TechCrunch Euro Tour – Amsterdam meetup wrap, and more to come
Tuesday this week we had the Amsterdam TechCrunch meetup, the last city in the Summer TechCrunch Euro Tour before I kick off again in September.
In just over a month and a half I tracked down startups in Paris, Berlin, Warsaw, Rome, Dublin, Istanbul, Athens, Barcelona, Zurich and now Amsterdam, not including the TechCrunch Pitch! event in London recently (thanks to Boingo for the great roaming WiFi). The picture of Europe I am building up is of a place where there are startups as hungry and thirsty for success as any in the U.S., but the kind of hothouse cluster you find in Silicon Valley does not yet exist – at least not to that level. The Silicon Valley of Europe is not a place. It’s a state of mind. And the synapses in that mind, which is spread across Europe inside the heads of excited young entrepreneurs, have only fairly recently started to form. That’s something I hope to improve by creating more opportunities for startups in Europe to network. In the meantime, this event wrap-up is the first of the ones I’ll be doing about the Euro Tour events over the course of the next few weeks (now that I’ll be standing still long enough to write them).
So we heard from etrip.nl – a sort of Kayak, / Skyscanner competitor; kipjes.com – human search engine (browser extension) which is in stealth mode; gemzies – “Digg for About.com style experts”; Treasuremytext – A way to save and archive SMS messages to the Web (more); Tunin.fm – mobile internet radio with a new compression technology; Mads.com – mobile ad serving, DART for mobile; Wiseline – A competitor to sites like dandelife and miomi; and Viuer – a scripted Ed TV show where users vote on the scenario. I also met with irlconnect, Wakoopa and TheNextWeb guys.
Like many European cities, Amsterdam is packed with a highly educated population that makes for a fertile ground for talent. But just as in the rest of Europe, getting funding for that first startup is still no easy feat, especially in the current environment. It makes me think that there may be a role for a Y-Combinator style micro-finance project out here. Seedcamp is one such competition which is making great waves, but we need more, much more.
See after the jump for pictures and more info on our generous event sponsors, eBuddy, Q-go, WatchMouse, E.Factor and Blurb.
http://www.flickr.com/slideShow/index.gne?group_id=&user_id=89698066@N00&set_id=&tags=TechCrunch
GOLD SPONSORS
ebuddy
Q-go – Natural Language Search company
WatchMouse – Site Performance Monitoring
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