Introducing European startups at Innovate! europe'06

I'm here in Zaragoza, Spain, for 24 hours to join many friends discussing innovation in Europe at Innovate! europe'06. Chris and Mike and their team have done a great job this year again identifying startups around Europe who will pitch in 10 minutes each in front of us. I have the pleasure to host a session and will introduce the following startups. They were selected by Chris for their innovations along with many other startups, I will discover them as they present their products.

-GTP Solutions, Greece, Feeds 2.0 - private beta (?)
-Skinkers, U.K. - desktop alerts
-Wakoo, France - enhancing conversations on blogs
-AR Networks, Zoomgroups, Spain - group & community building
-Nooked, Ireland - RSS Marketing solutions
-Saw-You, Weeworld, U.K. - building personalities, avatars, for "online properties" such as MSN Messenger or Skype

I have a few minutes to make an introduction on the blogs, community & social software market so in substance I will just point out a few facts and trends.

Size and growth stronger and stronger

-blogs continue to reach masses with Technorati tracking now more than 37 million blogs. The size of the blogosphere doubles every 6 months (with a consistent growth for the last three years).
-a blog is still created every second of every day -55% of bloggers are still posting 3 months after they created they blog
-Technorati tracks about 1.2 million new blog posts each day or 50 000 per hour
-more than 15 million blogs are on Six Apart's software. The world is definitely getting flatter -only a third of blog posts are in english !
-in France more than 7 million people read blogs on a monthly basis (source Mediametrie-Nielsen)

Not only text, audio and video, podcasting fastly growing
-close to 200 startups around audio and video publishing on the web

-there are more podcasts than radio stations in the World (source Feedburner, more than 40 000 podcasts using it)
-will podcasts challenge radio & TV as blogs challenged the printed press ?

There clearly is a new community of "world citizens" who permanently use blogs, listen to podcasts, are in social software such as Linked In, play World of Warcraft and have a place in Secondlife. More than 100 million of them use Skype, Nicklas actually joins us in Zaragoza tomorrow.

We're less talking about the impact of blogs as they just become usual

Still, blogs, social software and more generally word of mouth are more and more important
-in politics (60 000 posts, 6000 pictures and thousands of videos in France during the last students demonstrations)
-in business (corporate blogging is slower to be adopted than I thought by large corporations but now most companies pay attention to what millions of their customers are saying)
-in building a brand, without any marketing (Skype invested close to 0 in marketing, Wikipedia has a huge audience with no marketing). We thought everything was said about IT, see how Techcrunch is doing.
-in creating communities around shared interests and passions (Detournements, Treonauts, LaFraise...) with substancial revenues around them

Our challenge: taking it to the masses

We need to come down to earth, most "normal" people have never heard of RSS. I did a few weeks ago a presentation in front of a hundred heads of marketing of large corporations, very few of them just new what RSS was. And it's absolutely normal, they don't have to, they just have to understand what it brings them and their customers. We should make it obvious and not talk about technical stuff.

Blogs are taking off because they can be read (and commented) by people that know nothing about them. Podcasts will really take-off when they can more easily by listened to and viewed on TV sets. A few startups are working on it.

As Six Apart, after having managed to be the software of choice for more than 15 million bloggers, our challenge is to take it to the masses by having the friends of bloggers blog, by making it as simple as ever and integrating both text, audio, video and community features, social software. We'll launch Comet in 2006.

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