Silicon Berlin

What do these companies have in common?

(bought by Nokia in 2006)

(bought by Ebay)

Well, they are all in Berlin!

Berlin is one of the most vibrant places on earth where new web companies settle and thrive. Berlin attracts not only people from Germany but from all over the world. Especially English speakers are welcome in Berlin and find a lot of like-minded people here.

Investors are flocking to Berlin and almost every day or week we seen new start ups. Even the big players are coming now, as the recent press reports (sorry, mostly in German):

• NEUES GOOGLE-INSTITUT: Investoren sehen Berlin als nächstes Silicon Valley (Berliner Morgenpost 2011-10-26)
• Amazon kommt mit AWS nach Berlin (2011-11-10)
• STARTUP-METROPOLE UND SILICON VALLEY-PENDANT: Wann begann die Berlin-Euphorie? (2011-11-10)
• BERLIN - Europas Silicon Valley (DRadio Wissen 2011-11-11)
• Berlin: The birth place of the next Facebook? (techcrunch, 2011-10-24 in English)
  5 Gründe, warum aus Berlin das nächste Facebook kommt (t3n, German translation)
• Berlin ist das Silicon Valley Europas (Tagesspiegel 2011-10-20)
• Europe's Silicon Allee - Berlin on the Road to Becoming a Start-Up Mecca (SPIEGEL 2011-04-11 in English)
• Forget Silicon Valley (exberliner, 2011-11-16)

Also earlier reports mention Berlin as the European Silicon Valley:

• Why Berlin Needs To Become Europe’s Silicon Valley (2010-05-12) Scroll down and read the comments!
• Berlin ist die Start-up-Hauptstadt Deutschlands (2009-05-20)

Berlin also happens to have the most startup companies in Berlin, as deutsche-startups.de found out:

Source: Originally by deutsche-startups.de, now found on internetworld.de and frische-fische.de.
I was not able to determine about which year this statistics are, so take it for illustration.

Velocity Conference Linking Silicon Valley and Silicon Berlin

But the event that really links the Silicon Valley to Silicon Berlin is the Velocity Web Performance and Operations Conference, that leads the WebOps community in the Silicon Valley. In November 2012 the Velocity Europe came to Berlin for the first time with a great success both in numbers and quality content.

About 40% of the Velocity attendants where from Germany, we don't yet have a number on the participants from Berlin. The conference managed to bring the culture and feeling of the Silicon Valley to Berlin. I never met so many people from the various German communities at a single event as I did at the Velocity!

In my opinion the Velocity is an important step in linking Berlin to the Silicon Valley to support the development of a vibrant Web community in Berlin. I hope the next Velicity EU will be again in Berlin, everybody I talked to also thinks the same.

Update 2011-11-22: Added more links to Tagesspiegel and  techcrunch
Update 2011-12: Silicon Berlin bei ImmobilienScout24
Update 2012-02: See Silicon Berlin Update  and report about Silicon Berlin talk at Berlin Devops meetup.