Leweb 2009 - Startups

Publié le 19 décembre 2009 et mis à jour le 2 mai 2010 - 4 commentaires -

This is my late and last post cove­ring Leweb 2009. Like every other year (2006, 2007, 2008), I will make a roun­dup of the pre­sen­ting star­tups in the conference.

This year, star­tups didn’t have to pay to present, like in pre­vious years. As a result, the com­pe­ti­tion see­med ope­ned to more early stage com­pa­nies and it did show. Only two had already got some VC fun­ding and less than half had signi­fi­cant busi­ness angel back-up. There were fewer star­tups pre­sen­ting: 16 ins­tead of 30 last year.

The selec­tion inclu­ded many ecom­merce tools, various social net­work tools, and other stuff. Many of these had some pieces of “real time web”, mostly through connec­ting somew­hat with Twit­ter and the likes. In the social net­wor­king space, most of the inno­va­tions are about inte­gra­ting the various social net­wor­king plat­forms around. Many many star­tups want to play this game, but only a few may survive.

You can watch the pre­sen­ta­tion videos of the star­tups which are split in four ses­sions of one hour on UStream: one, two, three, four. A good pro­gress com­pa­red to last years of Leweb where these ses­sions were not recor­ded. Next year’s impro­ve­ments will consist in split­ting these videos by startups.

eCom­merce

In that cate­gory com­pe­ted three com­pa­nies hel­ping ecom­merce sites to be more effi­cient and three various e-something sites:

• Sto­ri­fic (France) is a web tool to help stores manage real-time com­mu­ni­ca­tion and cus­to­mer ser­vice through social net­works, Twit­ter and others. Is it a neces­sary inter­me­dia­tion? Can’t stores use Twit­ter directly? Busi­ness model is Fre­mium and white label based.
• Shutl (UK) is a web ser­vice to aggre­gate “same day” deli­very ser­vices com­pa­nies with e-retailer sites. At a cost that is equi­va­lent or even chea­per than stan­dard deli­very services.
• Liq­Pay (Ukrain) is a pay­ment solu­tion based on mobile num­ber to send cash to any­body. But not much infor­ma­tion on how it works, secu­rity, trust or bank rela­tion­ships. Can be posi­tio­ned as a Pay­Pal using phone num­ber ins­tead of userid+password. How safe is that? They are still already part­ne­ring with Visa. Their busi­ness model is to charge a tran­sac­tion based fee for each money transfer.
• Sokoz (France) is a real time reverse auc­tion sys­tem syn­chro­ni­zed with all clients. Auc­tions last 30 seconds and drive impulse pur­chase deci­sions. Right on point for this year’s web theme! It uses ins­tant mes­sa­ging and Twit­ter to warn users of new inter­es­ting sales. It’s star­ting as a btoc sys­tem but could be exten­ded to a btob sys­tem. Patent pen­ding process.
• Sports Pre­dic­tions (Den­mark) is a web site pro­vi­ding sta­tis­tics for sports sub­ject to bet­ting, star­ting with foot­ball. It improves the bet­ting pro­cess, but what if eve­ry­body starts to use it? Use sta­tis­tics to create the odds. Can be used to com­pare live TV games and live games to place real-time bets. Uses a lot of his­to­ri­cal data and pat­terns. Many bet­ting sites cur­rently show up in Europe are they are get­ting legit. Busi­ness model based on tran­sac­tion fees and white labels for book­ma­kers. Wants to go in the USA.

• Kukunu (UK) is a trip plan­ning site with hotels and sight­seeing recom­men­da­tions. With a tool to orga­nize ele­ments from a trip in an agenda, a recom­men­da­tion engine based on beha­vior during plan­ning pro­cess and inter­es­ting spot points around where you plan to be. The plat­form is open and social. Users can ask advice to their friends real-time through social net­works like Twit­ter. It lack tra­vel price opti­mi­za­tion at this point but could embed price rules after­wards. Busi­ness model is based on a clas­si­cal 6% com­mis­sion on boo­kings, mostly from hotels. It will have to address mobiles after they get some fun­ding. Will do spe­ci­fic SEM to gene­rate audience and some viral effect through social net­works. Quite a crow­ded mar­ket. They are loo­king to 600K€.

Social net­works

• Tiger­lily (France) is an appli­ca­tion that enables users to cus­to­mize and manage their Face­book pages with wid­gets. It sup­ports Flash ani­ma­tions and has seve­ral avai­lable wid­gets: video, text, image, Twit­ter, RS, music player, pod­cast and Fli­ckr pic­tures. It pro­vides various tools to drive traf­fic to your Face­book page such as a news­let­ter fea­ture to col­lect emails from friends and a contest fea­ture. It dis­plays sta­tis­tics to know what users are doing on your page. They already have Orange as a cus­to­mer and want to be the Euro­pean lea­ders of Face­book appli­ca­tion crea­tion. But Euro­pean expan­sion will be a big chal­lenge for them. They also want also to do consul­ting on com­mu­nity mana­ge­ment to get a direct rela­tion­ship with large cus­to­mers. Pro­duct or ser­vice? The eter­nal choice for a startup.

