This is a guest post by Benjamin Rohé.

PS: the opening slide is not meant to offend anyone.

This is the first article by Floriano Bonfigli, founder of We Innov8. Expect to see quite a few more by him over here.

You may have already heard about this: start-up companies have been a major contributor to U.S. job creation. In fact, the Kauffman Foundation released a report in January 2009 showing that over the 1980-2005 period, companies with 1 to 4 employees accounted for a large percentage of new jobs in any given year, about 20% on average. Moreover, if the jobs coming from new firms were excluded, the U.S. net employment growth rate would have been negative on average.

Last July, the Kauffman Foundation released a new report. They looked at employment in new companies as they age, by tracking cohorts of firms started from 1977 till 2000. There are some good news coming out the document. The first is that for a given cohort of start-ups reaching the five years mark, the employment level is 80% of what it was when they were launched. It does seem that jobs created by start-ups do not tend to disappear that fast, despite being highly volatile. As several studies show, fewer than half of all new startup survive to their fifth year, and this rate is already a huge improvement over the previous years. However, the jobs lost at failing or reorganizing ventures are partially balanced out by the ones created at growing firms.

Given the recent crisis, the Kauffman Foundation has also investigated how recessions affect total employment in start-ups. The second good news is that new ventures do not appear to be affected in the long term if they start in a recession. They indeed hire fewer people in the first years, but they are likely to catch back up to firms not launched in a recession cycle, as they reach the five years mark. On the contrary, prolonged or serial recessions do seem to affect total employment. In particular, ventures that go through periods of three recession years showed about 10% less employment, with reference to their start-up years, than ventures facing no recession in their first 5 years (obviously). Thus, companies starting now are less likely to be hurt than the ones started at the beginning of the current recession. As long as the U.S. economy keeps growing and eventually ramps up out of recession!

This is just a short review of the report. If you want to go dig deeper and take a look at the charts, you can download the .pdf document right here.

I am saddened to announce that, John Dilts, founder of the Maverick Angels group has died on August 2nd. No details of Dilts’ death were given.

Dilts founded Maverick Angels in 2006, after running the Los Angeles and Westlake Village chapters of angel group Keiretsu Forum.

I recently had the chance to meet John at an event in Milan, he was trying to extend the Maverick Angels group and had recently openend an Italian chapter. John was collaborating with Intesa San Paolo on their Startup Initiative, conducting days of training for young italian entrepreneurs teaching them how to pitch to potential investors. I am truly grateful to John for taking the time to come to Italy and spend some of his time mentoring unexperienced entrepreneurs, it’s not something many americans have done. I’d like to give my most sincere condolences to his family.

That’s what I asked on twitter today. I got some very interesting replies and wanted to share them.
The general response of my followers is that a vacation is almost mandatory. Sounds like what everyone is doing in Europe in fact. But what about if I had more US followers?
Do you think that’s a competitive advantage US startups have over EU ones? I’d love to hear @loic’s take on this.

What’s your take?

If you’re working in August, you should take a few hours off whatever it is you’re doing to attend this two new amazing classes on Startup School.

Founders Interview with Max Skibinsky : August 6

Max has been 14 year veteran of Silicon Valley. He bootstrapped his first consulting startup in 90ties, working with clients such as Netscape/AOL, Celera Genomics and Electronic Arts. Few years later, flush with VC funding Voltage Security singed Max up as their lead software architect. In 2005 startup addiction proven irresistible and Max jumpied heads on into swirling vortex of web 2.0 innovation, social networks and online communities.

He founded Hive7, one of the very first social gaming startups which in following years redefined the world of traditional entertainment. Hive7 was sold to Playdom in 2010. When not designing, recruiting, brainstorming, trash-talking, advising, and building startups Max can be found flying in general vicinity of Palo Alto airspace.

To register and attend click here.

Investor Interview with Mike Maples : August 12

Mike Maples, Jr. is the managing partner of FLOODGATE, and was recently named as one of “8 Rising VC Stars” by Fortune Magazine for his investments in business and consumer technology companies. Before becoming a full-time investor, Mike was an entrepreneur and operating executive who worked in a variety of senior management roles in high-growth companies.

His background spans a variety of markets including consumer technology, small business, and the enterprise, and he has led various functions in product development, marketing, business development, and corporate strategy.

