Archive for February 2014
Dassault Systèmes leads $14.2 million investment in US-based NuoDB
Having completed 7 acquisitions totaling nearly $1 billion over the last two years, Dassault’s appetite for investing in cutting-edge technology is showing no signs of slowing. This week NuoDB, a Cambridge, MA based company specializing in distributed database management, announced that they raised a $14.2 million round with Dassault as the lead investor. This investment […]
Mobile World Congress Day 3 Highlights – Connected City, Startup Europe Manifesto, and Alima
Although there was a lot going on as always, here were the most recent highlights for me at MWC: The Connected City, one of the biggest draws at MWC Building on the success of its Connected City exhibit which drew 15k visitors, GSMA launched an expanded version this year. Its principal partners Deutsche Telecom, AT&T, […]
Disrupting the Dentist – Kolibree goes head to head with Oral B on the Connected Toothbrush
After making its first appearance at CES in Las Vegas earlier this year, French startup Kolibree likely woke up to a rude awakening when Proctor & Gamble announced that they would be launching a Connected Toothbrush under the Oral B brand – the ‘rude awakening,’ of course, comes from the fact that this was the […]
WePopp announces integration with OpenTable, TopTable and LaFourchette
Having achieved rapid international success with their social planning app and raised a 130k euro seed round last November, Le Camping alum WePopp is ramping up their growth in the US market with the announcement of their integration with OpenTable, one of the global leaders in online and mobile restaurant reservations. The US has been […]
RudeVC: MWC2014 – Embracing the fringe
Two years ago I penned a piece in this very space entitled Europe still has a winner in Barça, in the form of the Mobile World Congress, and I believed it. The center of gravity has clearly been shifting away from the mobile operators and toward the handset vendors and content creators. In correlation with […]
Mobile World Congress Highlights Day 2 – WhatsApp, Startups, Pinterest and more from Orange
The second frenzied day of Mobile World Congress got underway yesterday. Having spent the day shuttling between the main MWC event and the startup focused 4YFN underscored how much MWC has evolved in recent years. Here were my big highlights from day 2: Startups have found a home at MWC For the first time this […]
The Cornerstones of the Hardware Revolution
Anyone who worked in technology before 2003 can tell you that it’s no coincidence that startups have exploded in the past 10 years – when servers costs when to zero, and open source software caught up to its proprietary counterpart, it didn’t matter how many people (a lot) were on the web, because scalability was […]
The App Stores are not “long tail”
The following article is a guest post by Yann Lechelle, co-founder of Appsfire, a growth engine for mobile apps. A French version of the article is available on the French digital daily Viuz.com Before we tackle this controversy, we should go back to the meaning of the Long-Tail Effect as referred to by Chris Anderson in […]
Paris mayoral candidate dreams of a tech savvy Paris for startups, tourists & citizens
1430 The elections for the next mayor of Paris are just a month away, and, while I don’t often treat political subjects, it has become clear that the next mayor of Paris will have an opportunity to affect change in the Paris ecosystem, and so, while I can’t vote in the elections, I’d like to take […]
Mobile World Congress Day 1 Highlights – Connected Living, Samsung, Mobile Connect & Zuckerberg
The king of all mobile trade events got underway yesterday in Barcelona. Each year the Mobile World Congress (MWC) seems to get bigger and more unwieldy than the last, but it remains one of the tech world’s can’t miss events. It’s hard to ignore though how major shifts in the mobile ecosystem have fundamentally changed […]