Europe 2.0

Next week the Web 2.0 community will turn its eyes on TheNextWeb conference in Amsterdam. If so many of the right people come there, there must be a good reason : Kevin Rose (Diggnation will be made there), Robert Scoble, Nova Spivack (Twine), Chris Saad (DataPortability.org), Scott Rafer (Mashery, MyBlogLog, Lookery),…

An important part of the event will be the startup competition : 24 companies presenting themselves in 5 minutes (that will be 300 seconds sharp). Currently, 22 companies are known, the last 2 will be choosen by the community early next week. Let’s have a short look at some of these startups (in alphabetical order) :

1. andUnite : a German startup with the powerful idea of connecting people that do similar searches on search engines
2. Backbase : the providers of a robust Ajax framework (3 million copies in 80+ countries)
3. Bemba : Dutch startup, providing a button allowing to share any content with your network
4. Beezbox : out of Paris, they enable companies to engage with their communities on social networks
5. ConfNetwork : a tool to facilitate networking at conferences (premiering at TheNextWeb)
6. CoComment : a strong swiss startup that materialized the “commentosphere”, an underlooked component of the blogosphere
7. eBuddy : based in Amsterdam, their browser based chat & messaging service allows millions to connect to MSN, AOL, on the web or on the mobile (recently raised €6.5M funding)
8. Empressr : Ajax/Flash based web presentation company out of New York (they’ve been out for a while)
9. Fav.or.it : plays in the RSS aggregator category, with a twist (or two), allowing to post comments without leaving the window, and to cut ’slices’ of what is of interest to you
10. Fleck : based in Amsterdam (and with an overlap with TheNextWeb people), brought the social dimension into the browser
11. Goojet : manages your mobile “spaces” ; has won LeWeb3 startup competition and raised a €2.3M ’seed-round’ (now this starts to sound US-style)
12. Hoera : under construction at the time of going to (word)press
13. Introniche : facilitates cross-promotion between niche sites
14. Lookery : an ad network for Facebook and social networks, using (anonymized) profiling data ; has raised $900K seed round (and more) from prominent investors
15. Netlog : this belgium-based company would be a heavyweight by European standards : >30 million registered users, it is sometimes compared to a “european facebook”
16. Radionomy : french and belgian team, wants to revolutionize the online radio, by allowing anyone to setup one
17. Symbaloo : with a name that sounds crafted by Kipling, this startup is a new iteration on the “personalized home page” trick
18. Twingly : this links the blogosphere to traditional media (and back)
19. uberVU : a Romanian startup that aims nothing less than “manage all your content and all your conversations in one place”
20. Wakoopa : tracks and shares application usage on your desktop, has been compared to Last.fm and Alexa for desktop apps
21. Wauw.fm : allows to transfer and process the media files of your PC to make them available on your mobile
22. Webnode : web-based website builder and manager
23. ZiLok : last but not least, winner of the public award at Plugg, this company pitches itself as the “eBay of rental”

So it looks like it will be a hot and contrasted show among all those startups, demonstrating that the European web 2.0 scene is alive and kicking. We will profile some of them in more detail.

And also wait anxiously for the last 2 candidates…