Today, Paris startup Cookening has opened up its “Airbnb for your kitchen” to the public, allowing anyone to taste the fine local cuisine of their neighbor or a local. Founded by CEO Cedric Giorgi (30€/meal to eat at his Paris apartment), CTO Sebastien Guignot(25€/meal) and CPO Julien Pelletier, the Paris startup has been in private alpha for six months, with 1500 registered users signed up so far. Now open to the public, Cookening will still be focusing on creating a superfluous number of hosts in the Paris region (want to eat with me?), but will be allowing international travelers to easily sign up for a meal.

Launching in Paris may have been one of the smartest moves for Cookening – founder Cedric Giorgi, who previously helped organize LeWeb, and spoke on a panel at SXSW last year, could have easily launched the company elsewhere, but Paris has a very strong collaborative economy culture, with companies like Airbnb seeing the French capital as a key location even today. The platform hopes to streamline interaction between hosts – whether professional cooks looking to create an intimate experience in their kitchen, or social eaters who wouldn’t mind sharing some pasta and a tarte aux pommes with friends – and visitors.

“The  purpose  of  Cookening  is  not  online,  it  is  off  the screen during a meal  with  real  people.  We’ve  thought  the  entire  user  experience  of  the  site  in  this direction.  Whether  the  feature  to  build  trust  between  hosts  and  guests,  the  table publication  system  or  the  payment  and  booking  process,  everything  has  been developed on Cookening so it is simple and intuitive to use for the end user. ”

-Julien Pelletier, CPO

Hosts can choose the price of their meal, the number of people allowed, as well as the time of the meal; much like Airbnb, the experience for each ‘restaurant’ page is about creating a personal relationship between the host and the visitor.

Underneath the hood, the payments system has been powered by MangoPay, the payments API released by Leetchi earlier this year. The company will be taking a 20% fee on top of what hosts will charge, which is a little higher than Airbnb or Blablacar’s 3-5% charge, but I’m sure this price will come down as the market grows. Cookening will be going up against competitors like Barcelona’s Social Eaters, which is a social network based around organizing food events in restaurants and public homes.

I’ve known Cedric for quite some time, and I am quite optimistic and curious to see how Cookening will evolve and grow. Equally, CTO Sebastien has been involved in several startups as well. Additionally, I find the idea quite novel, and may be testing it out myself in the future. So, what are you waiting for? Hop on and come share a meal!

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June 17th will see the first Uber B2B conference come to Berlin. Uber B2B seeks to bring together B2B software, web, IT and hardware entrepreneurs and executives from top mid-sized / multinational corporations to collaborate, network and identify new opportunities to work together. For startups, there’s lots of opportunity to get in front of big companies and potential partners via networking, the startup pitch showdown (application deadline June 1st) and the ‘industry reverse pitch’ (more information this in a bit).

The organizers strongly believe that given the rapidly changing business landscape in Germany and Europe as a whole as well as a challenging economic environment, the only sustainable way forward is for all players in the B2B ecosystem to work in collaboration. This sentiment is best summed up by Dr. Henning Kagerman, former CEO of SAP and president of Acatech who speaks about the challenges in Germany which clearly apply to Europe as well:

“Germany faces major challenges that can only be solved by working together. The innovation and sustainabilty of Germany thrives on the dialogue between established industry, the Germany Mittelstand companies, and young entrepreneurial startups. Events such as those by Uber B2B help promote the potential of young entrepreneurial talent and accelterate the interaction between these disciplines and players”

The event will of course have a solid programme including in-depth workshops around topics such as negotiation, launching your startup, big data, etc. and panels focusing on everything from how to close deals to utilizing mergers and acquisitions to drive growth. Another main highight of this years events is a nice twist on the pitch compeition concept called the ‘Industy Reverse Pitch’. This pitch will put five mid-size and multinational companies in the hot seat this time as they will need to pitch attending startups on the partner opportunities they offer. So if you’re a B2B startup and are looking for partnership opportunities this is definitely not to be missed.

Finally and perhaps most importantly for startups is that there will be a Uber B2B startup showdown competition where selected startups will get the opportunity to pitch infront of 50+ investors, 300+ professionsal from industry, media, etc. Selected startups will be notified on June 7th and will participate in 2 pre-pitch rehearsals. Apply here by June 1st if you’d like to participate.

