Mobile 2.0 Europe-roundup

BARCELONA -Mobile 2.0 Europe has come and gone again this year, attracting once again some of the finest mobile minds and entrepreneurs to Barcelona.

The (now 2-day) European showcase of mobile startups and trends in mobile this year gave everyone some extra food for thought with Tom Raftery on Mobile Sustainability and Regine Debatty on Mobile Culture.

Tom gave a thought-provoking presentation on why most telcos are not doing enough about achieving sustainability (with some squirming in the front seat from Carlos Domingo of Telefonica but pleased faces from Vodafone, with Tom's thumbs-up of their corporate web policy on green issues).

Regine offered a visually pleasing interlude of examples of not-for-profit mobile art and culture, with examples of giant SMS mobile screen projections (SMS Guerilla Projector) on the backs of innocent pedestrians (check out www.we-make-money-not-art.com) .

The panel on 'Beyond Free' managed to top last year's after lunch panel (on the role of Mobile Operators in fostering innovation) in terms of provocative debate, fuelled by some diverging points of view between Inma Martinez (Moderator) and Ian Ginn (seasoned web/mobile entrepreneur).

The conclusion from the panel, if there was one, is that mobile startups are still seen as an (un)necessary evil by most VC's but are treated as misunderstood children because they don't fit in the VC's risk/return equations.

You can find all the links to the presentations on the official event site here. A big round of applause to Rudy,Carles and the rest of the Mobile 2.0 Committee for organising (and pulling off) yet another great mobile event in Barcelona.

I will post some of my videos of the presentations by Ted Morgan of Skyhook Wireless and Priya Prakash of Nokia, starting with this one below:

European Entrepreneurship & Social Media @Plugg

BRUSSELS-The first couple of themes from Plugg this morning focused around European Entrepreneurship (and differences with US entrepreneurship) and Social Media.

Inma Martinez , founder of Stradbroke Advisors (and speaker at Mobile 2.0 in Barcelona last summer) marked out three categories of European Entrepreneurship: Clueless, Pirates and Super Bad.

The Clueless category includes entrepreneurs with great ideas but no idea as to how to market them (see Collaborative film making experiment Wreck A Movie and their great trailer www.ironsky.net), the Pirates include entrepreneurs not afraid to break the rules (PirateBay from Sweden was quoted) and the SuperBad includes those with cheeky ideas but not much more.

The key message? It is good to be cheeky and also European Entrepreneurs should focus on product and not on technical excellence.

Jo Caudron from ONE agency stated how the Web 2.0 era has now moved us from a model of media consumption of 'feeding fish to penguins' to a 'birds and the bees' model, where the bee is spreading the word and has the real power in the social environment.

He also emphasized how Web 2.0 companies can make money by understanding that they are dealing not merely with social media but all-encompassing social business, where the social element effectively permeates all parts of traditional business spheres.