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The New Digirati |
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Things may be tough in tech, but the top players are still moving and shaking. In the third annual TIME Digital Europe Top 25, we profile the entrepreneurs, managers and dealmakers who stood up to the downturn and set themselves apart through bold ideas, leadership and global vision.
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By JENNIFER L. SCHENKER |
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Posted Sunday, Oct. 13, 2002; 2.15 p.m. BST
Today, most dotcom kings find themselves left with
worthless stock options and equally worthless media clippings
detailing their heyday. Hoberman is an exception. It has been
a wild ride for this graduate of Eton and Oxford who, along
with business partner Martha Lane Fox, became a symbol of
Europe's dotcom generation. Lastminute.com was the U.K.'s
highest-profile and most oversubscribed Internet stock flotation
back in March 2000, but by March the following year the stock
price had plummeted 90%. Financial analysts now expect the
company — which offers consumers discount airline tickets,
hotel rooms, package holidays, entertainment tickets and restaurant
reservations online — to reach profitability in 2003.
Lastminute.com has snapped up four
major rivals in Europe, including Travelprice.com, one of the
largest online travel operators in France and Italy. It has
also taken a 20% stake in a fifth rival, Germany's Lufthansa
City Center. The firm now has operations in seven European countries,
plus South Africa, Australia and Japan. About 1 million of its
5.6 million subscribers make some $500 million worth of purchases
a year, which translates into $70 million in revenues from commissions
and advertising.
The Vision Thing: "We aim to make e-commerce
an essential part of people's lives."
Forward Spin: Lastminute.com is working with mobile
phone operators to allow customers on the move to book hotels
in Europe using voice recognition technology. When picture
phones come into wider use, the service will send photographs
of proposed hotels to callers' screens. The company is additionally
planning to offer travel and restaurant deals via interactive
television.
Call him Mr. Nanotech. Harper's mission is to ensure
that European business
people and politicians grasp the importance of nanotechnology
— a hot research area, potentially larger than the information
technology sector, that involves creating electronic and biomedical
materials on the level of atoms and molecules. A physicist
who speaks four languages, Harper honed his nanotech expertise
at the European Space Agency's Research and Technology Center
in the Netherlands. In 1997 he founded Madrid-based CMP Cientifica,
a research company that organizes Europe's largest nanotech
conference and publishes reports on its impact on business.
Harper most recently co-authored The Nanotech Opportunity
Report, which outlines how the technology will change business.
He also co-edits TNT Weekly, a newsletter covering global
developments in the field and has the ear of the European Commission. His firm,
CMP Cientifica, receives Commission funding to manage the
activities of Phantoms, a network that promotes collaboration
between nanoelectronics researchers and scientists, and to
oversee NanoSpain, a network that links the Spanish nanotechnology
community. Needless to say, Harper is the face of the European
nano-tech industry in the U.S., representing European interests
to groups like the U.S. NanoBusiness Alliance.
The Vision Thing: "I want to ensure that Europe's
world-class academic research in areas like nano-imprinting
gets translated into world-class companies."
Forward Spin: Harper is currently recruiting companies
to join the European NanoBusiness Association, a lobby group
he created to influence government policy on nanotechnology.
Leave it to Lynch, an engineer with a background in
mathematics who likes to retreat to his home in a remote village
in Suffolk, England, to think of a way to sift through the
blizzard of data that hits us every day. The software Lynch
developed sorts through information — in the form of
text, video or voice — in search of key concepts (as
opposed to key words, which often mislead). The program then
routes relevant information to the people who need it most.
The software thus eliminates the need for a human being to
sort through mountains of unstructured data. Autonomy sells
mainly to Fortune 500 companies, many of which use the software
to automate the routing of customer-service inquiries that
come in through
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STEPHEN BOND |
call centers or the Internet. Hutchison Whampoa, the Hong
Kong-based conglomerate with interests from ports to hotels
to telecoms, will use Autonomy technology to automate its
consumer services for the forthcoming introduction of its
3G phone network in Europe. Like all software companies, Autonomy
has been hurt by the downturn — its share price has dropped
some 80% since the bubble burst — but it has been profitable
for 10 straight quarters, and is still considered one of Europe's
most promising software firms.
The Vision Thing: "Some 80% of business is
conducted using unstructured information, the kind that computers
are really bad at handling. Autonomy's mission is to automate
the handling of that information and route it to the right
people in the right place."
Forward Spin: Autonomy is increasing its sales
to other software vendors, which are bundling the company's
programs into their own offerings.
In 1987, after six years in San Francisco as president
of venture capital firm Sofinnova Ventures, Schmidt returned
home to Paris to run the head office, now called Sofinnova
Partners (the two are separate legal entities, with some cross-ownership).
Back then venture capital was scarce. Unike most of his peers,
he is still doing what he did then: investing in early-stage
companies in information technology and life sciences. Sofinnova's
portfolio includes such high-profile biotech companies as
Germany's Cell-zome, which is trying to unravel the roles of proteins in disease and drug efficacy, and
Switzerland's Actelion, which develops new drugs based on
the endothelium, the single layer of cells separating blood
vessels from the blood stream. Sofinnova's technology investments
include France's E-Mail Vision, which makes technology to
enable clients like MTV to carry out market research via e-mail.
Under Schmidt's direction, Sofinnova's venture capitalists
are increasingly combining investing and entrepreneurship
— some are former CEOs who both invest in and lead a
company.
The Vision Thing: "When things clear up, venture
capital will emerge as much less volatile than one might think."
Forward Spin: As chairman-elect of the European
Private Equity & Venture Capital Association, Schmidt
wants to reinforce private equity as an asset class throughout
Europe.
One of the Continents's most vocal crusaders for changes
in stock-option rules and tax reductions for start-ups, he argues
that "entrepreneurs are more socialist than the socialists
because we redistribute wealth." Croissance Plus, the French
lobbying group for entrepreneurs he founded, evolved into Growth
Plus, a pan-European organization that has the ear of the European
Commission. When he is not stumping for entrepreneurs Payre
is proving he still is one. A co-founder of Business Objects,
a business-intelligence software company with a market cap of
$705 million, Payre has also created Kiala, which is building
a pan-European software and distribution system to allow customers
that have placed orders via their computers, phones or television
sets to pick up the items at specified locations. The service
automates all of the logistics, including the status of parcels,
through an interactive voice-response system or e-mail. French
mail-order giant 3 Suisses signed up to use Kiala's technology;
the contract could boost Kiala's revenues from €2 million
in 2002 to around €20 million in 2003.
The Vision Thing: "Governments in Europe have
to help entrepreneurs because they are key to job creation."
Forward Spin: Through Croissance Plus Payre is
pushing to further reform France's wealth tax.
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