Posts Tagged ‘Arnaud Portanelli’

Here they are – the most exciting startups from beautiful France. Our „Top 5“ choice is: Goojet, Lingueo, Silentale, MyID.is and Webwag.

Only last week Goojet announced that it has raised €6 million in second round funding. At the same time, the French startup is coming out with an updated version of its mobile content and services suite. As Marketing Manager Cédric Giorgi explains: „Goojet enhances your mobile experience by aggregating a number of services and content offerings into one portal. Users can create their mobile world as well as select and customize the services they need.“

Language social network Lingueo offers courses with native speakers in 36 languages around the world. Prices of Lingueo’s one-to-one classes start as low as 10 per hour. The Global Connections specialist for Language Exchange has been founded by Arnaud Portanelli, Johann Querne and Guillaume le Dieu de Ville.

Paris-based startup Silentale allows you to store all your digital conversations in one place and access them from anywhere. To learn more about the internet startup that brought back the People’s Choice Award from LeWeb08, please also watch founder Laurent Feral-Pierssens pitching at the European Plugg Conference.

MyID.is is all about verifying your online identity: Founded by Charles Nouÿrit, the Digital Identity Certification Platform allows people to claim their real identity online. The site entered into public beta at the end of March and offers its service free of charge - users only have to pay a small setup fee.





Webwag is another startup that has been awarded public choice ( please click here to watch Webwag’s pitch from Le Mobile 2.0 conference). Co-Founder and CEO Florent Pitoun explains: „ Webwag is a powerful web tool that helps users create a personalized home page with data feeds and web 2.0 services accessible from any connected device.“ Webwag Mobile 2.0 offers a solution to easily access all your internet services and allows you to download mobile widgets for free.

To review recent episodes of „The Top 5“ please click here. Next monday is all about „The Five Most Promising Nordic Startups“.

Another approach to make the world a better and more communicative place: Lingueo.com, a marketplace for learning languages with teachers coming from all over the world. Lingueo uses a video conferencing system based on a social network – there are public pages where teachers introduce themselves with videos courses as advertising. Tiburon-TV's Viktoria met with Lingueo’s founders Arnaud Portanelli, Johann Querne and Guillaume le Dieu de Ville at the Palais de Tokyo – a pretty impressive art space in Paris (the current exhibition „Hotel Everland“ with its mix of electricity, new technology and art gives the interview a unique background sound)

Arnaud finds that „to offer language exchange for free doesn’t work out“, so they created Lingueo like a marketplace where users can choose the price depending on the quality level of the teacher. Prices of one-to-one classes start as low as €10 per hour - students only pay for the time they spend in the course room with the first five minutes being for free. Founder Guillaume points out: „Right now we offer 36 languages – among them regional languages - with 600 tutors coming from more than 60 countries. Courses can be taken any time, any place.“ All tutors are labeled and rated both by the founders and the students at the end of each course. Everybody who has an internet connection, a browser and a webcam can sign up on Lingueo, there is nothing additional to download.

Lingueo is only online since three months and already experiences a high level of loyalty from its customers according to Johann. He announces that 2009 will be „the year of communication, where we evangelize the service as much as we can.“ Arnaud adds: „We are going to fight to ensure the best quality of our website.“

Make sure to watch the video until the very end: Pretty Viktoria is wearing a black curly wig while the Lingueo „boygroup“ is performing „the Champs-Elysées song“;)