Archive for July 2012
Rude VC: Summertime reading for Entrepreneurs on Holidays
Today, the last day of July, represents a crossroads of vacation periods. Northern Europeans are largely finished with their summer holidays, while the Dutch and Belgians are just winding theirs down. Italy is preparing to shut down for the next month. And here in France, we’re still ramping up too. In the vacation spirit, here’s […]
Gilles Babinet: Entrepreneur, Investor, Politician
In one of the first conferences I attended in France, Failcon France, I got the opportunity to see an interview with Gilles Babinet. At the time, I didn’t know Xavier Niel from Professor Xavier, let alone who Gilles Babinet was, but whenever an entrepreneur-turned investor gives you an account of his experiences & thoughts, you […]
German Carpooling.com plans US launch, but is the hearth safe?
Yesterday, TechCrunch announced that the German Carpooling.com, a ridesharing marketplace, raised $10M to launch in the US — this is about as far as I can get into the article giving full disclosure that I am a HUGE fan of BlaBlaCar, the France-based competitor who raised $10M to spread across Europe earlier this year. Not only was […]
AppAnnie Appstore Economy report impact on France
Earlier this week, the Seattle conference Casual Connect welcomed AppAnnie, the AppStore analytics & intelligence service, as they spoke about the appstore economy. Primarily focusing on the iOS and Google Play, App Annie showed off their data about the two appstores, mainly focusing on revenue & downloads by country. While AppAnnie guarded most of its […]
Smart Address Book startup Kwaga purchases BoxCar
This afternoon, French startup Kwaga, creator of smart address book service WriteThat.Name, announced its acquisition of New York-based startup BoxCar for an undisclosed amount. Founded in June 2009, BoxCar’s push notification applications for iPhone received $150K seed round from the Paris-based Kima Ventures this past March. In the announcement, Kwaga CEO Philippe Laval stated that the […]
Dandybox: a review of their first box for men!
One of the (small) perks of being a journalist is getting free stuff. When I interviewed Pierre Entremont, one of the co-founders of Dandybox, he only had an empty box to show (which he duly did, and even posed with it!), and he talked about the contents of the box.But he promised me a free […]
Sharypic – The HackFWD event photo sharing tool
I caught up with Sharypic co-founder Francois-Joseph “FJ” Grimault at one of the “Paris Incubateurs” buildings to talk about his event photo-sharing tool Their office – Paris Incubateurs The official name of the building is “Incubateur de Paris Région Innovation Nord-Express”, and it’s one of six that the City of Paris owns and operates, and it is quite […]
Ykone's Fashion Event FLOW is LeWeb for Fashion
Nobody would argue that the fashion business was late in opening up to social media. Iconic designers locked the doors as long as they could, considering themselves closer to god than to their clients. Then the social fashion revolution happened through an uncountable number of fashion blogs that popped-up across the globe – many in […]
Rude VC: Google's insidious plot with Yahoo!
Anyone reading the tech press last week couldn’t avoid the gushing over Marissa Mayer’s appointment to become CEO of Yahoo!. Google’s first female engineer and the brains behind the elegantly simple white search home page, the 37-year old Mayer will face a tremendous new challenge in taking the helm of the ailing internet company. Whether she will […]
Kobojo Co-founder: "Social = Mobile"
Interview conducted with Trista Bridges. I met with Franck Tetzlaff, CEO and co-founder of Kobojo, France’s 2nd larget social games publisher, to ask him about Kobojo’s vision for the year to come. It is a clear and hungry one. Franck Tetzlaff believes that social games and mobile games are fast becoming one and the same thing. […]