You’re invited on June 12th to TMT.Communities’08 Warsaw conference - New Europe’s most focused event on Web 2.0, social media and internet / mobile communities. It is organized in cooperation with Techcrunch UK & Ireland, who’s editor Mike Butcher will be speaking during the conference. We’re also having an Innowatorium & Techcrunch Meetup - an evening unformal event for tech startups, business angels and investors. If you’re interested in participating or in promoting your startup at Techcrunch.com - let me know.

By the way - Yours Truly is the chairman of the TMT.Communities conference. Take a look at the event agenda - looks interesting.

So creating products and services around internet & mobile communities presents great business and investment opportunities. Does it really? Or maybe Web 2.0 is ‘merely’ a social phenomenon attracting eyeballs but presenting not much value except for strategic investors intending to cross-sell their products?

Anyhow, creating and managing an active community throughout its lifecycle is a difficult challenge requiring a complex skillset. One has to deal with numerous business challenges and irritants for the (over?)sensitive users. Who’s to tell which early-stage projects will succeed? Why are some great seed projects misjudged and offered no support? Why some promising VC-backed projects fail?

Let’s discuss these issues on June 12th, 2008 during TMT.Communities conference in the Warsaw Stock Exchange HQ.

Did I mention that we’ll be watching Poland - Austria Euro 2008 football game? Well, we will.

On March 1st, 2007 we’ve had a special, unformal ‘innowatorium’ event (unconference) with Yegor “I’m a global guy” Anchishkin. We had a lunch and talked about his business and opportunities on the Ukrainian market. Shortly after I drove Yegor to the airport and we almost had a car accident - too much distraction caused by car-window sightseeing. ;-)

Yegor Anchishkin is a Co-Founder and a Product Manager at Viewdle - a startup that originated from Ukraine but offers its B2B services of video indexing and search to the biggest media corporations. But let’s allow Yegor to speak for himself:

Viewdle is a next-generation video indexing platform that powers private label search engines for TV, online video, and enterprise content. Viewdle was founded by a team of engineers from the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Hummingbird (Nasdaq: HUMC) and Jumpcut, who developed a product from idea to a stage where it is considered by Fortune 500 corporations.

The day before during TMT.Ventures’07 Warsaw event Yegor talked about “VC investments in technology prototypes with global market potential” and gave practitioner’s view on strategy and tactics for hi-tech startups to utilize the best from new economies of Eastern Europe.

Last friday I had the pleasure to attend a meeting with Pitch Johnson and mingle with senators, professors, American embassy officials, Polish government officials and the president of the Polish Constitutional Tribunal. What a company…

The meeting was hosted by USPTC which is a Silicon Valley based non-profit organization founded by a group of senior U.S.-based corporate executives and business leaders with professional, technical and practical working experience and accomplishments in both Poland and the U.S.

The goal of USPTC is to help companies and innovators make the right contacts to expand trans-Atlantic trade, investment and cooperation in the fields of information technology and biotechnology.

During that meeting Mr. Johnson talked about conditions which must exist for entrepreneurship and innovation to flourish. And the conditions are:

• Freedom
  • political,
  • economic,
  • personal
• Government support
  • stimulating commercial banks to support innovative SMEs,
  • indirect co-financing of innovative projects,
  • opening patent and information offices,
  • educating in the field of commercialization and e-ship,
  • moderate taxes
  • existence of public stockmarkets
• Entrepreneurial climate
  • role models like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates,
  • social acceptance of entrepreneurship as a lifestyle,
  • social tolerance for failure,
  • celebration of risk-taking and success,
  • support for informal social networks,
  • availability of talent, engineering and business skills
  • availability of capital for start-up and seed projects

After listening to Mr. Johnson with attention I concluded that the ‘entrepreneurial climate’ part is something I could help to cultivate. In fact I am doing that already.

After returning from Silicon Valley in December 2006 (I was invited there by USPTC) I started thinking about organizing a grassroots unconference for internet innovators. Tommorrow evening is the first such event called ‘innowatorium’ which stands for laboratory (laboratorium) of innovation.

There is no set agenda. Every participant has 15 seconds to introduce him/herself. Everyone may come and present. Everyone may interrupt and give comments or ask questions. Everyone may propose to change the rules.

Despite lack of media sponsors, advertising campaing or even set agenda the idea of such an open event was very well received in the Polish blogosphere. The number of participants is expected to exceed 150.

The response was so good I even got invited today to Polskie Radio to talk about innowatorium and inspiration coming from Silicon Valley and USPTC. You may listen to it on January 31st at 7.30 AM Polish time.

But thats not all folks! On 28th of February there’s going to be a little more formal event in Warsaw called TMT.Ventures ‘07 which I help to organize. The main topic is fostering innovation in Central and Eastern Europe. Special guests from Benchmark Capital and Index Ventures are going to add some global perspective while the President of the Warsaw Stock Exchange is going to talk about the Polish AIM - an alternative stock market for young and innovative companies. It’s called ‘Nowy Rynek’ and it launches in Autumn this year and will surely boost the entrepreneurial climate. Rafal Stroinski - US PTC Director - is one of the panelists at this event.

So there are more and more events building that nice California-style climate which is required for innovation to grow. But we still get lots of snow in the winter. I guess you can’t have everything in life. Anyway, it was great to meet Pitch Johnson in Warsaw.

Bio

Franklin “Pitch” Johnson, Jr is a pioneer in Silicon Valley venture capital and has been active in that field since 1962. He developed and taught a course in entrepreneurship and venture capital at Stanford for 12 years from 1979-1990. It was the first venture capital course taught in a graduate school of business.

Since that time he has been an advisor to students creating entreprenurial plans as Business 390 projects. He continues to work as a venture capitalist in his 41-year-old firm, Asset Management Company of Palo Alto. His most recent publication was a paper called “Entrepreneurship and Democracy” in the Hoover Digest, 2005, No. 1.

In the area of entrepreneurship and privatization, Mr. Johnson has served as an advisor to several eastern European countries since 1990. Mr. Johnson is an active jet pilot, is a close follower of the sport of track and field, and has attended ten Olympic Games. He is also chairman of the board of San Francisco Opera Company.