Archive for December 2012
SNCF iOS app now stores user info. Can Capitaine Train compete?
I wrote a little while ago about a startup called Capitaine Train, which raised $2 Million in order to bring a unified train travel ticketing experience. I have been outspoken about my lack of conviction about this business model – it’s not quite the kayak of the train travel industry, and their largest value-added is […]
French startups €543M in funding in 2012, a 93% growth
French startups raised a total of €542 million in 2012, up 93% from 2011, according to a report by JDN’s Hugo Sedouramane. The report, while annoyingly split into 9 different pages (stupid ad business) touches on some great points about this year in France, such as the influence of a few large rounds of funding […]
Why Facebook game Criminal Case is seeing explosive organic growth
Pretty Simple Games is a 40 persons social games company here in Paris, who’s just published Criminal Case, a hidden object game on Facebook. Another one, right? So why should you care? Here’s exhibit A : This is a hockey stick kind of growth – basically the dream of any company launching a scalable web […]
SumUp brings mobile payments to France – what about iZettle?
As announced today on TechCrunch, fast-growing Berlin-based and $20 million-backed SumUp, is expanding to France as well as Belguim and Portgual. This will bring the number of markets in which SumUp is operating to 10. Having launched only 4 months ago, this move enables them to leap frog Europe’s other two leading ‘Square-type’ startups, Norway-based […]
Dailymotion to launch cross-platform premium channel. For Kids.
Last Friday, Les Echos reported that Orange-owned Dailymotion will be looking to differentiate it’s 100% ad-based revenue model by introducing a premium channel for €4.49/month – the catch? It’s a Kids channel. Having signed partnership deals with several major television producers, notably Cookie Jar, a Canaditan TV producer which owns licensing to many of the […]
Teleportd to sunset side products, 2013 is the year of Nitrogram
Fresh off of a round of funding, Teleportd, the startup behind Nitrogram, seems to be doubling down on its Instagram analytics solution. The startup sent out an email to its Capsules users last week announcing that its photo-embedding solution (which we’ve been using for months now) will no longer be available, but, instead, will become […]
Here's how French startups can prepare for the series A crunch
The following is a guest post by our Rude BA, Jerome Camblain. I mentioned in a recent post the need to prepare for the series A crunch. The recent rise in the number of seed-financed deals will create a massive arrival of companies to the first round that follows the ‘Friends & Family’ or Angel seed […]
All 19 of the French People's Choice nominees for The Europas
The Europas have announced their list of nominees for the people’s choice award. For those who don’t know about The Europas, it is the European equivalent of the Crunchies, a startup award show hosted by TechCrunch in San Francisco. Startups from all around Europe have already submitted their nominations for a shot at one of the […]
Algolia powers search so your mobile app doesn't suck anymore
Probably one of the most infuriating things on a mobile device is when an app has poor search functionality. Facebook has had notoriously ugly search on web and mobile, and its probably one of the reasons I’ve started using Google+ more recently. That’s why I was pretty excited when one of the Seedcamp Paris teams […]
Ad Giant JC Decaux to sponsor connected cities startup incubator
Last week saw the kick-off of a new incubator focusing on the theme of ‘Connected Cities’, which is a joint effort by Paris Incubateurs and JC Deceaux. I’m sure the first thought springing to your head is probably ‘what another incubator? do we really need another one of those?’. Well, of course, there are loads of […]