Orange in Second Life...

Orange in Second Life...

Speaker at Telco 2.0 in London on Oct.18

Agenda
Creating Propositions for High Value Segments of the Digital Youth market?
18th October, The Guoman Tower Hotel, London

New Opportunities and How to Address Them:
Social Networking, Mobile Internet, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Music, User-Generated Content: Understanding the End-User and Creating User Experiences that Sell
> Stimulus Speakers and Panelists:
- The Opportunity from Social Networking - Martin Duval, Director of Social Media & OSUP, Orange/FT Group
- Understanding End-User Attitudes, Lessons from the ‘Worldwide Lab’ - Liza Noonan, European Strategic Marketing Manager, Alcatel-Lucent
- How are Students/Young Adults using ICT equipment today, How will they in the future? - Dawn Nafus, Research Anthropologist, Intel Labs

France Telecom launches 'Orange Vallee'

Jean-Louis Constanza (Orange Vallée) : "Chez Orange, je suis un patron de start-up qui dispose de la puissance d'un groupe"

The Orange Next.com team contribution to Soundtribes

Did you ever wonder what was the missing link between Claude Francois, a friday afternoon at the office, Sex Pistols and a 1m90 Wolf, we have an answer and it has been recorded !
Here is the coolest Orange Next.com team contribution to our dear Soundtribes.com service !!

Special messages to members from my team:

- Thomas: what were you doing in my office with these sunglasses on ?

- Aida : i will definitely do it your way next time i ask you to prepare a contract !

- Gwen: simply a revelation !

They even talked about it this morning on France 2 TV, are you guys stars or what ?

City 2.0

I participated last week in the first of a series of workshops 'Ville 2.0' coordinated by the FING to understand and imagine the transformations of a city (Paris in this case) through new and innovative services based on 2.0 and mobility trends.
Beyond the complexity of the roles and responsibilities to be shared and played by the different public bodies (transportation, city council, etc.), the infrastructure and services suppliers such as JC Decaux or Orange, start-up companies have obviously a key role to play in contributing both to the development of the necessary ecosystems and the launch of the many required user experiments.
An initiative like Tellmewhere, 'The collaborative and reusable encyclopaedia of places', is a typical and good example. Tellmewhere has developed a map based UGC platform to allow users, I shall say the 'city users', to find and contribute any information about the city. Let's also mention the sucessfull Yelp service in the US as a new generation Yellow Pages service.
Another example is Peuplade focusing on neighborhood services which in a way also closes the loop from physical to virtual and virtual to physical, when people eventually end up meeting again locally after having connected over the global web.
Also the area of mobility, interactivity and proximity marketing are obviously key ones: I for instance contributed to experiment interactive windows with the start-up Kameleon two years ago to allow citizens to download content 24h a day with their bluetooth connected cell phones as they were passing by Orange window stores. Other examples are 'smart objects' based on NFC technology developed by Airtag or platforms such as FuturLink.
Not to mention the extreme simulations of our future behaviors and expectations in virtual worlds such as SecondLife (can't wait to fly in a 2.0 City!).
We would probably imagine the city of the future offering different value added services based on our personal expectations. We can expect them to be based on basic ones like seamless, reliable and continuous connectivity, access to all (as many as possible ?) data at all times for localized tourism, real estate or employment search but also on new behaviors such as one to one real time exchange of services where one could offer ones cooking skills in exchange for painting or sewing ones. Anyone interested in preparing my sushi dinner in exchange for some kitesurfing lessons on a 2.0 beach yet ?

World Alzheimer's Day - 21 September

In this special World day against the Alzheimer disease , i am glad i have contributed through the world premiere i launched with my team at Orange Mobile France 2 years ago with Medical Intelligence and PasteurMediavita when we developed the Columba bracelet .

