When it comes to Internet technologies, it looks as if Europe’s excellent at inventing, but sucks at innovating (ie bringing inventions to the masses). Here’s a little compilation drawn from recent readings (mainly this week’s issue of Business Week) and thoughts.

• It wasn’t Dick Cheney who invented the Internet browsing interface World Wide Web (www), but it was made up in Geneva and appropriated later by Silicon Valley.

• Digital music standard MP3 was invented in Germany, within one of the 56 research partner institutes of the Fraunhofer Society. The Germans invented MP3, but the Americans reaped the benefits of this invention through the Bell Labs (Silicon Valley again) and later Alcatel-Lucent who now owns the Bell Labs’ intellectual property.

• Some of the hottest services going through the Internet are European: Skype was born in Luxembourg, from a truly European team, and bought by eBay in 2005 for a mere bn$2,6; MySQL, an easy-to-use and extremely well packaged database, was born in Sweden; FON is a Spanish initiative aiming at enhancing the use of wireless hotspots through a community of people willing to share their resources; Last.fm has put together social networking and music to become a leader; and the list could be countless…However, it’s no surprise if Skype was bought by eBay, and Kelkoo by Yahoo!

Europe has a hard time building sustainable world leaders on the Internet as well as making its inventions go from the research lab to the mass market. Can you think of a reason why all leading Internet companies are American and not Asian (yet) or European (yet)?

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Talented New York would-be fashion entrepreneur Linda Pratka, alongside with her business partner Alexandra Dumitru, need your vote to win the Microsoft IdeaWins competition!

The winners will be announced on March 13th, and will be appear on The Today Show on NBC. I never met Alexandra, but Linda and Jen (the girl who produced the video, working for MTV in New York) are really bright, nice and cool girls – just like Cheryl thanks to whom I met with them. Actually, Cheryl may be sort of less nice since she spammed me a dozen times in 3 days to remind  her endless closet of friends about the contest…But she’s the one actually pulling strings on who’s getting to meet who in this business, so shhh

Cheryl also told me she would arrange a date with Alexandra, Linda and Jen to all men who would’ve cast a vote in favor of Endless Closet, the name of their entrepreneurial idea, in case they win the competition…First to vote, first served!

Endless Closet is a new fashionable clothe rental service. I encourage you to watch the video to get to know more about the actual business. Watch the video and vote here for Alexandra Dumitru’s project.

For those not living in New York, a couple months ago, I came across a new e-Commerce fashion rental start-up based in Paris: Dorian Wear. Congrats to Annabelle and her very cool team for the good work.

What about a cross-border merger between the 2 companies to form the first and leading global fashion rental service?

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