Last day (I should say March 19th), I went to Plugg – a belgian conference organized by Robin Wauters regarding web2.0 in Europe. (Long story short, see the video) Mike Butcher, brit journalist and new media expert for the famous blog TechCrunch, was moderating the conference throughout the day. All in all, I was impressed by the quality of the presentations and the panel of entrepreneurs. High five to Robin!
(check out all the conference over here - included videos and keynotes).
During the day, I had the chance to talk to Simon McDermott – CEO & Co-Founder of Attentio, a Belgian company that monitors and analyses social media. He consolidates my thought that I should focus on the product and think global. Indeed, many entrepreneurs emphasized the fact that startups should start local and go global as soon as possible. This is understandable since distribution cost are near zero (i.e. avoiding this leads to an opportunity cost – see also Anderson Long Tail). TO go further, I also share Belgian entrepreneur and blogger Roald Sieberath’s vision of glocal business (global/local view of business): Local connexions and relevance needs to be instilled for any project to take root in a local market.
Lorenz Bogaert, CEO & co-founder of Netlog, one of Europe’s leading social networks (Belgian company by the way) came up with the issues in Turkey. We were talking about dealing with legal matters (i.e. privacy, terms and conditions) while expending the business. In there case, they were facing a privacy concern that happened within their social network. I learned, few days later (at the Next Web conference in Amsterdam), they announced they plan to set up offices in European country (like MySpace actually does while Facebook doesn’t…). However, I don’t know high to deal with us patents and privacy. Lorenz said the same comment as Simon; I should focus on the product, keep going forward and deal with it later on (Mmm ok, but I like anticipate – so what?? ) FYI, Netlog is my favorite startup because they were able to monetize at the earliest stage their bm – I hope I can do the same (actually I will do better :)
Last but not least, Zilok (see Roald’s post) another Belgian company, came up with a thought-provoking business model: an eBay-like for renting (btw, they won a prize). Actually their business model already exists (…) but they ‘boost’ media coverage. They didn’t wait to have something polished before releasing anything. (Dixit Scott Rafer) I always say : good enough is good enough; now, let’s start to generate revenue. That is even more true in the internet industry. It’s hard to forecast any revenue since your website doesn’t go live (even with a beta version). Anywho, I’ll write a post later to explain it.
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