Laurent’s blog

Your Facebook domain name

When Facebook recently announced that all of their 200 million registered users would be able to choose their own username on June 13th, most of us took it at face value. Great, I can now send a direct link to my profile with a simple URL!

Although this is already a great step from the very cumbersome numerical ID we had to link to previously, the rules Facebook applies to choose and suggest usernames bugged me. It’s very limiting, in fact, it may be even more restrictive as registering a new domain name. Only basic text, alphanumeric characters and a single period is allowed. This is quite different from the flexible names twitter and newer services offer.

Almost at the same time as the username announcement, there was quite a bit of talk around the opportunities the unrestricted gTLD introduces. There is no doubt established corporations will use those new TLD to reinforce their brands. We will see .facebook, .microsoft or .google.

Which raises the question, is Facebook preparing itself to provide a “shorter” URL to their 200 million members? Effectively giving everyone a direct access to their profile with a simple http://username.facebook or even with an unlikely http://username.fcbk.

Facebook has more chances to impose a new top level domain than anyone else, just by the number of people using them. They could effectively be seen as THE digital profile provider. Making it a great preemptive move for anyone else trying to do it (read… Google).

Posted in Around the web, opportunity | 2 Comments »

Silentale’s first brick & mortar ad campaign

While Silentale is still in private testing, we have started to promote the service to educate everyone on how Silentale can change how we search for our conversations.

To help us in this task, Sparky was born and today he’s helping us around the world as more people see his face on billboards, city walls, shopping centers and office buildings. To give you a taste of what’s going on, here are pictures of various locations.

Our next stop is Amsterdam this Thursday and Friday, so don’t forget to come and see us during TheNextWeb 2009. We’ll be presenting on stage on the second day!

Posted in news, silentale | Comments Off

San Francisco Party during Web 2.0 Expo Conference

It’s been a while since I posted here, probably due in part by the Twitter-effect. Although I partially blame twitter and my lack of free time in the recent weeks, I intend to improve the frequency of my posts. So stay tuned.

In the meantime, if you are in San Francisco this week, you are invited to join 10 french companies, including Silentale, Seesmic, Netvibes, BlueKiwi and Yoono, for a great evening. It’s Thrusday night April 2nd at Vessel, starting at 7pm. You can walk directly there directly from the Moscone center after the Web 2.0 conference.

Posted in events, silentale | Comments Off

Tiburon TV interviews @LeWeb08

Viktoria Trosien captured some of the excitement at LeWeb08 by interviewing a few entrepreneurs present. She has started to post them at tiburon-tv.com.

First interview is with Charles Nouÿrit of MyID.is certified

The second of Raphaël Labbé, founder of ulike.net where you share everything you like

And finally a few minutes where I speak about Silentale

Posted in events, silentale, startups | Comments Off

Silentale is looking to grow it’s engineering team

Intrigued by Silentale? Can’t wait to try Silentale? The best way is to join us. We have just opened two new positions based in Paris. We’re looking for passionate software developers that love working on difficult problems and that thrive in a startup environment. Some of our challenges include distributed systems, scalability and natural language processing. Familiar with internet based services, cloud infrastructure or machine learning, see the job descriptions at http://jobs.silentale.com and apply!

Posted in opportunity, silentale, startups | Comments Off

Bringing the People’s Choice Award back from LeWeb08

Last week, Nicolas and I spent two very intense days at LeWeb08. The morning of the first day was filled with excitement as we were prepping for the Startup Competition. The planned 7 minute presentation was how we would unveil Silentale for the first time. The very short time given to us, with strict rules on content, including a live demo of the product, was to be conducted in front of a panel of judges.

As it turned out, there were quite a few issues for anyone on and off stage. To start, there was no internet, no coffee and no heat. So imagine a chilly 14°C room, with entrepreneurs lacking their daily IV of caffeine running around in a frenzy saying “There is NO internet at the podium! That’s right, no wireless, not wired, nothing!”.

Fortunately, most participants managed well without being hooked to the internet. Each had to resort to Plan B, C or D with slideshows, screenshots and videos. As for us, I have to give praise and thanks to Nicolas and Steve for saving the day! While all of the turmoil was happening, Nicolas turns around with a smirk on his face and calmly says, “Let’s just make sure we have 3G on stage”. Thanks to a jailbroken iPhone (that’s Steve’s contribution) Nicolas was able to hook us up and get our live demo going. To top things off, no one in the audience even noticed the difference. That’s good, right?

