Posts Tagged ‘leweb’

E-Commerce business Shutl is a delivery revolution: Founder and CEO Tom Allason has created an electronic marketplace that connects retailers with local couriers ensuring delivery within 90 min. of purchase or within a one hour time-slot of the consumer’s choice. In the video, Tom introduces the Shutl application.

Click here for Tom's interview with Tiburon-TV. For an overview of all interviews from LeWeb09, please click here.

French Tellmewhere startup combines local reviews, mobile social networking and location-based discovery. Following his Tiburon-TV interview at LeWeb09, co-founder and CEO Gilles Barbier has given a demo of the Tellmewhere iPhone app.

Stay tuned for more interviews from LeWeb!

„We’re a mix of the best part of Qype, Foursquare plus local recommendation engines“ says Tellmewhere-CEO and Co-Founder Gilles Barbier in his interview with Tiburon-TV at LeWeb09. The Paris-based startup offers a web and mobile urban guide to discover new places suited to your tastes. „You can also rate and write reviews“ explains Gilles „the more you rate your experiences, the more precise and personalized your results become.“ Founded in 2007, the startup already has more than 450.000 registered iPhone users, mostly from France.

With version 2.0 of their iPhone application, Tellmewhere is going global with some very cool socializing features like an activity stream of everything your friends are doing. As for Tellmewhere’s business model, local merchants can propose „special offers“ on the Tellmewhere platform which are then monetized by the startup: Like a pay-per-visit model, each time someone uses a „special offer“ coupon, Tellmewhere charges the merchants a small fee.

To download the Tellmewhere app for your iPhone, please click here.

Paris-based startup Leetchi simplifies group gifts between friends. In this video, CEO and founder Celine Lazorthes provides a demo of Leetchi’s free and easy-to-use application. Click here to watch Viktoria's interview with Celine.

Finally today we’ll start our LeWeb coverage with a portrait of Celine Lazorthes and her brand new Paris-based startup Leetchi. Right after graduation from Business School last year, 26-year-old Celine created the platform for free group gift applications. With Leetchi, groups of friends can join together to organize gifts of all kinds and collect money for them in a „Leetchi pot“. Once the group gift is fully funded, it can be bought through Leetchi’s e-commerce partners.

According to Celine, group gift-giving is a huge market: Each year $103 billion are traded between groups and friends, with one-third being only for group gifts. Two months out the gates, Leetchi still needs both higher visibility and more visitors: „It is our goal to have at least 2000 ‚Leetchi pots’ in 2010“ the young female entrepreneur says. In February, the startup will launch its B2B part with a widget for an e-commerce website. To get a feel for how the platform works just watch the demo at the end of our video.

Stay tuned for more LeWeb coverage in the coming days!

After introducing SIME last week, we would like to recommend another great event to you: LeWeb, the #1 European Internet conference that takes place every year in Paris.

The 6th edition of LeWeb will be held on Dec 9th and 10th 2009 and is all about the "Real-Time Web". LeWeb not only wants to be a tech conference but an event touching on more wide-reaching topics. Its main stage program will be featuring internet leaders and visionary entrepreneurs as well as world renowed voices like author Paulo Coehlo or designer Philippe Starck. To submit discussion topic ideas or speakers please click here.

Adjacent to the plenary stage, there are special Networking Zones (there even was a mobile sauna for tired conference attendees at LeWeb 2008!) Please click here to register to the conference.

As in the past, LeWeb 2009 will be running a StartUp Competition: The best 20 applications will be selected to make a 6-min-demonstration of a new product. To submit your company please click here.

Out of the many amazing and talented people that attended LeWeb 2008, Viktoria interviewed sevenload’s co-founders Ibrahim Evsan and Thomas Bachem, David Hornik from August Capital as well as eBuddy’s CEO Jan-Joost Rueb.



Leading global social media platform sevenload.com concentrates on modern internet television and User Generated Content. The new media company even helps pave your way to stardom by giving you your own show in one of the sevenload channels...

LeWeb is also great for meeting investors and VCs like David Hornik from August Capital. According to David who’s also an author and lecturer at Stanford and Harvard UC, August Capital will be raising a new fund despite the economic downturn.

Online messaging aggregator eBuddy.com offers a free Web Based as well as a Mobile Messenger that enable you to chat without downloads.

That's it for now - learn more about the Shift conference in next Friday’s edition of „Events2go“!

