1 YouTube Challenger

Dailymotion

Paris

Founded: 2005
Sector: Video Sharing of User-generated Content
Co-CEOs: Benjamin Bejbaum and Mark Zaleski

Online video site Dailymotion has registered 15 billion page views since June, 2006, streams 750 million videos per month, and is now the 28th most visited Web site worldwide. That kind of traction is usually reserved for Silicon Valley startups. Unlike Google's YouTube, Dailymotion was multilingual from day one. It currently offers six local home pages and supports 14 languages, including Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish, and Greek, allowing users to title, describe, and tag videos in a variety of alphabets and scripts. The company also shares revenues with local content providers who produce professional fare.

 

2 Just the Ticket

Seatwave

London

Founded: 2006
Sector: Fan-to-Fan Ticket Exchange
CEO: Joe Cohen

The secondary ticketing market is worth about £1 billion ($2.1 billion) in Britain alone and about £3.5 billion ($7.2 billion) to £5 billion ($10.3 billion) Europe-wide. But it is primarily an informal market characterized by ticket touts at venues and sellers on eBay who sometimes turn out to be shady. Seatwave, an online marketplace for buying and selling tickets for theater, sports, music, and other live events, aims to give consumers some guarantees. It promises buyers will receive the tickets they ordered in time for the event or get a 150% refund. And it automatically provides a full refund if an event is canceled or if buyers can prove they were ill or had an accident and could not attend. The strategy appears to be working: Seatwave launched in February in Britain and already offers more than 400,000 tickets on sale at any given time. The company has since opened for business in Germany and the Netherlands, with other European countries to follow soon.

 

 

3 Mobile Convergence

Goojet

Toulouse, France

Founded: 2007
Sector: Mobile Internet
CEO: Marc Rougier

Goojet aims to make it easier to bridge the Internet and mobile worlds, allowing the same games, social networking, professional tools, news, and transactional services to be managed, used, and shared in a user-friendly manner, from any device, by anyone, from anywhere. The idea is to allow users to define, tune, and expand their applications and services according to their own needs and tastes, rather than have them dictated by a service provider or hardware maker. Goojet will initially be launched in France, with immediate expansion across Europe in 2008 and eventually the U.S. Competitors include Apple, Nokia, and Mobio.

4 Tailored News

Wikio

Luxembourg

Founded: 2005
Sector: Internet News Portal
CEO: Laurent Binard

Wikio is a personalized news portal that combs media sites and blogs for stories and topics users deem interesting. That sounds a lot like successful U.S. sites Digg, Technorati, and Topix, but Wikio intends to be all three rolled into one and to tackle all topics, not just tech. Wikio is available in English as well as French, German, Italian, and Spanish. Europe is the priority market, followed by the U.S. The company's chairman is Pierre Chappaz, founder of Kelkoo, an Internet shopping comparison service that was sold to Yahoo in 2004 for €475 million ($705 million). Chappaz left his role as Yahoo's European president and co-CEO of Netvibes, another European Web 2.0 company, to focus full time on Wikio.

 

5 Teleconferencing 2.0

sMeet

Berlin

Founded: 2006
Sector: Communications, Social Networking
Co-CEOs: Burckhardt Bonello and Marc Fleischmann

Video phones never really took off because, after all, who wants to be seen before they've had their morning cup of coffee or shave? sMeet ensures that users always put their best face forward by using digital stand-ins, or avatars, instead of real video images. Users enter the sMeet 3D communication space via phone or VoIP and a Web browser. They appear as avatars, which can be created from a photograph, and can talk and socialize by simply walking around and meeting up with others, just like in real life. The service, which requires no downloads or special hardware, not only heralds a whole new way of teleconferencing but also introduces other applications, such as virtual trade fairs and new types of social networking communities. The company, which has already opened offices in Berlin, Foster City, Calif., and Izhevsk in the Russian Urals, plans to target Europe and the U.S. over the next 15 months.

 

6 Social Betworking

Bragster

London

Founded: January, 2007
Sector: Social Networking
Co-founders: Bertrand Bodson and Wim Vernaeve

Bragster is a Web site where people challenge each other, claim victory, and brag about it. Think of it as Jackass Meets Facebook. Primary customers are the typical social networking audience of 16- to 30-year-olds in the U.S. and Britain. Participants make bets with their friends about anything, including challenging each other to do crazy stunts—for instance, "Bet I won't show up at school wearing only my underwear,"—and then make video recordings of themselves doing what they promised. The result is a collection of zany short videos that mimic some of the scenes on the U.S. TV show Jackass. The University of Kent already has launched the first on-campus "Bragster Society," and the site has attracted more than 70 high-profile celebrities such as 50 Cent, Mandy Moore, and Snoop Dogg, who regularly invite their MySpace/Xanga/MyYearbook friends to join the challenges they post on Bragster.

