Rakuten's Global eCommerce study on eShoppers
As discussed previously, eCommerce has grown astronomically here in France in recent years, with sales of online goods now reaching approximately €40+ billion annually. With so many consumers now shopping online, the French market has, not surprisingly, been inundated with eCommerce sites. One of the most important ways for these vendors to set themselves apart from the pack […]
Curation, Creation | Enemies or Friends?
There’s no denying the old Internet mantra, that Content is King. All major Internet companies eventually tend towards it: AOL & Yahoo are drowning in it, Google’s transitioning into a content company, trying to transition from a search monopoly to a content monopoly. Facebook & Twitter don’t create their own content, but their revenue model […]
Rude VC: Summertime reading for Entrepreneurs on Holidays
Today, the last day of July, represents a crossroads of vacation periods. Northern Europeans are largely finished with their summer holidays, while the Dutch and Belgians are just winding theirs down. Italy is preparing to shut down for the next month. And here in France, we’re still ramping up too. In the vacation spirit, here’s […]
Gilles Babinet: Entrepreneur, Investor, Politician
In one of the first conferences I attended in France, Failcon France, I got the opportunity to see an interview with Gilles Babinet. At the time, I didn’t know Xavier Niel from Professor Xavier, let alone who Gilles Babinet was, but whenever an entrepreneur-turned investor gives you an account of his experiences & thoughts, you […]
German Carpooling.com plans US launch, but is the hearth safe?
Yesterday, TechCrunch announced that the German Carpooling.com, a ridesharing marketplace, raised $10M to launch in the US — this is about as far as I can get into the article giving full disclosure that I am a HUGE fan of BlaBlaCar, the France-based competitor who raised $10M to spread across Europe earlier this year. Not only was […]
Ykone's Fashion Event FLOW is LeWeb for Fashion
Nobody would argue that the fashion business was late in opening up to social media. Iconic designers locked the doors as long as they could, considering themselves closer to god than to their clients. Then the social fashion revolution happened through an uncountable number of fashion blogs that popped-up across the globe – many in […]
11 French Business Associations urge French Senate to innovate now!
Eleven business associations, many of which represent the interests of the tech sector, published and presented yesterday to the French Senate their ‘Three urgent measures for innovative companies’. One of their principal propositions is the establishment of the EIC classification (Entreprise d’Innovation et de Croissance, in English, Innovative Growth Company), which would bring together the […]
SongPop: Where Cloning Good Design can take you
SongPop by Freshplanet now crossed over 2M DAUs, and is on a trajectory to reach the top 10 of Facebook games. The Android and iOS app aren’t doing too bad either. Its growth and design are strongly reminiscent of Draw Something. Rewind a bit, and you have a game called “we are music” launched at least a […]
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 […]
Rubbing the magic lamp, LoungeUp transforms hotel customer service.
Let’s start with me: make my wish your command. Magic lamps equipped with blue genies, unlimited wishes, and all that. What would I ask for first? Enhanced customer service that is a social experience. Differentiating one hotel from another is no longer based on towel softness or pool access, it is based on meeting the diverse yet […]