With the Traveling Geeks @ Paris Incubator

Publié le 13 décembre 2009 et mis à jour le 2 mai 2010 - 10 commentaires -

The Tra­ve­ling Geeks visi­ted one of the five incu­ba­tors from Paris Deve­lop­ment, a joint ven­ture bet­ween the City of Paris and the Paris Cham­ber of Commerce.

Paris Deve­lop­ment has been in place for 10 years and has two goals: have foreign com­pa­nies set­tle in Paris and help local star­tups. All in all, they incu­bate 100 star­tups repre­sen­ting 600 folks. 200 work in the “rue des Haies” incu­ba­tor we visi­ted, one that is dedi­ca­ted to digi­tal medias. But the pre­sen­ting star­tups came from all the incu­ba­tors from Paris. Incu­ba­ted com­pa­nies pay for staying in the incu­ba­tor, although it’s quite modest in com­pa­ri­son with nor­mal com­mer­cial offices price. And it includes all ser­vices (net­work, phone, wel­come desk, etc). They have a long wai­ting list of star­tups and wel­come only 7% to 8% of the can­di­dates. Com­pa­nies stay in the incu­ba­tor for a maxi­mum 4 years.

Here are the com­pa­nies who pre­sen­ted to the Tra­ve­ling Geeks:

• Stribe (@stribe) is the win­ner of LeWeb this year, looks like it’s the first French star­tup win­ning this award. They add a gene­ric social net­work on top of any exis­ting site. Sold as a white label­led solu­tion, it creates real reve­nue stream for the star­tup as well as a scale and net­work effect. You’ll find tons of com­ments on the com­pany fol­lo­wing their Leweb pre­sen­ta­tion and award. Below, their foun­der Kamel Zeroual with grou­pies from the Tra­ve­ling Geeks (Eliane Fio­let, Amanda Coolong and Renee Blod­gett). Kamel also did present his com­pany at Tech­Crunch last September!

• int13 (@int13): a games deve­lo­per for smart­phones, using their own aug­men­ted rea­lity tech­no­logy, sup­po­sed to be the fas­test around. Their Kwee­kies game adds ani­ma­ted cha­rac­ters on the table you’re wat­ching with your phone camera. This is two com­pa­nies in one: on one hand, a tech­no­logy com­pany buil­ding its aug­men­ted rea­lity engine, and on the other hand, a games deve­lo­per stu­dio. Guys have to add a contact email with a real name on their site… .

• Zoo­mo­rama (@gasi/zoomorama) pro­vides a web solu­tion for deep navi­ga­tion on rich content, with zoom in and out of large set of pic­tures or gra­phics, inclu­ding mix of vec­tor and bit­map based pic­tures. It’s based on conver­sion of web based for­mats into Flash. Look for example at this ama­zing pos­ter of the US fede­ral bud­get (click the white square to go full screen and then zoom with your mouse).
• Path­Mo­tion (@pathmotion), is “Using the prin­ciples of posi­tive psy­cho­logy and pro­prie­tary seman­tic search tech­no­logy, Path­Mo­tion has deve­lo­ped a career plan­ning tool that guides job see­kers from “What should I do with my life?” to “Get­ting the job—done!” Path­Mo­tion empo­wers stu­dents and alumni to make bet­ter career choices and find the job most rele­vant to their inter­ests and moti­va­tions”. Uh oh, AI and seman­tics used for see­king a job? The guy crea­ting this com­pany comes from… New Jersey!
• Tea­cheo (@teacheo) pro­vides an e-learning solu­tion using video­con­fe­rence and an inno­va­tive e-whiteboard where all sorts of docu­ments can be sha­red. The site has a no-risk/no-engagement pay-per-lesson busi­ness model.
• Stu­pe­flix (@stupeflix) pro­vides real time crea­tive videos edi­ting, used for real estate, clas­si­fied, dating, etc. It also mixing of videos, pic­tures, sound­tracks and sup­ports text to speech tech­no­logy for voice over. The visi­ting geeks found out its web site had a very good UI and the crea­ted videos where impressive.
• MLState (@MLstate, crea­ted last week…) pro­vides deve­lop­ment tools, libra­ries and gra­phi­cal data­base repre­sen­ta­tion tools to som­ply create your SaaS appli­ca­tions. 
• Gos­tai writes robot soft­ware. They have built an uni­ver­sal open source based ope­ra­ting sys­tem for robots (Urbi) tar­ge­ting 15 dif­ferent types of robots and appli­ca­tions like tele­pre­sence, home sur­veillance or kids enter­tain­ment. Their OS works on Spi­kee from Erec­tor, Rumba, huma­noid robots from Alde­ba­ran Robo­tics. Open sour­ced, so what’s the busi­ness model? Pro­ba­bly ser­vices based.

• Scan & Tar­get is pro­vi­ding a SaaS based mode­ra­tion ser­vice which mines text, pic­tures and videos in UGC based sites, emails and SMS to iden­tify ille­gi­ti­mate ones. It can be used both by any web site and also by law enfor­ce­ment organizations.

• Rue89 is a social news media site with an inter­es­ting pro­file although they don’t intend to play a world­wide game. The foun­ders are three for­mer jour­na­lists (and foreign cor­res­pon­dants) of the daily news­pa­per Libé­ra­tion. They thought two and a half years ago that it was time to create ano­ther form of jour­na­lism. Their site is mixing jour­na­list news and posts from “expert” rea­ders inclu­ding facul­ties, MPs, union lea­ders, etc. They have a very inter­es­ting wri­ting style, explai­ning the whe­rea­bouts of news. They also run a spe­ci­fic Eco89 eco­no­mi­cal site. Their site show­case the best com­ments for all articles, which are selec­ted by the jour­na­list. The site runs on an modi­fied ver­sion of Dru­pal. This French ver­sion of “The Huf­fing­ton Post” is the first local news pure player and has 1,5 mil­lion uv/mo accor­ding to Niel­sen Ratings. Below, one of their co-founders, Laurent Mau­riac, being inter­vie­wed by TechZulu’s Amanda Coolong.

All in all, this visit did show us a great variety of com­pa­nies with dif­ferent busi­ness pros­pects. At least six of them have some world­wide busi­ness poten­tial. Out of 10. Once they all get a Twit­ter account and a real per­son email for contact in their sites .

Publié le 13 décembre 2009 Post de Olivier Ezratty | Digital media, Innovation, Internet, Post in English, Startups, TV et vidéo, Traveling Geeks | 10 commentaires