L'OSUP est sponsor des 4eme Rencontres des Start-Ups Europeennes des Telecoms et du Multimedia du 3 au 5 octobre

Le 'Orange Start-Up Program' est sponsor des
4ème Rencontres des Start-Ups Européennes des Télécoms et du Multimédia.
Les 3, 4 et 5 octobre 2007 à la Porte de Versailles.
J'y animerai une table ronde sur les relations entre les start-ups et les grands groupes et deux start-ups partenaires de l'OSUP - SongSong et Mob-It - presenteront leurs offres.
Une occasion exceptionnelle de rencontre et d’échange entre investisseurs, entrepreneurs et industriels focalisée sur la dynamique d’innovation et sur la croissance.
Vous trouverez le programme et la fiche d’inscription sur :
Inscription et programme

Fund raising strategy...EASY! ;-)

I know now how to raise funds from VCs...brilliant 'UGC' video ! ;-)
How to raise money from VCs...

Speaker at :

Mobile Web 2.0 conference, 17-19 September 2007, London, UK

The presentation i made:

The return of the Incubators...

No, this is not the title of a new low budget summer sci-fi movie where some out of space hardly creepy creatures would attack a fun group of bored teenagers in a peaceful californian small city. Instead i am talking about this organisational specie which supports entrepreneurial projects and got quite famous during the dot-com bubble with some private U.S. based structures such as Idealab or Garage.com (they still exist by the way) even though the formal concept appeared in the 1960s in the USA and got followed by many public initiatives worldwide. Some pan-european private incubators were also developed such as GorillaPark or SpeedVentures (they don't exist anymore by the way). I actually entered the bubble myself opening and managing the French subsidiary of SpeedVentures before being hired by Orange to manage for 2 years Inventmobile, the Orange mobile focused incubator which then got merged with the France Telecom VC fund Innovacom .
But let's look at the definition of 'Business incubators' from Wikipedia:
' Business incubators are organizations that support the entrepreneurial process, helping to increase survival rates for innovative startup companies. Entrepreneurs with feasible projects are selected and admitted into the incubators, where they are offered a specialized menu of support resources and services. Resources and services open to an entrepreneur might include such diverse elements as :

- provision of physical space (offices, labs)
- management coaching
- help in preparing an effective business plan
- administrative services
- technical support
- business networking
- advice on intellectual property and
- help in finding sources of financing. '

Focusing on supporting the very early-stage phase of a project, incubators used to value these elements as sweat equity rather than providing seed capital. For instance, we valued Inventmobile's incubation support at 150k€ to take a share of 10% of mobivillage back in 2001, our first investment out of 6 over 2 years. Mobivillage was acquired by the japanese For-side 3 years later at 15m€. Not to mention the other 5 investments were not as successful...
It seems that a new wave and breed of incubators is now appearing and yes i will resist the temptation to call them Incubators 2.0.
Based on the assumption it requires little investment (from 20 to 50k€) and a short phase (about 3 months) to develop a standard web 2.0 new service to be Alpha tested, initatives like ycombinator in the U.S. or seedcamp in Europe, bring virtuality to the incubator concept mainly by not providing physical space, even though SeedCamp plans to provide office space in London. Another key difference is that they provide seed financing (up to 50k€) and strong networking rather than the above mentioned set of elements, a structured business plan being less and less of an issue at this stage, for up to 10% stake of the company.
I would also like to mention the notion of 'Business Accelerators' focusing more on international business development support. In that category, I met few month ago in San Francisco Michel Ktitareff, the co-founder of French Business Accelerator (FBIA) providing great support for French young companies to enter the U.S. market through the Silicon Valley ecosystem.
Finally and to a certain extent, i consider the 'Orange Start-up Program' (OSUP) i launched a year ago within the Orange group as a contributor to the incubation models thus providing a Corporate version of it. The OSUP's purpose is to develop an innovative ecosystem around Orange and mainly focused on web 2.0 business opportunities through partnerships with start-ups and VC funds. In less than a year, this global program has identified more than 200 start-up companies, contacted 100, flagged 30 potential partners, signed 10 MoUs to and launched 4 new services/products with more than 2m€ early-stage fund raising support from VCs (+ 3m€ round currently being negociated, summing up +5m€) . Next year's ambition is higher for these KPIs in order to broaden the areas of expertise and partnerships beyond 2.0 to domains such as Contactless, Mobile TV, Content, Broadband, Location Based Services, Health Care, etc. A similar Corporate version is the Microsoft IDEES program developed in France by Julien Cordorniou.
However successful these different models are, there are all great ways to propose constructive solutions to the lack of early-stage financing and support for innovative projects, that is still not solved at least in Europe and particularly in France.