This is a guest post by Liam Boogar of RudeBaguette.

When I first heard about 3DayStartup last September, it was being pitched by the organisers of 3DayStartup Paris at FailCon. Listening to the idea, I thought what most people probably think at first: “Oh great, another StartupWeekend knock off.” I quickly jotted down the differences in my head: not backed by Kauffman Foundation, no winners*, and you have to apply and get accepted – sounded like a losing combination, which is how I went into their end of the weekend pitch session this past Sunday.

This is a part II in a series of guest posts by Erik Bovee, a founder and partner in SpeedInvest, an early stage venture fund focusing on Central Europe. He’s previously written about why “Things happen fast“.

My fiancee, who is a violinist, and takes no interest in my work with startups, except to express the opinion that people who work in business (and particularly finance and hi-tech) are overpaid, and probably dishonest, came up with a second observation recently:

This is a guest post by Richard Holdsworth, Wapple CEO.

Flash is on the endangered species list, already extinct on mobile, and Silverlight has been all but aborted. HTML5 is being heralded as both the cause and the solution but what is it and are we getting caught up in a game of buzzword bingo that has spiralled out of control?

This is a guest post by Phil Wilkinson a former CEO of a daily deal site and now CEO of kopi.co.uk

I’ve been wanting to write this article for a while but it has never been the right time. Ideally I’d like to do a series of articles on the daily deal / group buying space as it is still a fascinating model and still an early market sector. I must be one of very few people, perhaps the only one in Europe, who has been involved in co-founding and running a daily deal site on one hand and then flipped to run a company that sells a product and service on the other. I believe this gives me a real unique perspective on things (which hopefully you agree with after reading this).

This is a guest post by Rodolfo Rosini, Founder/CEO at Storybricks, a new MMORPG out of San Francisco.

You see people raising millions for stupid shit. But if you dig deeper you find out that they sold a company to Cisco for ½ billion (and their cheese sandwich restaurant got funded) or built several huge companies (and their photosharing app with no users or purpose got $41m) or pretty much built Facebook (and investors pile up on their social network who can only have 150 friends like it cures cancer) or had multiple rounds of funding already and a completely finished product with tons of users and healthy revenues.

The successful launch of Hojoki, a German start-up, goes some way to confirm the view that that creating a central repository for all your cloud notifications is emerging as a new business model.

Let’s say you are working with Dropbox, Google Calendar, Pivotal Tracker, Evernote and Twitter on a project. Where can you have a real time global vision of a team’s activity in the project? Where can you have a “one stop search window” which finds in these numerous cloud applications, the document, the comment, or the modification that you are looking for?

This is a guest post by Raj Uttamchandani
who runs Incubatrix, a company that develops cloud application software and digital films. He also advises the Government of India on international trade matters.

A year ago, I arrived in Chile at the invitation of the Chilean government, or rather, as one of the first 23 participants of the Start Up Chile pilot programme. In the last 12 months I have:

This is a guest post by Liam Boogar, a Californian-native writing in English about the French Startup scene on RudeBaguette.com

This past weekend I was invited to be a juror for Startup Weekend Strasbourg, one of many Startup Weekend events going on this weekend during Global Entrepreneurship Week 2011. Having never heard of anything startup-related in Strasbourg, I expected to see your standard “1^st edition” of StartupWeekend: 50-70 participants, a lack of developers, and a relative ‘youth’ (read: mediocrity) in the ideas – boy was I in for a surprise.

This is a guest post by Erik Bovee, a founder and partner in SpeedInvest, an early stage venture fund focusing on Central Europe.

I woke up the other day to find that some of the worst regimes in the Middle East were on the verge of collapse, and Vienna had a startup scene. I don’t want to overuse the ‘Arab Spring’ metaphor, so I will stop right here and never, ever mention it again. It might all have come as a surprise for Americans who, paying intermittent attention to their inadequate news media (pro-tip: BBC World), have had little more than a vague impression that ‘things are pretty complicated over there.’

TechCrunch recently featured post by TechCrunch TV featuring Jeremy Rifkin, author of The Third Industrial Revolution, who argues that Europe will be the next cradle of innovation. To that end, we’re increasingly finding VCs in Europe looking for the best hubs for those innovators. And we recently argued that the axis of power was swinging behind both London and Berlin. But EarlyBird Capital was the first VC to open an office in Berlin this year and others like Accel and Index have become regular visitors. Below, Roberto Bonanzinga, partner at Balderton Capital, argues why he thinks Berlin could produce the next Facebook.

Whilst we don’t know when or where the next Facebook will be created, we do know where to start looking: Berlin. It’s a city which defines ingenuity and creativity. Walking between Prenzlauer Berg and Mitte, you could easily believe you were in South of Market (SOMA) in San Francisco during the nineties. There’s the same energy, the same passion and the same creative atmosphere which is transforming Germany’s ‘capital of cool’ into Germany’s ‘capital of start ups’.

