Wessel
Stupeflix – videos customized on the fly (includes a sneak preview of their iPhone app!)
Stupeflix is a team of young technical minds that took it upon themselves to build a really cool technology where you render videos on-the-fly in a server-hosted environment, from a template, where you can drop custom texts and images into. An example: Say Coca-Cola has a video of a famous singer, you can upload an […]
Textmaster – content creation and translation, the crowdsourced way
When I meet Benoit Laurent, CEO of TextMaster, he’s slightly out of breath and looking frantically at his watch. He explains to me that the reason he insisted on meeting at Gare de Lyon is that he and his wife live in Toulon (a 5 hour train ride away from Paris, on the Mediterranean coast) […]
MorningCroissant: Airbnb for the French countryside
Walking over to the office of French startup MorningCroissant, I thought to myself, why would anybody want to do an AirBnB clone? Little did I know that I was about to learn a valuable lesson – that slapping the label ‘clone’ onto a startup can make you look very silly if you’re not careful.. Alix […]
Mars Curiosity carries parts made in France
Everyone has seen the most recent Mars landing by NASA rover, Mars Curiosity, but the scientific effort has been an international one. In addition to outsourcing the launch to the United Launch Alliance’s (a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin) Atlas 5 launch vehicle, some of the instruments are sourced by NASA partners. Two […]
Dandybox: a review of their first box for men!
One of the (small) perks of being a journalist is getting free stuff. When I interviewed Pierre Entremont, one of the co-founders of Dandybox, he only had an empty box to show (which he duly did, and even posed with it!), and he talked about the contents of the box.But he promised me a free […]
Sharypic – The HackFWD event photo sharing tool
I caught up with Sharypic co-founder Francois-Joseph “FJ” Grimault at one of the “Paris Incubateurs” buildings to talk about his event photo-sharing tool Their office – Paris Incubateurs The official name of the building is “Incubateur de Paris Région Innovation Nord-Express”, and it’s one of six that the City of Paris owns and operates, and it is quite […]
Wikileaks re-opens donations thanks to French Carte Bleue system
Wikileaks, the repository for leaked private information, has been in the sights of the US government ever since they published a boatload of US classified data. Let’s take a closer look. Why is this undesirable? Governments are sore losers when it comes to information extraction. They’ll bend over backwards to spy on its own and […]
Quandora: The Quora for enterprise
Quandora co-founder Andreea Barroca, who lived in Bucharest, Paris, San Francisco, and now divides her time between New York and Paris, gives us a fresh perspective on Enterprise Content Management (ECM), an underestimated part of the IT industry. Enterprise Content Management, briefly, is the management of the thousands and millions of documents that float around […]
Rennes-based startup Tocea raises €300K to clean your code
Tocea offers enterprise-class, hardcore code analysis and improvement tools that aims to reduce your “Technical Debt”. What’s “Technical Debt”, you ask? It’s a term for the consequences you pay down the road for the coding shortcuts you take today. Researchers spend a lot of time obsessing over these concepts, that try to determine for what […]
Dandybox, the Joliebox for men!
Pierre Entremont, an HEC graduate, was kind enough to spend some time with me to discuss his venture, Dandybox. Pierre started his career in a cushy finance job, at a Private Equity firm. He described that life as a “Golden Cage”, and said he dreamed of more adventure, freedom, risk and potential reward. In other […]