3 Promising Startups Emerge from Startup 2.0

Another edition of the Startup 2.0 event (part of the Nonick conference) wrapped up in Bilbao a few days ago and three startups proved to be more worthy than others.
The winners, from top to bottom, include:

Paris-based SubMate is a “social commuting” site that helps people discover and meet people with similar interests that share the same commute on the subway. The site is currently available for Paris, London and New York. I give it a year before it morphs into a dating site…

Minube is a spanish social travel network (aren’t there already a lot of these?). With Minube, users can plan their trips, compare flights and hotels and share travel experiences.

Another Spanish-based startup, Askaro, is an information exchange site that lets users ask and answer questions related to specific geographic areas (cities, neighborhoods, etc.). I’d love to see a mobile app for this — could be extremely handy.

Link Love – the movers and shakers

I’ve been traveling quite a bit these past several weeks and have had a chance to discover some pretty stellar startup projects and the people behind them. Here are a few that I especially like:
ChaCha – ChaCha is like having a smart friend you can call or text for answers on your cell phone anytime for free!
PocketFuzz – PocketFuzz allows you to sell any of your songs as ring tones.
jovoto – jovoto is a worldwide community for creative talent and a fair and fun way of connecting those who have ideas with those who need ideas.
3scale – 3scale’s products and services provide critical infrastructure for the emerging Web Services (Web API) market
Indaba Music – Indaba Music is an international community of musicians, music professionals, and fans exploring the creative possibilities of making music with people in different places.
MeetingWave.com – free business and social networking tool that helps you connect offline [...]

KISS Your Features Away

How do you decide what features are essential to the needs of your users (and which ones will suck and fizzle away) when getting ready to launch your new idea? This is a theme that is central to many a startup and the answer is often times blurred by our own grandeur vision and features we would like to have, rather than what is in line with the business objective… and more importantly, the needs of your user base.
To this end, I recently came across a great post by Andrew Mason, founder of The Point, who provides some insight about how to determine core features that are essential versus “ehancements” when getting ready to launch your new product. One take-away that I agree with and can attest to is always adhere to the KISS principle… or die trying. I, like many others (and Andrew), have wasted so [...]

Will Barcelona be the "Palo Alto of The Mediterranean"?

I popped over to ifest 2008 the other day and sat in on a few interesting talks regarding business and innovation and the entrepreneurial scene in Europe. Both Herve Lebret and Nick Leon touched on the theme of innovation within societies and contrasted the U.S. (primarily Silicon Valley and Boston) with Europe, and tried to draw some conclusions why Europe always seems to be one step behind. Herve’s presentation went into this theme in great detail and he has also published a book on this subject (Herve, when do I get a copy?).
Nick’s talk also touched on this as he asserted that a city needs an ecosystem of innovation to align the talents and resources they have in order to build a successful innovation juggernaut (like SF and Beantown). To this end, he made a point that Barcelona could very well be positioned to be the next great city of [...]