Frenchweb invites you this week to come back to the digital news in Nice with Sophie Gironi, our correspondent in Nice. On the programme: a new coworking area, the arrival of the national innovation competition run by Huawei France and an event on innovative cities…
La Belle Verte opened its doors at La Colle sur Loup. Launched last April by Françoise Lelièvre, a former member of the Nice coworking space Les Satellites, La Belle Verte is the first coworking space in the Cagnois hinterland.
Located in the former premises of the Tourist Office of La Colle-sur-Loup, at an equal distance from Roquefort les Pins, Vence or Villeneuve Loubet, La Belle Verte allows professionals to break isolation without having to travel long distances to reach third places generally located in the city centre.
Actively supported in her approach by the municipality, Françoise Lelièvre also plans to organize events, which will facilitate meetings between the different actors of the local economy, whether or not they are members of the coworking area.
In addition to the Open Coffee Club Nice which will be held on Friday June 5 from 9am at the Comptoir de l’Imaginaire in Nice and its big brother the OCC Sophia which will take place on Thursday June 18 from 6.30pm at the Comptoir de Maître Kanter in Biot, the Côte d’Azur will host 2 events focused on innovation in June:
- On June 4, the Digital In-Pulse 2015competition, a national innovation competition led by Huawei France, will stop in Nice for the regional preselections. This competition, which aims to support innovative French companies in the field of security, connected objects and Smart Building, will reward 4 winners from among the 12 dossiers selected in Nice on 4 June, Lille on 11 June, Lyon on 16 June and Paris on 18 June. Each finalist will receive an endowment of 50,000€, including 40,000€ in cash and 10,000€ in support of the “Great China French Tech Acceleratech1 ” organized in China in November 2015;
- Innovative City 2015, on 24 and 25 June at Acropolis, will bring together exhibitors and speakers around the theme “City Apps”, with the stated aim of becoming an international accelerator for the development of innovative cities. Elected representatives, industrialists, experts and scientists will share their new thinking and best practices in the field of the intelligent city with the 3,000 international participants expected this year.
It’s the hustle and bustle of e-commerce in France and Navarre : Wizishop, a company from Nice, France, specialized in performance-based e-commerce solutions, launches for the 2nd consecutive year the “Formidable E-Merchant” contest.
Organised this year in partnership with Packlink and Nosto, this competition aims to highlight the work, creativity and often innovative ideas of e-merchants. Three projects will be rewarded following national selections, the finalists of which, selected by the public, will be decided by a jury of professionals next October. The best e-merchant of the year, the best hope and the best e-commerce project will thus be awarded more than €80,000 in prizes.
Applications are open until 31 July on formidable-ecommercant.com
Sophie Gironi: “Director of Communications at Gandi, a professor in web strategy and marketing, lecturer, radio columnist, active member of the satellite coworker community, and organizer of various pro events, including the OCC Nice, I am also an amateur photographer.
The Côte d’Azur is a cultural and economic melting pot, attracting both tourists and brains in search of the quality of life that our region undeniably offers. From this cross-fertilization are born beautiful encounters and great ideas, which unfortunately sometimes struggle to emerge in a relatively static economic context where agility and responsiveness are paramount. But things are moving, because Nice’s entrepreneurs want to make Nice a good place to work“.
Photo credit: Fotolia, royalty free images, vectors and videos
Credit: Starling Bank.
Starling Bank is raising £60 million or nearly €71 million from Merian Global Investors and the JTC Group, both historical investors in the neobank. This fund raising would bring the total funding for the company to £323 million.
Launched in 2014 by Anne Boden, ex-COO of Allied Irish Banks (AIB), Starling Bank has developed a mobile application offering a variety of banking services for both individuals and businesses. Users can view their account balance in real time, make standard transfers, execute international payments, instantly deactivate or reactivate their credit card, or send money to friends from their phonebook.
Strong European competition
Starling Bank’s services don’t stop there, as the neobank analyses user data via machine learning algorithms to adapt to their needs, for example by alerting the user when they have spent a lot of money over a certain period of time. By applying an open banking system (or “open banking system”), the startup also offers its customers the possibility of making transactions more fluid and faster, although it may share their data with other banking services, subject to their consent.
