With the Traveling Geeks @ Cedexis and Parrot

Publié le 13 décembre 2009 et mis à jour le 2 mai 2010 - Un commentaire -

We are near the end of my report of the Tra­ve­ling Geeks in Paris before Leweb. One star­tup and one mid-sized company.

Cedexis @ Club Melcion

We met Julien Cou­lon, the foun­der of Cedexis, a for­mer busi­ness deve­lo­per at Akamai.

The com­pany pro­vides a Content Deli­very Net­works opti­mi­zing ser­vice, iden­ti­fying the ones with the best per­for­mance to opti­mize the traf­fic and qua­lity of ser­vice of your web site. It pro­vides both ana­ly­tic tools to iden­tify the best ser­vices and pro­vide reports to both web sites and CDN ser­vices, and an auto­ma­tic swit­ching engine to select the right ones at each and every moment. CDN per­for­mance can always change and is not pre­dic­table, thus the need for a real time opti­mi­za­tion solution.

I won’t go into more tech­ni­cal details but rather com­ment how this star­tup is being crea­ted an run. Some weird or uncon­ven­tio­nal practices:

• A simple one sta­tic page web site while in beta. They run mostly in stealth mode. Not the Scoble way, defi­ni­ti­vely (he was there in the mee­ting). It may make sense given the btob nature of the busi­ness. Ano­ther play­book used more in Geof­frey Moore’s turf, in “Inside the Tor­nado”: first, satisfy a nar­row num­ber of cus­to­mers in a very seg­men­ted mar­ket, then expand.
• The ser­vice pri­cing is based on the savings made by web sites with opti­mi­zing CDN usage. Inter­es­ting to cap­ture new cus­to­mers, but will it scale after­wards when/if the tech­no­logy becomes a commodity?
• No funds rai­sed, fol­lo­wing the recom­men­da­tion of Mel­cion, Chas­sagne & Cie. We hear many such advices here from people who want to keep control of their equity and com­pany fate. Makes sense if the com­pany growth can be self-funded, which may be the case in btob mar­kets. Ink.com lis­ted the 500 fas­test gro­wing US com­pa­nies and very few have VCs. Their ave­rage fun­ding is 7500€. But they may have to change gear as they grow inter­na­tio­nally. Exe­cu­tion speed requires some exter­nal fun­ding and equity sha­ring, par­ti­cu­larly in highly com­pe­ti­tive markets.
• A French foun­der with an Ame­ri­can team with about 4 deve­lo­pers in the US, inclu­ding for­mer DNS spe­cia­lists from Cisco, and one Ame­ri­can deve­lo­per based in Thai­land. They also have a US part­ner. This is rela­ted to the net­work Julien Cou­lon has deve­lo­ped before crea­ting Cedexis, par­ti­cu­larly when wor­king at Akamai.
• They have already 35 accounts in France (since beta laun­ched in August), mostly media sites, inclu­ding the new site of Carla Bruni as a cus­to­mer. Next mar­ket to tar­get: the US, with the top 1000 sites.

They are coa­ched by Mel­cion, Chas­sagne & Cie, a stra­te­gic consul­ting com­pany hel­ping star­tups who are deter­mi­ned to grow inter­na­tio­nally. They have 7 part­ners inclu­ding 3 based in the US (in the Sili­con Val­ley, Bos­ton and Chi­cago) and 4 in France. Par­rot is one of their cus­to­mers. We were wel­co­med at the “Club Mel­cion”, a faci­lity and mee­ting room ope­ned to their cus­to­mers, for mee­tings and semi­nars. Their reve­nue model is based on a fixed yearly fee. They are not fund raisers.

The com­pany also publi­shed a book (so far in French) “Hors piste” that tells the com­po­site story of suc­cess­ful entre­pre­neurs. They use it as their mar­ke­ting tool.

Par­rot

We visi­ted the HQ of this French com­pany that is not any­more a star­tup. They felt the heat with the cur­rent reces­sion affec­ting all hard­ware ven­dors (-32% reve­nue in H1 2009 vs 2008) but are still solid. It’s a $180m+ com­pany employing 350 people and sel­ling its wire­less pro­ducts all over the world.

We met Henri Sey­doux, their CEO as well as their engi­nee­ring and mar­ke­ting teams. I met him already a couple times at the CES in Las Vegas. He’s quite approa­chable and is quite a crea­tive guy (above). He wants to expand his company’s busi­ness beyond his cur­rent boun­da­ries (mostly, in-car Blue­tooth kits). Par­rot recently crea­ted sty­lish Wifi connec­ted pic­ture frames (below) and Wifi ste­reo loudspeakers.

We were shown and demons­tra­ted an ama­zing new pro­duct from Par­rot to be intro­du­ced next January at the CES. It was shown under NDA (below, pre-printed for all Tra­ve­ling Geeks tour participants).

This new pro­duct is some­thing you would hardly guess Par­rot would do. It’s an ama­zing inno­va­tive mix of hard­ware and soft­ware. Can’t say more at this point. Stay tuned until CES! I’ll be there and commenting.

In the next and final part of the TG tour, I’ll cover our visit with Orange.

Publié le 13 décembre 2009 Post de Olivier Ezratty | Digital media, Internet, Loisirs numériques, Photo numérique, Post in English, Startups, Traveling Geeks | Un commentaire