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Serial entrepreneur Nicolas Berg in Switzerland

WATCH VIDEO ON NETWORKING WITH TWITTER

I’ve been talking to tech companies and new startups in Zurich, Zug and around the hub of Switzerland again.
It’s no secret that it’s becoming the new Silicon valley as I’ve written about in previous posts. Not suprisingly, social media has taken off there, with twitter seeing many Swiss German tweets.
I spoke with Nicolas Berg who is a man who not only dreams and plans big, but has been instrumental in so many startups becoming successful companies.
I remember the launch of Poken for social media at Zurich tech start ups.
I’ll be asking him about this and his passion for business, in his forthcoming interview here. Don’t miss it on wisequeen.com
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Nicolas Berg, Partner at Redalpine Venture Partners

Nicolas Berg, partner at Redalpine Venture Partners, Country Manager Xing Switzerland, serial entrepreneur, angel investor, venturelab coach.
Since 2007 Redalpine manages an Early-stage Venture Fund based in Luxemburg that invests in highly scalable European start-up companies.
Redalpine partners were among the first European Web 2.0 investors in startups such as XING, StudiVZ, Students, Plazes, Hitflip, Tagworld, Kyte.tv and Trigami.
2000-2007 Nicolas managed 16 angel investments (ICT, e.g. XING, and live science, e.g. Neurotune. 2006-2008 he achieved several successful exits (IPO, trade-sales).
1984-2005 he has co-founded 8 start-ups, e.g. borsalino.ch, a leading Swiss financial portal for private investors. It was acquired by Ringier, the leading publisher, in 2000.
For several years Nicolas has worked as a technology and finance journalist. Since 2005 he gives venturelab workshops for entrepreneurs at Swiss universities.
He is a jury member for several awards, e.g. Venturekick, Swiss Tech Tour, Swiss Venture Club, Swiss Angel of the Year, and Heuberger Jungunternehmerpreis.
Nicolas graduated as M.Sc. (BA) at the University of Bern in 1985. He lives in Solothurn with his family.

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Donna Jackson
Social Communications Specialist

Tech Startups,Yahoo and Google, Swiss become new Silicon valley

Moving in small spaces with vision and vivacity. This is what start ups must do. Last month I had the pleasure of interviewing some of the hot new Tech startups at a meet up in Zurich at Techcrunch.
There were 40 startups there and some really stood out.

Wua.la social network storage solutions, Yattoo free TV on your laptop, W2ML a simple writing platform, Yes.com music sharing and voting for your site, and an opportunity to win 100,000 dollars by downloading itunes.
So many brilliant tech ideas from inside Zurich and Switzerland in partnership with American, French and German, companies from the sharpest minds in the business.
I’ll be featuring some of their interviews here over the following weeks. So subscribe to Wise queen on the RSS feed

Here’s my interview with Marc Mongenet of W2ML at TechCrunch Zurich

Where is your home town?

Geneva, Switzerland.

Where are you living now?

Bière, a village between Geneva and Lausanne, Switzerland.

What were you doing before W2ML?

I was working as senior software engineer at ELCA Informatique SA
in Lausanne, developing document management software.

What did you study after school?

Computer science at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL).

What did you want to be when you grew up?

Farmer, but only to drive tractors.

Tell me how W2ML came about

Since the invention of the Web in the early nineties, thousands of
different, incompatible, Web Content Management Systems (WebCMS)
have been created to let people write in web sites: guestbooks,
forums, wikis, entreprise CMS… Some of them are really complex,
but there is no standard solution.

So I thought: is it possible to create a simple and generic solution for
common content management tasks? Is it possible to be as simple,
and generic as HTML is for web pages? (HTML is the language
invented in the early nineties, and still used, to create web pages).

Explain W2ML to me.

W2ML is a computer language to create read/write web pages.
It is an open format: the specification is public and everybody is
free to use W2ML and write software to support it.

What is your vision for W2ML?

I hope that W2ML will be widely adopted by webmasters, that
a community appears, exchanges solutions, and that W2ML
becomes a standard language for read/write web pages.

What would you like to do next?

To found a family.

What do your family think of your job?

Very risky but I have to try.

What are you most proud of professionally?

Nothing until now, that’s why I created W2ML.

Which book are you reading at the moment?

I just finished “One Hundred Years of Solitude” but didn’t
like it much.

What other profession would you like to try.

None.

Marc Mongenet
Creator of the Web 2 Markup Language
http://w2ml.com

Yahoo announced in March 2008 that it will relocate its European head office from the United Kingdom to Switzerland. Yahoo plans to make the move to the shores of Lake Geneva within 18 months.

According to AP, Swiss media reported that Yahoo will benefit from a special tax break by moving to Switzerland.

Yahoo follows companies including EA and Cisco Systems that have relocated European Operations to Switzerland in recent times. The move would indicate business as usual for Yahoo despite Microsoft’s hostile takeover bid and rumored negotiations with other possible merger or acquisition partners.
Swiss info

Why Zurich well here’s the Google office there

Google boss
Google and the Queen

Why do some startups soar and others nose dive? Do you know? Have you initiated a startup and seen it succeed or fail. We’d like to hear from you good or bad. We learn more from failure than success
sometimes.

Write to us with your story we’ll publish your site and story if it’s useful.
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