
French Startups to Look Out For - Torlock
http://rerral.com/six-french-startups/
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abolibibelot
Capitaine Train is super useful. The official SNCF (French State owned
railways company) site is unusable and tries to upsell you everything but the
actual tickets. Capitaine Train has a minimalistic design, fast search and has
niceties like .ics to remind you of what you bought.

(I'm in no way affiliated to Capitaine Train)

~~~
seszett
Yeah, I always wondered how this could be. Capitaine Train is making money
just selling train tickets, without any kind of ad at any point of the
process, and that's their only revenue.

On the other hand, we have the official SNCF website, which doesn't even have
to be financially successful itself (since SNCF already makes money on the
ticket itself), but is littered with ads, slow, ugly and unhelpful. And even
PDF train tickets come with half an A4-page worth of ads.

How can this be possible?

EDIT: just looked at the train ticket I printed today, well ok, I was wrong,
there is no ad on it anymore, but I'm sure there was at some point.

~~~
ldng
You're assuming voyages-sncf == SNCF which is not the case. It's a travel
agency whose shareholders are SNCF and Expedia. So they are a private company
that have a preferential treatment for which they been condemned once IIRC
(not that it changed anything ...).

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Signez
You're wrong. Expedia has no longer Voyages-SNCF.com parts since this
"alliance" was condamned by French Autorité de la Concurrence (anti-trust
autority).

Nowadays, the only Voyages-SNCF.com shareholder is Groupe SNCF.

~~~
ldng
I can find references to a fines but nothing about Expedia leaving Voyages-
sncf.com capital. Really curious about it, could you point me to some
reference ?

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tbassetto
I "only" knew Capitaine Train, Lima and Bunkr.

I would recommend you to check [https://sketchfab.com](https://sketchfab.com)
and [https://en.mention.net](https://en.mention.net)

~~~
ialex
i would also recommend [http://pixfirst.com](http://pixfirst.com) awesome SaaS
for photographers it helps photographers sell photos online, they store photos
for and you set the price, sends email to client once photos uploaded, you can
tag photos and create albums out of those tags so people only see their
photos, it is a really interesting startup.

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rtpg
I feel like youmood.me (lets you comment on any webpage) has been tried and
failed 100 times already. Am I just not remembering things?

~~~
pygy_
Maybe they'll get it right.

Tablets were a chronic flop until the iPad came around.

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sebm
I think that despite the clichés in France (as anywhere else too) there always
will be peoples that will try to do new things, different things, by
themselves without relying on the old structures, even if they may be a
minority. When I'm the most proud it's when I complete a project I set to do
by myself even if it's small or if it fails. I literally live for these
moments.

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dobalina
Another worthy mention would be Affilae (a 100% pure bootstrapped startup - no
incubators, no accelerators, no funds raised and yet already profitable). It's
B2B and not B2C though so perhaps not usually featured on these types of
lists. ;)

[https://affilae.com](https://affilae.com)

It's a white-label SaaS affiliate and performance marketing platform providing
tracking, attribution and analytics for running performance marketing networks
and campaigns in-house.

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xacaxulu
I love seeing posts like these! Allez les français!!

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virtualwhys
Should probably include zengularity.com, the creators of the Play! framework.

Not sure if they qualify as a startup; at a minimum they're a highly
successful French development team, perhaps the most successful in France
(LinkedIn just contracted with them on a major project, for example).

Lot of bright cats on their team based on what I saw at scala.io conference in
Paris.

~~~
p4bl0
> perhaps the most successful in France

Mh, I really don't want to undermine their work, but what about Dailymotion,
or Deezer for instance? That's just two _web_ -companies. If I broaden to
development teams, France have several companies with teams who develop the
lead product in their field worldwide.

~~~
virtualwhys
Yeah, I have no idea, thus the _perhaps_ bit -- these guys are rolling in big
time projects regardless, definitely on the rise.

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agumonkey
It would be nice to have a per-country map of recent startups/initiatives like
these.

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sarhus
Not in that list, but I think Smartmeup is quite interesting too:
[http://www.smartmeup.org/index.php?skip=1](http://www.smartmeup.org/index.php?skip=1)

Machine Learning + Realtime face recognition

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elwell
Both my co-founders are French. We are working to help venues aggregate,
curate, and display social media captured at their events.
[http://wesawit.com](http://wesawit.com)

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thom
Dunno if French guys based in New York count, but Placemeter are awesome. So
many things they could do with the technology.

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drstewart
This is awesome! I'd love to work in France, it just seems there are a dearth
of tech companies there.

~~~
GuiA
It's easy to find work as a software engineer in France, but it's typically in
contracting agencies or large companies. There is a dearth of tech startups
for sure.

~~~
paulhauggis
This is most likely due to the high taxes and regulations required for
companies there. General employment rules are pretty strict as well.

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norswap
From Belgium: [http://www.famest.com/](http://www.famest.com/)

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donpdonp
I interpreted the title as "French Startups to avoid."

