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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.

Anil de Mello, blyk, convergence, dopplr, Entrepreneurship, events, fon, Friends, Fun, Hans Peter Brondmo, innovation, International Herald Tribune, Ivan Communod, Jonas Birgersson, labs2, Loic Le Meur, Marko Ahtisaari, martin varsavsky, Mashup, meneame, menorca, Michael Jackson, mobuzz, netvibes, Ola Ahlvarsson, plum, Result, Ricardo Galli, Rodrigo Sepulveda, skype, social media, spanish startups, startups, Tariq Krim, techtalk, Thomas Crampton, Torrenova2007, vpod.tv, we media, web 2.0, wi fi

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.

Announcements, Awards, blyk, dopplr, fon, innovate!europe07, innovate europe, innovation, joost, labs2, loiclemeur, martin varsavsky, meneame, menorca, mobuzz, n95, netvibes, nokia, plazes, plum, skype, spanish startups, startups, technorati, techtalk, techtalkmenorca, truphonem onet, vpod

Barcelona has always been pretty pioneering with new technologies… The Barcelona City Council has been experimenting for a while now with mobile services and recently launched a “Barcelona Mobile” campaign to sensibly citizens and tourists on public services to be accessed from your mobile phone. (check out the video here, it’s great fun!)

Barcelona City Council offers you a new service which allows you to have all the information about the city on your mobile:

• MERCÈ 06 City Festival program (ended last week)
• What’s On: the Grec festival, your team’s match, children’s activities, the theatre, exhibitions and concerts.
• Directory: a guide to restaurants, hotels, etc.
• Barcelona city map -> exists already online and is excellent!
• How to get there: a tool how to get somehwere in Barcelona by underground, bus or just walking.
• Usefull numbers: firse service and emergency numbers

Now I’m happy all these services are becoming available on the mobile phone, in the end that’s what we all want, however I tried some of the services and the information is very poor. For example only 7 hotels were mentioned and the places I was searching for didn’t appear… well probably more time is needed to index everything. The map thing is pretty cool and advanced, connecting this to a LBS system with services is going to be peanuts later on.
The SMS service costs only 0,30 Euro/sms which is reasonable but knowing about my mobile web browsing bills from last months, I’m not attracted to use the Barcelona mobile web service a lot.

However, walking through the city and checking for (public) available WiFi acces points in Barcelona learns me there are currently a lot of these public acces points available a bit everywhere, so… Martin, isn’t this something to connect to with FON? Also, wouldn’t all these services be quicker and easier to build and be found through tools like Plazes.com once their mobile beta goes public? With a bit of promotion and marketing the best ‘plazes‘ in Barcelona can be tagged easily and become accessible through the mobile as another valuable option.

What about other cosmopolitan citizens? How are the mobile services in your city? It would be great to map some of the coolest urban mobile services…

3G, agenda, Analysis, art, Art Culture, Barcelona, culture, Experience Design, fon, guide, martin varsavsky, mòbil, móvil, mobile maps, mobile public services, Mobile Search, mobile services, plazes, spain, usability, user generated content, wi fi