Business Week is searching for Europe’s Young Entrepreneurs of 2007.

Where are they coming from? Estonia, United Kingdom, and the Netherlands. No French, no Swiss, no German. I would like to think that it is because Business Week is biased, but I’m afraid there is a lot of truth in this geographical repartition.

Part of my job is to know where are the cool and upcoming projects in Switzerland. Just as a personal reminder, here are 4 companies I wold like to meet and will closely follow

K-Team is a Swiss company that develops, manufactures and markets high quality mobile robots for use in advanced education and research.

They are the company behind the famous robot camel jockeys.

Fairtilizer is an innovative music sharing and rating platform. It will launch soon and seems very promising.

i-concerts is a new broadband and wireless syndication platform for the video-on-demand distribution of concerts and live music programming.

Bonus link: Top 15 Web 2.0 Startups in Europe?. The domain names situation is getting worse and worse for entrepreneurs (11870, trivop, hipoqih, Sclipo).

Last Friday I was invited by VentureLab to share my entrepreneurial experience with a number of Swiss students participating in Business Experience. This program is teaching them how to develop a startup project, some of them already looking quite promising.

Around 10 projects I was introduced to, Banana Security and NooTouch caught my eyes.

Banana Security is a tiny application that will help you secure your computer. The principle is simple: using the web cam of your machine, it monitors who is sitting in front of it, locking it if it is not you.

NooTouch is a “green advertising network”. They are like google adsense with an ethical twist, carefully selecting the advertisers who can use the service so publishers are sure they are displaying advertisement with an attitude.

There are more promising projects coming soon – not enough to start a Swiss Techcrunch yet – I will try to keep you posted.

Evan Williams, him who invented blogger.com and whom I tried to have speak at LIFT06 (he nicely refused, saying conferences were not his stuff) has rocked the Building Web Apps workshop by candidly sharing the things he blew up while developing his current gig, Odeo, the formerly hottest podcasting company we don’t hear much about these days except in unfriendly territory. Five things not to do:

1. Trying to build too much” – Odeo set out to be a podcasting company with no focus beyond that.

2. “Not building for people like ourselves” – For example, Williams doesn’t podcast himself.

3. “Not adjusting fast enough” [...] “long term is not soon enough for a startup if you’re trying to get a foothold.”

4. “Raising too much money too early”.

5. “Not listening to my gut” – “When you’ve got a bunch of money and you’ve hired a lot of people and you’re talking to your board and you’re talking to reporters, your gut can get drowned out.”

The full report is on gigaom. This reminds me of a previous post about the blink founder reflecting on his failure. And if the subject is of interest for you check my recent SHiFT talk about the lessons learned on cocomment.com.

I am doing a bit of research on Joi Ito these days, and Nicolas sent me a link to a profile made by the strategy+business magazine under the title of The Ambassador from the Next Economy.

The author captured pretty well the reality of a new breed of entrepreneurs I would call the “worldwide entrepreneurs”. These are the first one who embraced the web as their primary tool, using technology to conquer a flat world and, in the process, break both the established business models and the good old ways of doing things. Beyond the future of entrepreneurship, this is the future of knowledge work (= the future of a lot of people) that is emerging:

In some ways, Mr. Ito’s style foreshadows the changing nature of knowledge work; he moves among many organizations at once, balancing his entrepreneurial individualism against an avid, even obsessive participation in the organizations and communities that interest him, whether online or offline. [...]

Typically, when Mr. Ito discerns an idea with promise, he founds a company or funds an existing business to capitalize on that promise. Once the business is humming, he walks away to the next cool idea, expressing little interest in the money made on the venture, but continuing to evangelize its potential as a builder of communities and an enabler of public participation.

Link

I met some of these entrepreneurs this year – the likes of Pierre Chappaz, Jaewoong Lee, Thomas Mygdal, Loic Le Meur or Kiyoshi Nishikawa. They are all different and intriguing characters, always looking for the next challenge, juggling with tenths of projects, changing roles five times a day, constantly switching back and forth between the reality of the field (i.e. starting concrete businesses) and the more abstract world of ideas, of writing articles in Wired and speaking at conferences around the world.

The web has reshaped entrepreneurship the way it has reshaped almost everything else. Today’s entrepreneurs have different tools, values, motivations, expectations, and possibilities. And they are building a new ecosystem in which we will all be working in a few years.

Mike Arrington has his hands full with the TechCrunch redesign-gate so I won’t try to take over him today. But at Innovate Europe I got the chance to meet some pretty impressive companies. Here is a quick roundup:

These guys (partly based in Geneva) are rolling out a service allowing you to connect to your friends based on your localization. Pretty straightforward stuff, you send a sms to tell the system you’re “on” (which means you are ok to be localized), then your buddies get a message if they are near you. Easy, useful and simple.

Digislide is working on a tiny beamer that will be embedded in mobile phones. Really cool product and impressive demo, even if it prototype they were showing was far from functionnal (the guy had wires hidden all over his suit ). If this succeeds (they are looking for 4-5 million euros) it will be a must have on any phone and we will have a new nuisance in cinemas: abusive beaming!

Netvibes is the hot company of Innovate Europe so far. I had a chance to meet their CEO – Tariq Krim – and got a quick demo of the upcoming version. These guys seem to keep their cool despite the increasing pressure, and have a good roadmap for the coming months. I actually changed my opinion on them – I first couldn’t see a business model – really cool company and service.

Feeds 2.0 is a service that, once you see it, makes you wonder how you lived without. The idea is to fight information overload by providing a more intelligent RSS reader, changing the order of news items depending on your reading habits and interests. I signed up for the beta and can’t wait for these guys to release! Cool product from Greece!

All the companies presented at Innovate Europe are listed here.

Update: Pascal Rossini points to a great Paul Graham speech: The hardest lessons for Startups to learn. It’s worth a read, even if it’s not written by Pascal

Seems there is an informal series of blog posts about entrepreneurship in Europe emerging. After my rant and Valerie Thomson’s state of the European investment, the latest episode features a pep-talk by Pascal Rossini, CEO of Ads-Click and Sky-Click, one of the longest-standing Web entrepreneurs of Switzerland, and the best animator of our local blogosphere (mostly in French thou). He wrote an amazing post about the hardest lessons for a startup to learn, and says that “the most important quality in a startup founder is determination. Not intelligence. Determination.”

It is a must-read for all the web/software/product entrepreneurs, because as he says, things that make a startup successful “are kind of counterintuitive”. There are so many quotes I wish to reprint but instead click here and read that post!

The hardest lessons for Startups to learn

Lesson 4: Fear the Right Things [...]

Most visible disasters are not so alarming as they seem. Disasters are normal in a startup: a founder quits, you discover a patent that covers what you’re doing, your servers keep crashing, you run into an insoluble technical problem, you have to change your name, a deal falls through – these are all par for the course. They won’t kill you unless you let them.

Nor will most competitors. A lot of startups worry “what if Google builds something like us?” Actually big companies are not the ones you have to worry about – not even Google. The people at Google are smart, but not smarter than you; they’re not as motivated, because Google is not going to go out of business if this one product fails; and even at Google they have a lot of bureaucracy to slow them down.

What you should fear, as a startup, is not the established players, but other startups you don’t know exist yet. They’re way more dangerous than Google because, like you, they’re cornered animals.

Looking just at existing competitors can give you a false sense of security. You should compete against what someone else could be doing, not just what you can see people doing.

Link