I learned today that the Web 2.0 conference here in San Francisco has now been re-named “Web 2.0 Summit,” because the organizers had to turn away five thousand people who wanted to attend, at prices up to $3,000+ per ticket; so they’re holding a “Web 2.0 Expo” at San Francisco’s big Moscone Center next April 15-18. I should definitely be in the conference business; these guys are making a fortune!

Anyway, the second “workshop” session of the conference had the interesting title of “Has Europe Come of Age?” Since many of my clients are based in Europe, and since I had the pleasure of attending a Web 2.0 conference in Amsterdam last summer, I thought I’d see what’s happening in this area. At least the conference organizers got the names right this time, so I was able to see that the panelists included moderator Danny Rimer, Partner at Index Ventures; Brent Hoberman, co-founder of lastminute.com; Pierre Chappaz, Co-CEO and Chairman of Netvibes; and Marc Samwer, CEO and Managing Directo of the European Founders Fund. All of the panelists are successful (read “rich”) entrepreneurs who have started and sold one or more Web businesses in the past several years: Hoberman sold LastMinute to Travelocity for gazillions; Chappaz sold Kelkoo (a comparative shopping engine) to Yahoo for gazillions; Samwer sold Jamba (which sells online ringtones and other stuff for mobile phones) for gazillions.

Most of the discussion focused on the question of what advantages and disadvantages European entrepreneurs might have (vis a vis the U.S.) when starting new Web ventures. Hobart responded by saying that there’s less competition in Europe, and fewer competitive differentiators between various vendors; on the downside, he said European entrepreneurs have to deal with a brain drain (which other panelists seemed to disagree with), and that they have to deal with multiple geographies, multiple cultures, multiple languages, multiple currencies, and regulations associated with many different countries — all of which leads to higher costs, but also potentially higher margins. Chappaz added that because Europe tends to lag behind the U.S. technologically, entrepreneurs can watch the U.S. to see which new ideas work, and then replicate them in Europe. He also commented that European Web 2.0 entrepreneurs have access to some of the best AJAX programmers, because these folks don’t have many other job opportunities (as compared to the equivalent situation in the U.S. marketplace). Samwer noted that because of the popularity of mobile phones and SMS texting in Europe, it turned out to be a perfect place for him to start his business of marketing downloadable ringtones; that gave his company a huge advantage when they were ready to enter the U.S. marketplace.

Panel moderator Rimer then asked what sectors/markets Europe would be able to continue capitalizing on, to which Chappaz immediately responded by noting the earlier discussions of Europe’s advantage in the mobile area. He went on to say that today’s users want to mix services from several different vendors on one “home page,” and control their digital life without being locked in to a fixed “portal” a la Yahoo or AOL; this turned out to be a thinly disguised pitch for his NetVibes service (which had 7 million user/subscribers as of last month), which is indeed a very cool Ajax-based, RSS-enabled personalized home page. He went on to say that the Web 1.0 (circa late-90s) “portal” concept never took off in Europe, which gave them an opportunity to look at the evolution of Web services with an open mind. Rimer also suggested that “virtual” social communities (he mentioned something that sounded like “havu hotel” and “stardoll“) may be another area of European advantage; indeed, this may be part of a larger cultural difference between Europe and the U.S., since Europeans are more accustomed to dealing with internationalization, making friends across borders, dealing with multiple languages, etc. (earlier, Chappaz made the point that Netvibes is available in 80 languages). Rimer also noted that Linux and MySQL and several other open-source projects came out of Europe (though Rimer argued, a little later, that aside from companies like RedHat, there haven’t been many examples of successful, publicly-held, open-source companies). Chappaz even went so far as to argue that there is no “Europe” per se, and that any new startup in a European country immediately has to recognize that it’s dealing with several different languages, nationalities, cultures, currencies, religions, etc.

The leading European countries, in terms of Internet penetration and sophistication, according to Samwer, are UK, France, and Germany; after that comes the Scandinavian countries. Italy, he said, is a funny market, because Italians spend all day talking on mobile phones, but don’t blog or text as much. Samwer also says that China prefers to do business with Europeans, because they feel that Americans try to take charge. Someone in the audience asked whether European governments are more aggressive than the U.S. govenment at fostering competition. Chappaz disagreed, arguing that European governments are very bureaucratic, and waste (or cause entrepreneurial startups to waste) lots of time and money. But Rimer disagreed, at least in one area: he noted that European governments have often nationalized basic services, which operate very efficiently as part of the “physical” infrastructure that Web 2.0 companies depend on; to illustrate, he pointed to the UK postal system, which distributes mail and packages to 92% of the marketplace overnight, as compared to the dismal state of the U.S. Postal Service, which forced NetFlix to set up 40-50 distribution centers around the country.

Finally, someone in the audience asked whether we might see a significant not-for-profit service like Wikipedia coming out of Europe, because of its socialist culture/political background. There was mild agreement from Chappaz on this topic, but not much comment from anyone else … except for an intriguing comment from Rimer, who notes that Internet-based gambling/betting is coming from Europe, but frowned on in the U.S.