As more startups use independent consultants (programmers, web developers, marketing, sales people, freelance writers) who are based in other countries, they need to find a way to pay them in various currencies without those nasty bank charges. This is where Paypal comes in.

Paypal does not charge you a fee to make a payment to a contractor even if he or she lives in another country. Banks, on the other hand, charge hefty fees, sometimes as high as 15 EUR per transaction.

The other nifty feature about Paypal is that if you  deliver services to clients, you can easily create an invoice using Paypal and get paid that way. Paypal tracks unpaid invoices and sends you a reminder.  The record-keeping functions of Paypal make it easy for those who pay and get paid to keep track of their finances.

I was having breakfast yesterday with Alexander Casassovici, a young entrepreneur from Paris, who was in Amsterdam for the Nextweb conference. Alexander’s startup Wavestorm develops technology for the “Internet of Things” — machine to machine communications via Wi-Fi. We were talking about how this tech “bubble” is different from the first one in the late 1990s in that there are a lot of European entrepreneurs who are NOT moving to Silicon Valley. Back in the 1990s, a lot of non-American startups felt they had to move. Not so today. I believe there are 2 reasons:

- the high cost of living and working in Silicon Valley;

- this is a different generation of entrepreneurs who prefer to live and work in places like Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, Hongkong.

Alexander told me he’d rather live in Asia than in Silicon Valley. I’ve met a lot of other people who spend months working in places like Buenos Aires. More exotic than the Valley.

Another big change is that you can get good programmers and web developers in Eastern Europe and Asia, so you don’t necessarily have to go to California.

If you want to follow European startups, go to Alarm: Clock Euro.

Here are the first eight chapters on turning your blog into a media company. They are based on my experience as the founder of Muniwireless.com.

Part 1: birth of Muniwireless

Part 2: first year of Muniwireless

Part 3: finding a business model

Part 4: the Ninth Circle of Hell

Part 5: becoming a niche online publisher

Part 6: miracles happen in laundromats

Part 7: getting readers, rising high on search engines

Part 8: Microcast tells how to grow a blog into a media company

I will be posting more in the next few weeks. If you have questions, please post in the comments section below.

I came across the Open Coffee Club for entrepreneurs, which is located in cities around the world. Local entrepreneurs create clubs on Meetup.com or Upcoming.org and meet.

When I saw this mentioned on Read Write Web, I thought, “The bubble is back. This looks like First Tuesday.” But I will be going to our local coffee club in Amsterdam on Thursday and let you know if  indeed it’s First Tuesday brought back from the dead.