I’ve just read a great article in the tech section of The Times Online about how London is becoming the hot spot of the second Internet boom, fueled by the ideas and energy of young tech entrepreneurs and venture capital and business angles’ money. British and European start-ups pop up in an environment favorable for staring internet business: talent is attracted by the dynamism of London, available office space and high-speed broadband and the low cost of setting up a business!

So the venture capitalists are converging on London, their names whispered in the networking clubs: Index Ventures, Accel, Atlas Venture. “Money is coming from a number of sources,” says Ze’ev Rozov of Sportingo, a start-up that brokers sports content. “US VCs have opened offices here, and they’re making investments in start-ups in England.” Rozov, who has worked across the world, thinks conditions in the UK are “ripe”. Some go further. “London has become the Silicon Valley of Europe,” says Eric Baker of Viagogo, a ticket-reselling site that launched in 2006 with a $20m injection – gained precisely because of the London factor. Indeed, Biddulph has noticed “there’s a lot of money and sometimes not quite enough to spend it on.”

Whereas here in Spain we have the slowest but most expensive ADSL in Europe. Nothing new, of course. But let’s face it: slow tech infrastructure won’t make up against southern lifestyle and a beach.

London swings in the second internet boom, Barcelona spinns around tourism. Good night and good luck!

Stay tuned, we go to London soon to interview Matt Biddulph, co-founder of Dopplr, the online travel club.

bueno, bueno… tenemos la primera serie de MySpace: el prota se llama Porta, 19 años, rapero y de Barcelona!
Su vida se resuma en la serie “En boca de tantos“.
Con 5 millones de descargas de su maqueta y un contrato con Universal Music, MySpace le daba la posibilidad de ser el protagonista de la primera serie en España.

Curioso que es un chico de Barcelona… Bueno, aquí en este blog siempre pensabamos que la city produce y atrae mucho talento.

Cada lunes sale un nuevo capítulo en HD.

Pecha Kucha, which is Japanese for the sound of conversation, is a web-based platform that allows to organise events off-line.

It is a way to bring together young architects and designers and gives them 20 pictures, 20 seconds each of them to present their ideas, projects, dreams to an audience. The system is self-organizing; everybody can set up a Pacha Kucha Night in his/her town. There were / will be events in Madrid, Tokyo, Ljubljana, LA, Delhi, Austin, Lima, Linz, Bern, Groningen, Hamburg, Oslo, Belfast, etc etc…..

BUT nobody has taken initiative in Barcelona so far? Isn’t that weird in a “creative” place like Barcelona with tons of desingers and architects?

Through the blog of Bruno Giussani I discovered the latest book by Hervé Lebret - teacher at EPFL in Switzerland and manager of INNOGRANTS. The book is about the lessons to be learnt from “the valley” in terms of their start-up culture. Bruno Giussani interviewed the author for his blog; so here is what we Europeans can learn from Silicon Valley:

* It is essential to bet on individuals ready to take risks, ready to face uncertainty; the age of the famous entrepreneurs when they created their start-ups shows that youth is indeed a key ingredient. Passion and dreams have to be the keywords for these people. You can not succeed in a start-up without them. Remember Hegel: “Nothing great on the world has ever been accomplished without passion. Of course mental age is as imporant as real age so you also have mature “young people”.

* Ambition has been missing in Europe. Entrepreneurs are driven by their ego; they are most of the time impossible people because they are focused on a single thing, their success. Betting on ambition is compulsory. Speed is a linked ingredient; and speed requires resources and money; too many entrepreneurs fear venture capital which is essential; talking about “vulture capital” will not help; business is tough… Without feelings of urgency, your competitors succeed. (BG: see also this previous post)

* Innovation requires entrepreneurs and investors who understand each other; there is a virtuous circle of ideas and money which has to be well digested; of course this implies losing control and dilution, but a small piece of a big cake is better than a big piece of nothing. Understanding venture capital is another component of that world; oftentimes, the investors were themselves previously entrepreneurs. And… money may still be seen as a taboo after the speculative fever of the Internet bubble.

* Of course experience is necessary and Europeans may have nice ideas and technologies but seem less capable of developing them. Silicon Valley has many, many Europeans who may be willing to help, mentor the ambitious young entrepreneurs. These should not be mercenaries, but experienced people interested in sharing, helping. Silicon Valley has been known for this openness; networks of people are very efficient in SV such as Indian, Chinese, Taiwanese, Israeli associations and today these people help their native country.

