Last week I attended the European Venture Capital Forum in Stockholm, which Microsoft co-sponsored as part of our cooperation with the worldwide VC industry. Some 300 VC's and financial advisors, mainly from Europe gathered for two days to discuss latest trends in the industry as well as the general situation of venture capital in Europe as well as the US.

Paul Deninger from Jefferies in Boston gave some insights in data, which turned - in my view - out to be pretty promising for the European venture capital industry. Europe, as one example, has only 20% of the US volume in venture capital, but these 20% drive 60% of the volume of venture backed IPOs compared to the US. The number of Euopean IPOs is higher than ever before, except for the year 2000. It was also mentioned that the size and quality of European IPOs matches that of the best US time. With these exit-perspectives, investing in Europe should be really attractive!

The hot topic in general is for sure cleantech investment, with the US clearly leading in that market. (But I guess there is always lots of IT-opportunity in this industry as well) Worldwide cleantech investments will reach $2.5B in 2007.

Thanks to EVCA for a really interesting conference, and a dinner in the perfect setting of the Stockholm City Hall - the place where the Nobel Prize banquet takes place every year.

On a side issue: we also learned that in 2007 the number of mobile phones sold per second was higher than the number of babies born on a global scale - good news for the mobile folks.