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December 10, 2007
Buy, Hold, or Sell with Henri Seydoux
We were hoping that Henri Seydoux, the visionary founder and CEO of 
Bluetooth and wireless gearmaker Parrot SA, would give us a taste of the kind of lavish spending enabled by entrepreneurialism in this latest interview for the Buy, Hold, or Sell series .
After all, he not only co-founded several high-tech companies and is majority shareholder of Parrot, but he is also the co-founder of the lux shoemaker Christian Louboutin, known for its distinctive red soles.
But it turns out that Seydoux doesn't do a lot of acquisitions of the consumer kind. He's up-to-date but not one to throw out a good piece of technology in favour of something new, if what he owns still pleases.
For example, Seydoux is a big fan of his basic black and white plastic Swatch watch, one he's been wearing for "years".
"It is modern, but also a classical, quality watch, a neat design," he said.
Seydoux points out that Swatch was the first to put an analogue face on a digital timepiece, something that was quite innovative for its time. Indeed, the Swatch brand was established back in the eighties and the company behind it is now the largest manufacturer of finished watches in the world.
His laptop is a Sony Vaio that he bought three years ago. "When I bought it," he said, "it was the smallest, lightest unit on the market."
His mobilephone is a Nokia N95. He likes the camera in it, he said. "It lets me enjoy the reporter-effect - like a professional photographer, I always have my camera with me and am taking at least one photo a day."
The N95 is not the absolute latest from the Finnish phonemaker, but it sports a 5 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics. It handles MPEG-4 video capture (30 fps) and supports wireless LAN/UPnP, as well as high speed cellular data services (HDSPA and EGPRS) in addition to a quadband radio for making phone calls around the world.
The images below are from Henri Seydoux. Clouds and reflections are what he likes to photograph.
Thanks for the memory
The most recent purchase, and the one that has given him the most satisfaction is a modest one, a 4GB SanDisk microSD flash memory card for his Nokia. "It stores 2000 pictures, 500 songs, just a great buy," he said.
What might explain Seydoux's relatively conservative approach to personal tech is that he is typically the first end-user of the products that Parrot's R&D team develop. It is a team that reportedly outputs a new product every month of the year.
The latest gadget he's been using is a digital photo frame (model no. Parrot DF7700), a colour LCD TV display with a built-in SIM card and cellphone chipset, which means it can receive images directly from a mobilephone.
"I was in Hong Kong, sending my children photos of the ferry trip to the Mainland in Paris, directly to the picture frame," recounted Seydoux. When it hits stores, the gadget will retail for €189.
Serial Entrepreneur and Business Angel
Forty-six years old, Seydoux trained as a journalist, worked in sales for Le Matin de Paris, and joined the techie ranks in 1982, working as an operating systems software developer at a couple of French software firms. He subsequently started up a company to market Microarchi's operating system.
Seydoux also co-founded B.S.C.A (Buffin Seydoux Computer Animation), now known as BUF Compagnie, which has studios in France and Los Angeles. It did the Spiderman 3 visual effects, for example.
Lately, he joined a group of business angels to back French startup MobiNear , whose first product enables users to download digital audio files to portable devices and mobilephones (mainly Nokia but also at least one SonyEricsson javaphone). It does it via Bluetooth interfaces. You could almost count this investment as corporate venturing. Parrot sells Bluetooth dongles for the PC.
View - Parrot SA
Posted on December 10, 2007 07:26 AM | Posted to Being European | Permalink
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