Talking about the importance of aligning education with employment opportunities, he said in countries like Germany, students finish high school armed with the skills they need for the jobs that are available.

“Now at schools like P-TECH in Brooklyn, a collaboration between New York public schools and City University of New York and IBM, students will graduate with a high school diploma and an associate’s degree in computers or engineering,” Obama said. “We need to give every American student opportunities like this.”

Opened in September 2011, P-TECH is an IBM-backed, six-year program for New York City public high school students. At the end of the program, students get a high school degree, an associate’s degree and better chances for an entry-level position at IBM upon graduation. Even before the president’s endorsement, educators in Chicago, Maine, Massachusetts and elsewhere had started to explore the model, but given last night’s recognition you can be sure P-TECH will be getting even more attention.

In a chat with GigaOM Wednesday, Rashid Davis, P-TECH’s founding principal, talked about what makes P-TECH work, how it could be replicated and what could make the model even better.

GigaOM: As we write about frequently on GigaOM, the digital economy is creating the demand for new skills and new ways of learning those skills. From your perspective, what’s driving the momentum behind P-Tech and new schools like it? 

Davis: I think, really, it’s industry coming forward and saying these are the skills that are important and working with secondary and post-secondary institutions to say how do we make sure those gaps and skills are filled.

GigaOM: Corporations have worked with educators in the past but what really distinguishes P-Tech’s model?

Davis: Every student has a mentor from IBM and the expectation is for students to complete the post-secondary credential, not just earn a college credit. And it’s an open-admission school that starts in grade 9. We’re not taking students that have taken an academic test or have been academically screened for this particular model. 

GigaOM: Why is it a model that can succeed in different cities and school districts across the country?

Davis: Because you’re talking about the diversification that’s necessary – how do you get people who are underrepresented and you’re broadening the applicant pool for areas where jobs are not getting filled. … It can also be replicated for other industries – not just IT. It could be manufacturing, it could be fashion, it could be sports.  It really depends on the industry and the skills that you want to address and the post-secondary institutions that could give you that credential.

GigaOM: The first wave of students will graduate in 2017, but what early indicators can you look at to evaluate how the program is doing and measure success?

Davis: There are some students that may complete this program in four years or five years. But so far, we have 103 students who started with us in grade 9 last year and, of those, 62 are enrolled in at least one college course. … It’s important to understand that this an open-admissions population, with many students who may be the first in their family to even graduate from high school. I don’t want people to try to compare these students to traditional students who may have a different economic background or different levels of support and then [give less value to] measures of success from not really understanding [that difference].

GigaOM: What kinds of challenges have you encountered so far? 

Davis: The challenge is to have 13- and 14-year-olds who may have thought of themselves as students who have not done well, and now we’re telling them that they’re college students from day one. That becomes a challenge because students need to not only make a mental shift, but change their habits so they can… believe in themselves and be consistent in their outcomes.

GigaOM: How do you support them in that shift?

Davis: In addition to every student having a professional IBM mentor, every teacher mentors students and we’re having students adopt each other.

GigaOM: If you could do more to make this model a success, what would it be?

Davis: I would add a boarding component for six months in the summer and I’d try to find a way to house the students for the last two years… 85 percent of my students are on free or reduced lunch and they’re not coming from within walking distance of the community. And it’s important to remember that 76 percent of our population are boys, with 73 percent being young men of color. Every day they go into their communities and we’re at risk of losing them or having them sidetracked to other realities. With boarding, I think it’s essential to make sure we can continue the learning.

GigaOM: Aside from schools like yours, what else would you like to see in NYC schools?

Davis: I’d like to see every high school in NYC attached to one of the [City University of New York] schools to allow this same opportunity to exist for all NYC public school students. We know it’s hard for students to actually get meaningful employment – we need to start off by saying that it’s important for every NYC student who graduates from public school leaves with a post-secondary credential or associates degree.

GigaOM: And, as other schools around the country create P-Tech like schools, what would you advise them?

Davis: They should keep in mind: how do we move quicker? How do we really think of the ways that postsecondary schools could be dual-credentialed for students to actually let them do more while they’re younger and before life gets in the way?