To register and attend click here.

In case you need invites, please leave a comment and I’ll gladly send it over to you.

Earlybird Venture Capital, one of Europe’s most famous venture capital firms, today announces the expansion of its leadership team with the addition of Jason Whitmire who joins as Partner, focusing on early stage venture investing in mobile services, cloud computing, and digital media technologies.

Until June 2010 he served as General Manager & Vice President at Wind River Systems, where he founded and managed the company’s high growth mobile business (which according to the Wall Street Journal was the motivation behind Intel’s acquisition of Wind River for $884 million in July 2009). Previously Jason was shareholder and Managing Director of open source real-time Linux provider FSMLabs Inc. and played a key role in its acquisition by Wind River in 2007. Prior to that Mr. Whitmire co-founded the software business at Infineon Technologies, where he led the global licensing business for Infineon’s wireless software subsidiary, Comneon GmbH.

Doochoo, a San Francisco based startup which aims to connect massive amounts of opinion data, has announced the release of Couchin, a richly visual application for iPhone (Android coming soon) that allows users to vote, share and discuss their favorite movies and television shows.

Couchin is only the first of several opinion-based applications to leverage the Doocho platform, which will be released sometime in the future and promises to give opinions on the web tangibility and critical weight. Next up for development is PickOne, a service that eases organization and planning for sets of friends by asking the group for a collective opinion.

“Imagine a place where you can go and search for any possible opinion in a very tangible way, filter it, get recommendations and create actions based on the smart information you just found,” says Paolo Privitera, Doochoo CTO. “This is going to be a real revolution, the semantic Wikipedia for the opinions, a Freebase for what people think. And it all begins with Couchin: Nielsen Ratings 2.0″ adds Armando Biondi, Doochoo CEO.

With Couchin, users connect with the friends they already have to watch their shows together, and discover new friends as they participate. Most importantly, each user adds their vote to Doochoo’s database, which integrates all of the single opinions to create a massive collection of information for television networks about their audience’s viewpoint. Instead of relying on word of mouth recommendations for what to watch, Couchin provides a single portal with reviews and recommendations in a social, addictive setting, which aims to specify the usually imprecise public opinion. The core features are a live streaming chat function and Facebook/Twitter sync, to show your friends what you’re watching now and an ”Audience measurement 2.0″ system, a multiple and real-time rating aggregator, crunched into a social graph.

The team also promises to add soon Netflix/Flixster queue sync ability, trivia contests to win badges, gain backstage access, and unlock special features and forum to review your favorite shows and compare them to other reviews. The company is self-funded.

Couchin is available as a free download from the Apple iTunes store.

After an amazing conference last year, where I was called on stage with Gary Vaynerchuck and Kevin Rose thanks to a post that went on the twitter wall, I’m pleased to offer theStartup.eu an exclusive 15% discount code to Future Of Web Apps London 2010.

The speaker list is really impressive and includes amazing foudners suchs as Jason Calacanis (Mahalo), Nick Halstead (TweetMeme), SandyJen (Meebo), Andrew Mason (Groupon), Mike McDerment (Freshbooks), Andy McLoughlin (Huddle), Joe Stump (SimpleGeo) and Josh Williams (Gowalla). Take a look at the full speakers list.

The conference will be structured as a 2-days 2-tracks event plus one day of workshops (last year I attended Mike’s “The A-Z of building a successful web app” and it was amazing).

So, free up some space on your calendars for October 4-6 2010 and book your flights to London. You can register here, be sure to enter the code 15DISC to get your 15% discount.

These are some of the VC deals that happened until May around Europe, as posted on Techcrunch Europe. Keep an eye out for new posts with all of the latest VC deals.

