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… Germany, Spain and Belgium to go live in 2009 …

Blyk, the new mobile network for 16-24 year olds funded by advertising, announces its next wave of European expansion into Germany, Spain and Belgium in 2009, following its announcement to enter the Dutch market earlier this year. Blyk’s rapid expansion is subsequent to its UK success where members embraced the Blyk concept so quickly that its annual member targets of 100,000 were reached six months ahead of schedule, establishing it as a powerful new media for connecting advertisers with young people.

Blyk’s CEO and Co-founder, Pekka Ala-Pietilä said, “There is a great opportunity for Blyk in these markets. Our research shows that young people in Germany, Spain and Belgium are interested in the Blyk proposition because they want to interact with brands they like in exchange for free communication. Our success in the UK, illustrated by robust member adoption, has proven that Blyk is a youth media that works and we hope to replicate this success as we enter new countries. We are also working to attract local talent who share our enthusiasm and can help build Blyk into a significant youth media in other countries.”

The press release mentions Blyk has run over 900 campaigns in the UK for brands such as Coca Cola, STA Travel, Penguin, Buena Vista, L’Oreal and music artists The Kooks and Alphabeat with an average response rate of 29 percent, an extremely high level for any media platform. For example, Penguin’s campaign to promote Nick Hornby’s new novel, saw 7 out of 10 members engage with the publisher in a dialogue.

Blyk will make further announcements related to activities in each of these countries in the near future.

I asked the company about the choice of operator network they’ll partner with in the next expansion series of countries but Blyk replied it hasn’t taken a decison yet… I can only think about this perfect strategy having the operators to fight to get the popular brand on their network… Ahead of the curve as we say… To follow!

I didn’t expect Blyk was going to grow that fast on other European markets. I’m looking forward the brand launches in Spain, I’ll have the advantage my daughters will have 16 by the time Blyk launches here, so it will be fun to discover the added-value services with them and get their direct feedback

FYI Leif Fågelstedt, COO of Blyk is participating to the Mobile 2.0 Europe conference next week in Barcelona as part of the Open Business Models panel moderated by Mike Butcher of TechCrunch UK.

Coming to Barcelona for the Mobile World Congress? Don’t miss the MobileMonday Peer Awards Barcelona 2008! Sticking with MobileMonday’s recipe for success, the event will cook up a bunch of fresh innovations mixed with honest feedback and a dash of fun. Served with plenty of juicy networking at the NEW Espacio Movistar in Barcelona on Monday February 11 starting at 2:30PM.

The MobileMonday Peer Awards are recognised by the industry as one of THE interesting events in the mobile industry. Last year’s Barcelona Peer Awards event attracted 23 competitors, the MoMo community award went to Mobile Complete, the audience award to Plazes, and the expert jury award to Realeyes 3D. Check the Peer Awards 2007 Flickr Group pictures and winners’ announcement here.

Mr. Pekka Ala-Pietila, former president at Nokia Corporation and currently chief executive officer of Blyk Corporation, a virtual mobile operator in the UK, will be the keynote speaker.

The event concept is pretty similar as last year: every MobileMonday chapter is invited to nominate one startup to the Peer Awards Barcelona 2008. This year, we’ll divide the start-up finalist presentations in two categories: early-stage start-ups (founded in 2007, early-stage financing) and emerging start-ups (founded in 2005 and after, inbetween Series A & B funding). The organizing committee and jury selects the finalists to present at the awards event. Entrance into the running is free! Check the Peer Awards website for details.

There will be three awards in each category: jury, audience, and community (MoMo chapters). This year’s winners at the MobileMonday Peer Awards Barcelona will also be invited to participate in the Innovation Pad activities at the MobileMonday Global Summit in conjunction with the World Congress on IT in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, May 18-22, 2008.

Master of Ceremony is once again Mrs. Caroline Lewko, from the Wireless Industry Partnership (WIP).