During FOWA 2011, London, three startups launched their businesses.

City King is a way to list your favourite London places.

Jottify is a new space for writers to share, read and sell their work.

Layer Vault promises to give simple version control for designers.

Here are their pitches, produced by Chris Leydon of Keyone Producitons for TechCrunch TV.

This is a guest post by Jos White of Notion Capital who blogs here and Tweets here.

It’s difficult to know where to invest your money right now. Most asset classes are moving in the wrong direction as the world teeters on the edge of a double dip recession.

There is growing distrust of most of the established financial markets – complaints include that they are deliberately complicated and full of jargon, they are over regulated, there are huge rewards for a very few that are not necessarily linked to sustained performance and, perhaps most importantly, when things go wrong it seems to be the ordinary people who are the ones that really suffer.

This is a guest post by Paul Jozefak of Neuhaus Partners, commenting on the release of a working paper put out by the European Investment Fund about the performance and prospects for European venture capital. You can follow Paul at his blog or on Twitter.

The European Investment Fund (EIF) put out a working paper recently that initially sounds like bad news. Fortunately, for those of us in the market long enough, it's actually good news. As a side note, I'm glad to see this paper come out from the EIF. For those of you not in the know, they are one of the largest limited partners (LP's: investors in venture capital funds) in Europe and are basically in almost all the funds throughout the market. Hence anything from them is going to be based on information that truly represents the situation in Europe. 

This is a guest post by Philip Petersen, CEO of ad infinitum.

The seed for this article was sown by Sarah Lacy when she stated she was not writing enough about “admittedly boring infrastructure or enterprise software names.” Boring? How can anyone think that about data centre energy management software! Then Mark Goldenson discovered that “only 2% of TechCrunch stories are about enterprise companies.” And that did it – time for action. So, this is for enterprise software and some other boring sectors, too!

This is a guest post by DueDil, the free UK company information startup.

First: Ask family and friends

The first stage to raising finance is through family and friends, getting off the ground can be the hardest part. The thing with this is that it’s probably the easiest access to finance. If you go to an angel investor with just an idea they will obviously want way too much equity to fund it, and you end up working your ass off for peanuts. Families and friends are your biggest allies early on, even if it means asking for enough to make a MVP- minimum viable product. By building a MVP, at least you can prove to potential investors that this could work, instead of just given them a theory, build them a website with example scenarios or create a prototype.

This is a guest post by Mike O’Neill, Technical Director of Baycloud Systems, which develops scalable cloud based systems that address privacy issues, such as CookieQ, a web application that delivers a Cookie Consent button to any web page.

The Internet, driven by technological innovation and the free market, has brought huge benefits. But freedom without responsibility or accountability simply leads to chaos and lawlessness. People are losing trust in on-line commerce as increasingly they find their personal information being harvested and sold without their knowledge or consent, and realise that the “free” services offered to them are in exchange for becoming the product, not the purchaser.

This is a joint guest post from security camera tech entrepreneur / startup finance blogger Nick Pelling and “sweat equity” investor/consultant Andrew Lockley. They report on The UK government’s ongoing consultation on to the Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS), which could well reshape the UK startup investment landscape during 2012.

The UK government has spent most of 2011 whacking the same pro-enterprise rhetorical stake into the ground. It wants to turn the UK into ‘Venture Central’, “the best place in Europe to start, finance and grow a business”; and it claims that it will do pretty much whatever it takes to achieve this.

10/10 for ambition, but… what’s the plan? Aside from Tech City grandstanding (a bit shallow, but decent enough PR) and the whole Enterprise Zone fiasco-to-be (more offices? Why?), what the government wants to happen now is for business angels and VCs to start funding lots of high growth startups – fast.

This is a guest post by Adam Wynne: founder and Geek-in-chief of StreamScience. He co-founded a startup in Cape Town, South Africa, in 2000 and exited in 2004. In 2005 he came to London and worked in the IT dept of a prominent investment bank for a year, and then as a quantitative analyst for another four. He has now given it all up to found StreamScience and is Entrepreneur-in-residence in his second-bedroom.

Working on a trading floor in an investment bank taught me two things: to deliver things that work, as quickly as possible; and to avoid the Cos lettuce at the canteen salad bar (I once found a live worm in it covered in salad dressing, inching for its life – true story). Now I’m not going to lie to you: these past 5 years have given me some delicious problems to work on, and have rewarded me handsomely for doing so, so why, you might rightly ask, would I give it all up for the tumult, terrors and triumphs of founding another startup? “Fortune and glory, kid. Fortune and glory.”

