Philippe Jeudy and Altaïde Valley are preparing the third edition of the GeekTrip. This very nice initiative consists in a 1 week trip in San Francisco to:
meet with the main companies of the Valley to get a feel about the main trends
meet with French entrepreneurs in the Valley to hear about their experience and what makes the Valley so different
learn a lot during this week in the most innovative region of the world
To give you an idea, follow this link to the agenda of the previous GeekTrip that included meetings with: FaceBook, Google, Microsoft, Seesmic, Netvibes and many more. This video from the French TV LCI also give you an idea of GeekTrip spirit:
As you can see, these GeekTrips are perfect to discover the legendary Valley with the opportunity to really meet the Valley thanks to Philippe Jeudy and his network.
For Yoocasa, it is still too early to join the Third edition. But I will for sure be part of one of the future editions of these great trips.
I also wanted to take the opportunity of this post to thank Philippe for all his initiative in favor of the French entrepreneurs.
There were a lot of reactions about Steve Jobs health and the fact that Apple finally communicated about it. Most of the interest was focused on the content of the announcement itself: Is it the truth? Is this really benign?
Relieved to learn that Jobs health was not critical or forcing him to quit his CEO position, the financial analysts complained that Apple didn’t communicate earlier. Before this announcement, Apple always said that it was a “private matter”. And, a lot of people still think that it should have stayed like that.
A lot of Apple/Jobs fans think that Steve’s health is part of his private life and should not be made public. Indeed, for most CEO, I would agree that their health should stay private and only the potential replacement of the CEO by a successor matters for the investors and the employees. But, Steve Jobs is not any CEO: he is a super star CEO. He has real fans like so many other famous artists or singers for whom it is very normal that private matters like health are made public.
So, as a CEO, nothing justifies making Steve Jobs health public. On the other hand, for a super star like Steve, this type of intrusion in private life is a very common practice. This announcement just proves that, despite his abscence from the MacWorld stage, Steve Jobs has become more a super star than a CEO.
Cisco WebEx is one of the most advanced collaborative online meeting platform for companies. It offers a very convenient interface to work together remotely on documents. For Yoocasa, we benchmarked it a lot to try to inspire from it.
Wednesday, Cisco announces the release of a mobile application to attend WebEx meeting from the iPhone. It seems to miss only the video-conferencing part (easily understandable in term of bandwidth and performance requirements). This feature will for sure turn the iPhone into a more serious business phone and give it a real competitive edge in companies using WebEx..
Sorry, I only found this commercial video but it gives an idea of the application features: WebEx for iPhone.
The next question is: will we also developp an iPhone client for Yoocasa? Part of the answer is conditioned by the answer to this other question: Will Apple release Flash for iPhone?
We hope that the New Year brings a lot of happiness, health and wealth to you and your family.
For us at Yoocasa, 2009 is going to be a very important year because we plan to launch our beta before mid year. Of course, it is an exciting challenge and will mean a lot of work for all of us.
Our promise: do our best to make as many happy users as possible.
Who ever said that finance and funding is the boring and difficult part of entrepreneuship?
A bit like indians dance to get rain, First Round Capital organized a giant startups dance to fight the crisis, quoting James Brown, says “Any problem in the world can be solved by dancing”
I have to admit: I’m a huge fan of Gary Vaynerchuk. Gary is the guy behind the amazing success of his family business: Wine Library. He grew it from 3 million dollars to 50 million dollars a year between 1998 and 2005. And he did that mainly by building an amazing personal brand.
He has a tremendous energy and is such a great showman that it’s always a great pleasure to see him on stage. So, he was one of the reasons why I wanted to attend LeWeb and see him on stage for another of his highly energizing shows, even if the French public was not very reactive. Here is the video: Enjoy !
Last Saturday, Advancia, the French Entrepreneurship Business School, organized a business idea contest. The principle is quite simple. Each project owner presents his idea in 7 minutes followed by 30 minutes of questions and advises by a jury of experts. In the jury, entrepreneurs, consultants and professors from Advancia were here to challenge the projects and help us identify potential weaknesses.
This initiative was a very positive experience for all these early stage startups, because it’s a unique opportunity to confront a project with entrepreneur and experts. It was even a better experience for the 3 winners including Yoocasa. This will give us a good chance to enter the Advancia incubator and 1 year of consulting.
Thanks a lot again to Advancia for organizing this contest for early stage entrepreneurs.
France doesn’t have any Web worldwide market leader…. yet. But we have one of the best Internet connections in the World, as we can see on this map published beginning of December 2008 by the National Telecom Agency – ARCEP:
Grey dots represent areas covered by France Telecom and blue dots represent areas covered by France Telecom and at least one other DSL operator.
Indeed, French Web entrepreneurs have a real chance with one of the best-equipped domestic market. Even if the French population , this does give us the biggest number of Internet users, which is so important for monetization. But, this gives us a very mature market with a wide range of users and user categories. In France, Internet is definitely becoming mass market.
And the good news is that this growth is still solid:
If we look at a broader perspective to compare these numbers wih other countries, we see on this chart by Point Topic that France is indeed in a good position in term of broadband connection rate:
These statistics are very good market signs for Yoocasa. Indeed, we need mass market to be connected.
The .tel domains are a new generation of domains dedicated to the publication of digital identities and limited to this identity. User will have the opportunity to use them to publish there phone numbers, emails, website links… Thanks to search services, these .tel domains will offer a worldwide directory. Without going to much into too many technical details, these new types of domains are able to store and publish your digital details directly in the Internet infrastructure without requiring any hosting.
For those who understand: the .tel domain stores your digital details directly in the DNS, instead of the IP address of your hosting server.
This is a technically exciting idea, but it comes with some big limitations compared to similar services based on other technologies like GoDaddy’s SmartSpace or Chi.mp. For example, .tel don’t offer the possibilities to add your activity stream from Twitter or the content of your RSS stream. It is also impossible to personalize the presentation of your .tel page, because there is no page. So, with a standard price around $20, these domains seem a bit expensive for the service offered.
Launched last Wednesday, the registrar will offer these domains only to companies registered before 30 May 2008. It will be available for anyone from 3 February 2009.
My guess is that most companies won’t take the risk to not own their .tel domains, despite the cost. But, the success towards individuals still needs to be confirmed.
On our side, we will buy it for Yoocasa, just in case. I’m interested to know if you will buy yours.
