This week’s TechCrunch 50 conference in San Francisco brought together a number of threads and stories which have been kicking around the back of my mind for while. A little like Borat, I’ve been asking the Americans a lot of questions (though hopefully without the accompanying chaos).

The first one seems obvious but is worth spelling out one more time: to launch a consumer web service or, increasingly, mobile application, America remains the golden prize worth shooting for.

It is a large, homogeneous market which speaks one language. It is quite simply a no-brainer to really go for it there. That has always had implications for European startups. How do you launch in a market when you are not actually in the USA, or headquartered there? How do you get traction? It is of course perfectly possible.