The jury consists of some of the most recognized mobile industry experts and thinkers, currently confirmed:

• Carlos Domingo, General Director, Telefonica R&D;
• Ann Mei Chang, Mobile Engineering Director Google;
• Bena Roberts, Founder and Chief Analyst at BKI Media / GoMo News;
• Russell Buckley, Managing Director, AdMob Europe / Vice-Chairman of MMA’s EMEA;
• Carlo Longino, Mobhappy;
• Daniel Appelquist, Senior Technology Strategist, Vodafone Group;
• Madamohan Rao, Editor, The Asia-Pacific Internet Handbook;
• Jed Rice,VP, Market Development, Skyhook Wireless;
• Peter Vesterbacka, Founder, Some Bazaar;
• Jouko Ahvenainen, Chief Operating Officer, Xtract;
• Michael Wendell, General partner, Nexit Ventures;
• Sirous Kavehercy, Strategist and Consultant, Market Development Director at Acision;

The MobileMonday Peer Awards Barcelona 2008 are being organized collaboratively by the MobileMonday community and hosted by MobileMonday Barcelona. The event is free but you must register in advance since the 800 places will go quickly.

It was one of those inspiring days yesterday at Martin Varsavsky’s ranch in Menorca, an event gathering originally intended for the Menorcan tech scene ending up with so much interest outside of the island and Spain, the event TechTalk Menorca ended up with some 100 enthusiast entrepreneurs, developers and pure geeks mostly working in the next generation web ‘connected’ services.

Marko Ahtisaari introduced Blyk and Dopplr, Anil de Mello gave us a preview on Mobuzz going completely user-driven soon, Ivan and Rodrigo anounced a complete update of vpod.tv for their 1st anniversary on May 15 - check out their updates during next week! Tariq Krim explained how Netvibes got from 15.000 users on day 1 to 10 million users without a logo and spending 0 on marketing (!) Ola Ahlvarsson from Result explained how to create an ‘ecosystom for growth’ and Michael Jackson (no joke!) how Skype will continue ‘enabling the worlds conversations’.

Hans Peter Brondmo impressed already at iNNOVATE!europe’07 with Plum, still in private beta, to be launched on May 24. Plum is a free service that lets you save anything you care about – web pages, videos, photos, documents, emails, feeds, and more – and organize everything into collections. Something I have been looking for since longtime, I’m sure we’ll hear a lot from this new service the coming months.

Then Thomas Crampton and Loïc Le Meur did a dynamic and funny presentation on their next project, still in beta obviously, but already with a great vision of things to come, instant media now! Jonas Birgersson explained us about the infrastructure 2.0 plans of Labs2, something I can just dream about now but they’re making this already a reality in homeland Sweden. Ricardo Galli of Meneame explained how, without having a clue or a plan, his site became one of the most used website in Spain.

The sessions closed with a session on online games with Alexis Bonte from yesnomayB and Mathieu Nouzareth from cafe.com, anyway both worth following.

Martin Varsavsky invited us for a cocktail at his precious Torrenova finca not without giving us an update of just released stuff from FON, Gmail Uploader and Fon.gs, 2 simple features no one seemed to have thought of before. Check the What’s New section on their website, always worth checking!

All in all, it was a great day with great people in Menorca and a superb initiative from Martin to bring all these interesting people together to learn, share and connect. Entrepreneurship is all about a good idea and execution, and we have seen a lot of those yesterday. Stay tuned for a lot more exciting stuff to come from the next generation web connected services on this side of the ocean

My Flickr pictures here, Loïc’s video feed from yesterday here, you have to get through the morning boat excursion first however

UPDATE May 14: Loïc just posted seperate video’s of the TechTalk presentations on his blog here.

More pictures of the event here and here.

Tomorrow I’ll be attending TechTalk Menorca at the Martin Varsavsky’s ranch in Menorca, an event gathering some of the hottest tech entrepreneurs in a informal atmosphere.

From Martin’s blog:

At the farm we will have Hans Peter Brondmo of Plum, David Sifry of Technorati, Tariq Krim of Netvibes, Loic Le Meur France´s top blogger, Thomas Crampton of the IHT, Ola of Result, Marko of Blyk and Dopplr, Anil de Mello of Mobuzz, Ivan and Rodrigo of Vpod, Ricardo Galli of Meneame, Alex Straub of Truphone, Lukasz Weijchert de Onet (in Polish but the 49th most popular web site in the world), Marc Samwer German serial tech entrepreneur, Janus Friis of Skype, Joost, Felix Petersen of Plazes, Yossi Vardi, Jonas Birgersson of Labs2.

I share Martin’s view on European entrepreneurship culture and I admire the way he builds his business through symbiotic circles of trust with people and ideas he believes in. Watch a snip of the interview with Chris Shipley from Guidewire Group yesterday at iNNOVATE!europe’07 here below.

A complete wrapup of that conference to be published soon here.