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.

These days, it seems like everyone is trying to start an online classifieds business. In the web 1.0 era when online real estate portals were themselves disruptive, their primary competition online was amongst themselves. The offline classifieds players thought that Internet was a fad, so they didn’t really feel the need to invest heavily online.

Now everyone is trying to start some sort of classifieds business online. Media groups have seen the light and are moving and promoting their newspapers (and classifieds sections) online. Directories are trying to monetize their listings now that few Internet-savvy people will search for a business using print Yellow Pages. In particular, a lot of directories are trying to get into local search, with classifieds as a key component of their offering. Social networks like Xing and LinkedIn realise that it might be easier to convince a business executive to pay €200 per month to recruit job candidates than it is to convince her to pay €10 per month for a premium membership, when you can pretty much get all that you need with a basic — that is, free — account. Even Facebook has added a marketplace section.

I started thinking about this recently when TechCrunch UK announced that News Corp. might be interested in buying LinkedIn. The story appears fairly credible, as it’s been picked up by venerable sources such as The New York Times, VentureBeat and The Wall Street Journal’s Kara Swisher). At first glance, the link between, let’s say, The Wall Street Journal, MySpace, SimplyHired (a US jobs search engine that News Corp has invested in), Globrix (a stealth UK property search engine in which News Corp. invested “millions of pounds” a few weeks ago) and LinkedIn might seem a bit farfetched.

What the hell is Rupert Murdoch thinking?! (That’s the same question people asked when he bought MySpace for $580 million. Now that Facebook has been valued at $15 billion, even though it’s the number 2 social network — MySpace is still number 1 — people are definitely not doubting the wisdom of Murdoch’s strategic investments.)

Well, one clue might be to look at what News Corp. did with SimplyHired and MySpace — SimplyHired powers MySpace’s job board. That’s one way to monetize MySpace’s traffic. Perhaps not coincidentally, SimplyHired also powers LinkedIn’s job board. And VentureBeat suggests that the rationale behind News Corp’s interest in LinkedIn is as a way to monetize the Wall Street Journal’s traffic once Murdoch removes the subscription model (Murdoch plans to make the Journal free, like the New York Times, which is now free and based on an advertising model — note that the New York Times is an investor in Indeed, SimplyHired’s primary competitor and another vertical search player).

In the VentureBeat author’s words: “News Corp.’s strategy, from what we understand: Somehow integrate LinkedIn’s network with the Wall Street Journal as well as its other newspapers around the world, hopefully figuring out how to recoup News Corp.’s newspapers’ declining classified ad revenue in the process.”

And Swisher’s description of LinkedIn is instructive: “[LinkedIn] is trying to be a business classified service with online presence and connection elements woven in.”

So this means that going forward, the online portals like ImmoScout and Idealista are going to face increasing competition from:

• powerful media groups like News Corp., The New York Times Company and Axel Springer, all of which need to move online to deal with declining offline classifieds revenues;
• the Yellow Page giants, which need to conquer local search or become irrelevant; and
• the social networks like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Xing, which find it difficult to monetise their traffic and are looking to classifieds as one possible solution.

In short, the classifieds space is becoming very fragmented.

In such a context, a property search engine like nuroa makes increasing sense. Why would a user want to search site by site, format by format, giant by giant, when she can encounter all of the relevant information in one place?

Maybe that’s why vanguardist media groups like News Corp and the New York Times are eagerly investing in vertical search engines, aware of their monetisation potential in the increasingly fragmented world of online classifieds.

For those of you who are generally interested in social networks like LinkedIn, I’ve included an interview with Dan Nye, the new CEO of LinkedIn. Intruders TV also has an interesting interview with Reid Hoffman (but they don’t allow you to embed the video).

Dan Nye (new CEO) of LinkedIn speaks with Kara Swisher of the Wall Street Journal

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.

I’d like to welcome two of migoa’s employees, Victor Aloi and Kirsten Kottman to the world of blogging.