* The main error that Europe and other areas have made is to put in place first an infrastructure (sciences parks, innovation agencies, fiscal, administrative support and so on) whereas Silicon Valley is an ecosystem, i.e. people who interact informally; the culture came before the infrastructure and there is not much you can do about it… infrastructure does not hurt but has too often been seen as the solution, it is a tool only.

* Finally, Silicon Valley is a cluster of people where the fluidity of the exchanges is the major cultural element. When start-ups are about team, team, team, SV is about people, people, people…

Have a great 2008!

A GREAT idea worth spreading. The promo started last monday, so hurry up and sponsor as many children as possible.

At TechCrunch people have started discussing weather it is or it is not important that TOM, our all first friend and founder of MySpace, has obviously lied about his age. This and more dirty laundry about MySpace - the company, are currently talked about by Julia Angwin, a Wall Street Journal reporter who has apparently been working on book about the site.

Michael Arrington form TechCrunch says in his post:

Why would he do this? Maybe so that the company looked cooler, started by 20-somethings instead of 30-somethings when it first launched in 2003. Or maybe there’s another reason. Whatever it is, lying to your users, your tens of millions of users, can’t be a good thing in the long run. If you can’t trust the founders to be truthful in their profiles, how can you trust what anyone says on the site. The answer may simply be that you can’t.

As I personally could not care less about it - and probably the kids at MySpace don’t do either - I found it astonishing that the post even made it to the BBC’s “From the Blogosphere”.

So does it matter that the co-founder of the biggest social network is lying about his age or not?

Kedume sent me info on the upcoming changes in the MySpace platform, presented last Wednesday at the Web 2.0 summit (17-19th Oct. 07 in San Francisco) by Chris DeWolfe and Rupert Murdoch himself.

The issue here is that Facebook is setting social web standards and MySpace is lagging behind, so the basical news is MySpace will allow the creation of third party applications, like Facebook already does.

Fore more info go to Web2.0 summit or TechCrunch

I have just come back from an amazing festival trip to Amsterdam: the Cross Media Week, or Picnic 07, a unique and exquisite event at the inter-section of creativity, innovation, art and business. It’s hard to give a coherent resumee because it was simply impossible to attend everything one could be interested in the first place. We did some really good interviews with various people, among them David Weinberger (Everything is Miscellanneous), Sugata Mitra (A Hole in the Wall project), Emile Aarts (Vice-president of Philips Research Labs) and Alex Steffen (co-founder of Worldchanging.com) - the interviews should be out in the November and Dicember issues of infonomia’s “if…”.

Some of the conferences and speaches are available on video streamings at the Picnic web.

Some of my personal highlights were David Silverman who spoke about the creation of the SIMPSONS (it takes 9 month to complete one episode!). Then there was a great “hostile tête-à-tête” between David Weinberger and Andrew Keen, Author of “The Cult of the Amateur” , wisely moderated by Walt Mossberg. Then there was the US actor Woody Harrelson giving an outdoor yoga class (on the only rainless day out of 4), Pablos Holman’s live hacking of Cory Doctorow’s mobile phone box, Mr Mitra’s presentation on how poor, IT-illiterate children in India are able to teach themselves and each other with the help of a computer. During a really great “Creative China” special Kaiser Kuo, director of Digital Strategy at Ogilvy in Beijing, explained that Beijing underground-rockers can only survive in the harsh and economically dry chinese music business thank’s to their generous, wealthy European girlfriends.

There were loads of other great sessions about the future of media, virtual worlds, design, advertising, digital belonging, games, personal fabrication, AND then GREEN CHALLENGE, a competition awarded with 500,000 Euro (!) for the best idea for a product or service that reduces greenhouse gas emissions in a consumer-friendly way. Richard Branson came over to Amsterdam to hand in the price to Igor Kluin, founder of Qurrent.

Amsterdam and the Amsterdames (including it’s mayor - see video) are capable of gathering together interesting people around cutting-edge issues; the quality and quantity of foreign speakers from North America and Asia was impressive. This is possible because Amsterdam is a wanna-be place: a liberal, multi-disciplinary, open, 100% bi-lingual (ENGLISH and Dutch), relaxed, multi-ethnical city with cheap, ubiquitous communication infrastructure and an international, well-train workforce. A referrence model for what Barcelona could aspire to.