Europe 2.0

The Plugg.eu conference was held yesterday at the posh Plaza Hotel in Brussels. Most participants would agree that for a first edition, it was a success, and that organizer Robin Wauters managed to put Brussels on the web 2.0 circuit, alongside London’s FOWA, Paris’ LeWeb3, and Amsterdam’s TheNextWeb.

Rebecca Jennings from Forrester Research gave us some facts and figures about the European social demographics. Her study splits the public depending on their degree of involvement with social media (”participation ladder”) into Creators (10%), Critics (19%), Collectors (9%), Joiners (13%), Spectators (40%) and Inactives (53%).

Max Niederhofer from Atlas Venture got us excited about the online gaming market, and offered four ways to build a 100 M$ company :

• build the world’s largest casual game (”Poke” on Facebook being the current leader…)
• build Europe’s digital distribution platform for games
• get micro-currency applied to gaming
• successful browser based MMOG (that one would have to be bootstrapped by its founders)

An entrepreneurs panel moderated by Colette Ballou offered insights by Rodrigo Sepulveda (vpod.tv), Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten (several startups, including Flock and TheNextWeb), Simon McDermott (Attentio.com), Andrej Nabergoj (Noovo). Some highlights :

• markets are local by default ; it is important to find the right partners to help launch in other countries ;
• beware of cash flow : sales cycles tend to be really long, companies are often afraid of dealing with startups, and pay with long delays
• Rodrigo came up with some delightful analogies : starting a company is like having sex for the first time (you don’t have a clue) ; and setting up a subsidiary in Spain is like a wedding (with a long ceremonial by the notary)
• Andrej : people are key, take the time to find exceptional people for the initial team ; it will be the matrix out of which the company will grow ;
• Boris : the hardest thing is just to start ; get started !

The startup rally saw the presentation by 18 companies (2 had forfeited). Some projects depended on a quite technical platform, like Cellity, Floobs, MyOwnDB, Trutap… Other were mostly a nice idea, well put into form, such as HumanGrid, TVTrip, Mobiya. After seeing all of them, Alenty and Radionomy remained among my own favorite, truly “2.0″ in essence (some of the former still smelled a bit “web 1.0″, I won’t tell which).

The three finalists ended up being :

• Bragster : a platform for sharing “dares”, in a “Jackass meets Facebook and YouTube” fashion (and indeed one founder threw a pie on his co-founder’s face on stage)
• Viewdle : a platform for doing elaborate searches on videos (with a COO in a nice suit and tie, in complete contrast to the Bragster guys)
• ZiLok : a rental marketplace, started in Belgium, France, UK, US (and two cool founders as well, even without pie-throwing)

Viewdle won the Jury award, while ZiLok went away with the prize of the public. Two companies to watch ! (Bragster is already being watched by 800.000 unique visitors monthly)

The investor panel gathered Julie Meyer (Ariadne Capital), Paul Fisher (Advent Venture Partners), Reshma Sohoni (SeedCamp), Alexis Bogaert (Dexia Private Equity / Arkafund), moderated by Mike Butcher (TechCrunch UK & Europe). Some points :

• Paul Fisher : eastern and central european markets are very hot ; so is the next wave of internet advertising ;
• Julie Meyer : a core group of people build companies counter-cyclically with the stock market, that’s a smart timing
• Reshma Sohoni : there are a lot more angel investors now ; start thinking internationally early on
• Mike Butcher mentioned “Enterprise 2.0″ as an area of interest for the future

The panel on the Social Web was very promising, with very competent people like Olivier Creiche (Six Apart), Matt Colebourne (coComment), Lorenz Bogaert (Netlog), Jan-Joost Kraal (eBuddy). I found the discussion only mildly interesting, with people agreeing that it was very important to offer fine privacy control (”I don’t want my mother /girlfriend to see that I’m doing this“). Brands and companies better beware of these new social venues, as put by Matt Colebourne :

the era in which you can control what people say about your brand is gone.

Still, François Petavy from Eyeka tried to show how brands can indeed try and organize the creativity that can spring up from a dedicated user community.

Rudy De Waele (from m-trends.org) delivered an insightful presentation on the future of mobile, citing dozens of new innovative startups.

As always, it’s also in the alleysides that we get to meet some interesting entrepreneurs and projects, such as : Rummble, MyID.is, or TripSay.

All in all, a pretty good harvest of new and exciting projects to share with you in the next days and weeks.