Mike Arrington has his hands full with the TechCrunch redesign-gate so I won’t try to take over him today. But at Innovate Europe I got the chance to meet some pretty impressive companies. Here is a quick roundup:

These guys (partly based in Geneva) are rolling out a service allowing you to connect to your friends based on your localization. Pretty straightforward stuff, you send a sms to tell the system you’re “on” (which means you are ok to be localized), then your buddies get a message if they are near you. Easy, useful and simple.

Digislide is working on a tiny beamer that will be embedded in mobile phones. Really cool product and impressive demo, even if it prototype they were showing was far from functionnal (the guy had wires hidden all over his suit ;-) ). If this succeeds (they are looking for 4-5 million euros) it will be a must have on any phone and we will have a new nuisance in cinemas: abusive beaming!

Netvibes is the hot company of Innovate Europe so far. I had a chance to meet their CEO – Tariq Krim – and got a quick demo of the upcoming version. These guys seem to keep their cool despite the increasing pressure, and have a good roadmap for the coming months. I actually changed my opinion on them – I first couldn’t see a business model – really cool company and service.

Feeds 2.0 is a service that, once you see it, makes you wonder how you lived without. The idea is to fight information overload by providing a more intelligent RSS reader, changing the order of news items depending on your reading habits and interests. I signed up for the beta and can’t wait for these guys to release! Cool product from Greece!

All the companies presented at Innovate Europe are listed here.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 17th, 2006 at 11:53 am and is filed under entrepreneurship, english. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.