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Here's What You Missed Last Night At Start In Paris
is the Parisian answer to the New York Tech Meetup. Each month, 5 startups get 5 minutes to demo a product to an audience, which then votes for the startups. Beforehand a guest speaker, most often an accomplished entrepreneur, speaks for 10 minutes, and afterward there's an open mic session.
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Laurent Kretz and Jonathan Benoudiz, the founders of location-based social app Submate, organize the event, which is already a huge success. Already startups that presented at SIP have gone on to raise venture funding. This month too, the venue was packed to standing room only. Attendees ask questions via Balloon, a twitter and text questions service.
It's a great community event that gives a good look at the early stage web scene in Paris which, as we've noted, is growing very impressively.
Mathieu Nouzareth founded 3 startups in France, all of them successfully exited; the last one had 200 employees. Now he's moved to New York to found FreshPlanet.
Here's what he had to say about starting up in Europe vs New York vs the Silicon Valley:
- The red tape and the taxes are actually pretty much equally bad in the US and in Europe;
- The NYC ecosystem is booming, he said, but Paris is also one of the best in the world;
- It's not easier to build a company in Silicon Valley but the concentration of engineers there is still impressive.
Couple quotes:
- "If your startup is not always on the edge of a cliff, you're not pushing hard enough."
- "Every startup will have a near death experience at some point; if you don't, you're doing something wrong."
eAuteur's offering is as non-sexy as it is potentially useful: they make it easy to assert your copyrights to a creative work, whether it's an image or a text, which, once you put on the internet, anyone can grab, share, replicate, send around, etc.
You simply send them an email with your work and they will authenticate it and keep it around, and if you have problems asserting your copyright they can legally vouch for you.
We've all tweeted during a TV show or seen people do it. Jakaa wants to turn TV watching into an online, social experience. Their site is a social chat board where people can log in and start chatting about the TV shows they're watching, either publicly or in rooms with their friends. In the long term, Jakaa wants to be embedded in connected TV solutions like Google TV and Boxee.
It sounds pretty cool, but we wonder if actual people will ever use it. It sounds a lot like Hot Potato, which memorably started with tons of hype, but then failed and parked its assets in Facebook.
Geoquestour came out with a pretty interesting product. They make iPhone apps for tourists, that can help them discover the area they're visiting: travel tips, monuments, etc.
They actually charge local tourism offices, selling them platforms to manage the apps, add things to them, etc. The tourism offices can then make money from app sales and in-app sales.
MyCuisinier -- literally "MyCook" -- is like MySpace for cooks, in a way. In reality it's more like a listings site for both amateur and professional chefs to sell cooking lessons to people. They have a really nice site and seem to have some traction, but they're in a crowded market -- for some reason food is a pretty big market online in France, and there are mammoths who can follow them fast if they get successful.
MulteeGaming organizes online gaming tournaments with prize money. Gamers can either challenge each other to games, betting money on the outcome, or participate in sponsored tournaments. Their biggest rival was acquired by Richard Branson's Virgin and is now known as Virgin Gamers. So they've got an uphill climb.
Good product, strong business model, traction... These guys are on the right track!
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