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May 16, 2007
France Alert - Ten Web 2.0 Wonders
The a:c euro has investigated the French Web market and startups and hereby announce our Ten Startups Waking Up the Web from alarm:clock, with runners-up.
Some of the criteria for our choices: 1) Privately held 2) great founders 3) consistent execution on business plans 3) innovation 4) User uptake (based on sources like Comscore, Statbrain, Alexa ranking, and blog buzz). (ed. We turned on the Comments below for this one so you can have your say too.)
Helping us with the list is TechCrunch.fr publisher and VC Ouriel Ohayon who describes the French Web scene like this:
"Startups are being funded at a faster pace lately and some projects are really interesting with global ambitions and presence but there is still a huge gap with other countries and the USA. There is in particular a lack of light investment structure like YCombinator or CRV quickstart or even experienced business angels to support projects at very early stage before they arrive in VC hands."
Looking at France, Web 2.0 sees a thriving blog market, 10M bloggers as of January, and a lot of video platform projects. Other Web trends: a mature ecommerce market. The private sale of brand name discounted goods has taken hold. Social networks are not as popular among entrerpeneurs in France, but the mobile/web hybrid is.
France Alert - Ten Web 2.0 Wonders
Boonty
HQ: Officially its NYC, but the company came out of France
Funding: $10M
Business type: Casual gaming
Made the cut: Casual games are hot and Boonty is one of the best funded ($10M) and fastest growing. The company is making a smart entry into China with its buy-out of Beijing-based Gamehub. It has both a private label business and a destination site so it wins both ways. It recently signed up to French online retailers to sell its games through their popular shopping sites.
Read more
Criteo
HQ: Paris, France
Funding: It raised €3M in seed capital from Paris-based investors, AGF Private Equity and ELAIA.
Business type: Recommendation engine
Made the cut: Criteo recently released a widget called Autoroll, which allows blogs and websites to display which sites visitors have been to before and after stopping by your site, the idea being to recommend sites your visitors might find useful or interesting. Criteo's tech is flexible and the founders have tweaked it to provide recommendations for YouTube and for Netflix, although neither of these bigger players have picked up on it. We figure one or the other video content-related site could use it and one of them might buy Criteo to own the tech.
Read more and here.
DailyMotion
HQ: Paris
Funding: Raised capital from Atlas and Partech
Business type: European YouTube
Made the cut: The site is one of the biggest video clip sites in Europe. The buyout of YouTube by Google stamps a huge valuation on DailyMotion. As of November 2006, the site was getting about 9,000 new videos posted daily, and page views in excess of 16M per day.
Read - more
Eyeka
HQ: Paris
Funding: Eyeka raised €4.2M from Ventech.
Business type: White label platform for talent to upload, sell and distribute video/photos
Made the cut: Management is proven for sure. The co-founder is French entrepreneur Gilles Babinet who sold his last venture to Openwave for $121M. The other founder is Franck Perrier and CEO, led 200 employees at Corbis, managed the photographers and helped it enter the mobile market. The site design shows that some real pros are behind it.
Read - more
MXP4
HQ: Paris
Funding: $6.5M from Sofinnova Partners and Ventech.
Business type: Digital music technology that auto remixes songs.
Made the cut: We can't wait to get our hands on the tech. Music recommendation has seen great consumer uptake but MXP4 is a new twist. Management is topped by one of the top startup guys in France.
Read - more
NetVibes
HQ: Paris, France
Funding: In August 2006, Index Ventures and Accel have invested €12M in Netvibes
Business type: Personal portal.
Made The cut: This one is easy. NetVibes is probably the most globally known of the new Internet brands. Sure the space is competitive but the ownership over home pages for millions is invaluable. Management and investors are heavy hitters.
Read - more
Skyblog
HQ: Paris
Funding: Bought by a buy-out firm
Business type: European Myspace
Made the cut: Skyblog may be little known outside of France but it dominates the French blogging scene, currently hosting over 9M blogs. From a marketing perspective, the company has a great tie in to Skyrock, France's most popular radio station. Not only is the platform popular, but reviewers like Mashable give it great reviewers compared to other blog tools.
Read - more
Wikio
HQ: Technically Wikio is Luxembourg-based - think tax haven. The CTO, CEO and others are French.
Funding: Wikio raised a series A round of €4M ($5.3M ) led by Silicon Valley-based Lightspeed Venture Partners along with Gemini Israel Funds.
Business type: Wikio is a personalized blog and news aggregator and search tool with user voting.
Made the cut: Many Web 2.0 reviewers put down Wikio because its not innovative - nothing special about knocking off Digg. But it does track news sources that Google News (for example) does not. Digg and Google tend to be gringo sites while Wikio is taking this proven model to Europe, and it seems to be working.