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There’s an obvious reason they’re concentrating their energies, too. Technology companies are incredibly powerful, which draws a lot of attention, and a lot of anger in many cases. Unfriendly administrations can be powerful enemies: from Microsoft’s drawn-out conflict with European officials — effectively running for 20 years — to the vast fines levied on companies like Intel who break competition rules, conflict with governments can be costly and distracting. So what better way to try and smooth the path than try to head off that conflict earlier in the process?

But lobbying is furtive, and tends to happen behind closed doors: only dragged into the open when big issues emerge, such as the recent furore over American tech companies paying little or no tax in the U.K.. The European Commission does run a transparency register that companies are meant to report for, but the truth is that many — including, for example, Apple — have not signed up. Shouldn’t the extent of lobbying be more visible?

What follows is a short overview to some of the power players working to influence Brussels, or other governments in Europe, on behalf of the world’s big internet and hi-tech companies. It’s not meant to be comprehensive — there are lots of companies missing, and lots of individuals not named. But consider it more of a starting place: If you know more lobbyists, and their roles, then please leave them in the comments. Eventually, maybe, we can produce a map of their activities.

Google

Google has one of the most complex European lobbying operations among Internet companies. It operates a significant team in Brussels, but also has staff in most other major European capitals — including Berlin, where it opened a new office housing seven lobbyists. Their job? To try and influence the German government over issues like privacy and copyright, where it is far stricter than most other nations.

Key players:

Antoine Aubert, head of Google’s Brussels policy team, is listed in the transparency register as the liaison between EU and Mountain View. He is a policy wonk who previously spent three years working for the Commission itself.

Simon Hampton, the company’s director of public policy in Europe, is a former AOL and Time Warner policy chief. He took up the role with Google four years ago, which he describes on his LinkedIn profile like this: “His team of 45 evangelise the economic and social potential of the Internet, and work on the regulatory agenda to help Europe tap the full opportunities of the Internet.” The transparency register claims seven people working at European level.

Annette Kroeber-Riel, European policy counsel, heads up the German lobbying effort, which has built a network of operations, including think tanks and a research institute. Her background includes VeriSign and Jamba! (the company behind Crazy Frog, which was notorious Samwer brothers).

Peter Fleischer, global privacy counsel based in Paris, is a long-time hand at the company who works on international policy efforts around data and privacy. Largely operating behind the scenes, Fleischer’s profile was raised when he was one of those named, tried and convicted in an Italian court over a YouTube video of a boy being bullied. (The ruling was overturned just before Christmas.)

Sarah Hunter, head of UK public policy, was a senior policy adviser to former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Facebook

Facebook’s rocket-like trajectory in the last few years has rapidly increased its interaction with governments — rarely positive — and it is staffing up its lobbying efforts to reflect that. It seems keen to pick those with inside knowledge of the system gained from active political positions, rather than from the academic or bureaucratic side like most of its peers.

Key players:
Erika Mann, managing director of public policy (pictured) has helped build Facebook’s Belgian lobbying engine since joining in 2011, but knows Europe very well: the German was a Member of the European Parliament for 15 years.

Richard Allan, the director of policy in Europe, also has political ties. He spent eight years as a Member of Parliament in Britain (and then acted as campaign manager for Nick Clegg, the current Deputy Prime Minister) and sits in the House of Lords after being made a Baron in 2010. Before moving to Facebook in 2009, he worked as a lobbyist for Cisco.

Apple

Apple is one of those companies which has no presence in the transparency register, but clearly has a lobbying operation in Brussels. Steve Jobs himself was known to join meetings with European officials, and EC documents show he took part to get regulatory approval of Europe-wide pricing for iTunes. Still, its lobby effort does seem underpowered compared to rivals like Google.

Key players:

Claire Thwaites, director of Apple’s EMEIA government affairs previously helped lead Vodafone lobbying in Brussels and Washington.

Jaymeen Patel, senior government affairs manager (pictured), is another telecoms veteran, with five years at Telefonica.

Amazon

Amazon is one of a number of American technology companies that is lobbying Brussels in order to weaken restrictions on data collection. It is not listed in the joint transparency register. And yet it does have a Brussels presence to help try and secure itself a good deal across the single market.

Key players:

Andrew Cecil (pictured) has been Amazon’s director of public policy in Brussels since 2009, after he jumped from the same role at Yahoo!. Became temporarily notorious for refusing to answer a range of questions when when giving evidence to British MPs over Amazon’s tax avoidance strategies.