• Friend­Bin­der (UK) is an inte­gra­tor of social net­work to track what your friends are doing on these. It sup­ports Face­book, Twit­ter, You­tube, Fli­ckr, Digg, Deli­cious. Web site and mobile site with same fea­ture set. It includes loca­tion based friends acti­vity tra­cking. Friends can be orga­ni­zed but the pro­blem is your friends have to be in Friend­Bin­der so that they show in the friends list of the web site. So by default, after connec­ting to Twit­ter and Face­book, you have no friends in the appli­ca­tion user inter­face (see below). If a social net­work aggre­ga­tor requires you to rede­fine who your friends are, it becomes an end­less work! Their mone­ti­za­tion works through search ads and part­ner­ships, clas­si­cal, but will be hard to gene­rate break even for a while. How many social net­work aggre­ga­tors are com­pe­ting so far? Way too many. Many such tools also exist on mobiles such as Miyowa InTouch 5.

• Fit­ness­Kee­per (USA) runs Run­Kee­per, a mobile fit­ness tra­cker appli­ca­tion for the iPhone cou­pled with some web ser­vice conso­li­da­ting the rela­ted data. It tracks dis­tance, time, speed, pace, calo­ries bur­ned, ele­va­tion and path tra­ve­led on a map. What you record can be sto­red online and broad­cas­ted to your friends, such as through social net­works like Twit­ter. So, it’s mostly for jog­gers. The plat­form can pro­vide advice on when to do sports, how to do it, etc. It was in the top 10 iPhone appli­ca­tions for Time Maga­zine. The busi­ness model is fre­mium based, with a sub­scrip­tion reve­nue for a repor­ting solu­tion of indi­vi­dual data and other people’s data. The paid ver­sion was so far acqui­red by 10% of users. Not bad at all.
• Nyou­link Stribe (France) was the win­ner of this year’s Leweb star­tup contest. I already cove­red them in the Tra­ve­ling Geeks visit to the Paris Incu­ba­tor. Here they are, happy win­ners! A French star­tup win­ning at Leweb? Extra­or­di­nary? Not at all! French star­tups won 3 out of the last 4 Leweb star­tup com­pe­ti­tions (with Yoono and Goo­jet). Influen­ced by the jury that has usually at least one or two French guys? Hard to tell.

Text and search tools

• Men­de­ley (UK) is a (rich client) search mana­ge­ment tool for research papers which enables the crea­tion of a paper biblio­gra­phy and pro­vide some recom­men­da­tion on rela­ted papers. Win­ner of the Tech­Crunch Europe event Plugg in March 2009.
• The Hyper­words Com­pany (UK) deve­lops a brow­ser add-on that improves the way you search on the web and adds inline insert of text while you edit it. A Fire­fox add-on that will be hard to monetize.
• Wordy (Den­mark), an online ser­vice to copy-edit your English text for gram­mar, spel­ling, struc­ture and punc­tua­tion. Done by real people, cer­tainly offshore.

Col­la­bo­ra­tion tools

• task.ly (Rus­sia) is a web based task mana­ge­ment connec­ted to other popu­lar web ser­vices and avai­lable on web and mobiles. With easy task input and seman­tic ana­ly­sis to fetch docu­ments rele­vant to com­plete the task. Fre­mium based busi­ness model for $4 a month. A nice to have solu­tion. Not sure it’ll shake the web.

Deve­lop­ment and infrastructure

• Cloud­Split (Ire­land) offers real time views and gra­phics on what is hap­pe­ning on your Ama­zon, Azure or any other grid from a cost pers­pec­tive. It helps iden­tify opti­mi­za­tion oppor­tu­ni­ties for your cloud code. Can help assess the cost/performance ratios of various cloud com­pu­ting plat­forms. $10 a month per EC2 ins­tance. They are sear­ching for £2m to set up busi­ness in the Sili­con Val­ley. Star­tup did present at Tech­Crunch 50 2009. It looks like this com­pany was built from the ground up for an “exit”…
• Super­feedr (USA) connects web sites toge­ther in real-time. It’s an API-only BtoB ser­vice based on web stan­dards. So, not a consu­mer tool. The idea is to aggre­gate RSS feeds from sites and push content real time to other sites. Sort of Wikio APIs? It also handles feeds which have no APIs and pro­vides traf­fic ana­ly­tics. Their busi­ness model is to share (ads?) reve­nues with news sites.

I’m a bit sur­pri­sed by the choice of some of these star­tups for which the busi­ness out­look seems at best gloomy. Many pre­sen­ters loo­ked like being very stres­sed and lacking enthu­siasm. And these com­pa­nies where selec­ted out of a pool of seve­ral hun­dred can­di­dates from all over Europe and the USA…

So, this ends Leweb’s cove­rage for this blog. Loic and Géral­dine has put the bar quite high for next year! But they still have inter­es­ting room to fur­ther improve the qua­lity of the event. Par­ti­cu­larly to make it even more lively and more inter­ac­tive with the audience (par­ti­cu­larly for those wat­ching in video strea­ming mode).

Now, it’s time for some family mee­tings for Christ­mas / New Year. My next big report is the hea­viest of all: my visit report from the Consu­mer Elec­tro­nics Show in Las Vegas (Jan 7-10th 2010). It will show up some­time around January 21th 2010.

Publié le 19 décembre 2009 Post de Olivier Ezratty | Internet, Logiciels, Post in English, RSS, Startups, Traveling Geeks | 4 commentaires