Non Native but Powerfull Ecosystem
Last week I gain several readers who spoke only English, so I created a special feed for them with my posts in English. I also had several exchanges with Equity Kicker and I planned a trip to london to meet VCs and entrepreneurs. So I’ve checked Techcrunch UK and realize that Stowe was not wrong on one point: it’s difficult to meet freely in France and to some extent in Europe (UK apart). So let me make my point in two parts.
Non Native:
We have a few conferences as LES BLOGS (this year edition is called LeWeb 3 and it’s in December) but they are all closed and expensive (except from Barcamp). Rodrigo was a great blog for discovering VC and potential BA (we found one of ours thanks to him/ thanks Again) but the french side of his blog just vanished (I know he is a busy man, even ubiquitous ! But he still keep the tone right). But we lack a real place like Techcrunch (not only online but ij real). Techcrunch FR is dedicated to speak about French Start-up (they’ve done it: Scoopeo, Ziki …and more and even more generally with a possible web2.0 wake up) but it’s not as the UK one fully dedicated to UK with events. Ouriel translate a lote of US notes (which is great) and we have a few specific blogs as AccessOweb or Web2.info or even Canadian but no real open event (only bloggers night). That’s a lot but that does not create such an ecosystem as the UK one (without mentioning SiliconV).
Powerfull :
Nevertheless, France is an incredible (powerfull) ecosystem for drafting a service around the virtual identity. Here is some clues why:
1) Netvibes/Typepad no need to comment…. but impressive.
2) MyBloglog (reviews from TCus & TCfr) is a brilliant service (will need a lot of algorithm improvements to reach the status of real attention network but I am sure they are working on it). And it’s mainly used by frenchies. Eric one of the founder has 16253 contact and we could estimates that it’s the actual size of the service since he is automaticaly added to newbies. But the best is that this service has a lot of non bloggeur in it (1 out of 4 my estimate), it’s not techno-geeks, nor early adopters in the finance enviroment. Power of real use is in france.
3) Dailymotion.com is on the verge of being the next youtube. Take a look at Fred Destin post (he’s investor in it). And I agree with his view on youtube when chating with with Mark Tluszcz (Sorry) Tuluszcz. Myspace is the video provider and blogs are the ground of dailymotion.
4) France is co-leading on many Open source projects (Wikipedia, Firefox -Nito ruling europe is french- …etc)
—–> We are an exception…. we have huge adsl connection, a "wish to be" population, "bloggers" like maniacs, the Lumieres Utopia. We only need cash and a better entreprenarial ecosystem.
On techcrunch US i’ve found that video about Digg (from the early days 12/04) it’s on TV! That’s an extensive ecosystem (A VC even made me a joke about the way we talk about blogs on the french TV). Clearly we need an Angelpitch because our gap is wider than the UK’s one, creating better "arbitrage" position on the Public Internet.
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