TheStartup.eu

Erasmusu is a social network focused on Erasmus and international exchange students. The website is heavily influenced by facebook, with a very similar design and the same functions.
But I have to say they found a good niche and implemented some nice extra features such as:

• getting information about any city or university: the weather, photos, forum, people in the city, maps, reviews and other user experiences, Our intention is to provide a useful platform full of content to the students so they can:
• connecting with international exchange students that were\are\will be your exchange-mates.
• view rankings of the best cities and universities, ordered by party, people, art, health, prices and more.

If you have been\ are \ will be an exchange student, or would simply like to connect with international students coming in your city, I highly recommend to use their service.

The service is in private beta but we have got 10 invites to share with you, the first ten people to comment will get them!

Finally good news for european startups, the times reports that a new development fund is being put together to invest in early stage technology companies.

European Founders Capital (EFC) will have initially £20 millions to play with, but is looking to reach at least the £50 millions mark. The plan is to make early stage funding more available to european companies, imitating the valley’s seed funding mentality.

The fund will be led by two of the most know english tech entrepreneurs, Michael Birch and Brent Hoberman. Micheal is the co-founder of  the social networking site Bebo, founded in 2005 and sold to AOL (Micheal and his wife made a combined profit of $595 million from the deal). Brent is the co-founder of Lastminute.com Ltd, an online discount vacations website that survived the dot-com bubble and was sold to Sabre Holdings for £577 millions.

They clearly know what they are doing. They will be joined by Rogan Angelini-Hurll and Peter Dubens. “We aren’t taking institutional money,” Birch said said. “All the money comes from founders – people who have done it before.” Birch plans on positioning the fund between angel investments (£50.000 to £100.000) and venture capitalists which invest several millions per company.

It is really great and refreshing to see such news, and see the stratup-focused funds grow in Europe, joining two pioneering experiments: European Founders and Team Europe Ventures in the effort of promoting and strengthening european entrepreneurship.

Out of the many companies that launched at The Next Web, one that particularly got my attention is yellowBird.
They promise to “rock the movie industry world” and they may actually do it. They have a really cool technology, inspired by Google Streetview, that creates a complete 360° video that can be watched in any flash capable computer, and shared easily on the internet with their proprietary flash player.
“The viewer becomes the Director, who can choose what he wants to see from his position”, says co-founder Rafaël Redczus of yellowBird. He started working on this technology almost 10 years ago, but now all the pieces of the jigsaw are in place. “There are unbelievable opportunities for this new dimension in online experiences. Film producers can use it for their trailers on the Internet, city marketeers can use it to attract tourists, dance events become virtually
physically accessible for millions of visitors, documentaries and sports events become probing experiences, whilst this technology will bring about a
revolution in the world of advertising.” Redczus comments “Advertisers are looking more and more to the Internet. This offers them unrivalled opportunities
to present themselves.”

The Groningen-based startup may have actually created something that will change media distribution, not a minor funny technology.
Pictures, video, color video, live video, live internet streaming.. what’s next? This sounds like a good candidate. We will see how these guys do very soon.

According to Marc Groothelm, Managing Director of yellowBird, they are still the only company in the world that makes this concept accessible and available to
businesses. Keep in mind this is not intended at all to go mainstream for consumers, as the “stitching” process of the 6 video streams requires lengthy calculations by extremely powerful computers.

It is great to see such innovative startups in Europe reminding everyone that we aren’t just the artistic continent but we can have a major role in business and technology innovation.

Thanks to the guys of Creating Inspiration you can watch the video of their presentation at The Next Web:

Starting today each week you will find this post: Startup Weekend Reading. Every friday I will post links to the best articles on entrepreneurship and startups that I found during the week, so you don’t have to smuggle around hundreds of twitter feeds and guess all the tinyurls.

Here we go.

• What Venture Capital Can Learn from Private Equity

on BusinessWeek

• Customer Development Process & Sales Learning Cycle ( SLC )

on Nrao

• Advertising Yourself: Building a Personal Brand through Social Networks

on Knowledge@Wharton

• Why Iteration is a Powerful Way to Build a Startup
• Do You Need to Be a Developer to Found a Web Startup?

on The Netsetter

• Startups: Check Your Leadership Style

on Startup Professionals

• Top Quotes To Inspire Entrepreneurs

on IncomeDiary

Plus: McKinsey & Co. Report: Clearing the Air on Cloud Computing PDF. (Right Click, Save as).

Feel free to share links in the comments.

Here is a summary of the most important upcoming events in Europe.
We will try to cover as much of them as possibile.

• April 20th: Mini Seedcamp London.

http://seedcamp.com/pages/london09


• April 21st: Geek’n'Rolla London.

http://www.amiando.com/geeknrolla.html


• April 24th: Nonic Bilbao.

http://nonickconference.com/


• April 28th: Amazon Web Services Startup-Tour London.

http://aws.amazon.com/startupproject/


• April 28th-30th: Internet World London.

http://www.internetworld.co.uk/


• April 29th: Working Capital Camp Catania.

http://www.workingcapitalcamp.com/catania


• May 5th: Next09 Hamburg.

http://www.next-conference.com/next09/


• May 19th – 20th: European Venture Market Berlin.

http://www.europeanventuremarket.com/


• May 22nd: TechGarage Rome.

http://www.techgarage.eu/


• May 27th: TechCrunch Nordic Talk Stockholm.

http://www.amiando.com/tcstockholm.html


• June 23rd: Fuel09 London.

http://events.carsonified.com/fuel/2009/london/

This is E, an Amsterdam startup that launched today at The Next Web. The company promises to join all your online profiles and let you share them with any internet-capable mobile phone or using a specific usb-dongle called Connector, thus replacing business cards.

With E, you can create many different virtual cards and share the most appropriate depending on the situation you’re in (party, conference, meeting). Not only will you get all of the person’s details without having to keep  their business card, but if they change their email address or phone number the changes will get automatically pushed to your contact information.