As pointed out in part 1 of Viktoria's interview with blueKiwi's CEO and co-founder Carlos Diaz, the company has a pretty clever subscription based business model. Carlos now talks about the importance of looking at the size if one is editing software:

„Most of the software will be provided on size tomorrow. The size model is very interesting and also quite disruptive. Companies used to buy software making an investment first, then command and pray so that there will be no errors on their software. With size this is not a problem anymore since you pay only for the users you have.“

He adds that another advantage of a subscription based model is that you have all the maintenance, helpline and evolution of the product already included in the annual user fee:

„People want to start with your solution very simply and quickly and leave it when they don’t believe in it anymore.“

Talking about blueKiwi’s market, Carlos points out:

„In the field of social software most of the big players like jivesoftware or Teligence are American. Within the next three years, we want to demonstrate that a European player can become a leader. We know who our competitors are and with whom we are going to be fighting.“

Last but not least, Carlos’ advice for starting a company is:

„Work on your business model and keep it simple. If you can raise money today, do it. Then take the money and run!“

If you want to learn more about blueKiwi Software, also watch „Carlos Diaz – blueKiwi Software: Corporate Facebook, part 1“

BlueKiwi Software.com, founded 1 ½ years ago, provides social networking solutions for large organizations. Like a „corporate Facebook“, blueKiwi provides tools to manage an organization’s relationships to the people they care about: Clients, partners and employees. As CEO and co-founder Carlos Diaz points out

„if the enterprises don’t jump into social networking, employees will do it without them. What’s happening right now on the web is not congruent to what’s happening within the organizations.“

According to Carlos, organizations

„spent a lot of money in building up their information system – what they now need to do is to build up their relationship system.“

BlueKiwi’s software mixes people together in a private and confidential network in order to strengthen relationships between employees, partners and clients, share ideas and best practices, get feedback, create innovation and thereby accelerate time to market.

Right now, blueKiwi has around thirty customers, mostly large multinational organizations like BNP Paribas, Societé Générale, Alcatel and Dassault Systemes. Since blueKiwi’s solution is provided with a subscription model based on a fee per user per year, for Carlos it is „mandatory to make our clients happy with our product.“ A quite clever business model, as Viktoria from Tiburon-TV points out, especially with clients like Nokia growing from 100 to 5000 employees ...

Watch out for Part 2 of Viktoria’s interview with Carlos, which will be shown tomorrow.

Ulike.net is an entertainment suggestions website, co-founded three years ago by French entrepreneurs Mathieu Léronde & Raphaël Labbé. According to Raphaël, they spent one year on the algorhythm before having the website running two years ago. Ulike is all about sharing what you like or hate and getting recommendations: It offers 50 different categories with subgroups, i.e. books, music, movies, people, characters, cities or countries. Based on your ratings in these categories, Ulike gives you recommendations matching your interests so that you can discover new things. So it acts as a filter for any kind of entertainment. Raphaël points out that when it comes to music or books on the web, making discoveries „is ok right now, for example with LibraryThing“, but what’s new with Ulike is its broad approach and the possibility of building bridges from one content to another. I.e. Ulike will recommend a book based on your movie and music taste. Furthermore, it helps you to meet other people with the same tastes. With 70.000 - mainly European - users and 6 mio. ratings on its website, there are already 300.000 items on Ulike’s website. Each day 200 items are added by its core contributors. „Hopefully one day our userbase will be as big as the one of Last.fm“, says Raphaël. He points out that „we are still early in the process of having the personalized, collaborative, filtering algorhythm deployed around content.“ In order to broaden Ulike’s market, Raphaël wants „to evangelize the possibilities of that recommendation“ through TV or press content. Ulike raised money from French insurer AXA and has „good Business Angels“. In order to get a feel for Ulike, check out Raphaël’s lounge http://www.ulike.net/leafar

Silentale.com, founded by Laurent Feral-Pierssens and based in Paris, will be opening in a limited beta version starting in January. Using archival and search tools, Silentale aggregates personal conversations by e-mail, voicemail or chat and brings it to one secure place online. Since we all talk to the same people through different channels, Silentale can help us to put a thread between all conversations and provide a history of them. Laurent stresses that the information is personal, very well secured as well as not visible. No data mining will be done. Silentale’s service is subscription-based and users pay for the service they get: „Our customers value their information and they want to feel that relationship between them and us“ remarks Laurent. Silentale will be rolling out API and thereby be extended to Outlook Desktop Agent, iPhone SMS, iPhone App and Android.
Within Silentale’s preparation process of over two years, Laurent initially considered advertising, but finally decided „not to touch user data and not to put any ads.“ Silentale is backed by a very wide North-American and European group of investors that have funded successful companies before. Laurent finds it of utmost importance „to keep one’s value chain as short as possible. Be careful if you need three partners or four ways to make money“. His goal for Silentale is „to simply have a number of users“ in 2009 without being specific about it. With bouncing boards and jumping boards all over the place, Silentale tries to make its first impression everywhere at the same time, then penetrate in a marketing sense of way the markets locally. As Laurent says: „One needs to have a global approach and execute locally“. 
Silentale brought back the People’s Choice Award from LeWeb08. Users can participate in its beta by going to www.silentale.com