Saskia Horsch, the company’s senior public policy manager, previously worked for the European Casino Association.

Microsoft

Unsurprisingly, Microsoft has put a vast amount of effort into Europe over the years. according to the transparency register, it currently has 17 lobbyists working in Brussels, spending at least €4.5 million ($6 million) last year — though experts suggest that few companies accurately report their true lobbying spend.

At a national level, it operates governmental lobbying of various kinds — such as warning the British government over the adoption of open standards. And it has also funneled some of its lobbying effort through Burston Marsteller, the PR consultancy: opposing the purchase of DoubleClick by Google in 2007, for example.

John Vassallo, a former Maltese ambassador to Europe, has been vice president of EU Affairs for more than four years. He also worked in a similar position for General Electric.

Stephen Collins, the head of EU policy, recently gave evidence to British parliament over plans for a new communications bill.

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At least two sources have told me that that Adobe paid well north of $100 million. (Added on December 21: A well placed source tells me that the final number is closer to $150 million.)  What may seem like a lot of money is reflection on reality of the modern software business — not only does a company need to offer software via the cloud, it also has to have a community of engaged users to keep enhancing the value of that offering. Behance team makes those points in a post on Behance blog.

Creation should be inherently collaborative – and must evolve more frequently than typical software upgrade cycles. If the tools we use to create are connected with how we showcase and discover creative work, we can help usher in a new era of idea exchange and collaborative creation.

David Wadhwani, who spearheaded this acquisition on behalf of Adobe writes on the company blog:

 As we start to roll out increasingly integrated workflows across the services, you’ll start to see the benefits of combining the creation of content with the ability to seek feedback, showcase your work and distribute it across devices.

Behance was started in 2006 and raised $6.5 million from Union Square Ventures, Jeff Bezos, Dave Morin, Yves Behar, Chris Dixon and several others. It had a million members and was host to three million projects.

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Listen to the noises coming out of the local companies, and it’s clear that they feel good about this. Former Facebook executive Joanna Shields, now working for the government’s Tech City organization, said it would help turn a “vibrant community” into a “global leader in tech innovation”. And the head of Google Campus, the internet giant’s local bridge-building effort, said it would “help to establish London as a global center for tech entrepreneurs”.

London’s time, you’d assume, is now.

But here’s the message I took away from it all: it’s time to step things up.

Promised unfulfilled

Britain’s government has been one of the biggest cheerleaders of London’s nascent startup scene over the last few years. While the Old Street area has been a center for the country’s digital economy ever since the birth of interactive media, the decision to create an official “Tech City” movement has seen a concerted effort to court technology companies.

This is for a few reasons. It’s partly an attempt to find some light in the economic gloom. It’s partly an attempt by Prime Minister David Cameron to appear connected, forward-thinking and switched on (look at his relationship with Google to understand the positioning here). And it’s partly an attempt to turn the legacy of the Olympics into something more by enticing big tech firms to the area — even if they don’t contribute much in the way of tax revenue to the British economy.

But Cameron’s commitment to bolstering the startup economy is actually even deeper than that.

Right now, I think the British government — or at least it’s gov.uk team, which is rebuilding government services to be “digital by default” — is actually the most exciting startup in the country.

It’s dealing with big problems in a smart way, tackling and operating in a lean, mean, aggressive manner: a world-leading approach that Tim O’Reilly recently said set the standard for governments. And to do that, it’s hired some of the most impressive coding, design and strategic talent around. Over the last couple of years a sequence of great talent — mainly from London, many of them friends of mine — have been sucked into the gov.uk machine as they try to reinvent the way Britons connect to their public services.

Don’t get me wrong: tackling big problems is great, and the work that Government Digital Service is doing is extremely important. But I think it’s an indictment of the local scene that so many great people are choosing to work for the civil service, and that the apparently thriving scene around Old Street seems to be more and more reliant on government boosters.

So how do you fix that?

The challenge to Britain’s startup community

A few months ago, I wrote that London’s tech community was looking at “golden moment”: a confluence of circumstances that could see the region really push on and make good on its promise.

Now, however, I’m less optimistic. There are lots of great companies and strong ideas floating around the UK startup scene, but right now there are too many poseurs and very few world beaters. The latent potential is not being achieved, and the signal is being crowded out by all the noise of bearded startup hipsters tapping away aimlessly in local coffee shops.

