A couple of days ago, Plug and Play tech center – our hosting business incubator – organized one of its largest yearly events, WebPlay. We attended, interested not only to find out what’s going on in the www world, but also to see a quick and lively start-up presentation session. So here are some brief impressions:

• The current economy crisis does not seem to have affected (yet) the web advertising business. Could the crisis actually stimulate companies to advertise more at a lower price and thus increase the market share of web advertising?
• Nine web-based start-ups presented themselves, each company being allocated less than 10 minutes to convince the audience. Pretty large span of topics were covered, from rating mechanisms to music wikipedia. Impressive to see that more than 75% of the companies were struggling to follow the successful model of Facebook. Facebook appears the have created almost a cliche. And when you think that I was so reluctant to create a Facebook account!
• The most interesting (and controversial) discussion concerns funding. There are two main opinions around. 1) Economy crisis means less money for investments, therefore VCs tend to (re)invest in the companies they already have in their portfolios, logically meaning less chances for new start-ups to get funding. 2) Economy crisis affected mainly business angel funds, as a countermeasure VCs allocate more money to the so-called “seed funds” and spread their investments over new ideas, trying to lower the risks; as a consequence, not a bad time to come up with a start-up.

Let’s see how all these will look like in the next year. For now, happy Thanksgiving!

Raluca and Mihai

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