Going to Essential Web event on Wed 27th June

I'll be going to the Essential Web event this Wednesday at the BFI IMAX.

There are going to be a bunch of interesting companies there, but I'm really interested to see some of the folks who have come along to Opencoffee presenting, including Loudervoice, Yuuguu, Parkatmyhouse.com, Wonga and Extate.com.

Good luck to all of these companies.

If you're going to the event, we're going to be talking a little bit about Seedcamp, so please say hello and hope to see you there :)

Moo and MindCandy in Businessweek

There is a great cover piece in the latest BusinessWeek, which features Moo and Mindcandy, two innovative and edgy London companies in which TAG and Index were early investors.


Both are great examples are companies appealing and selling to a global audience based out a European city. The piece also talks about Joost based in Luxembourg and FON based in Madrid. Of course there are a legion of other European consumer Internet stars making waves worldwide like Netvibes, Bebo, Habbo, Stardoll, Last.fm and not forgetting Skype.

Its really exciting to see European companies making a global splash being recognized by mainstream US media - long may it continue.

Daylife from NYC raises $8m from LON

Congratulations to Upe and the team at Daylife for closing their latest funding round.

They brought on some really great investors: Ynon Kreiz joining the team from the newly named Balderton (formerly Benchmark Europe) and Adam Valkin from Arts Alliance. TAG was an early seed investor.


This is a great stepping stone for the business and should really help the team bring their platform for news to a much wider partner base and more international market.

There is great coverage in today's FT, which highlights the interesting angle of a US company coming to London for funding.

The Red Herring noted something similar in their coverage of Opencoffee Club last week and with London is becoming a hub for early-stage, its great to see this being picked up.

Openads raises $5m for free opensource ad server

Openads, has announced in the last few hours that Index have led a $5m funding round to build out the product and expand the team. The round includes investment from Mangrove, Josh Kopelman from First Round Capital, O'Reilly and TAG.

The core Openads team is based in London, is another great example of an interesting European startup, which has manage to exist under the radar screen, quietly creating a geographically diverse business with a commanding position online.

Openads develops free, open source ad-serving software which publishers use to manage the advertising on their websites. It has all the features a publisher would expect from an ad server but at a fraction of the cost of alternatives -- free.

In fact, in a world where so much focus has been placed on advertiser needs the team at Openads has really aimed squarely at understanding the needs of small and medium-sized publishers who want to make more moeny from their website.

Openads is already used by more than 25,000 publishers across 140 countries in 20 languages, in fact it has more installations than all competing ad serving solutions combined.

The geographical footprint is very reminiscent of Skype to me -- very strong in the US, but equally present in some of the web's most established (Western Europe) and fastest growing markets (China, Russia, Brazil and Poland).

We're really excited to be working with the team at Openads, who have built a very simple, feature rich and easy to use product that publishers across the world clearly love using. Publishers are having their business squeezed across the board and taking away the cost of ad serving so publishers can focus on raising their effective CPMs is a winning proposition.

There's already been some good coverage already on the blogs - at Mashable, Techcrunch and Buzzmachine.

Opencoffee breaks 55 cities

Opencoffee Club is now in over 55 cities - wow!

We're only 15 weeks in and we're now spanning the globe from Athens to Anchorage, and 53 places in between. London's group on Meetup has now passed 600 members.

There's lots of interesting things going on, so please check the forums on our online meeting point and if you've seen it take a look at Read/Write/Web's great piece on the Opencoffee movement.

I'd love to know how you think we can evolve, improve Opencoffee - so please met me know in the comments below or by mail.

Nextweb in Amsterdam

I know I've been slow in posting but wanted to share the slides from the talk I gave a few weeks back in Amsterdam at the really enjoyable NextWeb conference.



The theme was about stimulating more great European entrepreneurship - something which is close to my heart and I've posted about at length before.

In the last few weeks we have seen more great news for European startups - including the great team at Last.fm's fabulous exit to CBS and also Joost attracting Mike Volpi, one of the killer executives from Silicon Valley, to come to London to build what promises to be a company ready to redefine TV.

Who says Europe isn't at the cutting edge?