I’m hooked. I’ve resisted for as long as I could, but I’ve fallen in-love.

I tried to resist all of the Facebook media love-fest for as long as possible. I remember reading about some crazy guy at Goldman Sachs or something like that who said that he’d rather get fired than give up using Facebook at work.

Last week, I read with some disbelief that Microsoft had valued Facebook at $15 billion, up from $10 billion just a few months ago, which makes Facebook the 5th most valuable Internet company in the world with a market cap that’s bigger than IAC and Salesforce combined.

Following is the chart from TechCrunch reviewing the market cap and revenues of the Internet giants. It’s unlikely that Facebook is generating the revenues to justify its entry into such elite status, but that’s not my problem. I’m a user, not an investor.

And after using Facebook, I can be a “hater” no longer. I find myself perusing my old computer for pics to upload, so convinced am I that the rest of the world wants to see pics of my weekends and holidays that I’ve long forgotten about.

I don’t have time to speak to my mom and she accuses me of avoiding her calls, but I look for pics of Xmas holidays so that I can remember the good times spent with her.

I also spend hours searching for “friends” with whom I’ve lost touch. Most of them I really never even spoke to in high school or college, and it’s been about 10 years since those glory days. But there’s a perverse thrill in re-establishing contact with people, some of whom you tried so hard to forget about when you graduated.

Maybe time heals all wounds.

Or maybe people are cooler and more interesting when you don’t have to speak with them. When all you have are photos and blurry recollections (or reimaginings) of good times spent together. When you can become a voyeur peering from the safety of your laptop into their lives and personal photos.

And then there are all those apps. I don’t think I ever realised that I needed any of them. A week ago I thought that the whole Facebook App Week, and the idea of VCs funding companies whose entire raison d’etre was to create a Facebook App, was ridiculous. And maybe they still are.

But like my iPod, my Blackberry and now Facebook, silly little things that shouldn’t matter so much now matter a lot and have become life-defining than interpersonal contact.

I’ve even started to use Twitter.

Kind of like an interesting follow-up/contrast to my last post on the Samwer brothers, The New York Times has an article today focusing on Max Levchin, one of the founders of PayPal who’s worth about $100 million and is now in his second start-up. Levchin says that he will consider the new project, slide.com, a failure unless it’s ultimately worth at least $1.54 billion — the price that eBay paid for PayPal.

The focus of the article is to understand what drives under-35 tech millionaires in Silicon Valley who are already fabulously rich but still feel the need to create the next big thing.

Extraordinary success isn’t enough for them, if it only happens once and if it happens when they are still young. It’s almost like they have nothing left to live for after they’ve realised their dreams. So they dare to dream again.

Levchin explains why he didn’t enjoy his collaboration with Sequoia after he made his fortune. Or more appropriately, why he wasn’t a very good VC.

He explains: “I took this perverse pleasure in seeing if I could make someone cry.”

The thrust of the article is that in Silicon Valley, money isn’t everything. As Robert Sutton, a professor at Sutton explains: “In other parts of the country, things like a great estate are the symbols people most respect. But here, the greatest status symbol is a person’s ability [to] still bring out hot new companies.”

As we say every time we present, our goal is to supplement not supplant Google.

It’s a life-changer, a great technology. And combined with YouTube, the ability to retrieve general information from the web is amazing.

What am I talking about?

Well, at DEMO GERMANY a couple of weeks ago, we were literally face to face with Oliver Samwer, one of the trio of German entrepreneurial brothers with a seemingly golden touch. Oliver gave the keynote, and I was in the backstage area with him before he spoke. Our presentation was right after his speech, so there were only a group of 5 of us plus Oliver in the backstage area.

I listened to his speech and thought that he sounded like a nice guy. I’d only started to hear about the Samwer brothers after the sale of StudiVZ to Holtzbrinck Ventures for €85 million back in January 2007. Plus, I’d just bumped into Michael from StudiVZ at Etre in Budapest, so my interest in both the Samwer Brothers and StudiVZ was piqued. Oliver from Red Herring had also told me a bit about them at ETRE, so when I got back home from DEMO Germany, I decided to see what help Google and YouTube might offer.

