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February 14, 2006
Index Ventures EIR starts up Wikio
Pierre Chappaz, Index Ventures entrepreneur-in-residence, is giving interviews in the French trade press and blogging at Kelblog (his personal blog) about Wikio, his latest venture. Chappaz is best known for founding Kelkoo, a Pan European online shopping guide, and selling it to Yahoo for a bundle, making him and his investors a tidy profit.
Chappaz - Up Close
Wikio has not launched yet but according to an interview with Journal du Net, Chappaz is creating an RSS-based portal that sorts RSS content based on tags and plain text search. It is not a Wiki type application, although its name is similar.
The site sounds to be a cross between Technorati, Digg, and Google News. Chappaz says he has linked in some 10,000 news and source sites in the French speaking part of Europe. Google News (French) version has only 500, according to Chappaz. Some 1000 people have already signed up for the beta launch expected in four to six weeks.(This is the kind of pull that only a multi-millionaire entrepreneur has. We saw the same phenomenon with Martin Varsavsky of FON fame.)
The team is already thinking ahead. This time Chappaz based his company, in Luxembourg. So was Skype based there. The capital gains taxes in Luxembourg are favorable to entrepreneurs should they decide to sell the business.
Read Le Net Interview (Journal du Net)
Posted on February 14, 2006 03:52 PM | Posted to Web 2.0 | Permalink
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