Archive for December 2013
The “15-minute law”: Past, Present & Future
January 1st, 2014, it would seem as though the Taxi Commissions have won. The dreaded ’15-minute law’ will take effect, requiring smartphone chauffeur apps to wait 15 minutes after customers order a ride before picking them up, in order to — well, we can’t claim to understand what the intended ‘balanced’ result is meant to […]
Take Off Conference is back for its 2nd edition 30-31 January
Having launched a highly successful first edition in 2013, Take Off Conference is back and better than ever. As with last year’s edition, Take Off will again be held at Euratechnologies, Lille’s rising tech hub. Squarely focused on techies and digital innovators,Take-off seeks to bring together engineers, creators and technology managers to meet and learn […]
Eightly co-founder Andy Grignon “I’m addicted to creating Platforms”
Sitting in the Hotel Vendome bar with Andy Grignon, a man whose title ‘fuckchop’ at Apple comes second in awesome-ness only to his position as one of the original iPhone team members, the phrase ‘moving the needle’ comes up quite a lot. I met with Andy during LeWeb in December to discuss his most recent […]
Going public & Growing Up – inside Criteo HQ
Across from the Theatre de Paris, Criteo’s Paris headquarters sits just blocks from Google & Facebook, as well as fellow French successes Deezer & Dailymotion. After their successful IPO in October, the company has a wealth of cash that will likely be spent on M&A – the question on everybody’s mind, of course, is who […]
Why 2014 will be the year of Connected
Last year around this time I wrote that 2013 would be the year of “Passive.” The main reasoning I used to argue this point was the number of apps that I had encountered which needed me to commit to a certain level of activity in order to ‘learn’ about me. This past year, I can safely […]
3W Academy takes an alternative path to getting aspiring developers job-ready
Like many other markets, France struggles to have sufficient developer resource to meet demand. Over the course of 2012/2013 France’s unemployment agency Pole Emploi received 16k offers alone for the job of web developer, of which 75% of the roles were for full-time, permanent hires (ie the infamous CDI status). While most of these roles […]
Modeled after YC’s SAFE, AIR is the first legal convertible note in France
The convertible note is a staple of any healthy startup ecosystem. It allows business angels to invest in seed startup companies without getting bogged down on the particularities of the valuation, by applying the equity exchange to the investment on the next round, with a declared discount (15-25%) applied to previous investors on a investor-by-investor […]
BNP’s L’Atelier releases its ‘portrait’ of the French entrepreneur
L’Atelier, BNP’s technology and innovation tracking unit, recently conducted a comprehensive study in conjunction with TNS/Sofres on the motivations, aspirations and lifestyle of tech entrepreneurs in France. While the results will likely confirm the perceptions that many have of today’s tech entrepreneurs, there were some particularly interesting insights around their varying motivations in choosing to […]
Growing up Parisian – inside Airbnb Paris
It’s not easy for a Silicon Valley company to come to set up an office in France. The very thought of a foreign company making money off of French citizens gets under the skin of France’s finance minister, and the public discourse around multinational Internet companies has been quite negative in recent years. Airbnb remains […]
Appsfire announces its 2nd native mobile app ad: Ura Maki
Appsfire announced today the release of their second native mobile app ad format – Ura Maki – which they hope will revolutionize the mobile AdTech space and the way mobile users discover new apps. As is to be expected with Appsfire, who recently announced they would shift focus away from their B2C app discovery app […]