A little bit of research on Google showed that they are innate entrepreneurs that sold their first company, Alondo.de (a German marketplace site, like eBay) to eBay for €40+ million about 100 days after they founded the company. They then served as managing directors of eBay Germany, which they made into the most profitable international site of eBay. A few years later, they struck gold again with Jamba, which became the market leader for wireless content such as ringtones, pictures, games and videos for mobile phones in the US and Europe. Verisign acquired Jamba in 2004 for $273 million.

So now the brothers focus on helping to create an ecosystem in which entrepreneurs in Europe can thrive. From what I’ve been able to find out, Alex (the youngest brother) runs a foundation that supports Romanian children that can’t afford an education. And Oliver and Marc focus on mentoring and supporting young entrepreneurs, not just with their money but also with their time.

It’s cool to see this kind of thing. The brothers seem profoundly normal and real, without the ego-tripping that sometimes infects very successful people. They seem like good people who are trying to make a difference after their bit of good fortune (and hard work). Either that, or they are amazing actors.

Take a look for yourself.

Oliver Samwer

Marc Samwer

When I was traveling over the last few weeks, I saw this video in every country that I visited. I’ve heard the video translated into at least 5 languages. It’s a bit disturbing but nonethless hilarious.

I’m sure that you have already seen it, but one of my friends just posted it to his Facebook page, so I couldn’t resist adding it here.

The video is from a devoted fan who responds to evil bloggers who posted crap like this after Britney’s last MTV “performance”.

Leave Britney alone!

Thomas, one of the potential employees that we met with in Germany, sent me this video from the “super-exclusive” P1 club in Munich - yeah, the one that kicked me out for asking for Beyoncé too many times. I invited Thomas to come along and invited him to one of those €17.50 cocktails.

Anyway, there was a pizza guy there who had a lot of fun spinning his dough. When he saw that Thomas was recording his performance, he started over and gave a show, asking Thomas to record it on his cell phone and send it to his (the pizza guy’s) girlfriend so that she could see him at work.

All I could think was: I hope he’s washed his hands! If not, so much contact with the dough that I might later eat is pretty gross.

Whew! It’s been a hectic month, which explains the delay since my last post. We’ve been very busy bees since the launch.

I’ll go item by item.

Right after the launch, we got contacted by various Spanish newspaper groups, which meant that we were travelling a bit within Spain to discuss possible collaborations.

Then we flew to Cologne via Frankfurt to meet with a potential investor.

Then we flew to Munich to attend the Demo Pitch Camp, which was cool because I met a lot of interesting German entrepreneurs. It was a challenge, because the basic rules of Demo are: i) no powerpoints; and ii) you have to do a live demonstration of your product. Given Murphy’s law, the result is that the experience can be nerve-wracking, but I had a lot of fun. It was also the last weekend of Oktoberfest, so I got to see people of all ages, races and sizes dressed up in traditional Bavarian costumes with men in Lederhosen and women in Dirndl. They even wore the costumes to the dance clubs! It made for a trippy experience seeing people dance to Rihanna in lederhosen!

After Pitch Camp, we flew to Budapest for ETRE. Without a doubt, I have to say that ETRE is THE best conference that I ever attended. Everything is over the top, but with good taste. All of the dinners were in fabulous, historic buildings in Budapest that were unbelievably beautiful. And on top of that, important people just sit next to you and chat. Simon Cook of DJFEsprit sat down next to me at lunch and we had a cool conversation about how start-ups should grow, and compared the approaches in the US and in Europe. I sat down on the bus to go the last dinner and decided that I’d be social (sometimes I prefer to just listen to my ubiquitous iPod). It turned out that the guy next to me was a general partner at Northzone Ventures and he’s also on the board of Schibsted, the parent company of Anuntis Segundamano. We met so many “important” people that it was unreal. When we were eating dinner, Michael Brehm, the co-founder and COO of StudiVZ came up and started chatting with us. At first, I had no clue who he was — there was no ego involved. And when he mentioned StudiVZ, I told him that I remember reading that they had just sold their social networking site for almost $100 million. He confirmed that and we chatted a bit about running a German start-up.