• 
  Austrian venture capital house GCP gamma capital partners has sold online trading platformFatFoogoo to NASDAQ-listed e-commerce group Digital River. The exit values FatFoogoo at $10m and GCP has further agreed an earnout provision.
• 
  GrandCentrix GmbH, a Cologne, Germany-based start up which develops a “Smartphone Analytics” technology, has received an undisclosed investment from High-Tech Gründerfonds.The company develops and provides a Platform as a Service (PaaS) which allows suppliers of interactive mobile value added services to achieve a comprehensive consolidation of mobile user identities.
• 
  EnjoyVenture has led a second round of financing for amedo Smart Tracking Solutions GmbH.
• 
  I-Source has led a €3m first round of financing in Compario, an e-commerce company, along side XAnge Private Equity.
• 
  MMC Ventures has invested an undisclosed amount in mobile telecommunications software designer Creativity Software in return for a significant minority stake.
• 
  Belgian provider of payment solutions Clear2Pay has acquired Jware Technologies, an internationally operating software technology provider of eCommerce and mobile payment solutions.
• 
  Qualitas Private Equity has increased its stake in social networking site Tuenti Technologiesto 30%.

• High-Tech Gründerfonds has led an investment in software developer Propertybase GmbHalongside Bayern Kapital and Neuhaus Partners. Properybase is developing a real estate CRM. Financials have not been disclosed.
• Gimv and a number of other venture backers have sold their stakes in CoreOptics to Nasdaq-listed Cisco Systems, which will wholly acquire CoreOptics. TechCrunch IT reported the news, but didn’t say that many of those bakers are european.
• Mobiüs Corporate Venture Capital, INICAP and Enisa have backed Advanced Wireless Dynamics (AWD) with €1m.
• Bessemer Venture Partners has led a $7m series-C financing round for Criteo. You can read more on TechCrunch.com

On Tuesday night TechHub and Techcrunch hosted the Techcrunch Europe Summer Pitch battle.

The venue

TechHub was chosen as the setting for the battle – the recently launched space in central London offering office space and facilities to startups. It represented an optimal scenario for the event.

The contestants

In excess of 35 different startups entered the field to pitch their ideas to a panel of judges coming from Eden Ventures (Ben Tompkins and Katy Turner), Neu Haus Partners (Paul Jozefak) and Moonfruit.com (Wendy Tan White), alongside angel investor Eileen Burbidge. The startups were requested to go through three consecutive rounds: an initial screening based on a written one-line description of their idea, a one minute slide-less pitch and a three minutes aided pitch, before getting to the final podium. Even though the scene was dominated by anglo-american companies, several continental European (and beyond) startups were present to pitch their ideas.

The battle

Around 30 startups pitched their one-minute introduction to the judges and the spectators. The process was a bit hectic, with the twitter feed being overwhelmed by tweets trying to understand the spelling of the startup names.

Only nine startups made it to the slideshow round, where the judges decided for the following podium:

1) Calaboard: presented by Francesco Masia, it promises to enrich video-conferencing by allowing “in-the-air” drawing with your finger – your counterpart will actually see the drawing appear on the conference window.

2) Duedil: complements Linkedin profiles by allowing users to post complete reviews and feedbacks, allowing professionals to build reputation and clients to make better decisions over the professional figure to hire.

3) Geomium: bringing together social and location services, Geomium creates a recommendation engine for things to do in your neighborhood – friends can see what each of them is doing, propose what to do, chat and meet.

The remaining 6 final presenters were:

- ProspectVision: improve the conversion rate of visitors to your website, turning them into sales leads

- Me-Stars: online gaming network, where the user can actually put his face in the game, thanks to a face recognition and digitalization service

- Gourmetorigins: a service to get information about the regional origins of gourmet food, including the possibility to get in touch with the local producers and the local roots of food culture

- CrowdScanner: ever wondered who is attending the same event you are in? CrowdScanner is a mobile app that allows the user to “ask a question” to the crowd, favoring new encounters and easier networking, based on personal interests.

- MindQuilt: Mindquilt is “an enterprise knowledge management platform with intelligent question and answer matchmaking and gaming achievement dynamics”.

- Oneleep: “a shortcut to hard-to-access influentials: the decision-makers, employers, investors, buyers and experts – “Shakers””.

Special mention to the second Italian team pitching, for the first time on the European scene: Fubles.

You can also find the complete list of startups in this other great recap.

The bottom line

Social-geo-location-community are the buzz-words that are closest to the hearts of the entrepreneurs pitching at the event. Many of the startups tried to answer a social question by implementing a location- or community-based layer around (or on top of) their idea. It is notable, on the other hand, how the event winner Calaboard is not a project in the social or location space. Do the VCs see an excessive proliferation of location-based social services? Is the market getting tired of this sudden abundance? It is probably way to early to tell. Or is it?