San Francisco – 2009

The first webmission happened in may 09. Obviously, at first, it was not supposed to be a webmission, as this concept didn’t exist in Belgium. We have to thank Laurent Eschenauer who had the brilliant idea to say it loud: Guys, i’m invited to Google I/O, join me in this great experience. Social networks… worked, Betagroup was also a relay, and finally 14 of us travelled to San Francisco! Here’s the summary of what happened!

Monday morning – Caltrain to Mountain View were we met another belgian, Olivier Gillin. Olivier works for Yahoo, and its mobile platform. Olivier allowed us in, so, we saw what was the size of a very big player!

We then drove to Stanford, where we had a look at the university. Off course, it’s a worldwide-known university; but what was a shock to me, was the sport infrastructure. Wow.

Tuesday – The group split that morning. Some of us assisted to the Myspace Devjam meeting. We met then with another belgian entrepreneur, Sebastien de Halleux (Playfish). He gave a presentation about social network games. Since then, Playfish has been bought by EA for 400 million $.

Another great experience was to visit Citizen Space. We joined Candide Kemmler (yes, you’re right, another belgian!), we were given a tour of the facility. A place where entrepreneurs can buy an assigned desk or get a free space to work and develop their business. That idea of a shared workplace has now been put in place in Brussels too, have a look at The Hub.

Another part of the group attended the Mountain View 140conf. They met the famous Scoble, iJustine,  listened to Jason Calacanis…

Then, together, as a belgian rocking group, we presented at the SF NewTech. SF NewTech is a series of regular events for VCs, journalists, hackers, techies, recruiters, CEOs… Five belgian startups pitched their work: Storytlr, Tweetag, MicroPlaza, LovelyCharts, YourTour. A success for all of us!

Wednesday & Thursday – Time for Google I/O, the Google developpers conference. Laurent Eschenauer was presenting Storytlr in the Sandbox the 2 days. We attended the official launch of Google Wave; Laurent was lucky and explained StoryTlr to Sergey Brin,… In the meantime, Xavier Damman, Antoine Perdaens and Jean Yves Huwart decided to go to Plug and Play, where they could, again, present their companies.

So, as you can see, for a very first, it was already 5-stars packed events; business opportunities; experience sharing.