I attended a panel session at the South by Southwest Interactive conference recently on the topic of high-tech startups in Europe.  The panel included Marten Mickos (former CEO of MySQL, now at Eucalyptus), Resham Sohoni (CEO of Seedcamp), Peter Robinett (Bubble Foundry) and Felix Petersen (Nokia).  It was interesting to learn about some of the initiatives, like Seedcamp, which are investing in and promoting startup companies like Erply, and Codility coming out of eastern europe. These companies are small, but they have big ambition and are leveraging open source and cloud infrastructures to keep their costs low.

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This is a picture with a lot of impact. This was from Seedcamp. The question asked was “What tools will you use?”.

Mårten pointed this out to us at the opening speeches at the Sun Database Group Developer’s Meeting. Its interesting to see what technologies are used. MySQL is by far, the most popular database server that all startups seem to use (though to be fair, I see CouchDB and PostgreSQL there too). PHP is about the most popular language (followed closely by Java, then Ruby). Its amazing to see what kind of technologies people are using to build the companies of tomorrow.

Find out more about it, at the Zeitgeist redux on the seedcamp blog.