In France, NYE SMS sees decline as MMS and new platforms rise
Although sending a SMS is still the prefered way to say ‘Happy New Year’ in France, things are starting to change. According to early estimates published in Les Echos, at least 600 million SMS were sent in France as 2013 descended upon us. SFR alone logged 280 million between 21h on the 31st and 9h the […]
LeCamping Manager & EIR to launch TheFamily, an early-stage accelerator
According to LinkedIn, LeCamping‘s manager, Alice Zagury, and the most recent Entrepreneur in Residence Oussama Ammar, will not be joining LeCamping for another season, and have instead partnered up to launch TheFamily. Described as an “accelerator for early-stage startups to support them from [0] to [1] through education & unfair advantages,” TheFamily sounds quite similar to […]
Paris Apple store robbed on NYE by 4 armed individuals
Waking up after a long evening, it seems no one had a better New Year’s Eve party than the four masked individuals who broke into the Apple Store at Opéra last night around 9:00PM. Having subdued a security guard, the four men spent forty minutes loading the entire store stock – estimated to be worth […]
Meetic purchases Belgian dating site Twoo.com to go international
It seems that Marc Simoncini’s dating site is looking at internationalization in 2013 – they purchased Massive Media, which owns Twoo.com, one of Belgium’s largest dating sites, for $25M. In their announcement, originally caught by TNW, Meetic CEO Philippe Chainieux said: This acquisition consolidates the MEETIC Group’s positions with a substantial increase in the number of […]
Top 5 best performing Windows 8 Apps by French Startups according to Microsoft
At LeWeb Paris this year, I got to try out the Windows Surface as well as sit down with the Microsoft guys and talk shop. With all this “2012 is the biggest year for Windows ever!” talk going around, I thought I’d touch on a better subject: of those French startups who committed to building […]
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 […]
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 […]