Tonight at 8:30PM, Nuroa and Highgrowth Partners will sponsor TechCrunch Barcelona Meetup with Mike Butcher. We organized the event on very short notice, but it looks like it will be a success, with more than 100 people signed up to attend. Of course, there’s often some variation between the number of people that sign up and the number that actually attend, but in either case, we’ve pretty happy. And nuroa got mentioned in TechCrunch, which is always cool.

The event will be at a cool new hotel, Granados 83, which came highly recommended by my friend and fellow entrepreneur Santiago Porrero, who also helped put us touch with the public relations and reservations department.

All in all, no complaints. They were able to offer us a really cool option on very short notice and at a very good price - an open bar of wine and cava (Spanish champagne), plus some light snacks for 100 on their rooftop terrace with views of the Eixample.

I’m not sure if it’s the open bar, the views, or the chance to network with other entrepreneurs and with Mike, but in any case, the response has been surprisingly encouraging.

I hope to see you there tonight! And if not, I’ll be sure to post pics from the event in tomorrow’s post.

Last week Sophie and I went to Paris for the Le Web event. Whereas ETRE probably has the best networking and is over-the-top elegant, and DEMO Germany is a must for anyone wanting to enter the German market, Le Web is easily the coolest tech event that I’ve ever attended (Essential Web is probably second).

By cool, I mean that it felt like I was at a cool, exclusive party — kind of like when my friends and I snuck into Puff Daddy’s VIP Party when the MTV Awards came to Barcelona. But that’s another story . . .

At ETRE, the guests are important but not really focused on being cool. It’s more like being invited to a world summit where you can actually meet and interact with world leaders. At DEMO, you have all of the German VCs available to you. At Le Web, the speakers and other guests are cool, public figures but probably not the main attraction. Some of them gave 20-minute extracts of what should really be much larger discussions. In fact, in a world where almost everyone has a blog and has posted his or her best presentations on YouTube, you usually don’t learn anything new at large conferences geared to general-interest audiences full of non-entrepreneurs. If you want to participate in longer, more substantive conversations with entire micro-communities of commentators, analysts and entrepreneurs, go read your favorite entrepreneur or VC’s blog or become one of her “friends” on Facebook or search for her presentations on YouTube. There are a lot of options that are cheaper than paying the hefty entrance fees and travel expenses to go to a conference.

But if you do go to a conference, it’s nice to feel welcomed, as if you are a VIP guest. And that’s what Le Web excels at. It’s clear that they spent lots of time designed to make the event feel special and singular — making it comfortable and elegant, as opposed to just functional and boring.

A few highlights:

• The networking lounge was full of modern art work and live artists drawing while entrepreneurs networked on comfortable couches and/or watched the main conference on large plasma TVs.
• There was the Michelin-star type lunch, with chefs preparing foie, shrimp, fondues, raclettes and other great meals, and other waiters serving wine, cocktails or whatever beverage might capture your attention.
• Each guest was introduced with electronica / house music, which certainly woke me up at 9AM in the morning
• Loïc Le Meur graciously introduced himself to each guest at the party, smiling broadly and being a good host, even when Phillipe Starck spoke about 1 hour more than his allotted time.
• Kevin Rose had a very intimate and personal conversation with a Business Week journalist, who asked him about Digg’s groupies.
• Most of the presentators cursed and spoke in a lot more “vulgar” terms. It was surprising on the one hand, but it lent to the atmosphere that the audience was being allowed to hear open and honest conversations between influential Internet opinon-makers. No bullshitting. Just the real deal with lots of cursing.
• Most of the attendees were dressed stylishly and intelligently, as if we were all part of an exclusive Rive Gauche soiree.
• And, of course, there was the fact that so many people went. Bloggers. VCs. Tech analysts. Entrepreneurs. It seems that we all go to the same conferences, but people seemed a lot happier and cheerful at this one. Various blogs had speculated that there’d be 2000 people attending (clever, aggressive marketing). At the event, however, Loïc mentioned that 800 people would attend, and it seemed to me that there were fewer than that. A good showing, but fewer than 1000 people in the same room at the same time. And a lot of the tickets seem like they were comped — i.e., free for friends of friends of Loïc and certain bloggers.

That being said, it was definitely a very cool event. The coolest, most elegant tech event around by far.

Next week, Sophie and I will be heading to Paris for Le Web3 and a couple of business meetings. I will be taking my trusty video camera, with the hopes of posting some of the highlights. According to the folks at Le Web3, 1300 people from 40 countries will show up. I can’t wait to see what the party will be like!

