On the geek side Robert Scoble’s talk on the future of technology was fascinating as was CEO of Evernote Phil Libin’s Keynote.

The star of the event however was Klara, the very well behaved cow, who took the leading role in www.dungville.com a clever twist on the Million Dollar Home Page. Users were asked to click on three squares in the virtual field where you thought Klara would drop her cow pat.

Congratulations are due to Nuji one of our Seedcamp portfolio companies won the Best Web App award at the event.

Thanks to the Coen and Herman for the Henq Invest VIP party on Thursday, which was great fun.

Being only an hour away Amsterdam is definitely one of our favourite event destinations.

On Tuesday this week Jos White tweeted the very good news that Notion completed their first close of Notion Capital Fund 2, focusing on emerging Cloud Computing and SaaS companies.

Notion have already invested $50m from their first fund investing in 10 high-growth companies such as Brightpearl, eSellerPro, NewVoiceMedia, Star and Tradeshift. Tradeshift recently completed a new funding round valuing the business at $137m and we are proud to have been able to assist the company with their European expansion. We helped Tradeshift hire their first executives in the UK, Netherlands, France and Germany and expect great things from the team moving forwards.

With this $100m fund, which should close at $150m, Notion are now able to really scale up their investment efforts. Another bright spot on the European technology landscape!

http://bit.ly/I4i5qf

Back to Berlin – 15th May

Posted: 30 Mar 2012 06:10 AM PDT

Berlin has been a fixture on our Seedcamp calendar since 2008, not only because of the great entrepreneurs and the startup activity but also because we have always had great relationships with local investors and mentors. This, and of course, the recent surge in activity and attention for the German Capital’s startups, makes us more than excited to come back for our fourth Seedcamp in Berlin.

Last year’s Berlin event was a full-on success for us: not only did we invest in three companies as a result of the event – Mopapp, EfficientCloud and Crashpadder (who was recently acquired by Airbnb) – but other great results also followed. Our recent guest post by Christian Thaler highlighted how he met Bonusbox at Seedcamp Berlin last year and made an investment after being in touch with the founders for a while. Similarly, Passion Capital invested in wireWAX, who were one of last year’s participants. Since we set out to not only invest in great companies, but also to facilitate connections beyond our events, we couldn’t be happier with last years’ event.

This year, we are playing an even bigger fiddle. Fresh off the back of our huge U.S. trip in March, Tel Aviv this week, and April’s Seedcamp in Tallin, we will come back to Berlin in May, where we will be hosted by our new investors at BDMI for what looks to be our biggest and best event in Berlin yet.

Seedcamp Berlin will take place on May 15 in the beautiful “Unter den Linden 1″, one of the most iconic buildings in the capital. We already have some of the best German and European startup investors, entrepreneurs and mentors signed up, and can’t wait to see what the applications will bring.

If you are a web- or mobile-orientated startup, focusing on an exciting space apply before 25th April. We invest from a prototype to a live minimum-viability product through to launch with a few users or customers. As usual, we are excited to see companies from all over Europe applying. We are especially looking forward to see what Berlin’s and Germany’s startup communities are working on, and also expect to attract a record number of applications from the neighbouring countries.

Apply now – and keep yourself up to date about Seedcamp by following us on Twitter and Facebook. Of course, if you’re not working on a startup yourself, make sure you tell your friends about the upcoming Seedcamp Berlin!

The so-called “Estonian Mafia” are not the only Eastern Europeans who have global ambitions. The Eastern European companies we work with are thinking global from the outset and building teams to execute on an international scale from the get go.

We recently completed a CEO search for one of our Seedcamp portfolio companies, UberVU .  The company had expanded into the US and was looking to hire an experienced executive to take advantage of the massive market opportunity for social media monitoring in the US.

We have also recently completed a NED and CEO search for a Kiev based company in the online travel space. Our most recent customer is a flash sales business originally founded in UberVU’s home town of Bucharest. They are setting up their HQ in the UK to tap into the London based VCs and are planning a pan-European roll out.