Since the launch of its application, Starling Bank claims 1.25 million accounts created and over £1.25 billion in deposits. Having opened offices in London, Southampton, Cardiff and Dublin, Starling Bank is more than ever looking to expand further in Europe. Indeed, the startup’s expansion objectives were momentarily thwarted by the uncertainties associated with Brexit.
However, in the neobank market, Starling Bank will have to face much more advanced European players, such as the British company Revolut, which, with its 8 million customers, now dreams of winning 100 million customers and raising 1.5 billion euros, or the German startup N26, which has raised 470 million dollars in 2019.
Starling Bank: key data
Founder:Anne Boden
Founding: 2014
Head office:London
Sector:FinTech
Activity:mobile banking
Competitors: Revolut, N26, Monzo…
Financing: EUR 71 million from Merian Global Investors and the JTC Group in February 2020, EUR 35 million in October 2019, EUR 85 million in February 2019 .
Assiya Berrima
Journalist at FW – DECODE MEDIA To contact the editorial staff: [email protected]
All means are good to avoid the spread of coronavirus (even drones)… and to dust off the first movie in history (even the 4K). It may seem like science fiction just a few hours after the Oscars (bravo Joaquin Phoenix and Brad Pitt!), but this is the real world. Joseph Postec tells you everything in this new episode of Wild Card.
For the time of a podcast, Joseph Postec leaves his camera to take his cap as a columnist. In less than five minutes, he decodes his selection of Tech news to give you a pungent analysis in a podcast, not without humour.
Discover the other Decode Media programs
- Decode Business:follow the players who are making news in the Tech
- Decode Exit: how does a business transfer take place? Find out what’s behind the sales of startups
- Decode VC: discover the best investors, their vision, their practices
- Decode CTO: discover the CTOs of the best French Tech startups and companies
- Decode HR: discover the most inspiring HR Directors and their best practices
- Decode of the week: Richard Menneveux and his guests decipher Tech news around the world.
- Wild Card :our sniper Joseph Postec shares his view on Tech news in an offbeat tone
- Silicon Carne: Valley news as seen by Carlos Diaz and his guests
Credit: Frenchweb
New DECODE with Cédric O, Secretary of State in charge of digital technology, to draw up an overall assessment of French Tech since its launch eight years ago. While he notes the dynamism of all the players, he is keen to remain lucid about the reality of the market if “Tomorrow, it will be the big French startups that will be doing M&A For the moment, “we are condemned to see foreigners buying up our startups”.
In front of Richard Menneveux, the founder of Decode Media, Cédric O explains the highlights of his first year as Secretary of State for Digital Technology and his ambition to position France as the leading European tech company ahead of Germany and the UK. It is also an opportunity to discuss the construction of a financing ecosystem through the issue of buybacks. Cédric O also mentioned the GAFA tax, the digital transformation of the State and the digital divide. Quantum as the next technological breakthrough and cybersecurity were also discussed during this interview.
With Richard Menneveux (@rMen), founder and CEO of Decode Media.
Discover the other Decode Media programs
- Decode Business:follow the players who are making news in the Tech
- Decode VC: discover the best investors, their vision, their practices
- Decode CTO: discover the CTOs of the best French Tech startups and companies
- Decode HR: discover the most inspiring HR Directors and their best practices
- Decode of the week: Richard Menneveux and his guests decipher Tech news around the world.
- Wild Card :our sniper Joseph Postec shares his view on Tech news in an offbeat tone
- Silicon Carne: Valley news as seen by Carlos Diaz and his guests
Benoît Dageville and Thierry Cruanes, the founders of Snowflake. Credit: Snowflake.
The cloud and big data are constantly reaching new heights, and Snowflake is not going to complain. Proof of this is that the Franco-American unicorn has just completed a new $479 million financing round. This G Series was led by Dragoneer Investment Group and Salesforce Ventures, the venture capital fund of the CRM software specialist. On this occasion, the American giant has formed a partnership with Snowflake, the outlines of which will be unveiled next June at the Snowflake Summit, the annual conference of the Californian start-up.
The historical investors, namely Sequoia, Altimeter Capital, ICONIQ Capital, Madrona Venture Group, Redpoint Ventures and Sutter Hill Ventures, also participated in the transaction. This brings the company’s valuation to $12.4 billion, more than triple the previous one. Indeed, in its $450 million financing round in October 2018, the Franco-American unicorn was valued at $3.9 billion.
On the way to Wall Street?
