Over the past few days at the Next Web conference in Amsterdam, I
had the opportunity to hang out with about 700 Internet entrepreneurs
from all over Europe. The startup scene in Europe reminds me of Silicon
Valley four or five years ago—hungry startups building Web companies on
the cheap and products that scratch a personal itch.

Swedish startup Twingly, for instance, wants to come up with spam-free blog search by starting with the best 450,000 blogs and letting users share blog posts with each other. ParisBrussels-based Zilok is creating an eBay for renting things such as drills and digital projectors. London’s Fav.or.it
makes a feed reader with extra powers—you can leave comments on blogs
within the reader, it ranks posts based on how much they are actually
read, and it lets you filter posts by tag, rank, or category. In
Munich, andUnite has created a service that allows you to collect your search terms and share them with others.

And a handful of companies are even gaining substantial traction. I was surprised to learn that the social network Netlog
claims 30 million unique visitors and four billion page views per month
(comScore counts 11 million visitors, but five billion page views).
Netlog operates in 15 different languages, and 20 countries. Then there
is eBuddy, the Meebo of Europe, which boasts 12 million Web users and
1.6 million mobile users of its Web-based instant-messaging service.

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