Europe... time, culture and quality !

First let's start with Saul Klein presentation @ The Next web conference.

Europe can lead in various internet domains (as said by Saul & Jeff Clavier) like mobile and broadband and probably open source and P2P. That seems to be a fact now.

Europe is lagging behind the US, but it's actually great news.
We have time for us. Time in our transparent world is knowledge and as we all know time is also money !

• Time to see what happens over there in terms of new products and results. You can launch a copy of twitter, but you can also spend sometimes fixing the idea or the model, twitter guys are running after scaling (and hey are not currently translating it, it will cost in scaling ;-)).
• Time to evaluate. Facebook make a huge announcement and like always it's the rush in europe. You need to develope something quick ... get on board as fast as possible ! Even if i agree that it is a great distribution opportunity, I want to know why last.fm hasn't taking part. I want to evaluate if i can scale, I want to consider the product carrefully to get it right the first time. Why I can wait ? Because i was the only one in my facebook networks until a few weeks ago. When I look for HEC (my shcool) all the registered users will graduate in 2008 or 2009 (they are only 200 of them and they poped up recently). So facebook it's just starting to break in France -31k users in the france region- (I know it's more in the UK).
• We learn from the US because they are transparent ! As Google Scholar says it "On the shoulders of the giants". We have been studing last.fm development plan and for scaling U-lik (that contains mainly photos) we use the scaling strategy of Flickr. It's Priceless !!!

But most of all, Europe is a unique place because it's plural.

• Unifing Europe is more painfull, but it can be the best entry barrier you could ever come up with. And we are the all ones really capable of doing it quickly. Skyblog has beaten Myspace in many European languages, we have our leaders from Netlog to bebo or event Piczo. Try adding your school in Facebook, it does not exist... they have only 6 high Schools for Paris!
• Think about Kelkoo and last.fm.
• Cultural lifestyle can make it difficult for americans.  Europeans don't  love stats has much as americans. We are more interested in quality relation than by having the largest number of friends. It's no big deal but it means that we can create more value elsewhere in the chain.
• Building a european large website make you closer to a universal model. Look at Amsterdam, people from all continents live there because they were once colonized. That's an excellent spreading base for non european growth.

When Saul ask : "So what about Europe ?" he gave many examples:

• we've always had creative prodigies (s20)
• We still create global entertainment ... (s21)
• brands that define global luxury... brands that disrupt markets globally (s22 &23)

--> It's all about entertainment, culture and high quality. This were we could make the difference.

European companies think big and entrepreneurs  take huge risk and I agree with Gary... don't need to blame entrepreneurs too much ... we also need a better ecosystem. Saul gave a great help with the open coffee, but we need more. More quality !! I'll get back on that one in my next post about conference in Europe.

We have time, we have exist startegy (it's easier for an american to buy it's way in Europe - again look @ kelkoo and Last.fm or we can go the other way and get quoted there -vistaprint-), we have entry barriers, we have quality stuff and we are closer to a universal apporach.

Ecosystem is getting better everyday and we will see more & more European successes ... that's for sure !

I love EUROPE and you get amazing insights from this various cultures (I have plenty of example from the conference). I'll be happy to have your views on this.