With the Traveling Geeks @ Cedexis and Parrot
Post de Olivier Ezratty du 13 décembre 2009 - Tags : Digital media,Internet,Loisirs numériques,Photo numérique,Post in English,Startups,Traveling Geeks | 1 Comment
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:
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.
Lien du blog Opinions Libres : https://www.oezratty.net/wordpress
Lien de l'article : https://www.oezratty.net/wordpress/2009/with-the-traveling-geeks-cedexis-and-parrot/
Cliquez ici pour imprimer
(cc) Olivier Ezratty - http://www.oezratty.net