Anyway, Loïc Le Meur, France’s best known blogger, video-blogging entrepreneur and organizer of Le Web 3 is now on a major marketing campaign to promote Le Web 3 (and his new project seesmic.com, which is still in alpha). I get daily video updates from him on Facebook about what’s going on at Seesmic, all of the major tech blogs are offering free tickets or discounted tickets to Le Web 3 to spur attendance, and major newspapers like the Financial Times are writing articles about Loïc and Le Web 3.

Watching his commitment to self-promotion is cool, because I’ve gotten some interesting lessons about what we can do to promote nuroa.

Highlights from the FT article:

• Seesmic.com, a video-blogging platform, is Loïc’s fifth start-up, and he moved from Paris to San Francisco, because he thinks that Silicon Valley is the only real destination for entrepreneurs that want to launch global Internet brands. It’s a bit ironic that the person responsible for organising one of Europe’s biggest Internet events firmly believes that the US is the only place to be if you really want to be relevant in the Internet space. But Loïc justifies it by saying that Europe’s 22 languages and geography complicates deal-making, while San Francisco is at the epicentre of deals. In his words: “The way you do partnerships here, everyone’s a block away or 20 minutes away in Palo Alto. If I need to set up a partnership with [micro-blogging service] Twitter, I call them, we have coffee, and two hours later the deal is done. If I were in France, there’s a nine-hour time difference and it’s like you don’t matter.” If even marquee-level European entrepreneurs with direct access to world leaders feel irrelevant if they are not in Silicon Valley, what does that mean for the rest of us?

• On a more optimistic note, Loïc provides his top 10 tips for entrepreneurs. I’ll re-post them here and comment on them in more detail in the future. In general, I’d just say that they are very insightful, but as with most things, much of it is easier said than done.
  1. Don’t wait for a revolutionary idea. It will never happen. Just focus on a simple, exciting, empty space and execute as fast as possible
  2. Share your idea. The more you share, the more you get advice and the more you learn. Meet and talk to your competitors.
  3. Build a community. Use blogging and social software to make sure people hear about you.
  4. Listen to your community. Answer questions and build your product with their feedback.
  5. Gather a great team. Select those with very different skills from you. Look for people who are better than you.
  6. Be the first to recognise a problem. Everyone makes mistakes. Address the issue in public, learn about and correct it.
  7. Don’t spend time on market research. Launch test versions as early as possible. Keep improving the product in the open.
  8. Don’t obsess over spreadsheet business plans. They are not going to turn out as you predict, in any case.
  9. Don’t plan a big marketing effort. It’s much more important and powerful that your community loves the product.
  10. Don’t focus on getting rich. Focus on your users. Money is a consequence of success, not a goal.

The guys from DEMO Germany just sent us the video of our presentation. As I mentioned before, I think that DEMO is an awesome event. They’ve sent us the press clippings, and the event itself received a lot of good buzz. And as importantly, it was a great opportunity for us to meet a lot of German investors and other entrepreneurs, which wouldn’t have been as easy if we hadn’t attended DEMO.

I hate seeing myself on film, so I haven’t actually seen the video, but I lived it, so I guess that’s good enough. I remember thinking that I did a decent job at explaining the pitch without much notes or a Powerpoint presentation, but you can feel free to judge for yourself.

Oriol and I are in Paris to meet with potential investors. I haven’t been here in about 4 years, and even though I usually think that I don’t care for Parisians (I do try to make it more often to the South of France), I must admit that I was very excited as I boarded the Vueling flight.

I slept most of the way. I’m sure I was snoring, but luckily it was a relatively empty flight.

Once we got in, we saw democracy (?) in action, as the transportation workers were on strike, which meant that the only way to get to the city from Charles de Gaulle was via either an airport bus for €13.50 per person or a €60 taxi ride.

We opted for the bus, which meant standing in the cold rain for about 20 minutes. We’re still stingy entrepreneurs.

Oriol was generally surprised by how unengaging most of the Parisians were to him. He’d ask questions in French, but they all responded like they were in a rush to be somewhere else and he was bothering them. That might have been the case, but it was striking how universal their reaction seemed to be.

Once we got to the city (and it really is a very beautiful city), it was nearly impossible to get a taxi. There was a line of cabs, but I think that most of the taxi drivers were rushing off for a free bottle of Bordeaux or something, because they pretty much ignored us.

Finally, we got a taxi, arrived at the two-star, very French hotel with views of the Eiffel Tower. We dropped off our bags and went to eat. The cocktails were amazing, and the dinner was pretty nice too. I had the onion soup and steak tartare.