Still, I believe this is a glass-half-full situation. Those who are really taking the bit between their teeth and developing serious businesses are doing very well. Moshi Monsters has turned into a massive children’s brand; online loans company Wonga is doing things that banks can’t; innovative smaller outfits like BERG and Makie and others are making waves in their industries.

But the scene needs an injection of real talent and ambition — in part from the same people who have been subsumed into the government’s digital efforts. While they get down to Important Public Service stuff, the hangers-on have fallen into a self-congratulatory funk, drunk on applause from boosters and ego massages from investors looking to pump up their own interests.

Fortunately, most some of the talented individuals working on gov.uk are contractors, not staff. When their time is up, they’ll be back out. Let’s hope they do something great when they’re free again.

In the meantime, listen up, Silicon Roundabout: don’t buy into the mirage of success. It’s time to stop combing your mustaches and build something important.

Update: Mike Bracken, who heads the GDS project, has been in touch to say “most of our people are civil servants, as we’ve removed loads of contractors as per government policy”.

Glass of wine photo courtesy of Flickr user Davide Restivo

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To be clear, this isn’t about finality or absolutes, and we should especially not think in that fashion in a field such as digital media and its technologies – a field that is forever transforming. We should, however, consider the subject of maturity in its relative sense, in comparison to points of reference: a time, a sector, a different pace, perspectives that always evolve.

Media, as a segment, has always been unique (and fortunate) in its public relations. After all, it’s perhaps the only sector that reports on itself. The challenge then is to sift through the noise and vested interest. To help us out, we can rely on the cold, disinterested financial markets.

Here’s what we have observed:

(1) There has been venture capital consolidation, leading to fewer individual points with bigger and possibly less adventurous pools to deploy.

(2) There is an increased emphasis on revenues and earnings (as distinct from pure potential and option value), accentuated by post-IPO flagship properties that have been penalized as the operation has not kept up with the optionality.

(3) A significant portion of M&A activity has consisted of smallish “acqui-hires“ that take out the upside of willing sellers before the startup has hit its theoretical stride.

(4) Cash accumulation by some of the largest competitors continues, and sometimes the cash is even sent back to shareholders through dividends or buybacks.

(5) Many of the sector leaders have underperformed relative to analyst growth expectations in the latest reporting period.

With this backdrop, a number of predictions are in order. Think of these as New Year’s forecasts if you like, considering the season, but more truly they’re observations for the visible future.

• With maturation in the underlying assets, look for maturation in the way these are funded. As we climb up from small and early venture equity to mid-stage to late-stage to growth equity, buyout finance, and even debt capital, look for all of these follow-on pieces to increase in prominence and traffic. Some of the sector linchpins are already tapping the bond markets and securing debt ratings, which reminds us that media was at one time a borrowing sector (when it was old enough).

• Look for greater business emphasis on volume, capabilities and capitalization. While it pays to be small, nimble, and agile – able to navigate sharp turns in periods of high volatility and find plenty of new openings into which to dive – when the terrain is calmer and the openings narrower, this value proposition can start to lose its charm. Look for dominance (if not survival) to overtake iteration as buzzword of choice in our vernacular.

• In the strategic community, look for M&A activity to take place based on the integration of disparate parts. We have already observed the confluence of media and commerce, of finance and technology, of media and finance, and obviously media and technology. Look for these combinations to continue and for strategic directions to be set on an increasingly integrated field, where the distinctions will be blurrier between retailer and media outlet, between hardware and software company, and, most notably, between information and money flows.

• In keeping with the motifs of size, capital and integration, look for hardware to assume a more central place in the imagination of founders and the strike zones of buyers and investors. In comparison to software, this realm is more capital intensive, longer cycled, and difficult to “pivot” – which is alright when the turbulence is diminished and the money is perhaps more patient.

• Lastly, look for traditional media to garner increased attention from new media. This sub-segment that was at one time the only segment had been of late forgotten. As the breathlessness for novelty subsides and competition for market share and revenue intensifies, traditional media will be revisited and its audience and communities recognized for untapped value.

There are two overarching themes in these assorted observations and the handful of forecasts presented: On one hand, convergence and overlap (of sectors as well as capital sources); and, on the other, a progression from an era that was arguably defined by its financial ventures to one that is more highly strategic in nature.