The announced panel of judges was quite interesting and diverse consisting of VCs, industry professionals and serial entrepreneurs. For each set of 5 companies, the 4 judges would change, making each group uneven in their ratings. But, who would dare to sit in for 30 presentations in a row? A few people in the audience did and one jury member as well. It was Scoble, the President of the Jury. Unfortunately, a picture of him playing a game of Solitaire during one of the startup’s pitches leaked. Fun but not funny for the guys on stage. Better yet, it was mentionned in the now legendary Guardian article titled “Freezing cold, no internet, boring: it’s a French web 2.0 conference!“. So British.

The event was far from being that bad. The second day was warmer and brought great speakers on stage, including Chris Anderson of TED, Marissa Mayer of Google and Marc Simoncini of Meetic. Recorded footage from the main stage can be viewed on UStream.tv.

As for the competition, Viewdle was the gold winner, a very cool video indexing technology. Bronze went to Webnode and silver to Zoover, all quite establised companies. Although, it took us a few minutes to realize the “People’s Choice Award” went to no one else other than Silentale!

Unfortunately, everyone was disappointed with the way the judges announced the three winners. Scoble asked the three founders to present their companies on the main stage before announcing the order of the prizes. Order that was, in fact, the same as the presentation order. It simply made no sense at all. As for the People’s Choice Award, which is by definition the choice of the attendees, it was barely heard by anyone. That’s why most of you may have only heard that the prize even existed by reading Mike Butcher’s post after they were announced (thanks @mbites!).

At least Loïc and Géraldine Le Meur, the organizers, have acknowledged this year’s issues and apologized profusely in a long and detailled post on their site, and in an email to the 30 Startups participating in the competition.

As for us, we are very pleased to have been chosen as the events favorite startup. Thank you all! It means a lot and we hope to bring Silentale to you very soon. If you have not done so already, register your email at www.silentale.com, read about the company at blog.silentale.com or simply follow us on twitter at @silentale.

A few pictures of the event:

by leafar. : Nicolas Fouché, Laurent FP, wondering if we convinced anyone

by rMen: Raphael Labbé (ulike.net founder, in the background), LFP and Charles Nouyrit (MyID.is founder)

by leafar. : NF and LFP getting ready

by rMen: NF and LFP on stage

by leafar. : Pierre Kosciusko-Morizet member of the Jury, founder of PriceMinister.com

Posted in events, silentale, startups | 2 Comments »

Startup Academy: coaching and 50,000€ for your Internet or mobile project

You have a project, you want to get to your next step but don’t know exactly how to proceed. That’s where Startup Academy is trying to help.

Three projects will be selected and will have the possibility to tackle their own issues with a broad range of entrepreneurs, professionals and experts turned coaches for a few months. Sun is also chipping in a few hosted servers for the winners.

The only requirements are that the company/project needs to be based in France, be less than 3 years and, of course, have an internet or mobile internet project. How to participate?

Update [12/8/2008]

And the winners are:

1. Alenty – online advertising optimization
2. Affiz – online advertisement statistics agregator
3. Hellotipi – your family social network

Posted in startuping | Comments Off

Silentale to participate in LeWeb08 Startup Competition

We are pleased to announce that Silentale has been selected to present in front of a great panel of judges at LeWeb08. The conference will be taking place in Paris on December 9 and 10. 30 contestants will be presenting and the top 3 startups will then have the chance to present on the main stage. This will be a great opportunity for the winners to get some real time feedback from 1,500 people, including potential users, partners and investors.

If you’re planning on attending the event, then mark your calendar to come and listen in, as it will be Silentale’s first public presentation.

If you’re unable to attend, please feel free to contact me during or after the conference. And as usual, use twitter, SMS (+33672014787), Skype or email as me as a last resort.

Lastly, if you want to be one of the first to use Silentale, visit www.silentale.com to get an invitation, or reach out to us during the conference; Nicolas Fouché and myself will be there.

•••

The 30 companies that have been selected for the 2008 Start-up Competition are:

1.    2Win-Solutions – FRANCE
2.    3scale networks S. L. – SPAIN
3.    Apture – USA
4.    Box.net, Inc. – USA
5.    Brozengo SA – FRANCE
6.    Charge Ventures – Malta
7.    Cmune – CHINA
8.    ConTrust – ISRAEL
9.    DoctorSIM – SPAIN
10.  Edicy – ESTONIA
11.  Haploid – FRANCE
12.  IZI-collecte – FRANCE
13.  Kaltura – USA
14.  MyID.is Certified – FRANCE
15.  Nimbuzz – NETHERLANDS
16.  Popego Inc. – USA
17.  Producteev Inc. – USA
18.  Publing – FRANCE
19.  Radionomy – BELGIUM
20.  Samedi GmbH – GERMANY
21.  ShoutEm Ltd. – CROATIA
22.  Silentale – FRANCE
23.  SquareClock – FRANCE
24.  Tellmewhere – FRANCE
25.  Trendiction – LUXEMBURG
26.  Viewdle, Inc – UKRAIN
27.  Webnode.com – CZECH REPUBLIC
28.  Zavedenia.com – BULGARIA
29.  Zipipop Ltd (Zipiko) – FINLAND
30.  Zoover Holiday Reviews – NETHERLANDS

