2nd Web Montag in Silicon Valley – Unite German and American Techies
I attended the first Web Montag in Mountain View in June and really enjoyed the opportunity to exchange various technology ideas. I presented a Flex 2 application integrated with SAP web services. About half of the attendees were Germans or Swiss and the others Americans with an interest in Germany. I was really intrigued by the presentation of Stefan and Felix who build Plazes, a web site which keeps track where you last logged on to the Internet. I became addicted and use it a lot (as you can see from my Plazes batch on top of the Blog).
David Hornik (VentureBlog), just wrote about Entrepreneurship In Europe. I agree with him that it is even harder to build a successful start-up in Europe. What is important to understand however is that Europe is not one country. Each individual European country continues to have its own culture and therefore also deals differently with technology and start-up businesses. A lot of activity is actually going on in Ireland, but as you can tell from initiatives like the interest in Web Montags all over Germany other countries have grass roots efforts as well. As we discussed at Web Montag a major hurdle of starting a company in Germany is the fact that in case you fail (which is very likely) your reputation can be ruined. Therefore fewer entrepreneurs take the risk of starting a company. Interestingly several Silicon Valley executives came to the same conclusion in a meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
The 2nd Web Montag in Silicon Valley will take place on August 14. Now you have the opportunity to join the discussion and help foster American German technology relationships around Web 2.0. I hope Shel Israel reads this and has a chance to attend since he is doing research for his next book “Global Neighborhoods”. Unfortunately I cannot attend since I will be in Los Angeles for a short vacation. But I certainly will come again next time.
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