Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

From Sunday until Wednesday, Rainy Day will be blogging daily from the Digital, Life, Design conference in Munich. The event brings together "thought leaders from Europe, the Middle-East, America and Asia" and we (yes, we: Arianna Huffington, James Murdoch, Caterina Fake, Luc Besson, Sir Norman Foster, Marissa Mayer...) will be discussing "digital innovation, gaming, arts and science." Rainy Day is particularly interested in seeing if Europe's anaemic performance in the digital world can be improved to the point where the continent's innovators and entrepreneurs are at the forefront of Web 3.0 instead of at the rear of Web 2.0. Back in December, Loic Le Meur addressed that very point, saying:

"The successful European companies do not remain European and get acquired fast (Skype, Lastminute.com, Kelkoo, etc). I would like France and Europe to concentrate less on the past and more on the future, we need more people taking risks, we need more entrepreneurs, we need more business angels, more VCs, more M&As and more companies going public (even though it got easier in Europe than in the US). It is an entire sector of the economy which is being created, that could represent millions of job creations in Europe. Look at how many jobs just Google created in the US. Shimon Peres said at LeWeb3: 'Today a man can create an economic state of his own in a fair way,' he added, before pointing to Big G: 'Take the two young boys that created Google their budget is larger than that of any government in the Middle East — they didn't steal, they didn't chat — individual people are becoming creators of economies.' We need more of these individuals in Europe."

Let's see how many of them we can find at the weekend in Munich.