Seeing these parallel patterns from another angle still, we note a transition from the more or less speculative gambit to a market that is structured, calculated, and framed within a narrower band of potential outcomes. We are seeing, in short, that digital media is verging on adulthood at last.

Dan Ramsden is founder and partner at CoRise. He blogs at discourseandnotes.com; follow him on Twitter @d_ramsden.

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The docks, once crawling with shipbuilders constructing huge constructing vessels like The Titanic, are now an empty sprawl of wasteland dotted with lonely office buildings. And for anyone who remembers the Troubles, an activity as simple as crossing the road or staying at a hotel can carry chilling reminder of brutality that is not easily forgotten.

It’s no surprise that these difficulties have had an impact on the local startup scene too.

From what I heard, the attempt to build a new entrepreneurial culture is there, but it’s slow going. Northern Ireland’s turbulent existence means that the economy remains massively reliant on the British government (around a third of the population work for the public sector) and it is still working hard to attract investment from outside. Meanwhile, locals are still looking for a real champion, a real victory, beyond bluster and good ole boy networks.

Belfast’s problem is that things don’t get consigned to history: in fact, history stubbornly raises its head at every opportunity, bleeding mercilessly into the present and the future. Northern Ireland’s ambitions are too often scuttled like The Titanic, crushed by the pressure of the past.

But the truth is, Belfast is not alone in this. It may feel like an extreme example, but the whole of Europe suffers the same malaise in some shape or form.

Weighed down by the past

From Finland to Faliraki, from Portugal to St Petersburg, Europe is sitting on a vast and varied history that it struggles to move beyond. We’re stuck like flies in amber, our ideas freeze-framed at the moment our societies were at their most successful or most extreme. Britain can’t shake off the arrogance of empire, France clings to its l’exception culturelle,

In a way, this is especially resonant in technology companies — because, after all, they the ones meant to be inventing the future. And because our societies are failing to shake off the worst parts of their legacy and craft a successful vision of where we’re going, we are all left copying Silicon Valley’s idea of what tomorrow will look like.

Look at Nokia — not long ago the world’s biggest force in the world’s fastest growing technology industry, now apparently an also-ran. Although some of its leaders have a bright vision, too many insiders stubbornly cling to a history of greatness that no longer chimes with the rest of us.

Or look at Germany’s attempts to enforce rigid and steadfast privacy rules. These ideas have a totally understandable historical context, but outside of that unique bubble, it would be polite to call them overzealous. Clinging to that history has left German web companies hamstrung while the buccaneering robber barons of the Wild West clean up everywhere else.

The result is that the conversation about our future has become a one-sided dictation from a group of companies who essentially grew out of the same Valley culture. Our tomorrow is their tomorrow.

I was reminded of this failed future when London’s Tech City announced that it had poached top Facebook executive Joanna Shields to run the organization.

Bringing in Shields, an American, is definitely a win for the group paid to cheer on London as a startup and technology capital: she’s got more experience at the top of 21st century web companies than almost anyone else, which gives her a stratospheric level of credibility with the investors that Tech City is desperate to court. She’s smart, savvy and sharp: a great hire.

Shields’ record is not as spotless as Downing Street would have everyone believe — for example, masterminding the $650 million sale of Bebo to AOL was a genius move for company insiders but disastrous for everyone else. And then there’s the little fact that she has presided over companies that avoid millions of pounds of taxes from the country she now represents. But there is a rightful sense of pride at being able to prize somebody away from Mark Zuckerberg’s clutches.

However, bringing her in is also an admission that Britain — and Europe — has no other visions of the future to offer. It’s a tacit acceptance that technology, that innovation, can only be built the way they see it in Palo Alto.

Follow your own path

Perhaps you don’t mind. That’s fine. But I think if we want to find some alternatives — or at least explore them — we need to move on from our history, and our obsession with creating “the next Silicon Valley”.

Earlier this year I gave a talk in Portugal aimed at helping people there understand that they cannot win by chasing the Bay Area’s dreams. Every startup hub across the continent talks endlessly about being “the new Silicon Valley”, every PR flack has pitched the and every journalist (including me) has worked on those stories. But that’s just playing somebody else’s game. You can’t be the next Silicon Valley by doing what Silicon Valley does. It will win every time, because the game is stacked in its favor.