We are certainly going to see more of this global/international expansion from Eastern Europe. These are  exciting times – the Industrial Revolution 2.0 is well under way all across Europe.

In February this year I posted on the Seedcamp Road trip to the USA. I jealously followed the Tumblr blog  and now Milo Yiannopoulos, the Editor in Chief of The Kernel, has written a great round up of the very successful trip.

Here are some of the numbers

The teams met with:

• 6 Accelerators
• 20 Companies
• 16 Investors

The teams experienced:

• 12 Learning sessions/lectures
• 4 Mentoring Days
• 18 Social events

The teams met:

• 77 VCs
• 65 Entrepreneurs
• 18 Corporate Executives
• 15 Marketing & PR Executives

And GREAT traction:

• 3 Term Sheets
• 13 Ongoing discussions

Hats off to the Seedcamp team!

Brett was asked by The Entrepreneurs Interactive Club at Imperial College London Business School to present on the subject of ‘building entrepreneurial teams’. On March the 19^th Brett joined Allan Wallace of Octopus Ventures and Paul Dowling of Dreamstake to present on how to build world class start-up teams.

http://slidesha.re/H5x5z4

Jos White of Notion Capital has just started a new blog called ‘The Daring Journey’. The blog will describe what it’s like to be an entrepreneur and also life in general! He’ll be writing about both but it will be mainly focused on the converging worlds of technology, investing and being an entrepreneur.

You can see the blog at – http://www.thedaringjourney.com

I am occasionally asked about Seedcamp’s funding model and the real value add that Seedcamp brings to a start-up company. The question comes from entrepreneurs who haven’t yet experienced a Mini-Seedcamp or Seedcamp Week. When I answer this question, apart from the money, I normally talk about the calibre of the mentors, the access to the best and most successful entrepreneurs in Europe and the ability, through those mentors and entrepreneurs, to reach out to and get in touch with almost anybody in business in Europe. I also talk about the links that Seedcamp has with the US tech scene and suggest that the aspiring entrepreneur speak to one of the Seedcamp alumni to get a firsthand account of the value that Seedcamp brings.

When I am asked that question in the future, I will simply point to this web page http://bit.ly/w0EEb5 .

Check this out! Which other accelerator/incubator/investor has the capacity to pull off a Road Trip like this?

      -  Kicking off in New York from Saturday 18th until Wednesday 22nd
      -  Staying in Boston from Thursday to Saturday 25th
      -  In San Francisco and the Bay Area from the 25th until the 6th of March
      -  Visiting Seattle on March 7
      -  Flying to San Diego and Los Angeles on March 8 and 9,
      -  Wrapping things up in Austin at SXSW until March 13th.

There are three goals for this trip:

1. To learn and be inspired
2. To get some business done
3. To have some fun and make new friends

The Seedcamp Roadies have already visited the offices of Union Square Ventures, ETSY, Tumblr, Highland Capital Partners and they have only just touched down in the land of the brave! As a tech entrepreneur, being able to go on a Road Trip like this, is WAY BEYOND PRICELESS! If this was a ticketed event you could sell out to US based entrepreneurs in minutes – God only knows what they would pay for this type of access?

Just imagine if you could spend almost a month with a bunch of fellow entrepreneurs meeting some of the best tech teams in the world, some of the best entrepreneurs in the world, some of the best VCs in the world and having a blast while doing it. Duuuuh!

Knowing most of the Seedcamp Roadies, I am sure that goal number three – the fun and friends bit – is in the bag. I can’t wait to hear about the learning, inspiration and, best of all, the deals that were done!

Here is the seedcamp.tumblr.com blog which has the daily updates of the trip.

Sign up for the next Seedcamp in Tel Aviv http://www.seedcamp.com/events/seedcamp-tel-aviv

The vacations seems like a very distant memory as we hit the ground running at Forsyth Towers in January – unbelievably we are already almost 6 weeks into the new year! We completed 2 assignments in January for our favourite e-invoicing SaaS company Tradeshift . We have now built out their sales leadership team in the Netherlands, Germany, France and the UK (2). We also completed a Venture Partner assignment for Connect Ventures, it’s great news when another VC enters the European ecosystem!