The judges will be:

•    Ola Ahlvahrsson – Result
•    Roberto Bonanzinga – Balderton Capital
•    Mike Butcher – TechCrunchUK
•    Laurent Chiozotto – Sun Microsystems
•    Julien Codorniou – Microsoft
•    Don Dodge – Microsoft
•    David Hornik –August Capital
•    Pierre Kosciusko-Morizet -  Price Minister
•    Simon Levene – Accel Partners
•    Om Malik – GigaOM
•    Dave McClure – 500Hats
•    Freddy Mini – Netvibes
•    Marc Samwer – European Founders Fund
•    Axel Schmiegelow – Sevenload
•    Gary Shainberg – British Telecom
•    Megan Smith – Google
•    Pascal Thomas – Orange
•    Martin Varsavsky – FON

Posted in silentale, startups | 1 Comment »

Antidote Mobile: Untangle your French on the road

On the road being a figure of speech, of course!

Two weeks ago, Eric Brunelle, president of Druide Informatique, announced at Apple Expo Paris the immediate availability of Antidote Mobile for iPhone. It became instantly the best way to carry with you the huge number of references usually found in the desktop version.

Eric’s team has been able to make good use of the iPhone navigation to seamlessly access the 10 dictionaries and the 10 linguistic guides. At least for me and a few other fans of the original Antidote, the mobile edition has almost completely eclipsed my use of the references on the desktop version. It’s just quicker to get to what you’re looking for.

We’re only missing the award winning correcteur. But in order for Druide to do that, our friends at Apple will first need to make some sort of copy & paste available.

Mac4Ever.com has an interview with Eric during Apple Expo (in french).

Posted in mobile, news | Comments Off

Mobile apps should be web based, or should they?

A few days ago, I received this cartoon in Penrillian’s latest newsletter. It depicts pretty well my true feeling have about the current state of mobile web-based applications: they’re great except…

With the release of Android and the success of the iPhone as a mobile internet platform, questions about the application strategy becomes more frequent. We know the data is located on the cloud, but where should the application be?

A- On the device (native)
B- On the web (dedicated)
C- On the web (generic)

Everyone ask if they should be developing a native application such as an iPhone or Blackberry app, a platform specific web version (ex. iphone.myco.com) or generic mobile web version (ex. m.myco.com) of their service.

On one side, the native application is much closer to the platform in terms of look & speed but requires a download and need to be adapted to each platform. On the other side, the web-based application dedicated to a single platform is a more lightweight alternative and doesn’t require a download. Unfortunately the mobile network is far from being ubiquitous and the convenience of mobile web is not necessarily obvious. Especially if you consider that you still need a manipulation for a web application to own some real estate space on the user’s screen .

Answer: All of the above

Unfortunately, “all of the above” is too often the developers first answer. They provide a native app, a specific mobile version of the site and a generic one. If you take for example LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter or many others applications, you will see that they experiment with the various ways to access their service on the same device.

The terrible drawback of this method is that each tool provides a different level of functionality. Users actually need the two, three of four applications to experience the same service as what can simply be done using the desktop’s browser.

It looks the same but not the same

Let’s take Facebook for example. The “Home” on the iPhone application only displays friends’ status messages. In order to view new friends and events on top of status messages, then accessing Facebook using the mobile version dedicated to the iPhone is possible. This version includes the latest stream including notifications, photos, events and everything else from the “regular” news feed.

As for pending requests, this cannot be done using iphone.facebook.com, only the generic mobile site m.facebook.com will allow to confirm friends and events. Unless you really wanted to add your friend to one of your Friend Lists, in that case you can only do it through the regular site www.facebook.com.

Our future

To the opposite of the desktop space where web applications are slowly taking over the installed software space, on the mobile device, the gap between native and mobile web is narrowing partially thanks to Apple’s App Store easing the distribution of native applications.

But for now, I still prefer a feature complete native application using plenty of network to get to the data over an average web application.

Even if ultimately services will consolidate their offering, it will not happen anytime soon as we will first see a proliferation of smaller applications (web and native) from the developers themselves along with applications from the community using the official APIs.

Let’s just hope that each one of them becomes more feature complete over time.

Update [a few minutes after posting this]

My wish has been granted as Facebook just released v2 of their native iphone application. They have included most of the missing features: full feeds, notifications and requests.

Posted in mobile | Comments Off