The same thing happens elsewhere. I talked about the reporting I did a couple of years ago from Shenzhen, China, where most of the world’s electronics are now built. Those skills, that expertise, are all in one place — and in just 30 years. Now their advantage is so huge, why would you try to beat them?

The problem with “the next Silicon Valley”, I argued, was that we took it too literally. Focus on “the next”: What will the next huge technology-led industry be? What will the next center of innovation that touches everyone be? What will change the world? Find that, get there early, build now around a vision of the future that you really believe in, and reinvention could work. Use the strengths you have locally — things like engineering talent, design culture, customer service, research expertise — but don’t let them dominate you. Don’t let history weigh you down.

Now, I don’t know what that thing is — biotech, next generation manufacturing and data are all contenders that Europe could focus on. But whatever “the next” ends up being, every entrepreneur across the continent, whether they’re in Belfast or Berlin — must stop looking over their shoulder, shrug off the past and stop buying into somebody else’s dream of tomorrow.

Photograph of Bobbie Johnson and Belfast mural used under Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr users Luca Sartoni and Infomatique respectively.

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The San Francisco-based startup is a software-based financial advisor and, in its mission to bring financial and investment advice to a broader audience, CEO and president Andy Rachleff said, the company is starting with people in tech.

The new interactive tool, launched today, lets tech company employees sort by job function, level, company size and region to see the range of salaries and packages for each role.

“There are a lot of good sites on the net – Glassdoor.com, Salary.com – for finding salaries. But it’s very opaque when it comes to how much equity people should get,” Rachleff said. “We think that a symmetrical market is a better market.”

To create the Startup Compensation Tool, Wealthfront licensed compensation data from an annual survey of 135 private technology companies, which included 8,000 employees (as part of the agreement, the startup can’t disclose the source of the data).

A quick search, for example, shows that biz dev folks tend to earn higher salaries than those in product development (salaries in the 75^th percentile are $185,000 vs. $160,000) but get less equity (.098 percent vs. .113 percent – for packages in the 75^th percentile).

The data also reveal that the mean cash compensation across all tech companies was $112,000 and the mean equity compensation was .072 percent.

Not surprisingly, the smallest companies (with fewer than 20 employees) granted the largest equity packages but, interesting, Rachleff pointed out that once a company reaches 20 employees, the salary doesn’t significantly increase (although cash compensation is slightly higher in companies with more than 50 employees).

Earlier this year, the company launched a simulator for figuring out the best time to sell stock post-IPO and it plans to build out a fuller suite of tools in the future.

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It’s an approach that has worked well for big names like Skype, Wikia, Opera and many others.

But guess what? That’s not necessarily the way it works anymore. Partly because of Europe’s financial crisis, some of the “old” countries are now becoming the jumping-off point for services in developing economies, and not the other way around.

Take Portugal. Once it paved the way for the modern age as a nation of explorers who built the first global empire in history. These days, however, it’s fast becoming a center for inexpensive startup workers, especially with those companies looking to expand into Brazil and elsewhere.

A fundamental shift

Here are a few examples. HouseTrip, a holiday rental service similar to Airbnb that is regarded by many as one of Europe’s hottest startups, is headquartered in London but has a large number of service staff in Lisbon. Or what about Webnographer, a UX startup that has had offices in the city for a couple of years?

But the prime candidate is probably Rocket Internet, the notorious German clone factory that has a significant development center in the northern Portuguese city of Porto. It houses at least 150 programmers and support staff, who are all building crucial elements of major international properties like Groupon and Zalando.

For Rocket and its masterminds, the Samwer Brothers, Portugal provides a great base for dramatically expanding its business in developing economies across South America, Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Miguel Pinto, the managing director of the Porto center, confirmed recently that the team was focused on technical development and would carry on expanding at pace.

But Carlos Silva, a Lisbon resident and co-founder of crowdfunding startup Seedrs, says it’s a confluence of bigger circumstances that makes it sensible to hire staff in Portugal for companies focused on markets like Brazil.

“The Brazilian market is definitely a very big and interesting market for European companies, but — at least for a startup — setting up a base there is not an easy task,” says Silva. “Getting work permits is complex, and the country is still quite bureaucratic. Portugal, on the other hand, is part of the EU, making it very easy to attract talent from all over, has a very simple process to create companies and deal with legal and tax obligations, and is geographically much closer to European centers of entrepreneurship.”

