We found out a couple of weeks ago that we’d been selected as a Red Herring 100 Europe winner, but we were given permission yesterday to make the honour public. All of the winners will celebrate the Red Herring 100 Awards with VCs, other investors and business development, strategy and marketing executives from the largest public technology companies at Red Herring’s Venture Market Europe conference in Cannes from March 25-27 at the InterContinental Carlton. The theme of this year’s event is “The Politics of Disruption”.

To be honest, I’m both excited and scared. This is the second such honour we’ve received, even though we haven’t publicly launched our website. The first was Innovate!Europe 2006, where we learned that we had to focus our product more and make it more international. We had to be both more and less ambitious — in other words, we had to be smarter about positioning ourselves in the international marketplace and not just be content to win a small piece of the Spanish market. We learned a lot about how VCs work and think, some of it good, some of it less pleasant. But all in all, it was a great experience, and our company would not be the same if we had not gone to Innovate!Europe 2006. (I think that Chris and her group are already accepting registrations for the 2007 version.)

That’s why I’m so excited about Red Herring. There’s no guarantee of funding, and in fact, it’s unlikely that anything will come directly from our attending the event. But the feedback is great, and you also get the chance to introduce yourself to influential players and investors. Both of these factors only increase the possibility that you might eventually have a product that makes an attractive investment. And it also helps to generate a bit of buzz for your product.

These events are also great, because you make great contacts with fellow entrepreneurs with promising projects. On the one hand, we will have the chance to learn from a lot of the other companies have already generated a lot of favourable buzz, such as Plazes.com, Lastfm, and Joost.

That being said, it seems that the competition this year was particularly tough, given that great projects like Panoramio that have generated a lot of favourable local buzz apparently did not win the final award. That decision really surprised me, because Panoramio is so well-regarded. Maybe the editors placed special emphasis on the business model? I really don’t know, particularly as I didn’t read the proposal that Panoramio submitted to the evaluation committee. And I didn’t get the hear the interview that they provided to the journalist that contacted them from Red Herring. But I think that their project is definitely a part of the Spanish web 2.0 vanguard, and maybe the full extent of that innovation was not adequately translated in the interview process.

All I can say is that we’re really excited to go to Cannes and be in the presence of some of these other companies and VCs. The list of European VCs that will be there is amazing: Accel Partners, Atlas Venture, Benchmark Capital, Espirit Capital Partners, Grupo Financiero Riva y Garcia, Index Ventures and Ventech. Plus Martin Varsavksy will be a keynote speaker, meaning that one of Spain’s most prominent and entertaining entrepreneurs will be present. (Riva y Garcia is the sole Spanish VC that will be represented.) Really, it’s a great chance to see and be seen, both locally and internationally, and we’ve already been given our presentation slot, which we’re very happy with. There are a lot of lunches and dinners planned, which is nice, as it will give us a lot of opportunities to network with potential investors.

And on top of it all, the staff at Red Herring has been very nice to us with all of our questions, etc.

We’re driving to the conference on Sunday morning to be there for the cocktail dinner on Sunday evening. I’ll keep you all updated on how the conference goes and about if we make any interesting contacts.

Congrats by the way to the three other Spanish companies that made the cut: BitRock, Agnitio SL and Openbravo ERP.