They include such figures as Pierre Kosciusko-Morizet of Priceminister, Marc Simoncini of Meetic, and Xavier Niel of Iliad, who launched Free, a telecoms firm, from nothing to take on the established giants.

ECONOMIST: France

Last December ten times as many came and on the stage were plenty of Europeans, including Marten Mickos of MySQL, a maker of databases now owned by Oracle, a software giant, Marc Simoncini, founder of meetic.com, Europe's largest dating site, and Niklas Zennstrom, who started Skype.

ECONOMIST: Europe's tech entrepreneurs