If you review the main media agencies covering startups, you will get a list of companies based in the U.S.A., and that mainly - if not exclusively - will cover U.S.A. startups. So much that in Europe it is often said that in order for startups made of Europeans to be successful, they should be created in - or move to - Silicon Valley, which sounds particularly paradoxical given the ubiquity of the web.

This site presents interviews with software startups and software product creators based in the European Community, offering a quality space for an articulated presentation. Here you can learn from other's mistakes and successes: this is a place where to access direct experience on creating software houses in Europe.

Any software house can get interviewed, you can present your company here and even do the first part of the interview yourself here. We are not strictly limiting interviews to the 27 European Union countries, if say you are based in Turkey or Croatia it is fine.

Software houses based in the European community have intrinsic disadvantages compared to ones based say in California; not only because of structural and economic reasons, but also in term of ease in getting media attention. It is quite unlikely that Robert Scoble will ever come to Florence, Italy to do a quick video about a startup, however interesting may be what they are doing -  but he does interview all the time startups in Silicon Valley. This project is so also an attempt to give an accessible entry point to media to European innovative software houses. It is true that media on the web is open to everyone, but it is still more open to some, and this should be fixed.

Startups often submit their products to online directories. This is OK, but limits of these services are that they do not give a qualified image of the product. In Developers in Europe there is an editorial staff, the interviews are custom built for the company interviewed, and are edited before publishing. We present articulated contents about management and development in the companies presented. And our work does not end in presenting the interviews, we also provide a state-of-the-art Q&A site so that the readers can get back to the interviewed and ask more details. We also intend to get back to the companies interviewed in a year to hear how they're proceeding.

Why we are doing this? This site is produced by Open Lab. We believe that by giving a real service to companies similar to ours, we too will get media attention. Personally, after the very first interview, I felt I learned something from it, and received energy that will help us continuing producing innovative, high quality web applications. And I believe that the same can happen to the companies being interviewed - having a look at the mirror can help, at times.

So I hope to talk to you all soon. You can write me at ppolsinelli@gmail.com.

Pietro Polsinelli