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Early stage startups in Europe will be the primary beneficiaries of a new €6 million seed fund just announced by Berlin-based Team Europe Ventures. In the past we've talked about Europe's entrepreneurial woes, most notably a dearth of seed funding due to having a culture largely averse to taking risks financially. This new fund is a good step towards changing that trend and keeping more startups from looking for funding elsewhere.

Entrepreneurship in Europe has a problem. A lot of their talent is "crossing the pond" to increase their chances of finding early-stage funding. A lot of venture firms in Europe tend to play the safer hands that they are dealt, investing in proven companies rather than new startups looking for seed funding. Though organizations like Seedcamp are doing what they can to reverse this trend, incubators in the U.S. like TechStars are still seeing an increase of international applications, many likely from Europe.

A new study commissioned by the European Union has finally proven what many have suspected all along: internet users don't want to pay for content. Period. And nothing is going to change their minds. The report finds, in a surprising contradiction to what industry executives have been spouting for ages, consumers' behavior has nothing to do with the peer-to-peer technology (P2P) that has given rise to all-you-can-eat systems for free downloads of copyrighted content. In fact, many people claim that they wouldn't pay for online content even if all other free options were taken away. This finding has dramatic implications for the future of business, and not just in the entertainment industry, either. If people won't pay for content, how will companies survive?

Swedish music service Spotify just announced their application's submission to the iPhone App store. Similar to the company's Android application, the iPhone app gives users the ability to search for tracks and create music streaming play lists. One key feature of both applications is that it allows users to cache music for offline play. With this sort of functionality, it will be interesting to see if Spotify's app will be taken as a threat to iTunes. If this were the case, then Spotify's little green iPhone app might never make its way onto the device.

The following is one in a series of guest posts by venture capitalists that we're running on ReadWriteStart. This one is by Paul Jozefak, a VC based in Hamburg, Germany, who used to run SAP AG's European venture activities and is now a managing partner at Neuhaus Partners. The original post can be found on his blog.

One way or another, I've addressed the question of "Where is the Silicon Valley of Europe" a hundred times, be it in interviews, in blog posts, on Twitter, or on panels. Ultimately, there isn't really a "Valley" in Europe, only some places kind of like it. If you want my ideas on that, I have other posts on the topic.

Today, we spoke with Fred Destin, a Partner at Atlas Ventures in London. This interview has some great perspective on the success stories in Europe's e-commerce and video markets. Here are the basics of Atlas Ventures:

For our third VC Interview, we decided to check out the early-stage VC scene in Europe. So we spoke with Paul Jozefak, Partner at NeuHaus in Germany. We found him via his excellent blog. We wanted his perspective on how the venture scene in Europe differs from the one in the US. We also wanted to see if the surprisingly healthy early-stage financing market that we are seeing in the US is echoing in Europe.