They’ll be writing about what it’s like to live in Barcelona as young expats, real estate news generally, and the challenges and joys of promoting nuroa and trying to make it into a market-leading property search engine.

Victor is our 26 year old product manager for Spain. He started out as an intern (while he was getting a masters in corporate communications and advertising) but impressed so much that we hired him full-time back in June. In Brazil, he studied journalism and had a very popular personal blog. In addition to being a co-worker he’s also one of my best friends in Barcelona (which happened after we started working together). His blog will be in Spanish.

Kirsten is our German community manager. She’s originally from Berlin (one of my favorite cities in the world) but now lives in Barcelona (my favorite city in the world). Her background is in PR and journalism, including a stint at MTV. She’s really cool and really hard-working, and we’re lucky to have her. Her blog will be written in German. I’m looking forward to seeing how she deals with our collective craziness at our next party, which I hope will be a drunken karaoke session.

So far, the best blogger of our bunch is still Carlos, who continues to inspire us all! In fact, Carlos was going to do our presentation at Ojobuscador before it got cancelled. We miss him, but a good education is the most important thing, even more important than working at migoa!

We’ll see if Kirsten and Victor can make up for lost time and give Carlos a run for his money!

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

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.

We did it!

After what can only be described as an eventful and interesting year and a half, our website has finally gone live.

In the end, we have decided to launch vertical by vertical, country by country. The goal is to offer a depth and degree of local knowledge that tends to be absent in some of our competitors. We understand that classifieds are extremely local. Not even national in many cases. Extremely local.

A user in Berlin could often care less about the housing market in Munich (unless the move is inter-regional).

Similarly, most home buyers in Barcelona could care less about the various neighborhoods in Madrid. That information does little to inform her search for a property in a few select neighborhoods in Barcelona, and even within Barcelona, if she’s only searching for properties in Gracia and the Eixample Esquerre, she could probably care less about the real estate market in Sants and Sarria (two other districts within Barcelona).

Our goal is to understand what motivates and concerns the user in each key region. Otherwise, it will be very difficult to provide a truly satisfying user experience. There’s a limit to how individualised you can make the search experience, but the goal is to make it feel extremely personalised, and the first step in the context of a real estate search engine is to make it feel extremely local.

So that’s why we have started with two real estate sites: one in Germany (www.nuroa.de) and one in Spain (www.nuroa.es). They’re password protected for a couple of weeks — we’re still correcting a few major bugs like the fact that the search engine confuses Barcelona city with Barcelona province — but we will give the password to anyone who wants it, and we wholeheartedly welcome your feedback. (Please send me an email to gary @ migoa.com, and I’ll get you the passwords.)

Our goal is to launch in the UK and France within the near future, but only to the extent that we can launch something that demonstrates an understanding of how the local markets work. And only to the extent that we can dedicate sufficient resources so that the websites don’t just become cut-and-paste versions in French and in English.

We are the only vertical search engine in the world to include what we are calling “intuitive search”, which essentially means that we integrate web 2.0 aspects (i.e., we integrate relevant real estate blogs, newspaper articles, videos, photos, etc.) into our search results without detracting too much from the central focus of the page — the real estate listings. So if you do a search for “piso Barcelona”, you will get the search results AND in another column you might see relevant articles from the APIs in Barcelona telling you why now is the time to buy, or a study from BBVA about the evolution of prices in Barcelona, plus pics that other users have taken in and of Barcelona, etc.

We think that intuitive search is the wave of the future. The “big” search engines are already experimenting in this area with Ask3D and Google’s universal search. We think that they understand the future of search pretty well, so we adapted some of their insights to our particular verticals.

And such an approach makes sense. We understand that finding the right apartment is often only the first of many steps in the property purchasing process. And it is only one of the many considerations that will determine if, when and how you will purchase your dream home. So our results page tries to figure out what these other relevant considerations might be and provides you the collective insight of other members of our real estate community.

Our refined search features are also pretty cool and are supplemented by the ability to search by tags. And it all works pretty dynamically. So you have many options to narrow down the millions of possible search results into the few really relevant results that meet your criteria. That’s the key comparative advantage of a “vertical” search engine relative to a “horizontal” one like Google — the results should be more precise and relevant with regard to the vertical in question.