Read - more
Yoono
HQ: Paris, France
Business type: Social networks empowering contextual search
Funding: AGF Private Equity invested €1.7M in January 2007
Made the cut: Yoono announced this week that it has 600K users. It also announced the private beta of its social Web clipping tool as an extension for its popular community. This makes it similar to StumbleUpon. Unlike many other Web 2.0 companies, Yoono's CEO Pascal Josselin has actually run a large company.
Read - more
Zlio
HQ: Paris
Funding: Bootstrapped
Business type: eShop building tool
Made the cut: We like bootstrapped startups that create buzz because of the quality or ease of use of their service and products. It's not as easy as it looks.
Read - more
Runners-up
Vente-privee.com
HQ: Saint Denis
Funding: Bootstrapped
Business type: eCommerce
Claims €240M in turnover last year. Founded in 2001 pioneering the private sale model. We note that it gets more traffic than buyvip.com and 24h00.
Achatvip
HQ: Paris
Funding: AchatVIP raised €3.5M from Edmond de Rothschild Investment Partners and OTC Asset Management.
Business type: eCommerce
Read - more
24h00.fr
HQ: Paris
Funding: 6M euros
Business type: eCommerce private sale
Read more
Looneo
HQ: Paris, France
Funding: Backed Groupe Marc de Lacharrière, a major shareholder in the French holding company Fimalac.
Business Type: Social shopping
Read - more
e-Box.fr
HQ: Paris
Funding: E-BOX has raised €1.7M
Business type: Self service postal facilities
Neteven
HQ: Paris
Funding: Neteven that raised 1M euros in March 2007
Business type: eCommerce platform
Read - more
Fotolia
Business Type: Platform for stock photo talent
Funding: Private non-VC
Well-designed and attractive web-hosted stock photo platform. Number two to iStock photo's pole position in terms of number of photos. Headquarters moved from France to New York in anticipation of winning market share in the US.
Mobease
HQ: Bordeaux.
Business type: Widgets
Funding: Now a subsidiary of angel-backed Webwag
Mobease was acquired in March 2007 by Webwag, a personal portal provider like Netvibes. Mobease makes mobile widgets and a mobile search engine. Its software supports Symbian phones and enables things like a scrolling news feed. Webwag was founded in France but moved its HQ to Palo Alto. Webwag is funded by its founder who was an executive with Google France.
Read - more
Kewego
HQ: Paris
Funding: Banexi Ventures has backing a low-budget rollup of interactive video and TV startups by the founders of Pulsevision, now called Kewego. The startup raised €5M in a second round from Banexi Ventures. It acquired Pooxi.com, a French video sharing and aggregator.
Business type: Interactive TV
Read - more
Glowria
HQ: Paris
Funding: Venture-backed
Business type: Video on demand
A founder executing on a vision of a European consumer video powerhouse.
Read - more
Vpod.tv
HQ: Paris
Funding: Raised funding from Innovacom. Angel Martin Varsavsky has invested an undisclosed amount in June 2006.
Business type: Video publishing platform
Read - more
Miyowa
HQ: Paris, France
Funding: In September 2006, it raised €3M from Techfund and Sophia Europlab
Business type: Mobile instant messenger
Read - more
Navx
HQ: Paris
Funding: Raised funding from AGF private equity
Business type: software and services that can be integrated into navigation devices
Read - more
UbicMedia
HQ: Lyon.
Funding: The has team raised €320K round of seed finance.
Business type: Video distribution platform
UbicMedia is set to launch in May a new video and film platform called PUMit, which at the time of this post is still under wraps but is signing up beta reviewers. The company has several patents on enabling a combination of Video on Demand and P2P streaming of films and videos.
Read - more
Splitgames
HQ: Paris
Funding: It raised €2M from Credit Agricole Private Equity in October 2006
Business Type: Game swapping
Read - more
Atafoto
HQ: Gif-sur-Yvette
Funding: Bootsrapped by Founder and CEO Thierry Verrecchia who was founder/CTO of KeeBoo.
Business Type: Online shared photo site
JobMeeters
HQ: Paris
Funding: The startup says it has raised a few hundred thousand euros in a first round from Unaya.
Business type: Recruitment social network
Read - more
Trace.tv
HQ: Paris
Funding: Universal Music Group has made a strategic investment of an undisclosed amount.
Business type: Urban music programing
Read - more
Contrarian picks
Sarenza
HQ: Paris
Funding: Raised about €5M from Galileo Partners and business angels.
Business Type: Online shoe shop
The VCs recently swapped out the founding team and replaced the CEO with a former AOL executive.
Read - more
Exalead
HQ: Paris
Funding: In January 2007, it raised $15.6M (12 million euros) led by Qualis SCA.
Business type: Search
Read - more
Posted on May 16, 2007 11:03 PM | Posted to Web 2.0 | Permalink
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