Last Friday 120 top-tier private investors from Europe, the US, China, and Russia met in Zurich at the SWX Swiss Exchange for the first global private investors’ conference, privateDC. Besides discussing investment opportunities and inspiring panel discussion, probably the most notable contribution was the connections being established among the participants.

The numerous discussions initiated at privateDC will continue with the help of Private Deal Network (privateDN) – the invitation only network for global private investors focussing on their investment activities in high-growth companies.

After this exciting day, 40 participants explored the famous Jungfrau region in the heart of Switzerland. Despite challenging weather conditions everyone enjoyed the relaxed atmosphere to deepen personal connections.

In the end, everybody agreed that this will not have been the last Private Deal Conference and is looking forward to meeting the next time for privateDC 2007.

Read some other reviews on privateDC and about some participating investors here and here.

Technorati tags: privatedc privatedn venture capital

Yesterday I had the pleasure to meet some exciting persons of German’s Internet scene on the first Webmonday in Munich. The well organized event comprised also presentations about current tools in the Internet, user participation by Michael Pütz, AJAX, and podcasting. Looking forward to the next event of this kind to get to know outstanding Internet entrepreneurs.

Read some other reviews here and here.

Technorati tags: webmontag web2.0

The web-based instant messenger application meebo has received first-round funding from Sequoia Capital, as meebo confirmed last Friday. The funding is rumored to be between USD 3.0m and USD 4.0m with USD 9.0m pre-money as sources reveal.

The young team (first-time entrepreneurs) – two IT girls from Stanford and one boy, who was with IBM and is a Yale graduate – only started with meebo 13 weeks ago and did manage to attrack major attention right from the start. With over 250,000 users daily using the in Ajax programmed application in order to chat over one or multiple IMs (MSN, AIM/ICQ, Jabber/GTalk and Yahoo! Messenger) simultaneously meebo is still in “alpha mode”. All in all, quite ambitious plans Sequoia has with them in order to judge this high valuation. Will be interesting to see how their business model evolves.

Technorati tags: meebo Sequoia Capital VentureCapital IM Ajax web2.0

Quite a buzz about Yahoo!’s recent web 2.0 acquistion has been announced last Friday – both by Yahoo! as well as from del.icio.us.

With focus to one of the two VCs having been invested in del.icio.us this is just another trade sale to Yahoo!. BV Capital already sold eGroups to Yahoo! in 2000. However, for the leading VC Union Square Ventures it was definitely a time to celebrate after they hold their investment only eight months.