I got a kick out of this this morning, and I couldn’t help but sharing. This morning I received an email alerting me to a contest that was going on, an opportunity to win a trip to the southwest town of Biarritz, France – it was the first city I ever lived in here in France, so I clicked through out of curiosity. How curious: the contest is organized by Leetchi, who recently announced their payments API MangoPay, in partnership with Capitaine Train, a web app for ordering train tickets to anywhere in Europe, and Airbnb, who is killing it in France, likely because Paris is the most visited city in the world. They are also doing the contest in cooperation with the Biarritz Tourisme bureau, which says a lot about how digitally connected local towns are in France.
The Facebook contest itself is being managed by Kontest, who, last October, rebooted its Facebook contest platform to make it even easier to organize a facebook contest that abides by Facebook’s ever-changing rules. So we’ve got three French startups, a major US startup with heavy activities in France, and a local tourism bureau. The winner of the contest gets free travel, accommodation, and, well, nice beaches, along with 3 friends to boot.
We talk a lot about the French ecosystem – how things are changing, what works and doesn’t – but it’s nice to be reminded every once in a while that the French digital ecosystem is self-sustaining enough to power a cooperative effort like this – all four of these participants are getting great exposure, and a great example of how to introduce Facebook users to these services.