Our “official” launches will take place during the month of October at various conferences. We will launch the German site at DemoGermany (the German/European equivalent of the successful US conference). And if all goes according to plan, we will launch the international site at the Future of Web Apps (FOWA) conference in London next week. We’re currently ironing out the details right now with Ryan, but it looks like they’ll give us a few minutes in front of the general audience to make a brief pitch. Both are cool events that will be attended by influential bloggers and press, so it makes sense for us to use them to launch.

And on top of that, both conferences should be cool.

I sincerely believe that the final product reflects the hard work and analyses that went into it. A lot of influential investors and people from the sector have already congratulated us on the interface. And our tech is probably among the best of the current vertical search players. That’s our goal, in any case.

One commentator on Juan Luis’s blog said that we took too long in development, which surprised me given that we took the same amount of time as the original vertical search engines in the US. Our goal wasn’t to put out a rushed and underdeveloped product, or a cut-and-paste version of what already exists in the US. Our goal was to put out something innovative with truly disruptive potential. I think that we have done it.

And as I have noted elsewhere on this blog, Google was the 12th search engine to launch.

The goal isn’t always to be first.

The goal is to be the best.

Particularly in the tech sector, the two concepts are often not synonomous.

Try out nuroa and let me know what you think.

Simon Waldman, Director of Digital Strategy for the Guardian Media Group in the UK, has posted a very insightful presentation about the intersection of the Internet and Web 2.0 on his blog. The text reflects a speech he gave to a German general media audience in Berlin. There is also a pdf version of the script of the presentation.

Simon makes the following arguments:

• Newspapers that want to survive need to embrace, exploit and excel in web 2.0. “There is no denying that our industry — particularly in Western Europe and North America — is structurally challenged, and that is almost entirely down to the net. . . . But I fundamentally believe that newspaper publishers who are prepared to experiment, innovate and invest online will create significant cultural and commercial value as a result of their efforts.”
• Internet moves quickly and probably a lot more quickly than the pace to which traditional media groups are accustomed. “Being online is like having a shop in a mall– you have to keep up with everyone around you, even if they’re not a direct competitor. Otherwise, you seem very tired, very quickly.”
• There are four axes of Web 2.0. “I know that there are all sorts of definitions of Web 2.0, but in my mind there are four key characteristics in the boom: Social networks, search and aggregation, collaboration and video.”
• Google is a frenemy. “Google and its impact on every sector of the economy’s attempt to grapple with the Internet are undeniable — and the newspaper industry perhaps more than most. Some of us see them as a competitor and a stealer of content; others see it as a source of traffic and revenue . . . . [B]ut all I will say is that defining and understanding a relationship with Google and other search players and aggregators is a crucial part of operating effectively in the online world.”
• There’s no turning back, even though most newspaper companies and traditional media groups might wish otherwise. “I wish Google would go back to being a nice, cuddly search engine that does no evil, rather than a global advertising bohemoth. Or at the very least, I wish they had to pay big bucks to carry our headlines and first paragraphs on Google News. I wish free classifieds sites would go away, or that the Internet has recruitment advertisers rushing to spend more rather than less. . . . [B]ut I also know that they are not going to happen. . . . The point is - this is about change. Not a gentle, start of the new school year, kind of change — but disruptive, shifting of tectonic plates kind of change.”

It’s good to see this kind of realistic optimism from the traditional media. There are obviously a lot of synergies between newspapers / media groups on the one hand, and search engines on the other. Indeed has The New York Times as an investor and strategic ally. Simply Hired has News Corp. Yahoo and Google are also increasingly trying to create cross-selling opportunities with newspaper groups.

But it’s also true that when we spoke to some investors initially - and even more recently - people seem to have the concern that search engines and aggregators “steal” their content, rather than they are partners that can redirect traffic to their businesses for less money than traditional media outlets, like newspapers, that charge a lot more for reaching target audiences.

