Currently, the most talked about startup event in the world is the TechCrunch50 being organised in San Francisco by Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch. Mike Butcher wrote an article in the UK version of TechCrunch about the non-existence of European companies, compared to Israeli startups (there were 5 Israeli startups present).
Now if we look at this from a Nordic and Baltic perspective – the only Nordic company we could find in the participation list was Burt (Sweden). While the investments required for such a trip is high, I was wondering if it really is worth the money for the European companies or do they already receive enough visibility here in Europe?
I know the Israeli companies in general are pushing more aggressively to the US market, while European startups can somehow still manage locally here in Europe with its 300 million domestic market. So there are differences in strategies, but I’m throwing the ball to the entrepreneurs – what do you guys think, is it worth the money? or do we need something like this in Europe? Or is there an explanation I’ve missed for Europe’s absence (could it be that many applied, but did not get through)?
Bitbar
iWillStudy.com
Definitely worth the time and effort, if the event’s schedule naturally matches your launch time window. There are few startups out of the Nordics compared to the US or Israel. Combine these two factors and it hardly is surprising.
Both events are highly US centric both in terms of companies and their stories.
Which means that if you want to be a amongst the finalists you have to tune your story accordingly:
If it’s mobile – it has to heavily iPhone centric
If it’s messaging – it has to be Twitter-like
etc.
Also, keep in mind that IVA (Israel Venture Association) was a proud sponsor of Demo – and I’m NOT saying that’s the reason why 5 companies from Israel were showcasing – all I’m saying is that they had a perfect channel to get their message heard before the Final.
Seriously – go through the finalists (I did, and so did Scoble:) – how many really good services did you see? Some examples:
-DotSpots brings the power of Wikipedia – the wisdom of crowds – to every meme (block of text) on the web, and leverages automatic semantic matching to distribute each contribution to every instance of that meme across the web.
- Yammer is a tool for making companies and organizations more productive through the exchange of short frequent answers to one simple question: “What are you working on?
Although I have to admit that Dropbox is great!