Image via WikipediaExactly one year ago was Zemanta’s first public presentation. That took place in Kiberpipa, the topic was an announcement of our project Strip mine, and Andraz had that famous slideshow, where his email in footer changed from previous academic one, to new @zemanta adress.

This marked an important change in lifestyles for all of us, and after a year, I am sure, that I don’t regret it. It’s been a very interesting ride so far.
We started in a garage of course. Ok, to be honest, it was actually a room in my appartenment, with a desk made of a closet sides and the first server humming in the storage room. We moved from there in September, directly to ‘luxurious’ house in Kensal Green and at the same time expanding team to 7 people. We had to multithread the team at that point, having Gasper managing Ljubljana office, while we were hacking London.

Looking back I mainly find good memories of crazy adventures, like building the final prototype that got us to Seedcamp in two nights of six guys hacking. Or squating in Gherkin offices. Or assembling the second server on the floor of a local shop in Kensal Green. Or smuggling the server and the chef’s knife wearing top hats from London via Paris back to Ljubljana in December. Or using team work on California parties to secure precious minutes from journalists in the middle of the night.
There were some frustrations, like the ‘no internet’ crisis, and also, the last morning of Seedcamp, when we were sure we blew it, was probably the worst feeling ever. We survived and with each new experience we grew stronger.

We evolved from an enterprise, tailor-made product to generalized web service, from a two-men band to a 15 people venture-funded company, from Slovenia to the World. It’s not anything near final success yet, but it’s a nice start.

I’d like to thank everyone who was part of this process. Friends, families, patient girlfriends, co-workers, TFL, Seedcamp mentors, Hellerehrman, Eden Ventures, T.A.G., Saul, Scott, Eric, Erica, and everybody else we’ve met in this time.

Image via WikipediaYesterday Cyberpipe hosted Richard Rutter from Clearleft who had presentation on web typographies. Recently a journalist from one of the big press agencies was embedded with Zemanta while he tried to find out if Slovenia might be brewing new wave of web companies to take over the world. Today there is presentation at Jozef Stefan Institute by Neel Sundaresan, director of eBay Research Labs. Cycorp decided to open their European HQ in Ljubljana. There are weekly web crowd meetings “Spletne urice” plus endless stream of entrepreneurial events. Something is up, but it is hard to point out what.

Last week web.start conference albeit happening in Croatia was occupied by Slovenians. Not to mention there are rumors floating around that another Slovenian startup called Noovo is launching next week.

When talking with smart people from the States and Western Europe there is a sentiment brewing that next big thing might come from New Europe. Saying Ljubljana is becoming web-capital of Europe is naturally exaggerating by a wide margin, but the region as a whole might be hiding some very precious pearls.