Today morning I visited Wuala for coffee. The company, which is well-known for its online storage service and which was acquired by LaCie early this year, has reason to celebrate. The first reason (and presumably the more important one) is the fact that more than 100 million files are now stored with Wuala technology in the “cloud”. In addition to that, they relocated to new offices downtown Zurich.

Congratulations, Wuala, on 100 million files and on a new office!

We also moved offices this week. Luckily, we only moved one floor downstairs (this is our incubator). Still, it is always a disruptive moment for the team – packing, throwing things away and seeing the place you’ve spent so many hours totally empty; at the same time it is exciting to move in at the new place, with more or less a clean desk. Besides this and the view from your window not much changes for a web start-up. Your computer is still the same. Everything should be running the same way. Moving offices is a good moment to move on and to implement new processes, new structures and new habits. This is just psychology, this is how we act.

Wuala is doing really good, as far as I can assess. It was a nice coffee break this morning. Thanks for having me and I hope you enjoyed the Grittibänz. Have fun working in this spacious, great office. We’re staying tuned what interesting products you’ve got in your pipeline!

Pictures by Wuala, click here for more

Yesterday’s Sunday press summarized latest statistics about the mobile and web market in Switzerland. I thought this is quite good information and worth to be translated in English. If you need in depth information about statistics from Switzerland check out these source:

Swiss Federal Statistics Office, Eurostat,  Comparis, Net-Metrix, Wemf, Public Data

Some cherry-picks:

(Switzerland has approximately 7.5 million people)

Print media
71.1% read newspapers

10.0% watch tv for at least 3 hours a day

Web media
0.56% watch television online once a week

20.5% download music online

Social Media

20.2% use instant messaging

0.1% use twitter

51.0% have a profile on a social network

21.3% are on Facebook

Mobile

13.0% own a mobile gaming console

4.0% connect to internet with a mobile phone

Love

31.9% have searched for a partner online

14.3% have met their current partner online

More stats

Read full story »

The Europas are the TechCrunch Europe Awards for technology companies. TechCrunch is one of the most famous tech and start-up blogs and therefore a great platform to present your own company. Being nominated for the Europas is even a bigger achievement.

The Awards Night will be held on July 9th in London. 400 start-ups from Europe and EMEA were voted on by users and 19 experts. Among the 400 entrants, there were several Swiss startups, namely Amazee, Doodle, NewsCred, RouteRank, Poken, Wuala, Zattoo and Kooaba as well as the Swiss Venture Fund Index Ventures and three start-ups with Swiss co-founders, precisely Amiando, Busuu, Kyte.

I was very happy to see now some many of these companies still in the running after the vote. They are represented in 6 out of 14 categories. Being among the top five and therefore nominated for the Europas is a fantastic accomplishment. Congratulations!

Here are the nominees: Read full story »

We’ve had this discussion several times at different occasions. GigaOM recently asked the same question in one of his blog posts. Instead of asking, which city in Europe could possibly become as important as San Francisco for technology and entrepreneurship, I think the question is more IF it’s possible at all (in Europe). You’ll find a lot of start-ups in Berlin, London, Paris, Zurich, Tallinn, et cetera. However, no market is big enough to allow such a concentration of entrepreneurs as there is in SF. Each country will have its small start-up clusters. The bigger the country the bigger its cluster will be. But is there a potential for a handful of large specialized clusters in Europe? Read full story »