Our Seedcamp portfolio companies are going from strength to strength. Brainient raised $1.8M from Atlas Venture and Credo Ventures. GrabCAD raised a $4M Series A led by Matrix and David Skok will join the board of directors. Congratulations to Robot Media, the company received its second consecutive Publishing Innovation Award at Digital Book World New York.

Brett has been invited to present “An evening with Forsyth Group” at London Business School, talking broadly about the Hi Growth Technology Ecosystem. We hope to have a video of the evening to share.

Live blogging casts, Transhumanism, SOPA, the rebirth of SMS and more…

1) What if you called a bandwidth crunch and no one came? AKA have you ever seen a bandwidth crunch in Boise Idaho?

2) The decline, fall and potential rebirth of SMS in a world dominated by Smart phones

3)  Will we see a compromise on SOPA?

4)  Why Facebook will make an impact beyond advertising in 2012

 5)  Free.fr and the business model of unbundling the set top box: I have been tracking the rise of  free.fr for some time .. and it could be truly disruptive. Gigaom explains the context and says that the set-top box could be a stealth weapon. Unbundling – decoupling the set-top box could be a powerful concept.  It is also relatively easy for other providers/countries to also do the same i.e. decouple the set top box from the network and provide connectivity services by including Nano cells/femtocells etc

6)  The perfect storm driving the uptake of Smart cities : Relating to my work on the advisory board of the Word Smart Capital Initiative  - Amsterdam, in the recession, many local governments all over the world will adopt the idea of smart cities. Smart cities reflect ‘Internet of things’ in action. There are three drivers to Smart cities: the Smart home, the smart building and mobile devices. However, the biggest driver for Smart cities could well be Smart data and the enabling of people to ‘add intelligence’ to locations and objects –ex the tweeting cat door , the live blogging cat , Adruiono etc.  This is a perfect storm of many elements: Cheap sensors , open source hardware and software, Sensors in mobile devices, networked homes and most importantly, Open data. For instance, the European Commission has launched an open data strategy  and here in the UK, professor Nigel Shadbolt will lead an “Open Data Institute” with Tim Berners-Lee.  This is the perfect storm driving Smart cities. See my presentation at the Oxford University on Apps for Smart cities

7) Tech policy issues impact mainstream computing because they effect both cloud computing and the Internet:  Cloud computing is everywhere – but the technology is not the only issue now for CIOS. SOPA, the Patriot act and other regulations are now taking center stage. Privacy, identity and cybersecurity dominated tech policy headlines coming.  The U.S. government’s National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace addressed key issues around creating an “identity ecosystem online.”, the eG8 showed that online innovation and freedom of expression still need strong defenders. We covered this in the policy bloggers network – Fostering trust in the Cloud in the face of law enforcement access to data and IGF – Nairobi : voices from the blogosphere and beyond

8)  Social media ‘inside’ like ‘Intel inside’ – TV finally becomes a ‘social’ platform: Social media is fast becoming ‘embedded’ i.e. ‘Social media inside’ (just like Intel inside ). The value of Social media is not in itself but rather as a component of other services. This will have the greatest impact on TV this year. Already, we can login via facebook or twitter, we can logon using spotify on virgin (i.e. listen to spotify on virgin media) etc. Social media recommendations via TV,  co-viewing apps (tablet apps used to watch with TV) etc all are becoming mainstream. A year ago. Western Europe suffered its first Q1 drop  in TV sales ever and now Smartphones, tablets are edging out television sets on buyers list-Accenture. So, this year, TV will finally become a social platform – despite some resistance from the traditional TV purists.

9) Transhumanism: I have been interested in transhumanism like many in the technology industry specifically my latest book  - Meditation in the age of facebook and twitter – this trend of ‘augmenting human capability through technology’ is being picked up by more mainstream companies – IBM says mind reading is no longer a science