Founded by two Frenchmen, Benoît Dageville and Thierry Cruanes, two former Oracle employees, with the support of Marcin Zukowski, the start-up specializes in the implementation of a virtual data warehouse (cloud data warehouse) that allows customers to extract indicators and simplified analyses on large stored volumes. In concrete terms, the company has developed a platform that allows the centralization of a company’s data, whether structured or not, so that teams can extract the main material from it to get an overview of the performance achieved and make forecasts for example.
Snowflake is positioning itself in a very flourishing market, as more and more companies are opting for a multi-cloud approach. In this context, the start-up is working to facilitate the movement of data between the main cloud platforms. Thus, Snowflake’s offer is deployed on the cloud infrastructures of Amazon, Microsoft and Google. Although the Franco-American unicorn appears to be a competitor of these industry giants, it is also one of the main customers of Amazon, which nevertheless offers Redshift, an offer similar to that of Snowflake.
This round of financing and the alliance with Salesforce should enable the company to consolidate its position in the cloud data warehouse market. This also puts the company in the best possible position before taking its first steps on Wall Street. Snowflake has appointed Frank Slootman as CEO. He led ServiceNow, another cloud computing company, to a stock market listing. To date, Snowflake claims 3,400 customers, including Accor, JetBlue, Netflix, Electronic Arts and Monoprix.
Snowflake: key data
Founders:Benoît Dageville, Thierry Cruanes and Marcin Zukowski
Founded:2012
Head office:San Mateo (USA)
Sector: Cloud
Activity:centralized data storage
Funding: $,479 million in February 2020, $450 million in October 2018 .
Maxence Fabrion
Journalist at FW – DECODE MEDIAPo contact the editorial staff: [email protected]
Credit: Ofo.
Victim of the free-floating bicycle bubble, one of the former leading figures in the sector, the Chinese Ofo, notably supported by Alibaba, was unable to repay the balance still held in some accounts. To achieve this, the company has achieved an astonishing feat in China: transforming its application into a shopping platform.
How much are we talking about? For Ofo, and the sector in general, the difficulties began in 2018. The company with the yellow bikes had to withdraw from some cities, even in China where it was particularly present. At the end of 2018, several Chinese media reported that 8 million people were awaiting reimbursement of their filing fees for amounts between $15 and $30. In addition, some users had even gone to the company’s headquarters in Beijing to ask for their refund, forming an impressive queue spilling out onto the street.
“Ofo has fundamentally no assets ”
Since then, the situation is still complicated and not all Chinese users have been reimbursed. How is such a situation possible? After being sued for unpaid bills in June 2019 by a local court in Tiajin, the court declared the company – which had raised $2.2 billion since its inception in 2014 – unable to pay its debts. “Ofo basically has noassets,” he said.
On the user side, the company began implementing its application conversion strategy in February 2019. A path in which it persists and signs by having launched in recent weeks a new version of its application that puts even more emphasis on the possibility for Chinese users to use the rest of their credits to shop via the platform.
A shopping and lifestyle platform
In concrete terms, via the application, users who had not applied for a refund before February 2019 are strongly encouraged to make purchases via the application instead. Tech in Asia reports that as soon as they open their application a pop-up invites them to convert their money into cash-back rewards. Both the site and the application have even been redesigned to look more like a shopping and lifestyle platform. And the offer is varied: the latter can make purchases on JD.com, Taobao & Tmall or even order a meal via ele.me (these last three platforms belong to Alibaba). Not sure, however, if it works so well. Also according to Chinese media, negative comments populate different platforms such as the social network Weibo.
Note that the application also still allows you to order a bike for Chinese cities where Ofo is still present.
A departure from France in December 2018
As a reminder, the Chinese company, which had an international presence, had begun to withdraw from certain countries in 2018, including France. In December of the same year, the company admitted that it was “on a break” in France. The same problem of repayment arose at the time. The persons concerned were invited to send an email for reimbursement.
Former Frenchmen from Ofo create Dott
In the meantime, early last year, Ofo closed its international division, creating a haemorrhage of employees at the same time. For example, as regards France, Laurent Kennel, who was then Managing Director France and responsible for EMEA, joined Dott – an electric scooter company founded by two former French executives who had also worked for Ofo – as “head of strategic development”.
Innocentia Agbe
Journalist @FrenchWeb.fr and @LeJournaldesRH. Please send your press releases and information to [email protected]
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