From the 15th to the 17th of April Jeremy and I were in Malta with some very cool European tech startups and European VCs to see whether we would make the cut as one of the Top 100 Tech Companies in Europe as voted by Red Herring magazine’s editorial team.
As Red Herring puts it:
“For 10 years, Red Herring’s editorial team has diligently surveyed entrepreneurship around the globe. Technology industry executives, investors, and observers have regarded the Red Herring 100 lists as an invaluable instrument to discover and advocate the promising startups that will lead the next wave of disruption and innovation.”
Anyway, to cut to the chase, on the Wednesday night (16th April) we learned that we had won this prestigious award. Given that past winners have included Google, Yahoo!, Skype, Netscape, Salesforce.com, and YouTube, we felt honoured indeed.
A couple of personal highlights from the conference:
Webjam
Webjam is a Web 2.0 startup that allows groups and communities to create their own shared space on the web with minimal fuss and maximum personality. I’ve been using it for some of my own projects for over a year now, so it was a pleasure to meet and speak to their CEO and co-founder, Yann Motte, a man with a genuine passion for his product and his customers.
Trampoline Systems
I’d never heard of Trampoline Systems before, but the presentation from their CEO Charles Armstrong was for my money one of the best at the conference. Using principles derived from the social sciences, Trampoline have developed a social networking platform for enterprises that helps to unlock the hidden knowledge and networks of expertise within any business, using existing data sources (such as email) as a starting point. It’s a sort of Facebook for business that automatically updates your profile with all the projects you’re working on and the people you’re talking to. That might sound a bit scary but what you expose and to whom is completely under your own control - the privacy aspects have been thought through very carefully.