In any case, it seems that the “slow death of newspapers” at the hands of search engines, aggregators and online classifieds sites is in the news a bit this week. Don Dodge has also an interesting post entitled “Online classified ads take $3.1 billion from newspapers,” which is review of an article in the Washington Post about the same topic. The post article is particularly interesting because it examines how vertical search engines such as Edgeio and Oodle are disrupting traditional classifieds businesses.

The bottom line: Search engines and aggregators are here to stay. Not all of us will survive, and most of us will be co-opted or bought. A few may become large, independent IPO-friendly companies. But the technological and economic disruption to traditional media companies can not be ignored or denied.

There are some bad news and some not-so-bad news if you are a Spanish Internet start-up.

The bad news

Tornado Insider has produced a study of European VC deals in 2007. Blognation has a good analysis of the study, but the bottom line is:

• the UK is still the place to be if you want to get funding. 30.6% of all technology investments targeted UK companies;
• Germany is a distant second to the UK, but it’s getting better. In fact, Germany is now 2nd in Europe, ahead of France, with 16.7% of all deals. (France used to be number 2.)
• France is now 3rd, with 11% of the deals in 2007 – down considerably from its 7-year average of 14.1%.
• The rest of the top 7 includes:
  • Israel — 8.7% in 2007 (average of 8.1% since 2000),
  • The Netherlands — 6.3% in 2007 (average of 5.4% since 2000),
  • Denmark — 4.4% in 2007 (average of 4.1% since 2000), and
  • Sweden — 4.1% in 2007 (average of 6.4% since 2000).

By cities, the distribution of European tech funding is as follows:

For Internet investments, London is clearly the place to be, with 20.8% of all European investments being made there. Paris is second, with 10.7% of all European Internet investments.

Spain is nowhere to be seen on any of these charts. It’s not even mentioned in any of the online summaries, which suggests that it’s largely irrelevant in terms of European VC funding.

The not so bad news

Tornado Insider also reports that there was a lot of VC activity in Spain last month. Spain tends to have an average of 1.5 deals per month, but 5 deals were recorded in July. It’s interesting to note that:

• none of the deals involved first-round financing for an Internet company (there is one second-round financing of an Internet company);
• Biotech and mobile account for 2/3 of the investments;
• The Basque Country and Navarra account for 1/2 of the investments, while Madrid accounts for the other 1/2; and
• There were no investments of any sort in Barcelona, even though 2 of the investors were Catalan.

Following is a summary of the Spanish deals that were reported in July 2007:

• Bilbao-based security software company Panda Security raised €10 million in a new funding round from HarbourVest Partners and Atlantic Bridge Ventures. Previous investors Investindustrial and Gala Capital also participated in this round.
• 3i, the European Founders Fund, angel investor Michael Kleindl and Molins Capital Inversión invested €5.75 million in second-rounding financing for Madrid-based BuyVIP, an invite-only online shopping community.
• Sodena invested €3 million in Navarra-based 3P Biopharmaceuticals.
• Debaeque Venture Capital invested €2million in first-round investment for Kimia Solutions, a Madrid-based media content developer. Kimia aims to develop technology to enable efficient delivery of rich media Internet content to mobile handsets.
• Clave Mayor invested €475,000 in Navarran company Laboratorios OJERpharma, which produces high-quality dermatological pharmacy products.
• Honorable mention goes to Berggi, a US-based developer of mobile messaging services for cell phones, which raised €6.6 million in early August from Avanzit and Adara Ventures. The company has offices in Madrid and is as much Spanish as it is American. Berggi enables consumers to use email, instant messaging, text, alerts and new messaging tools to stay connected with friends, family, and colleagues.

This is admittedly a small sample set that might not be representative of the big picture, but it suggests that pharma continues attracting money, mobile is hot, and investors tend to be cautious about Internet projects.

It also suggests that Barcelona is not the best place to be if you want to get significant first-round financing for an Internet project. It can be done (after all, we got financing from angel investors and from the government). But it’s challenging at best.