I generally liked it, except for one truly mind-boggling fact: The restaurant didn’t have French fries! How ironic is that?

(I added this last pic, because I think that a sexualized photo of a beautiful interracial couple like this one might still be controversial in the US, but it was prominently placed in the exclusive neighborhoods in Paris.)

When I was a college student, I had recurrent dreams about becoming a psychology major. I loved psychology, because it seemed to address issues that mattered, particularly when I took social psychology courses with a young Yale (now Stanford) professor named Jennifer Eberhardt. As an aspiring law professor, I was convinced that a better understanding of the human psyche would help me understand discrimination and social injustice.

Social psychology attempts to get to the core of key issues like: Why are people racist? Why would white slave-masters want to have sex with black slaves, even as they debated that blacks were less than fully human? Why do so many men have rape fantasies? Why would a member of a racial minority discriminate against another racial group or even against members of his own race?

These classes fueled hours of interesting debates, and some of the core theories have stuck with me to this day, particularly the debate regarding the unified self, which came up again the other day at the Web 2.0 conference in Berlin when I was chatting about the pros and cons of Facebook with Oriol and my new friend Ingo Di Bella.

I was arguing that Facebook forces me to be an exhibitionist, to demonstrate all of the various elements of my personality that might be captured on film when I’m acting silly or represented by my friends from various walks of life.

Oriol was arguing that that’s precisely what he likes about Facebook — the fact that you are able to peek into these other aspects of your friends’ or acquaintances’ lives. The fewer filters there are with regard to these other elements of a colleagues’ personality, the more fun Facebook is.

To summarise: Exhibitionism bad. Voyeurism good.

This made me think about the unified self debate. Some psychologists argue that the self is a singular, coherent, and specific entity. In other words, deep down there’s one Gary — the “real” Gary, and everything else is just a reflection of that unified personality. Other psychologists say that the unified self is a myth, that there is no “real” me, that Gary is just a set of characters or personas that are often contradictory and shifting depending on the context.

No simple answer to the universal question of: Who the hell am I?

I’m more in the “no unified self” school, even though it goes against certain conceptions of their being a soul. I’m very different around my parents, around investors, around my best friends, around people whom I’ve just met, when starting a new job, when I’m the boss — everything depends on how I feel in a situation and the relevant rules of conduct. There are some generally shared traits, but sometimes I can seem like two different people.

My parents don’t know all of my friends, and I’d like to keep it that way.

To me, that’s the big problem with Facebook. It assumes that there is a unified self that I want to put on display for the whole world to see. But that’s not quite true. I have so many elements to my personality, and depending on who’s around and the amount of alcohol being consumed, the image I present to the whole can be quite different.

I think that filters would be a good thing — controlling who gets to see what — but I agree with Oriol that then the fun of Facebook would disappear. Quite a dilemma . . . for Facebook.

I don’t aim to solve it. I’m not an investor, so I don’t really have to.

Instead I’ll end with the lyrics to a song that sums up the anti-unified self point of view quite nicely. They’re from Meredith Brooks’ hit song from the late 1990s.

I hate the world today
You’re so good to me
I know but I can’t change
tried to tell you but you look at me like maybe I’m an angel
underneath
innocent and sweet
Yesterday I cried
You must have been relieved to see the softer side
I can understand how you’d be so confused
I don’t envy you
I’m a little bit of everything
all rolled into one

Chorus:
I’m a bitch, I’m a lover
I’m a child, I’m a mother
I’m a sinner, I’m a saint
I do not feel ashamed
I’m your health, I’m your dream
I’m nothing in between
You know you wouldn’t want it any other way

So take me as I am
This may mean you’ll have to be a stronger man
Rest assured that when I start to make you nervous
and I’m going to extremes
tomorrow I will change
and today won’t mean a thing

I was recently invited to be a speaker at the International Classified Media Association’s general meeting, which was entitled “100% Digital”. I was supposed to represent and explain web 2.0 to traditional print media classified companies. Henri and I took the trip to Amsterdam on Wednesday (i.e., Halloween), missing the puente but looking forward to the famous coffeeshops.

When preparing for the conference, I was expecting a bitter backlash from incensed traditional media types given that my message was: “Promote online or perish! Property search engines like nuroa are the future!”.

Ouch!

Harsh, right?

But the general response was: “Yeah, we know that, so how can we work together? Let’s sit down and consider the possibilities. We are all prepared for co-opetition”.

