My friend Lukasz Gadowski has just announced the launch of Team Europe Ventures, a new home for his large portfolio of Internet companies. Lukasz is a successful entrepreneur who founded Spreadshirt in 2002 and cofounded StudiVZ, Germany’s largest social network (sold to Holtzbrinck last year) and is also an active business angel investing in Internet companies (he invested in more then 50 companies worldwide).

With Team Europe Ventures Lukasz will keep investing in early stage European Internet ventures and will co-invest in later stage rounds (Series A or Series B). In the last twelve months Lukasz was involved in the creation of many Internet companies like Brands4Friends, MisterSpex, Absolventa, Triphunter, Playnik and Käuferportal.

I also invest in very early stage internet companies. The companies that I invested in appear on the right of my blog. But lately I feel what is missing from the internet companies is concrete ways to generate revenues. The Google Ad model, or the advertising model, is mostly broken for anyone but Google. Companies like Fotolog have shown that is not enough to have enormous traffic volumes but that revenues other than Google are needed to be successful. Fon for example would die if it had to survive out of advertising alone and not from selling routers and passes. Another model that has greatly intrigued me lately is a company that David Cantolla, a Spanish acquaintance of mine launch. It is the company with the rights to the child series Pocoyo. In their case as you can see the series themselves which are available in DVDs in many countries are also available in Youtube. But that is because the money in Pocoyo is not in the series itself but in the fanaticism that the series engenders among children who like my son Leo who is younger than 2 then want in merchandising. Internet sites should learn from Pocoyo and find something real that they can sell out of virtual fame. Something like the T Shirts that Lukasz started with.

This traffic analysis shows what I have been saying for years now and that is that streaming will kill P2P as what people want is to see things, not so much to own them. Moreover legal streaming is making a great deal of progress over illegal streaming thanks to sites like Joost or Hulu. People don´t necessarily want to break the law. They want great services. Streaming with a few ads is acceptable.

I recently bought the Panasonic with WiFi. These are my first impressions. The Panasonic Lumix TZ50 is a 9.1 megapixel camera with great optics for its size (8mm wide-angle Leica DC lens, with 10x optical zoom). The camera is actually quite big for not being reflex type, but there is no such thing as good quality pictures in flat, small cameras – it’s a trade off. The camera also takes video in HD quality which is rare. But what really makes me love this camera is its WiFi integration. The best I’ve found so far. Other cameras with similar functionality see WiFi as something akin to Bluetooth, but the Panasonic is different. The TZ50 works with any open or encrypted WiFi network and can also connect to the T-Mobile HotSpot Service which is available in more then 8,800 public locations around the US. Once connected to the Internet, this camera can upload your pictures to your Picasa Web Albums account (here is mine), so you can share them with your friends and family or the general public while you’re still travelling and not days later when you come back home. This is a whole different experience to photosharing, something more similar to a photo diary or to Twitxr. You can also register an email address and get a link to your photo album just after it’s uploaded, so you can simply forward the URL to your friends using a smartphone. One drawback though is it doesn’t work with Flickr.