A Penny For Your Thoughts?

This is a really quick post regarding this week’s upcoming TechCrunch Paris event at LaCantine on March 24th. The event is currently sold out. Huh? As I’m moderating the women’s panel, I thought I would take the opportunity to get any lingering questions/comments prior to the event. Take a look at who is on the […]

Have You Seen Me? 9 French Entrepreneur Names to Know

Talk to anyone from Silicon Valley about French names in hi-tech and you’ll systematically get the 3 same answers: Loic Le Meur, Jeff Clavier and Pierre Omidyar – if you’re lucky. But how about French entrepreneurs in France? In an earlier post I suggested putting French entrepreneur success stories on milk cartons to remind us […]

You Suck! Entrepreneurship and Elite French Education

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry published an article in Silicon Alley Insider today on the negative impact of the hierarchical French education system on entrepreneurship. Let’s take a look at his argument for “Why France fails at start-ups”, shall we? Is “Grande école” French for “Ivy League”? For all the Silicon Alley Insider readers that saw the term “grande […]

Wikipedia Initiative: Plan B

This is a quick follow-up on the Wikipedia initiative, which has proven to be quite interesting. Yoocasa: my guinea pig. Some companies are simply too young for Wikipedia. My first start-up to join the cause, Yoocasa, was removed after only a few hours. Sad, but true. Which is surprising because I have seen many companies […]

The French Start-up Wikipedia Initiative

Far from anything being discussed at SXSW, this is a quick post on something I just noticed: There are a lot of French start-ups that are MIA on Wikipedia. Obviously it’d be great to develop some kind of French start-up database, but let’s first concentrate on the basics: Wikipedia. Yeah, so? Hopefully I don’t need […]

Smart Money: French companies get creative with funding

I’m considering starting a weekly tradition where I give a shoutout to a French company that is doing something I find particularly innovative. Well, this week that company is Lyon-based Regioneo – who launched a user-investment campaign, which I detailed in TechCrunch Europe. Why is there no translation for “bon appétit” in English? In case […]

Under the radar: Are some French companies hiding?

Somehow, the conversation always ends up on which Silicon Valley companies are MIA in France. A week or two ago, Deezer’s Jonathan Benassaya posted this comment on Twitter: Opentable actually launched in France in 2008 and ironically their product didn’t take off – so I am told. French restaurants were too traditional to go electronic […]

Bienvenue en France: Welcome to Exitland

Alright, it’s high time we set the record straight. I met with yet another French entrepreneur this morning that seemed to think France was void of decent exits. Well, guess again. Have you seen me? In the US, whenever a child or a person goes missing, his or her face shows up on a milk carton (or at least, it […]

The Most Expensive of the French App Store

Génération Nouvelles Technologies recently published an article on a study by userAdgents done on the French iPhone App Store. FYI, the study can be requested for free on their website. A numbers game. The study found that in the beginning of February 2010 the French App Store had 76, 976 applications from 23,942 publishers, with an average […]

Smelling French: Not Such a Bad Thing

Paul Carr published an article in TechCrunch a few days ago and naturally the title caught my eye: Cherchez la fame – or why the media’s obsession with Twitter campaigns will make customer service smell French. A word on smelling French. What I think is a little ironic in this article is that “smelling French” […]