Another bunch of great startup and venture capital articles found around the web..

• Working with VCs part 1 : its not summer camp (nor should it be)

on Leaving The Flock

• The Capital Raising Ladder

on Read Write Start

• 14 startup pitfalls to avoid
• Shocker: Study shows VCs plan to invest in fewer companies

on Venture Beat

• The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online

on Wired

• The Five Most promising Dutch Startups

on Tiburon TV

• There is only one currency: it’s called value

on Khuram

• Ten Commandments from Entrepreneurial ‘Evangelist’ Guy Kawasaki

on Knowledge@Wharton

• The Start-up Guru: Y Combinator’s Paul Graham

on Inc.

Bonus: List of Entrepreneurs on Twitter

Bonus video: The real time investor

Italian startup Passpack is an online password manager. A web application to securely store your passwords.
With the release of Passpack 7 they introduced a lot of new cool features such as automatic saving, search, tags & filter. But the most important has surely been secure password sharing: you can now send your passwords to other passpack users without having to email or IM them.
A few days ago another great feature was released: bulk actions. You can now delete or share multiple entries with one click, awesome. But not enough..

At TechGarage I met Francesco Sullo, the founder of Passpack and he gave me a scoop: get ready for Minipacks.
As of now you can share passwords only with passpack users, so if they are not registered you actually have to call, email, IM them and get them to sign up. But what if someone is using other softwares?
With this release (due in one week approximately) you will be able to send out minipacks, completely secure and encrypted files containing your passwords, if the person you are sending the minipack to is not registered on passpack he will be able to import the file in any software after having inserted a password (you will have to call or email for this).
I think this is such a huge feature, it definitely needed a post. Can’t wait to see it live.

Here is a video if you’ve never heard of passpack

High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF) has invested EUR 500,000 into software prototyping company RapidRabb GmbH in a first round of financing.

The startup, a finalist at the Red Herring 100 Europe Award, provides an interesting product that gives business and developers the tools for rapid prototyping of software interfaces and easy-to-lear graphic specifications, early-stage testing and efficient communication.

RapidRabb was founded in 2008 by a young group of designers, developers and economists. It is based in Berlin, Germany.

The High-Tech Gruunderfonds invests venture capital in young and promising technology companies who turn scientific results into economic success, they have a volume of about 272 Milion Euros available. Investors of this Public Private Partnership are the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology of Germany, the KfW Bankengruppe, as well as the combinations BASF, Deutsche Telekom, Siemens, Robert Bosch, Daimler, and Carl Zeiss.

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.

The european internet startup scene has gathered in Amsterdam for this 3-days amazing conference.

Technology entrepreneurs, start-ups, innovators, venture capitalists, industry journalist, bloggers and simple geeks will attend keynotes and speeches given by internet celebrities such as Matt Mullenweg, Eric Meyer and Jeff Jarvis. Speakers include high level executives from Google, Yahoo! and Level 3 as well as entrepreneurs (SoundCloud, Imeem), venture capitalist and writers.

The agenda is really interesting. While today was the “unconference”, with Mobile DevCamp and “The Current Web”, tomorrow the real show begins.

The agenda includes a “Rising Sun Start-up Rally” that will surely have an important role in the event. The 19 companies that will have the chance to pitch to VCs and bloggers have been selected out of 200 with the help of twitter and a special voting system.

Take a look at their agenda, speakers and startup finalists.

We will be back with more posts regarding the event and hopefully with videos of the keynotes!

Berlin based SoundCloud, a professional music sharing service, raised €2.5 million in a round led by european VC Doughty Hanson Technology.

Founded in 2007 and now counting 100,000 registered users, SoundCloud is one of the most promising european startups. At the moment their business model is based on pro accounts, but we do not have any real income information.

We will update you once we know what their future plans are, having secured that amount of cash.

To learn more about the service you can read the official press release:

SoundCloud Raises €2.5m from Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures

SoundCloud, the internet audio platform which enables music professionals to send, receive and distribute music, today announced that it has received an investment of €2.5 million from Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures, a leading European venture capital investor, in its first institutional round of equity financing.

SoundCloud provides a simple and efficient platform for music professionals to privately exchange music, allowing for easy collaboration and communication prior to a public release.  With SoundCloud, musicians can easily send and receive studio-quality tracks without cluttering up their email inbox, needing to make use of generic file sending services or having any specialist technical expertise.

SoundCloud was founded in 2007 and raised seed financing from business angels including music producer Chris Zippel, internet entrepreneurs Christophe Maire, Peter Schüpbach, Tariq Krim and Felix Petersen and the founders of music production software company Ableton AG.  The Company launched its service in October 2008 and since then has attracted more than 100,000 registered users.

Stefan Tirtey, Partner at Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures who joins the Board of SoundCloud, commented: “SoundCloud has all the qualities we look for in a business: a solid product solving a real problem, a proven business model, and a capable and ambitious founder team. We believe that Soundcloud has the potential to revolutionize the production and distribution process for digital music and this funding will enable the company to build on its success to date.”
Alexander Ljung, Co-Founder and CEO of SoundCloud, added: “SoundCloud’s business proposition is based on bringing web innovation to the music industry and empowering those who create and promote music globally.  Doughty Hanson demonstrated early on a clear understanding both of our business proposition and of the music industry, and already has a strong track record in backing internet- companies.  This funding, combined with the strong operational and strategic experience they bring to the business, supports our ambitious expansion plans and positions us well for the next stage in the company’s development.”

Watch SoundCloud’s video tour:

The great guys over at intruders.tv had the chance to interview Marc Roisin of Vinogusto at Plugg09.

Vinogusto launched in 2007, it is based in Brussels and provides guides for wine lovers. It is completely based on user content.

“Are you crazy?” “Are you starting your blog with a post linking to competitors?” That’s the first question that someone may ask me after reading this post.
Well, the main goal is to help startups, entrepreneurs and enthusiasts providing news, interviews, articles and other resources. I can only be glad there are such sites around already doing this job.
In the past few years I have seen some great companies launch in Europe but no one ever had the kind of media exposure that valley’s startups get, and I think we have to (and we can) change that.
Here is a list of the best blogs and sites that currently cover european startups, I read them every day and I think everyone should.

• Techcrunch Europe

You all know Techcrunch, the most important startup blog in the world, founded and edited by Michael Arrington. This is the continent-specific blog dedicated to europe, it is edited by Mike Butcher. They cover startups and organize  major entrepreneurship events around Europe.

• Techcrunch France (French)

Techcrunch France was founded in 2006 for the fracophone community according to technorati it soon grew to be one of the most influential blogs in France.

• Arctic Startup

ArcticStartup is one of my favorite blogs, it covers all the startups in the scandinavian countries. It was founded by Ville Vesterinen, Antti Vilpponen, Miikka Kukkosuo and Karri Saarinen. If you live in any of the nordic countries this blog should be a daily read.

• The Next Web

TheNextWeb was started in 2006 by the founders of The Next Web conference (which will be held again this year in Amsterdam starting April 15). They cover “everything that influences the future of the Web, in any way“.

• Dutch Cowboys (Dutch)

Too bad I can’t read dutch, because this blog looks interesting and the dutch startup scene is one of the most active around Europe. There are also German Cowboys and Belgian Cowboys.

• Loogic (Spanish, Italian, English)

Loogic is the most influential web2.0 blog in Spain, it is available in spanish, italian and english.

• theStartup

This one, of course. We are aiming high, and we’d like to make it to the top, providing great and useful content every day!

Please feel free to add some others I forgot in the comments, and I’ll update the post.