This is a guest post by Shane Hayes, founder of Daily Deal Aggregator Siftie.co.uk. He reports on the UK Daily Deal market size and speculates as to whether a major acquisition is imminent. Siftie.co.uk is a graduate of the Launchpad accelerator programme at the NDRC.

In a Techcrunch article in April of 2010, Tim O’Shea, founder of Blurtit, wrote about his experience of trying to launch a Groupon Clone in a Hyper Competitive London market in the first quarter of 2010. At that time, MyCityDeal (who were later to be acquired by Groupon) had just launched and a variety of players ranging from cash strapped start-ups to spin offs from major companies were all hoping to become the next Groupon. Livingsocial was still based in the US and would not arrive on the scene until Q2 that year.

Ciarán is a Principal at Earlybird Venture Capital and represents the first institutional VC to set up shop in Berlin. His current investments include Peak Games, CrowdPark, Madvertise, simfy and B2X Care.

When fellow Earlybirds Jason Whitmire and Hendrik Brandis published their report on European VC performance, strongly suggesting there are valid signs that European Venture Capital may have become and will probably continue to be a more attractive asset class than it has ever been before, and given that U.S. VC is considered the gold standard for comparison, we wanted to kick of a well-needed and overdue fact based debate on the whole topic. Not the simplistic “Europe can’t produce category leaders because it has no Google” debate, but a refreshing exchange of facts and views on them. Wow, we sure have that debate on our hands now.

David Caldwell is a co-Founder of YourJobDone.com, a mobile marketplace for getting local jobs done fast. Here he shares some of his first-hand visa experiences and thoughts for VCs, policy makers, and non-EU founders thinking about the UK.

The British Government has beaten the US to a startup visa – but what this means in practical terms for founders and investors hasn’t really been explained. I am a co-founder of London-based YourJobDone.com, and am Australian. I have seen intended visa options shut-down after considerable investment, been detained twice by the UK Border Authority, experienced interrogations and searches of many hours, had my passport confiscated for a week, witnessed and contributed to the new visas and am one of the earliest recipients of these new visas. I know about visas and border protection in practice.

I’ll give you some background, explain the requirements of the new visas, and illustrate why supportive and relevant personal networks are critical to making it work.

This is a guest post by Fred Destin, a Partner at Atlas Venture based out of Boston. Previously Destin was, for years, an active VC in Europe, working on DailyMotion, Seatwave, Zoopla and a number of other high profile European startup investments.

Nick Halstead at Datasift seems to have ticked people off the wrong way with a candid assessment of his experience fundraising in Europe. He might might not return emails but he’s also raised money from one of the smartest dudes around (Roger Ehrenberg and his Big Data Band) so if you allow me I’ll pay some attention to his opinion, and in fact expand on it.

Nat Wei (@natwei), is a social entrepreneur. As Baron Wei of Shoreditch he has an interest in the emergence of the cluster of startup technology companies in the Shoreditch/Hoxton area of London which has come to be known as Silicon Roundabout and which has informed the UK government’s new “East London Tech City” initiative. This is the third in in a series of guest posts on the use of technology in re-building civic society. The first is here, the second here.

There are dramatic changes happening in the way public services are evolving to become more citizen led and people driven. In the UK there is a huge amount of activity currently underway to reform and open up public services so that decisions are made more locally and on the front line, so that workers in public services have more say in how their services are shaped and can respond better to citizens who are being armed in turn with more data, and in how providers will be rewarded (or not) for their outcomes. A forthcoming White paper on public services will shortly set out the framework for this change.

This is a guest post by Guillermo Vigil, of Socialance

For the last couple of days I’ve had the pleasure of attending “La Red Innova” for the first time. This is a web conference held in Madrid, Spain that aims to bring together high-profile speakers and leaders from different companies worldwide with emphasis on Spanish-speaking and Latin-American countries.

Celebrated right in the centre of Madrid in the great Teatro Circo Price, the venue and setup were excellent, if not a little too small for the close to 1,000 attendees there. For those more interested in up-and-coming startups from the Hispanic market parallel sessions oddly named “workshops” occurred in rather small, unsuitable rooms with generally bad acoustics and no WiFi connection. 

A lot has been written about Groupon recently but have we missed the point? Rob Carter, Director at bookingbug.com, gives his opinion on the value of what they have achieved.

Despite articles to the contrary, many think that Groupon is valuable and still has big potential. I agree, but wonder if my reasons are different. I think that their deep discount model is unsustainable as Groupon’s longevity is reliant on repeat business. Much of what Groupon does is not new; deals, time-limits, coupons. What Groupon has done is more impressive than it may seem; Attribution. The biggest advance that Groupon has made is that it makes an online recommendation of an offline venue (a place). This again in itself is not new; tracking the success of that recommendation is.