7 Say What?

CoComment

Geneva

Founded: 2007
Sector: Internet, Blogging
CEO: Matthew Colebourne

CoComment's free software allows people to pinpoint conversations in the Internet's vast blogosphere. It already tracks and stores about 11 million conversations in multiple languages on 220,000 sites. The software lets you decide what you want to follow—you can either track one person's comments, or companies can track what people are saying about them or their products. CoComment already has more than 565,000 registered users, accounting for around 100 million ad impressions. Later it plans to sell market research on what popular opinion is at any given time

 

8 Scoring Goals Online

Cybersports

London

Founded: 2006
Sector: Massively Multiplayer Online Computer Games
CEO: Malcolm Clark

CyberSports is up against some tough established competition, including Konami's Pro Evolution Soccer and Electronic Arts' FIFA. But it hopes to score some big online goals nonetheless. Its first game, Football Superstars, a virtual soccer game that will be available for a monthly subscription fee, is scheduled to be launched in May next year. On the pitch, each player will control one footballer. There is also the option to play at being a team manager, recruiting team members and overseeing their training in virtual gyms. The game will include life outside the stadium, in an "aspirational utopian football-based virtual world." Players will be able to buy virtual merchandise while out on the virtual town, such as brand-name sports shoes that will give them a competitive advantage on the playing field. They also will be able to design merchandise online—such as a custom football shirt—and then order the actual shirt to wear. The company plans to make money through the combination of subscriptions, advertising, and merchandise sales.

9 Everything in Its Place

MyThings

London

Founded: 2004
Sector: Internet Communities
CEO: Benny Arbel

MyThings, which first launched in England and is now equally active in the U.S., is a one-stop shop for consumers to keep all relevant information and to access services for the things they value most. The company joins with retailers such as Tesco, Sotheby's, and Curry's to drive their customers to the MyThings Web site following an online sale. Retailers transfer data to MyThings about the new purchase, and each customer has immediate access to a MyThings online portfolio with the details of their new purchases. Traffic is driven to the site through online advertising, public relations, and blog-relations. The company makes money through online advertising and gets a cut of third-party services sold to the consumer through the site.

10 Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?

Amiando

Munich, Germany

Founded: 2006
Sector: Online Event Organization and Ticketing
CEO: Felix Haas

Amiando offers an easy way to create your own Web site for an event and track RSVPs, taking the guesswork out of party planning. Individuals can use the site to organize events such as birthday celebrations or family reunions, at no charge. The site also offers do-it-yourself online ticketing with payment, ticket delivery, and billing for professional organizations or businesses promoting dinners, concerts, congresses, seminars, and tournaments. There are no setup fees, but Amiando makes money by charging businesses a small percentage per ticket sold online. The company currently operates in Switzerland and France and plans to expand into Britain and Spain over the next 12 months. Competitors include Evite, Acteva, and Eventbrite.

11 Dig My Face

Neo

Ljubljana, Slovenia

Founded: 2007
Sector: Online Advertising and Media
CEO: Andrej Nabergoj

Neo, short for New Europe Online, already runs one of the largest online advertising networks in Eastern Europe. Now it is expanding into social media, with plans to roll out a service that will combine the type of content sharing found on the U.S. site Digg, the tools for self-expression found on MySpace, and the type of social networking made popular by Facebook. The code name for Neo's platform is digmyface. It is first focusing on Eastern Europe and then plans to go global.

 

12 Caveat Emptor

Test Freaks

Stockholm, Sweden

Founded: 2006
Sector: E-commerce
CEO: Kristofer Arwin

Test Freaks wants to build a global buying guide and owners' community through content aggregation and analysis, wisdom of crowds, powerful search, and wiki. The CEO is the founder of the price comparison site PriceRunner, which was sold to Nasdaq-listed Valuclick in 2004. Test Freaks will operate in six different languages and 20 countries, spidering the Net for all product-related information. A public beta version will be launched in December. Competitors include Shopping.com, PriceGrabber, and Wize.

 

13 Social Call

Zyb

Copenhagen, Denmark

Founded: 2005
Sector: Mobile
CEO: Tommy Ahlers

Zyb wants to shape the future of mobile social networking by acting as the missing link between online social networks and the mobile phone. It enables users to store their mobile-phone contacts, calendar, and pictures online. When using Zyb, the user gets an online interface and the ability to subscribe to auto-updates from friends and import public calendars into the phone. Plaxo, another European Web 2.0 company, offers this for e-mail addresses, which works well for business users. But Zyb says its service will resonate better with consumers because it allows them to store and categorize their network of family members and close friends under mobile numbers. Zyb has so far signed deals with operators in five countries, and the service is available in five languages. Its primary focus is now on Europe, but it later plans to expand into Asia and the U.S.

 

14 Speed Wooing

WooMe

London and San Francisco

Founded: 2006
Sector: Internet Communities
CEO: Stephen Stokols

So much for wine, roses, and romance. WooMe aims to position itself between dating sites focused on love and social networks by taking the speed dating craze online. With WooMe, you get to meet five people in five minutes and decide if you have been wooed by any one of them. You can also create your own sessions based on your interests such as "roller blade fanatic in London" and invite people to play with you. The closest competitors are hotornot.com and plentyoffish.com. The company has already opened offices in England, Germany, the U.S., and China.

15 Free Wi-Fi

WeFi