If you’ve heard about Berlin, Germany a lot recently, it’s because it’s a growing technology hub in Europe that many people are calling Europe’s next “Silicon Valley.” There are a lot of web companies opening offices all over Berlin, like eBay, Nokia, and Wikimedia, and they already have their own “Facebook,” the social networking site studiVZ.

Berlin is certainly Germany’s internet capital and quickly rising in the ranks as Europe’s top technology-oriented city (behind only London and Paris).

In order to attract American and global companies to Germany, Berlin Partner, a business development agency, partners with companies looking to expand to Europe and offers them reimbursement grants of up to 50% of a company’s investment.

At New York City’s Web 2.0 Expo I sat down with Alexander Kolpin of Berlin Partner to talk about why Berlin is so hot, what exactly is going on in Europe in terms of social media, and how Berlin plans to host their own European Web 2.0 Expo in October. You can watch via the embed below or download the MP4.

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Residential real estate receives an enormous amount of attention from sites around the Web. Commercial, a bit less so. And according to Rofo, a service launched earlier this year as a beta and now officially unveiled, commercial space sized just right for the entrepreneurial, small business set is more treacherous still. Particularly in the fast-paced San Francisco Bay Area and cities beyond.

Established by two former commercial real estate brokers, Alan Bernier and Garrett Krueger, Rofo is said to catalogue some 6,000+ spaces in California’s central fixation for the startup world, all for the purposes of finding locations with square-footage that more or less encapsulates that very demographic of business. And not only does it publish listings, it cuts out the need for users to monitor posts with space needs notifications. Once items come across your account inbox, you can send property managers requests for showings, conduct Q&A sessions with users, and even publish reviews and directions for fellow users to consider when searching for space and ruminating needs.

Most everything is well drawn within Rofo’s various quarters. There’s nothing scattered or overwhelming about the place. And as far as expert- and user-generated tips and content, posts are concise and worth browsing, whether you’re involved with pre-lease or post-lease planning and habitation. Also, if for whatever reason you’d like to gauge the average price for a space in a particular city within the Rofo database, you can input your specifications into the Rofometer (embeddable on any webpage) to find out if you’re getting it too easy, too hard, or somewhere in the middle.

As a search utility alone Rofo is quite good, if unfortunately very selective in regional focus. But you can argue that being thorough in one area is better than stretching thin across a vast swath of land. And chances are Rofo will grow with time as usage demands it. As a comprehensive source for location spotting and the give-some-take-some that the advice forum provides, it’s even better.

Source:Mashable!

Last week, Web 2.0 Expo NY brought out a lot of different companies and social networking platforms to debut their latest endeavors, and among the big players this year was the very popular site, Hi5. Very popular, that is, internationally.

Ever since Hi5 debuted in 2003, it has garnered millions of users in countries like Japan and Mexico, making it the third most popular social networking website worldwide after Facebook and MySpace, but only 83rd in the U.S.

I met up with Mike Trigg, head of marketing for Hi5, during the week of the conference to talk about what makes Hi5 so different from Facebook and MySpace and what the network’s plans are to win over Americans.

A special thanks to Sony for letting me use their amazing TG1 HD camcorder, without which none of the Web 2.0 Expo videos would have been possible. You can watch the video via the embed below or download the MP4 directly.

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