The other day, I was reminded of how ignorant some cocky Silicon Valley aficionados can be when it comes to the rest of the world, when one of our posts hit Hacker News and promptly garnered a comment to the tune of 'seriously, does Europe have any tech companies other than Skype and maybe Spotify? I can't name any others lol.'

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It was amusing at first, because there are of course many more, and perhaps this person was simply trolling. Besides, many in Silicon Valley and other places around the world are well aware that there are plenty of excellent and fast-growing tech companies coming out of Europe. Being able to name but two is a testament of one's stupidity, at best.

The more I thought about it, though, the more I figured it was part of our mission here at Tech.eu to give people some insights about what's happening here in Europe.

We're not looking to become uncritical cheerleaders, and we'll be the first to point out that the European technology industry has many crosses to bear and mountains left to climb, but we would like to set the record straight and hopefully open some eyes here and there.

While it's most definitely true that Europe has been unable to produce many global tech behemoths the size of SAP, and that you'll have to look elsewhere to find the companies owning the major platforms and networks (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), we'll be happy to challenge any assumptions you may have. Just so that next time someone says he or she can't name more interesting tech companies in Europe than there are fingers on their hands, you have somewhere to direct them to.

We'll even do you a favour and leave out most of the publicly-listed European tech giants like Yandex (Russia), Nokia (Finland), Opera Software (Norway), Mail.ru (Russia), Criteo (France), Ericsson (Sweden), StoneSoft (Finland - now part of McAfee), AVG Technologies (Czech Republic / The Netherlands), bwin.party (Gibraltar/UK) and F-Secure (Finland). Let's pretend they don't count.

Playtime in Europe

So you've heard of Spotify. Well, at least that's a start. What about music streaming rival Deezer (France), which may or not become available in the United States next year but has meanwhile managed to attract over 12 million users - 5 million of which are paid subscribers?

Or what about SoundCloud (Germany), the increasingly popular service for sharing all things audio, with more than 200 million users? Or Songkick (UK), which lets millions of people track their favourite bands and artists, and provides them with personalized news about live music events?

Or maybe you're one of the 400 million+ people around the world who've used Shazam (UK) to tag songs heard you've on the radio or television? Maybe you discovered a ton of new music on Last.fm (UK), or moved on to much younger, fresher services for that purpose, to places like Rushmore.fm (UK), Soundwave (Ireland), 3Plet (Estonia/Russia), Soundrop (Norway), or Mixcloud (UK).

Perhaps you're more into games, though. That's cool.

Are you a Minecraft fan? You can thank indie video game developer Mojang (Sweden) for that one.

Or do you prefer playing games on Facebook, your tablet or smartphone? Then you may have heard of Angry Birds, made by Rovio (Finland); or Candy Crush Saga, made by King (Sweden); or Diamond Dash, made by Wooga (Germany); or Clash Of Clans, made by Supercell (Finland); or Cut The Rope, made by Zeptolab (Russia/UK); or Dragon City, made by Social Point (Spain); or Total Domination, made by Plarium (Israel); or Criminal Case, made by Pretty Simple Games (France); or Rummi Plus, made by Peak Games (Turkey); or Top Eleven, made by Nordeus (Serbia); or Talking Tom, made by Outfit7 (Slovenia/Cyprus); or Subway Surfers, made by Kiloo (Denmark); or ..

To wit, the list goes on and on, and these aren't companies mucking about somewhere in the margins: they are some of the most successful developers on the Facebook platform, and among the makers of the highest-grossing games on the iOS App Store and Google Play.

And then there are the online betting, gambling and social casino games companies in Europe, many of which are growing like crazy. It would be nearly impossible to list all of them, but take a look at Betfair, Plumbee (UK), Akamon (Spain), Betable (UK) and Ongame (Gibraltar) for starters.

And let's not forget Mind Candy (UK), whose Moshi Monsters world has attracted more than 80 million registered users (and the company's just getting started when it comes to entertainment).

But perhaps you're more into video. Well, then meet Dailymotion (France), which attracted over 112 million unique monthly visitors and served more than 2,5 billion videos views worldwide last time it shared statistics (nearly a year ago). It's no YouTube, but it's nothing to sneeze at, either.

Up next: keep an eye on Voddler (Sweden), Streamnation (Luxembourg) and Magine (Sweden), just to name a few interesting companies in the media consumption and cataloguing space.

It's not just fun and games

Setting aside entertainment, let's take a look at what Europe has to offer on the business front. Que es tener una poker face.

In the enterprise file sharing and team collaboration space, there's Huddle (UK), which has over 100,000 organizations using its software today, and its lesser-known but fast-growing rivals Teambox (Spain) and Flowdock (Finland), while Podio (Denmark) continues to grow under Citrix's wings.

Then there are product management tools like Blossom (UK) and Readdle (Ukraine), great software that helps your organize your life like 6Wunderkinder (Germany) and Any.do (Israel), services that lets your organize and communicate within groups, such as GroupSpaces (UK), and solutions for connecting and integrating business-oriented applications like CloudWork.

There are applications like Datahug (Ireland), which helps people inside organizations better visualize and leverage relationships, and cool tools like Traity (Spain) that helps people measure and share their reputation. Apps like doo (Germany) let people find and access documents across platforms.

There are website-building service providers used by millions of businesses and people every month, such as Wix (Israel), which recently went public, and Jimdo (Germany) which has managed to compete against them and a host of other rivals with a mere $500,000 in funding.

There's also InvisibleCRM (Ukraine), an enterprise application integrator that has designed and delivered solutions for Salesforce, Oracle, NetSuite, EMC Documentum and many more.

Riding the waves

Let's look at 3D printing, one of the major tech trends of the hour, and you'll find companies like Materialise (Belgium - see our profile), iMakr (UK), 3D Hubs (The Netherlands), GrabCAD (Estonia) and Leapfrog (The Netherlands). This is anything but anecdotal, by the way - some reports in fact predict that Europe could become the world leader in 3D printing by 2020.

That other trend, connecting everything to the cloud? If you're interested, you're well-advised to keep track of companies like Option (Belgium), Gemalto (The Netherlands) and startups like Tado (Germany), Cloud Your Car (Poland), BERG Cloud (

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