One of the big passed event in Silicon Valley was OSCON 09, dedicated to Open Source, 4 days of talks, keynotes, shows, interviews, network (and parties) in San Jose, California.
I touched base in this Open Source conference with guys who are a good example of how Silicon Valley can be very critical for a European startup to develop significantly : Funambol. We already saw that Italian people had some presence in Silicon Valley. But I think it’s more a matter to know how to deal in this place more than to make it better. Entrepreneurship is too much risks to claim that... Funambol has been founded in 2001, in Italy, a well dedicated country to Open Source, for a very simple purpose : a Mobile Cloud that sync and push emails of smart-phones. Let’s come to the facts : $25 Mios of funding since 2005, 3 Mios downloads by 50,000 developers in over 200 countries. Despite a big competition in a niche market (Apple, Google, Nokia...), the company announced recently that sales in the 2Q of 2009 grew exponentially, acquired several major customers and forged important strategic partnerships in the past three months. We could expect more details, but whatever from what I’ve understood from discussions with Hal Steger (VP Marketing) they have many source of business models, and with Stefano Maffulli, Community Manager, they really focus on their community expectations... they look confident.
- Sparus Software
As other examples of European guys attending OSCON, I met people like Christophe Pierret, Sparus Software’s CTO and co-founder (a French company developing a software suite for mobile device management) : "I’m at OSCON because, whatever Sparus is a closed-source sotware company, we believe that using open source sotware and contributing back to the communities gives you a substantial competitive advantage by saving a lot on your R&D costs and improving overall product quality. We would not be so agile without Apache Tomcat, Postgres, Hibernate, OpenSSL, HAProxy and Spring. Futhermore, our product is the only mobile device management solution to officially support Ubuntu and Red Hat. That’s an awful lot of good reasons to be at OSCON today".
I also met Paul Birnie, Principal Architect at BouncingMinds (a London based development company company committed to the delivery of free, open source technologies and solutions in video) who confessed : "I went there to network and believe it’s essential to keep a finger on the pulse of Silicon Valley, to understand what people are looking for and see where the market is moving. I believe Europe has a lot of skilled people and is great for innovation, but Silicon Valley has the advantage of easy networking plus a good understanding of the massive US market".
Presence is the essence. World is small after all !
Funambol
