No, Portuguese startups are not only focusing on the national market but also heading to global success! Celso Pinto and Vitor Domingos are just about developing the next killer application and setting it up to an own global mobile application network.

How would business look like if startups would act like rockbands? How would our world look like if companies would focus more on our dreams and how to realize them? That are ideas Henriette Weber figures out with her own company toothlesstiger. Lets learn with Henriette, how we can turn our startups and our companies to something more connected to our customers and our environment, so go ahead and watch the video.

OpenSpime.com, a Social Energy Meter, shows you the energy you are consuming to see how you could improve your energy and electricity spendings. You can set up goals with your friends on saving energy and share that in social networks like facebook. Developping smart objects which care for the environment, that is the aim of David Orban, co-founder of OpenSpime.com . He claims it an open source technology empowering individuals, corporations, and governments to better understand their environment, through the use of a new generation of location-aware sensor networks. The interview was shot during the SHIFT conference in wonderfull Bairo Alto of Lisbon, Portugal. And the funny people around are: Tara Hunt, Felix Petersen and Ton Zijlstra.

Bruno Pedro has been one of the first movers in Portugal working in the Internet business, having himself a background in web development, working for sapo.pt and being a serial entrepreneur. His new business idea is tarpipe.com, a social media publishing platform, which allows you with one single action to post everywhere complex posts with different types of content. For example the content of a post with text, photos and video, will be separately distributed to sites like flickr, youtube, twitter and at the end be put together again.

One advantage of starting up in a small country is that you can generated a big impact quit fast, as TheStarTracker.com did. This startup unifies the global Portuguese talent, providing a network for the Portuguese living abroad which are 5 Million people as a target group, consider that Portugal itself has around 10 Million inhabitants. Anyway the startup had the talent itself of catching very fast the interest of the Portuguese president and getting him involved.

Tara is going to publish a book in April 2009. It is all about the Whuffie Factor, explaining how the social capital will be the new and all defining curency. She was inspired by the the book "Down and out in the Magic Kingdom" by Cory Doctorow. At the shift conference in Lisbon, Portugal in the great Bairo Alto.

If you want to get an impression about the Portuguese startup scene and why it is just for idiots, you should watch the following interview with Sergio Veiga who works on a extreme sports portal called stream19.com. Stay tuned the next days for not missing the other interviews focusing Portuguese startups and interesting speakers of shift08.