VB Interview #30 - Mark Curtis, CEO of Flirtomatic (Tech Tour 07)

I met Mark Curtis at the European Tech Tour Web and Communities Summit in November 07. His company, Flirtomatic, was one of the 25 finalists.

Interview with Mark Curtis

 

VB Interview #29 - Marc Fleischmann, CEO of smeet (Tech Tour 07)

I met Marc Fleischmann at the European Tech Tour Web and Communities Summit in November 07. His company, smeet, was one of the 25 finalists.

Interview with Marc Fleischmann

 

VB Interview #28 - Kristofer Arwin, CEO TestFreaks (Tech Tour 07)

I met Kristofer Arwin at the European Tech Tour Web and Communities Summit in November 07. His company, TestFreaks, was one of the 25 finalists.

Kristofer introduced testfreaks as the next generation of buying guide.
Their goal is to symplify product research online, and become the leading buying guide by 2010 with over 40 million unique visitors per month.

Interview with Kristofer Arwin

VB Interview #27 - Joe Cohen, CEO of Seatwave (Tech Tour 07)

I met Joe Cohen at the European Tech Tour Web and Communities Summit in November 07. His company, Seatwave, was one of the 25 finalists.

Seatwave is the leading secondary ticket marketplace in Europe: it is a person-to-person ticket exchange which relies on its trusted community of fans.

They launched in January 2007 in the UK, September 07 in Germany and November 07 in the Netherlands.
They have two exclusive customer protection offers: ticket integrity and ticket cover.

I really enjoyed listening to Joe when he shared his vision about the importance of content for a marketplace: content drives tickets. Joe and his team developed a dynamic content model with a dedicated team of editors. Good move.

I agree with Fred Destin, Partner at Atlas Venture, who said on his blog that Joe Cohen "stole the show": Joe is passionate, very knowledgeable on the ticketing industry, and he is a great speaker.
 
Interview with Joe Cohen

VB Interview #26 - Mark Zaleski, Chairman of Dailymotion (Tech Tour 07)

I met Mark Zaleski at the European Tech Tour Web and Communities Summit in November 07. Dailymotion, was one of the 25 finalists.

Dailymotion is the number one independent video sharing site in the world. Dailymotion is very popular in France and all the French speaking countries. They have 38 million unique users per month, and 600 million videos viewed every month.

According to one journalist who met the executive team a few months ago, Dailymotion is "the largest company you have never heard of". Indeed, even though Dailymotion is not as famous as YouTube in the US it ranks 34 in the Alexa rankings.

Dailymotion has a few key differentiators:
* localization strategy: with a presence (to date) in France, the US, the UK, Germany and in Spain.
* motion maker program: 20,000 creative content creators approved (to date) with no limitation in terms of length or size of the videos.
* respect of the copyright owners: recently signed the disney principles.

Interview with Mark Zaleski

VB Interview #25 - Malcolm Clark, CEO of CyberSports (Tech Tour 07)

I met Malcolm Clark at the European Tech Tour Web and Communities Summit in November 07. His company, CyberSports, was one of the 25 finalists.

Their goal is to dominate the online sports game market. Currently, they are working on Football Superstars, a MMOG where you can play virtual football games as a player or as a manager.
They plan to launch their first game in May 2008.

Starting with football is smart: it is one of the most played and watched sport on the planet, so their potential market is enormous.

Malcolm would like to see the best games on television one day. That day, they will know they made it big.
   
Interview with Malcolm Clark

VB Interview #24 - Pierre Chappaz, CEO of Wikio (Tech Tour 07)

I met Pierre Chappaz at the European Tech Tour Web and Communities Summit in November 07. His company, Wikio, was one of the 25 finalists.

Wikio is a new kind of information portal: it is an easy way to find & track information. For its Founder, "wikio is the better swiss knife for info 2.0". There are 2 guidelines for wikio: the service must be easy and personal.

With wikio, not only can you keep track of a specif topic on the web, but its goal is also to become The site to visit before shopping online. Indeed, they aggregate most of the available product info and reviews on one page: you can quickly check the consumer reviews, the expert reviews, the video and pictures of the products...
   
Wikio had 4 million unique visitors in October 2007, with 2 million unique visitors from France.
Pierre and his team will release the new version of Wikio in December 2007. At the same time, they will officially launch wikio in the UK. One of the key new features will be to give the ability to find the most popular videos on the web.
 
Interview with Pierre Chappaz

Pierre is well-known in the online industry, from his first internet venture called kelkoo, now part of Yahoo!. It was one of the first price comparison websites and Pierre sold it for over 450million euros a couple of years ago. Pierre is also one of the top shareholders of another successful internet website, netvibes.

FYI, I also shot a video of Pierre in French.

European Tech Tour - Web & Communities Summit: D-Day minus 2

It is d-day minus 2 for Tech Tour Web & Communities summit, and d-day minus 3 for Audemars Piguet 's Changing Time Award Dinner.

I very much look forward to covering the event, and meeting & interviewing the 25 CEOs of the selected companies and the members of the selection committee.

The event kicks off on Wednesday with the Cocktail & Gala Opening Dinner with a Keynote Speech by Morten Lund at Chateau de Chillon (in Montreux, Switzerland).
Thursday will be busy with several sessions dedicated to company presentations and tech showcases.
 
It is going to be a great opportunity to network with some of the most well-known, passionate, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists in the industry.

The line-up is still confidential. We just know that two of the finalists are wikio and dailymotion. I invite you to check the official press release for more information.

During the Audemars Piguet award ceremony, I will have the pleasure to interview:

Georges-Henri Meylan, CEO of Audemars Piguet, and Sven Lingjaerde, Founder & President at European Tech Tour Association.
I invite you to check the list of finalists.
 

European Tech Tour - Web & Communities Summit: Blog Coverage on Visible Banking

I am proud to have been invited to cover the European Tech Tour Web & Communities Summit, next week in Switzerland.

The organizers enjoyed my coverage of a few events in the last couple of months: ad:tech, finovate, the virtual worlds and more recently Finextra: Forum in Financial Services.

Thanks to Yann Mauchamp, Simone Theiss and Sven Lingjaerde for their confidence.

The Web & Communities Summit is an exciting event focused on one of my favourite topics, online communities. The TechTour team and the selection committee shortlisted the top 25 companies from Europe to meet with the leading venture capitalists and media companies.
 
The plan is to shoot a video interview with all the 25 CEOs, each selection committee members, and a few delegates during the gala dinner and the conference on Thursday. It is going to be a fantastic and unique way to meet and network with many worldwide experts in just 24 hours.

It is a great challenge, and I am looking forward to it.

I invite you to check the TechTour site for more information on their future events.

The main sponsor is Audemars Piguet, the famous swiss watchmaker.


I love Swiss watches, and it is going to be a pleasure to attend the Audemars Piguet Changing Time Award Dinner on Thursday 15th November, and interview their CEO.