In general, everyone was very receptive to the message, and in fact, my message was one of the milder ones out there. Some members of the organization said it in far more blunt terms, making sure that members clinging to purely traditional models got a kick in the pants, in case they were still stuck in the 1990s.

And equally as impressive, a bulk of the presentations were “member-to-member”, meaning that current members of the organisation explained to their co-members how they’d updated their sites and what advantages they’d reaped as a result.

I spoke a bit with the CEO of a Dutch vertical search engine and learned abot how classified sites in Estonia, Finland, Russia and the US were working on integrating web 2.0 features. It’s amazing how people in such diverse places are generally doing the same sorts of things.

And there were workshops on usability, SEO, applying classifieds to the mobile world, etc.

In general, not a web 2.0 stone was left unturned.

And you definitely had the sense that the members had formed a close-knit family, facing an adverse situation, but determined to survive. This despite that fact that some of the participants were from “big” companies like Careerbuilder, Schibsted and Trader.

I thought it was a great conference, and I’m happy that they invited me (after reading a comment that I’d left on another post and then reading my blog). I made a lot of great contacts, some of which will likely result in collaborations and/or friendships, and as importantly, I learned a lot about the classifieds industry from people who’ve been working in it for the last 20+ years.

Congrats to Lucie and Shay.

Sorry, that’s a random reference to one of my favorite “dumb” movies — White Chicks from the Wayans Brothers. It’s basically the ghetto equivalent of saying “Bring it on!”or “Let the Games Begin!”

Long story short, News International has invested in a UK property vertical search engine called Globrix. A few key facts:

• The investment was for “a multi-million pound funding round”. Combined with the valuation that Properazzi got from Mangrove just for the initial idea of a vertical search engine a couple of years ago, it shows that the property search engines like nuroa are an increasingly interesting area.
• The company, Globrix, still hasn’t launched, but intends to launch during this month. The company was founded in 2007. If you go to their website, you will see that they are still in private beta. This makes me a little better about all those people who asked “When are you going to launch nuroa?” Sometimes the prize doesn’t go to the person who launched first.
• The million-pound investment appears focused on marketing and advertising, as the goal is to make Globrix one of the most trafficked property sites in the UK within the next 12 months. So they’re going to buy their way into being a market leader.
• Globrix’s business model appears to be exactly the same as nuroa’s.
• News Corp claims that the technology is “next generation”, which is simply another way of saying “a web 2.0 property search engine”, just like nuroa. As the CEO of Globrix explains: “Globrix is about answering a fundamental need in this marketplace - creating a Google-style model for the property search industry. By enabling agents to list for free we cover virtually every property in the UK, which in turn provides a hugely compelling proposition for consumers and creates a new opportunity for an ad-funded model.“
• News Corp argues that investments in vertical search are a key part of its digital strategy (it should be remembered that News Corp invested $13.5 million in the US jobs vertical search engine, Simply Hired ( www.simplyhired.com), which Google is reportedly in talks to buy, a fact confirmed to us by a News International representative at a conference that we attended recently. In any case, News Corp appears committed to vertical search. As Clive Milner, Group Managing Director, News International, said: “Through its digital and print media, News International is one of the largest single players in the UK property media market, so this investment is about us remaining at the forefront of what’s happening commercially and technologically. Globrix is set to be a truly disruptive business in the online property search marketplace - it essentially turns the economics upside down and creates an unparalleled consumer offering from an innovative business model.”
• News International invested in a property search engine, despite already owning 50% of the number 2 property portal in the UK (Property Finder — www.propertyfinder.com). As mentioned above, they note that the new technology is the next step forward, even taking in account their years of experience in the classifieds sector, both print and in web 1.0 vertical real estate portals like Idealista and ImmobilienScout.
• All of this despite the fact that the UK property market is one of the most difficult, given the economic power of Rightmove (a valuation of €1.2 billion) and its exclusive control of the real estate agents (the top 3 real estate networks that control about 60% of the market are their original JV backers). No other market in Europe has barriers to entry as high as the UK market or as many strong already existing competitors. By comparison, the France, Spain and Germany are relatively easy — the market leaders aren’t quite as dominant and there are fewer property search engines covering those markets.

I think this is good news for other vertical search players, particularly those of us not focused exclusively on the highly competitive UK market. It seems that Globrix will do essentially the same thing, but will now count on a few million pounds to attack other UK players such as Extate, OnOneMap, Nestoria, Zoompf, Right Move, etc.

More news to come tomorrow about the recent ICMA conference, and the present Web 2.0 conference that I’m attending.

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

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.