The free movement of workers inside Europe certainly helps, but that’s not all that’s going on. There’s also the fact that the economy is under severe pressure. Portugal has the lowest GDP per capita in Western Europe, and the sovereign debt crisis has been kicking the nation in its soft parts for a long time now.

Joao Martins, the CEO of Porto-based news aggregator app Niiiws, thinks the lack of opportunities at home is a big part of this recent change.

“There are at least six great engineering universities in Portugal, graduating a lot of very well-prepared young people to work,” he says. “The problem is the general economic environment, the work culture and the lack of management skills. You can hire one of these guys for $1500, but you can’t find more than a dozen really big Portuguese IT companies.”

Meanwhile Brazil is getting more and more expensive as the startup economy explodes: According to Payscale.com, the median salary for an IT manager in Brazil is 136,000 BRL ($66,000) but the same job in Portugal is just €30,000 ($36,000).

Who’s next?

The connection between the two countries makes a lot of sense — not least because of the linguistic connection and the imbalance in populations (Portugal has around 10 million people; Brazil has 196 million). But in the past it would have been Portugal and its entrepreneurs taking command of those emerging markets rather than simply supplying them with low-cost talent.

The signaling has become even stronger recently. Even the prime minister, Pedro Passos Coelho, got in on the act, telling local people struggling to find jobs that they should emigrate to South America.

That may be excessive — and Coelho came in for plenty of criticism — but it’s clear there’s been a shift.

“Portugal has always been an excellent platform to enter not only the Brazilian market but also other developing markets like Angola and Mozambique or even India, through its connections with Goa, and China, through Macau,” says Carlos Silva. “Bigger companies are already taking advantage of it by having participations in some of Portuguese biggest companies like Portugal Telecom and EDP and, as you said, some startups are starting to do the same. I would not be surprised to see more startups follow that same route.”

The shoe is definitely now on the other foot. The question is whether this change will happen elsewhere in Europe too.

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The Dutch company — which I described earlier this year as ‘the semantic web for the rest of us’ — has just announced a $1.6 million seed round led by NEA, the Sand Hill Road firm that has backed the likes of Salesforce, Macromedia and 23andMe.

It marks a significant moment for the company, which is trying to build a self-service semantic engine that can help companies and individuals understand, drill down and work with data, documents and content. That’s all a bit hand-wavy, so to get an idea of what Silk does, here’s what I said the last time I wrote about it:

It works like this: you build a series of pages inside Silk and link them together with tags. The pages can be anything you like: text files, pages from your website, company documents, your schedule. And the tags, too, can cover anything you like: any genre of data you can imagine.You then use the simple editor to add tags to your documents (telling it, for example, that the “United States” in your file refers to a country) and it connects the dots for you.

For example: say you’ve got a set of files with information about various countries and you want to rank them by GDP. While traditionally you’d have to do it manually — or at least get an underling to compile a spreadsheet from the data in your documents — Silk makes it far easier to perform the same task without requiring those extra steps.
If your Silk pages are tagged properly, the app simply joins the data together and allows you to instantly build charts, graphs or maps documenting the data you’re after.

That’s still the case. It’s an entirely web-based service, and to get an idea of what it can do, try taking a look around the Countries of the World subdomain that Silk has up and running. It allows you to combine and re-combine different data sets on nations from all over the globe that has been drawn from Wikipedia.

The site runs impressive technology and it’s remarkably fast — but it still requires some work to turn it into a really useable service for the kinds of businesses that can make the most out of it. CEO and co-founder Salar al Khafaji said it was a “milestone” for Silk.

The company had previously raised a $455,000 round led by Atomico (Rdio, Fon, Xobni). The London-based fund will be joining this round too, alongside angel investors Anil Hansjee, Philippe Cases and Jens Christensen.

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Sandvine said that the two stores are combined because in addition to the release of OS X 10.8  Mountain Lion, Apple also updated a number of its first-party OS X and iOS apps to support some of Mountain Lion’s new features. They predict that the traffic will hit another peak later today around 7 pm because a lot of folks will come home and download and install the new software updates. Typically iTunes and Mac App Store traffic peaks around 7pm local time, Sandvine said.

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