Yannick Laclau

UPDATE2: Wow. It’s very heartening to see, via my statcounter, that this post is being read by people all over the world. I count at least 30 different countries. Great exposure for local companies here, and I’d love to be reading about the equivalent startups in other places. If anyone out there is blogging about startups in other countries, particularly small ones, let me know and let’s spread the word around.

UPDATE: Oops, just correcting a mistake below. I’ve been informed that Enrique Dans is actually an IT professor, not a journalist. Sorry for the confusion!

WebDosBeta is over; It was an intense day of startup presentations and
panel discussions. More than 150 people from all over Spain attended.

Interested in a snapshot of what Spain’s internet community is up to?

Browse the list of presenting companies (scroll to bottom), and click on over to
check them out- there’s some good stuff out there!

Why WebDosBeta?

This was a grassroots initiative started by Albert Armengol’s post on the lack of innovation in Spain. Journalist IT professor Enrique Dans  and
SixApart’s man in Spain, Victor Ruiz, picked up on this meme and the
three of them kicked off, via the blogosphere naturally, the idea to hold a conference.

Some thoughts

• Congrats to the organizers- it went down pretty well
  • The event had its own wiki (of course!)
  • Companies not able to present live were invited to present virtually on the wiki
  • The event was certainly photographed- masses of pixs on flickr
  • Instant buzz: on the day of the event, WebDosBeta became the 2nd most searched term on Technorati
  • All participants grouped online for networking in eConozco , a LinkedIn  for Spanish business people
  • Conference had its own real-time tag cloud!
       

• Spanish innovation
  • It’s alive! There are great hackers here, and totally
    cluedtrained entrepreneurs who are as internet-addicted,
    tech-passionate, and buzzword-savvy as anybody anywhere. But I guess
    the problem is that it’s not a very large group, they’re not clustered
    anywhere in particular, and are desperately undercapitalized. Almost
    everybody presenting seemed to be totally bootstrapped operations!
  • There were some really interesting companies presenting, some
    still largely working the local market, but others very much projecting
    internationally. Check the companies section below for some more info.
  • Discussion around innovation circled around these issues.

• Drop the brands
  • It adds prestige to the event to invite people from Google,
    Yahoo, etc., but frankly, they hardly add any value. All the really
    interesting stuff about these big companies seems to be happening at HQ
    in the US, so having the "country manager of X de Espana" just to claim that X brand name was there is actually wasting people’s time. Compared to Martin Varsavsky
    (real entrepreneur, presenting his own new startup) or Luistxo
    Fernandez (the Basque dude from Tagzania), listening to the corporate
    people was about as stimulating as watching someone read PR press
    releases.
  • I think that for everyone attending, it’s much more interesting
    to discuss with real entrepreneurs, even if their companies are tiny.
    Entrepreneurs can add real value by speaking very forthrightly on
    topics that are going to be top of mind with all their fellow
    entrepreneurs in the audience- the struggles for financing, strategies
    for sales growth, issues around product development, the nitty-gritty
    of tech trends, recruiting, dealing with competition, figuring out
    expansion, etc.
       
• Martin Varsavsky
     
  • This guy deserves a bullet point all for himself. Clearly the
    rock star of the conference, a born salesman, and probably the richest
    guy in the room (worth over $500 million? founded and cashed out of
    Viatel, Jazztel, Ya.com, etc.)
  • Anyway, he presented his latest project, FON .
    It’s a weird, kind of exciting, kind of half-baked project, and I’m
    still struggling to get my head around whether it makes sense or not.
  • Maybe the most interesting aspect of FON so far is how Martin
    has been able to literally blog this company into existence. More on
    this in a future post!

     
   

Companies presented (live and virtually, via the Wiki) - in no particular order!

• Tagzania (English)
  • Sort of a Delicious + Google Maps; tag locations easily; view, share, aggregate it all on maps
• MusicStrands  (English)
  • Algorithmic + tag-based music recommendation engine; VC-backed; part-US team including former Amazon Chief Scientist
• EyeOS  (English)
  • Open source project to do a "Web Based Operating System"; respect to the team- 3 18-year-old catalan kids built this thing!
• DiceLaRed  (Spanish)
  • Sells customized portals to companies/orgs to present aggregate
    topical news to their consumers; aggregates media, blogs, boards.
• Blogometro  (Spanish)
  • Technorati/Blogdex for Spanish-language blogs; needs work, but still fairly authoritative for local blogosphere; nice vibe
       
• Trabber  (Spanish)
  • Vertical search engine for flights; good stuff- watch these guys.
• CompareBlogs  (Spanish & English)
  • Tools to understand better subscribers of your blog feed; still
    work in progress, but interesting experiments. Feedburner should be
    offering this stuff
• Weblogs, SL  (Spanish)
  • Spanish Weblogs, Inc.; profitable, growing network of 11 themed blogs; also creating blogs for corporates, movie releases
• FON  (Spanish)
  • Software to share your wifi; if you share yours, you can use
    everyone else’s; also a wifi phone angle in there; and an adsl sales
    angle; and maybe other stuff, too!
• Festuc  (Spanish)
  • Spanish Dodgeball (mobile social networking/dating); launching soon
• EasyPodcast  (Spanish & English)
  • Client to facilitate podcast creation
• Tractis  (Spanish)
  • Web services to broker, arbitrate contracts
• NectaRSS (Spanish)
  • Algorithm to filter blog posts by relevancy; based on PhD research
• Aud’asti  (Spanish)
  • Tools to track the comments you leave on other blogs
       

Finally…

This dude with the big hair in all the flickr photos is Javier Candeira; he’s a big copyfight activist and also runs Barrapunto,
Spain’s version of Slashdot. Anyway, funny thing is that I’ve exchanged
emails with Javier several times over copyright issues in Spain, but I
don’t think I could have guessed he sported that particular hairstyle!