Just a few days before I take off to spend a week in the great city of Zaragoza, Spain, where the first edition of Innovate!Europe will take place on June 13-15. Produced by the Guidewire Group, this conference will try and set the agenda for a new
European technology “innovation ecosystem” that supports pan-European
entrepreneurship more efficiently. A mix of panels and company presentations, the program put together by Chris Shipley should lead to interesting debates.
A good mix of journalists and bloggers, coming from the US and Europe, have been invited to "cover" the event, and contribute to the proceedings of the conference: a "European innovation" white paper, aggregating personal
contributions, interviews and session summaries.
I had originally been invited to blog the event, providing a Silicon Valley/early stage/venture capital perspective – with a European entrepreneur twist – which was already very cool. A couple of weeks ago, I have also been given the privilege of moderating the panel "Working Capital: Empowering Europe’s Investment Community" during which I will beat up lead my European colleagues to do a SWOT analysis of the local VC industry. And since one of the panelists will be my old friend and Partner Marc Goldberg, the exercise should be quite provoking and entertaining.
A number of my European friends will also be in attendance, speaking and/or blogging, including Loic Le Meur, Rodrigo Sepúlveda Schulz , Andrew Carton, Julie Meyer (who I have not seen for ages),… which means that we are going to have a great time.
If you are attending the event and want to get together for a chat, feel free to send me a note at jeff [dot] clavier [at] gmail [dot] com.
Oh yeah, almost forgot, readers of Software Only can attend the conference for a mega-reduced rate (395 EUR), a 60% discount, by using the discount code GT2005 when registering. Since I don’t know when that code expires (if it does), act quickly – and see you there!