With the Traveling Geeks @ La Cantine

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

This second part of my report from the Tra­ve­ling Geeks tour in Paris is focu­sed on the com­pa­nies we visi­ted during the first two days, Mon­day 7th and Tues­day 8th of Decem­ber 2009. With star­tups with short pre­sen­ta­tions, star­tups with long mee­tings, then lar­ger com­pa­nies (Orange, Parrot).

I’ll start here with the star­tups we met at La Can­tine. I rea­lize I’ll need more posts for the rest of this two days visits.

We met com­pa­nies at La Can­tine (@lacantine) which were pre-selected by Cap Digi­tal (@Cap_Digital), a Paris area Digi­tal Media clus­ter. France crea­ted clus­ters back in 2005 against a model that works more or less in many Euro­pean coun­tries. There’s always a willin­gness to recreate some of the magic that exists in the Sili­con Val­ley. But eve­ry­body knows that the alchemy of the Val­ley is way more com­plex and dates back from a while (crea­tion of Stan­ford Uni­ver­sity, the his­tory of the chip makers, etc).

Crea­ting clus­ters is a way to reach a cri­ti­cal mass of star­tups, research labs and large com­pa­nies orga­ni­zed by indus­try sec­tor. Govern­ment and local govern­ment pro­vide some infra­struc­ture and signi­fi­cant sub­si­dies. It’s encou­ra­ging col­la­bo­ra­tive pro­jects. The typi­cal sub­si­di­zed pro­ject gathers a couple star­tups, one or two public research labs and one large com­pany. There are 71 clus­ters in France, which is way too much. But fun­ding and com­pa­nies are hope­fully concen­tra­ted on the top 10 clus­ters. And there are 5 ICT (infor­ma­tion & com­mu­ni­ca­tions tech­no­lo­gies) clus­ters in the top 6.

Back to the TGs, the mee­ting took place at La Can­tine, a Paris loca­tion put in place in 2008 where all sorts of ICT mee­tings take place. There, entre­pre­neurs can meet on the go, open source com­mu­ni­ties mee­ting can take place as well as Bar­Camps and the likes. Cor­po­ra­tions like Orange, Sun or Micro­soft also use it for some of their launches.

At La Can­tine, we met tra­di­tio­nal star­tups like MXP4 and Musi­co­very, and a bunch of not-for-profit orga­ni­za­tions or star­tups wor­king on open source pro­jects and/or for local govern­ments. While many of them had a local impact, they are still pro­vi­ding inter­es­ting ideas to expand worldwide.

• MXP4 (@TheRemixCulture) who pro­vide a web soft­ware solu­tion to lis­ten to music with remixing it and selec­ting the ins­tru­ments you want. Kind of a multi-track mixing music at your fin­ger­tips. Demo was done with “I want you back” from Michael Jack­son, which was impres­sive, par­ti­cu­larly given the com­pany has a strong part­ner­ship with Motown to pro­mote MJ’s cata­log. The UI is quite simple to handle. You can also dis­play song lyrics, share your mixes on Face­book. It’s a good way to reju­ve­nate back music cata­logs. One of the foun­ders of MXP4 is Gilles Babi­net, who crea­ted Musi­wave, sold to Open­Wave and then to Micro­soft. The pro­ject star­ted in 2006. Artists “signed” include Brit­ney Spears, David Guetta, MJ, Pet Shop Boys and Pink. Their busi­ness model is to license their soft­ware tech­no­logy to content rights owners although it’s been free as a start for bands and record com­pa­nies like Motown. They com­pete with com­pa­nies like mix­match­mu­sic. All in all, a star­tup well posi­tio­ned in the glo­bal market.

• Musi­co­very pro­vides a web based music player or DJ using a “mood matrix” ring where you can define the kind of music you want to lis­ten (calm to ener­ge­tic, music you can dance, tempo, year/decade, music type, etc). The site was iden­ti­fied a one of the Top 50 web sites to watch by Time. The site gene­rates 1 mil­lion uv/mo, has 600K regis­te­red users, with its first audiences in the USA and Latin coun­tries. France accounts for only 20% of their audience. The TG folks poin­ted out a risk of a law­suit from the records indus­try. They’re wor­king on it with the help of Cap Digital.

• Terra Nume­rica is a research lab of 15 people based out of a clus­ter of 17 Paris uni­ver­sity labs wor­king on vir­tual and aug­men­ted rea­lity solu­tions for cities. They work on col­la­bo­ra­tive pro­jects and create consor­tium on an ad-hoc basis. They did show us videos of two inter­es­ting pro­to­types: a vir­tual teles­cope for city pano­ra­mas tes­ted at the Arc de Triomphe which adds infor­ma­tion on top of the visua­li­zed pano­rama and an impres­sive high-resolution 3D vir­tual ver­sion of Paris in which you can navi­gate. A much bet­ter expe­rience than any “Street View” solution!

• Green Watch is a pro­ject to mul­ti­ply the num­ber of envi­ron­men­tal sen­sors in cities. It mea­sures the qua­lity of the air (Ozone levels) and noise (dB). It contains a GPS and Blue­tooth connec­tion to trans­mit the col­lec­ted infor­ma­tion to a nearby mobile. 15 pro­to­types have been built so far. They’ve been part­ne­ring with SFR, the second mobile ope­ra­tor in France. The pro­to­types have been tes­ted at La Bas­tille in Paris and also in Amster­dam, which enabled the crea­tion of the map below with hot colors sho­wing pol­lu­ted areas.

• Feed­books (@Hadrien) is a web site publi­shing public domain books for rea­ding them on mobiles. The cloud ser­vice is able to refor­mat books for any kind of screen. They also create PDFs for mobiles out of RSS news feeds.
• XWiki Enter­prise is an open source pro­ject to run enter­prise wikis. There are many belie­vers in the open source model here in France. While it’s popu­lar eve­ryw­here inclu­ding in the USA, those project’s busi­ness models are mostly based on IT ser­vices and are not very sca­leable. Thus, besides a couple excep­tions, these pro­jects remain rather local.
• Bears­tech, a ser­vice com­pany for hos­ting open source based solu­tions. Wasn’t here during their talk.

Next: the Paris Incu­ba­tor startups.

Publié le 13 décembre 2009 Post de Olivier Ezratty | Digital media, Internet, Logiciels, Post in English, TV et vidéo, Traveling Geeks | Pas de commentaires