In addition to the luck we had just bumping into people, Farley and Oliver were great about introducing us to possibly interesting contacts. Since they know everyone, they just very informally introduced us to a lot of great people that we might not otherwise have had access to. And then when they weren’t available, we discussed European entrepreneurship while getting toasted with the Red Herring interns.

The truth is that everyone was relaxed and fun. Even some of the VCs that we’d seen at other conferences seemed more mellow, as they approached us to ask for updates as to how we’d evolved since the last time we met.

And the last night was a ball. We all danced to R&B and pop music in a small club that the people at Red Herring had rented out via a local promotor. The overzealous promotor also recruited about 20-30 young, blond girls whose only job was to make sure that the male guests had fun. Interesting, because unlike most events, ETRE is one in which spouses are usually taken along. And we’d just come from a black-tie event, so the wives were in formal gowns and the men were in tuxedos. And the female “entertainers” were dressed in cut-off tank tops and tight jeans with knee-high boots. A surreal way to end an amazing event.

From ETRE we flew back to Barcelona to recover over the weekend, and then it was off to Munich again for DEMO. It was also a wonderful event. I don’t think that it got the press coverage that it deserved, but it was a great opportunity to meet all of the major German VCs and media investors in one room. All but one of the ones that we wanted to chat with came to visit our booth. Some very interesting conversations have begun. And Stefan Herbert and his staff ran a great event that was on time. The keynote speech was by Oliver Samwer, which was cool since the Samwer brothers are among the coolest story of serial entrepreneurs that is out there. Three young German brothers who got internships in Silicon Valley, then went back to Germany to create an eBay competitor that was bought only 3 months later by eBay for a bit more than $40 million.

Stefan, the executive director of DEMO, in particular was very cool. He’s someone that I’ll definitely stay in touch with, and I highly recommend the event for anyone looking to break into the German market. And I definitely agree that a presentation without a Powerpoint and with a live demo is much more exciting and informative, both for the speaker and the audience. The challenge is definitely worth it if you do it right.

The only negative part was getting escorted out of the P1 Club, which everyone tells me is the most exclusive club in Munich. I asked for Beyoncé, and when the DJ wouldn’t play it (even though it was a private party and he was being paid supposedly to play what the attendees wanted), I told him that I thought the club sucked. I was promptly escorted out. I didn’t like the club anyway! The drinks were €17.50 a piece!

So now we’re back in Barcelona. We’ve met with a bunch of possible investors. Some interesting things should be happening to us within the next few months, if all goes according to plan. And I’ll be sure to write about it all on this blog.

Next week, it’s off to Amsterdam, where I’ve been invited to give a 30-minute presentation to the attendees of the International Classified Media Association’s conference. My task will be to explain why vertical search could be viewed as an opportunity for traditional classifieds players.

And immediately after we’ll be headed to the Web 2.0 conference in Berlin. I’m looking forward to that. We’ve made a lot of friends in Germany, and quite a few of them will attend the event.

The only disappointing thing about the last few weeks is that we were also supposed to attend the FOWA conference. Ryan invited us to present when he did the Roadshow visit to Barcelona. We were all ready to go. We exchanged emails until the Sunday before the conference, which was then followed by . . . dead silence. The last correspondence had been that they would confirm the details of our presentation (how much time we’d have, what slot we’d present, etc.). When no one responded to our emails, we called all the numbers on his business card and website, but no one would answer our emails or phone calls. About a week after the conference, Ryan sent me a brief email telling me that it was unfortunate that things had turned out as they had, but that he simply hadn’t had the time to get back to us. It’s understandable to a certain extent, but it definitely made me appreciate a lot more the professionalism of the DEMO and Red Herring people. I think it’s not so cool to do a roadshow, invite (without any solicitation on our part) entrepreneurs to present, exchange emails confirming the invitation, and then simply fail to respond.

But that might just be me.