If you’d like to attend, they still have special rates available through May 31st for startups at only 100€, students & job seekers at 50€, and professionals (VCs, angels, mid-sized / big companies) at 500€.
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Event Details

Date: June 17, 2013

Location: The Kalkscheune, Johannisstraße 2  Berlin, Germany

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After last week’s very successful first edition, we are excited to announce the next Paris Founders Event, which will take place Tuesday June 25th at 7:30PM at Delaville Café. The event, a founders-only networking event with an open bar and open buffet of food, is brought to you with great thanks by Index Ventures, Schibsted, Ftopia, Optimizely, Paymill & MyJobCompany. We’ve also hooked up for this event with Snapcar, who will be providing all attendees 15€ discount on their private chauffeur platform (you can download the app here), and, of course, thanks to Eventbrite for being our exclusive ticketing partner!

But enough with the sponsor mumbo jumbo: the real question is “Why should I attend?”

The Paris Founders Event has been created for two reasons:

1. We wanted to create a place where real founders of product-oriented tech companies could share their experiences, discuss their problems, and get feedback from the only other people who have gone through the same issues they have – other founders.
2. We wanted to create an outlet for founders outside of France to be able to meet the heart of the Paris ecosystem – its founders. This event isn’t the “Founders Event for Paris startups” – it’s an event for founders that takes place in Paris. If you’re a founder planning on coming out to Paris for business, pleasure, or otherwise – I highly recommend you schedule your trip around one of our Paris Founder Events – we’ll be doing them every month.
   

We’ve welcomed limited, hand-selected sponsors to support the event because we recognize that founders have a need to meet other players in the ecosystem, who can help them open doors and provide services for them. If you’d like to support our Paris Founders Event or any of our other events, shoot us an email at sponsorship@rudebaguette.com.

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Female-friendly social network Pinterest already announced earlier this month that after their big push in the UK, France was up next – according to this job post that appeared this week, “next” is now. The standard Country Manager position, Pinterest is looking for someone with a strong social media background and the ability to research the market, localize the product, and built a team from the ground up. However, what they don’t tell you on the job listing, is that the Pinterest team is coming to Paris this month.

Speaking with Sara Martineau, French community coordinator based out of San Francisco, she tells me that, after having launched the “Pin it Forward” campaign in the UK, “We plan to do the same for France in just about a month.” In order to get a better feel for the market, “The team going to Paris to meet bloggers will include [Sara], and four other members of the Community Team.”

It seems that Pinterest is quick to roll out its expansion in Paris, and so this job may not stay open for a long time – the team will be out in Paris from late May through early June, so if you’re looking to get an interview in, now may be the time.

Meanwhile, it seems that fellow social network Twitter has been delayed in its presence in France. While some say there are already up to four team members working at the Twitter France office, an official country manager of France has yet to be announced – perhaps they’re waiting for some of the French tech drama to subside. Hopefully Pinterest’s entrance into the market will be more welcome – they have yet to be pursued by the French government for tax evasion, but all things in due time.

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Comscore released their monthly report on web traffic and video property traffic from April 2013, and it seems that there is quite a bit of fluctuation in the video traffic space. Dailymotion’s month got even more rough – fresh off a severe rejection by Yahoo who in-turn acquired Tumblr (rebound acquisition much?) – the French video site lost its #2 slot (the #1 slot is held by Google, of course) to Videology, and now sits at #3 with a nearly stable amount of traffic compared to March. Another surprising change in the Video property space was French startup StickAdsTV, who last week announced a 3.1M round of funding led by Ventech as well as previous investor ISAI.

I sat down with Ventech Analyst Audrey Soussan yesterday, and she seemed quite excited about the recent wave of investments that Ventech has seen (they also announced a Series C investment in Bonitasoft). According to Soussan, Ventech as up against at least one international VC who was interested in the investment, and with this latest ComScore report, I can see why: StickyAds landed at #9 with 9.2B page views in April 2013, outranking eBuzzing, Vimeo, TF1 & many more. StickyAds recently launched their video ad exchange and have partnered up with several leading video web content producers – TV stations, etc. – to provide a place for video ad producers to bid for pre-roll spots.

Soussan told me during our lunch that, while Google Ad Exchange has been quite normalized, the video ad market is still quite nascent, and while some will be content to have their Car Commercial pre-roll on YouTube before a video of a 13 year old kid skateboarding, some ad producers would like a little more targetting and a bit more qualified of an audience, which is where StickyAdsTV comes in. In addition, the company has been working on innovative technology, Soussan tells me, that allow pre-roll video ads to be synced up with TV ads, so that TV ad producers can catch the audience that is watching TF1 replay TV, for example, on their Tablet, at the same hour they run their TV ad on the TF1 station.

It is clear that 2013 may not be the year of Mobile, but it is definitely the year of Video.

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