Just came back from DLD 06. Americans may have the best technology companies but Europe gets the upper hand on great technology conferences. What I like about the European events is that they take place in beautiful cities, DLD in Munich, Les Blogs in Paris and SIME in Stockholm, that they have fantastic nightcaps, and that they bring the best selection of American participants. Why are the best speakers in the world American? Is it because the American speakers are just great or that the ones who make it over here are chosen by Europeans? Mine was an all American but me panel, and it was a pleasure to be part of it.

Having managed three ISPs, Viatel, Ya.com and Jazztel I think that this senior American executive is clueless. Liberalization: it all started in America. But with the Bush Administration, monopolists are having a ball. Witness unbundling, Americans invented it, we copied it in Europe, now Americans lost it and we get much more bandwidth for less money than in the States that it´s not even funny. And that´s with the euro at 1.2. With ideas like selective speed management soon America will revert back to the Internet Dark Ages of dial up.

Yesterday I met with David Bitton, the founder of Wengo. Wengo is a new company, very similar to Skype but in open source and not p2p. Skype is of course much much larger and still growing at amazing speed but Wengo while three months old, is getting its own group of fans within the opensource community around the world. They are also doing some remarkable software developments. At one point in the meeting David took out this Qtek phone with a Wengo client. I was impressed. It is a beautiful phone and the fact that operates both over wifi and gprs makes it very useful. It is a phone that is crying out “please give me FON: wifi everywhere”. It is the first good looking wifi phone I ever saw.
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