companies who want to exploit Microsoft's software or services in new products. (The Redmond-based giant sheds some light on what it is doing in Europe in its startup blog platform and there are also details on its appetite for acquisitions and startups. E.g. it has made 21 acquisitions this year, three of them were in Europe - none were blockbuster-sized though).
Speakers are Bob Young, the CEO of lulu.com and a co-founder of Red Hat, Jonathan Wolf who is Yahoo's director of corporate development in Europe, and Anil Hansjee who has a similar title at Google, which means you might be able to meet them before and after their talks.
And if a financing round is on agenda, there are quite a few VCs signed on to attend, such as 3i, Acacia Partners, Advent Venture Partners, Amadeus Capital, Benchmark Capital, Celtic House Ventures, Esprit Capital Partners, as well as Partech International, TLcom Capital Partners, and TTP Venture Managers, will be on hand. Most of these invest across Europe, as well as the UK. The BBC, Sky, and Guardian are participating from the media side.
Read - Microsoft EMEA - Investors in Innovation (David Rowe's blog)
Read - Microsoft Ready To Deal (alwayson)
Read - Library House Web 2.0 Conference (the equity kicker)
Read - Mediatech 2006 Who Is Walking The Walk (UK TechCrunch)
Posted at 07:02 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
November 13, 2006
Le Web 3 And Someone Asks What is Web 2.0?
Several readers have asked if the a:c euro is going to cover the Paris-based confab called Le Web3, the third edition of a the get-together originally call Les Blogs. It is going to be huge -- so far a little over 500 people have signed up - top limit is 900, double the number that attended last year.
We looked at the list of participants, which is a nice feature to offer attendees, as is the breakout of the countries they come from. France, UK, and Germany top that ranking. There are a lot of folks going that are regular a:c euro readers. (Link to list of people that have registered) so it would be good to make it.
Le Web3 is in Paris but the entire event will be in English. The panels have some amusings titles like Life 2.0 and The World 2.0. Their is an opportunity for startups to make their pitch to participants too, and four venture capitalists will take on the question: Will there be a Web 2.0 bubble? The date of the event is December 11 and 12.
Maybe someone should take on answering "What Is Web 2.0" like John Cook, a journalist, who covers technology and ventures for a Seattle-based paper, who wrote a heard-on-the-street style post asking just that question. The answers are enlightening.
Link: Le Web3
Read: Heard on the street: What is Web 2.0?
Posted at 05:57 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
September 28, 2006
On the Internet, Nobody Knows Your French
That one liner came from Olivier Ezratty, a variation on the Peter Steiner classic cartoon, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog”. The context was a chat about the chances of startups over here becoming dominant, or global players, on the Web. He is just one of the many people we met this week at an event organized by IE Club in Paris. (Thanks to Julien Cordoniou for the invite.)
Also on hand was Tariq Krim, founder of Netvibes (who still owns the majority of his company – we learned) along with Pierre Chappaz, founder of Wikio and Kelkoo....
They talked about what it is like to go from garage mode to building an organization, something every startup has to go through if it is in it for the long run, as well as Pascal Lorne, CEO of mobile messaging startup Miyowa who spends most of his time travelling to mobile network operator customers – he actually likes the selling game. Interestingly, he based his R&D in the Southern French port city of Marseille, where wages are 30 percent lower than in Paris and employee loyalty higher.
Also Philippe Berner, of Kayentis, whose company is doing some neat things in the e-Health area with pen and paper computing (it’s like Anoto but you don’t need to buy special paper). The startup has some pretty big name life science customers using its applications.
And Modelabs founder, Stephane Bohbot, impressed us with the financial performance of his company which floated in April – there are not too many that go from zero to €140M in sales in a couple of years, even if they are able to execute on acquisitions with the alacrity that Bohbot has done.
Bohbot’s prior venture, mobile audio technology firm Digiplug, was acquired by Japan's Faith Group in 2002 and his tales of trying and failing to raise VC had a few of the moneymen squirming we noted.
Marc Simoncini, the founder of publicly-traded dating company Meetic, who has exceptional public speaking skills, talked about web technology trends that have impacted business. He said that what made the Web really viable for business was not hypertext but the emergence of photos and images "… pictures of people, books, products, that is what was the big thing.”
He added that video and wireless are the next things but that it is still early. In other words, it might be another five years before we see the real benefit to businesses of online video and connecting cellphones to the cloud.
Ezratty told us about several startups he is working with, eHealth software firm Voluntis, u-lik, user generated shopping application, and n-generate, which is a Franco-US startup developing software to make the use of corporate design easier . He worked in marketing and biz dev for Microsoft for 15 years and has a popular blog that has some meaty insights into Microsoft, digital technologies, and entrepreneurship.
The panel members posited the idea of a “mondiale” player emering here. Who knows if that will happen, but if it doesn’t, it is not going to be due to lack of founder ambition at the early stage. We get the feeling these entrepreneurs won't be content selling their companies to the likes of Yahoo this time, or even floating to become a French success story, rather the desire is to go further and try for a seat at the table with Google, eBay and Co.
The IE Club is kind of like First Tuesday of old. If we say it’s like First Tuesday, we mean it in the sense that it is an open and relaxed place to meet high quality entrepreneurs to learn more about building a successful tech venture and hook up with potential business partners.
We also eyeballed a couple of partners from French VC firms. So for entrepreneurs it’s worth going to make some contacts and set up meetings.
It doesn’t have the same feeding frenzy that FT used to have. For one thing the management consultant types are not swarming trying to make a buck off over-funded startups or over-enthusiastic investors. In fact, we met a couple of advisers that told us that they are working gratis for startups in the hopes that their investment in time will pay off in fees or valuable shares when the company hits its stride– we can assure you that this was not the case during the bubble era. There’s optimism in Paris, but no euphoria.
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June 25, 2006
Get In The Elevator With Atlas Ventures
The Elevator Pitch normally means a short presentation by a startup founder in front of a VC - the equivalent time limit as if the two parties were travelling between several floors in an elevator.
But we hear that Atlas Ventures is hosting a real elevator pitch at upcoming TheNextWeb conference in Amsterdam where entrepreneurs actually get in an elevator with two of the managing partners to pitch their idea.
It sounds like a good event for online service and web-oriented startups with VCs from 3i, Solid Ventures and Mangrove Capital Partners, also on hand.
Posted at 08:22 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
March 15, 2006
Euro Tech Pitch Fests
A couple of tech founders have asked us about events in Europe, the kind of events where startups can make their pitch and meet business partners, investors, and their peers. So the a:c euro put together the following list of upcoming events.
Link - Innovate! 06 – Spain - May 15 to 17 (Brought to Europe by Chris Shipley, the founder of the DEMO conferences in the US. She is currently inviting startups CEOs to apply for a chance to present in May.)
Link - European Tech Tour (Regional events that bring together executives from large IT and telecoms companies, VCs, investment bankers, and entrepreneurs. The next one scheduled is The Benelux Tech Tour on May 30 - June 1, 2006.)
Link - Red Herring Venture Market Europe 200 (The a:c euro notes that the deadline is today to enter to be part of its Top 100 award contest, but it is still worth going to the event, scheduled for May 8-10, 2006 to see and hear what is going on in Europe and Middle East.)
