'technology' Category
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Is France prepared to make the sacrifices necessary to foster the innovation ecosystem it claims to want?
October 28, 2015Open Innovation, the Year of Innovation, Young Innovative Enterprises, etc. we cannot stop talking about innovation. But we also should acknowledge that innovation comes with certain demands. For example, innovation requires flexibility. For companies to be innovative, they must be agile. Lack of agility is one of the reasons large established firms are caught flat-footed […]
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Imagining the future of food
October 20, 2015What will the future of food look like ? On the one hand, the world is facing a food crisis. Roughly 1 in 9 people lack enough food to eat, while pressures are mounting from population growth to climate change. At the other end of the spectrum, the developed world’s expectations are growing increasingly sophisticated. […]
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Beyond Robots, France and Japan Launch Year of Innovation
October 6, 2015It was an honor to participate in France’s governmental delegation to Japan to launch the Year of Innovation between the two countries. Seriously, I’m not being sarcastic. It’s true that I like to mock government initiatives in innovation, and my first reaction to the ministerial invitation to serve in the official kick-off of FrenchTechTokyo was […]
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Préparez-vous pour Dash Camp 2016
October 2, 2015Pour la troisième année consécutive, on m’a accordé des places pour amener une délégation française de 5 startups privilégiées au prestigieux Dash Camp au Japon. Dash Camp représente la conférence de référence en Asie qui facilite les échanges entre les entrepreneurs innovants et les dirigeants des grands groupes tech japonais. Elle est pertinente pour ceux […]
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The worst innovation of our day ?
September 30, 2015I have this ongoing contest with a childhood friend on identifying the most impactful contributions to society’s moral decay. Potential winning candidates reflect more than mere kooky inventions: they genuinely qualify as innovations because they witness widescale adoption, for better or (in this case) for worse. I had won the last battle when I cited […]
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France has its tech Unicorn. Next it needs its Unicorpse.
September 15, 2015France allegedly crowned its first unicorn last week when BlaBlaCar raised a new funding round led by Insight Venture Partners of $160 million at a post-money valuation of $1.2 billion. Actually, there is some debate on whether BlaBlaCar represents France’s very first unicorn (some argue that Vente-Privée should hold that title, but that’s beside the […]
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When engineers mix with artists, amazing things can happen. So why segregate them?
July 7, 2015Skimming through the alumni magazine of my undergraduate engineering school, I stumbled onto an article about a student project from a course called Data as Art. Data as Art is a course that groups students from my engineering school alma mater with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in a combined art-meets-engineering curriculum. […]
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Introducing the French Taule Ticket
July 1, 2015[credits: Junjie Peng for the artwork; the French taxi union for the motivation; the French government for the inspiration]
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LINE Stickers still are a thing
June 29, 2015Although there are not many of us in Western Europe who use LINE as their primary messaging app (outside of Spain, where LINE penetration is remarkable), the multi-purpose platform that is LINE continues to entertain and stimulate creative new use cases around the world, like being coupled with Instagram to drive e-commerce in Thailand. I […]
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Did Apple just hobble Criteo’s achilles heel ?
June 16, 2015Apple caused some reverberations last week among ad-tech companies when it revealed that iOS 9 will permit “Content Blocking Safari Extensions”. In other words, the next release of iOS will allow users to install ad-blockers on its mobile browser, according to the documentation provided to developers at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference. Criteo’s stock plunged more […]
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Italy on the Pacific: How Airbnb can alter Japan’s trajectory
May 12, 2015When Japanese Prime Minister Abe visited the San Francisco Bay Area last week, he spoke about the need for Japan to foster its own version of Silicon Valley. His rationale makes sense. Many governments here in Europe have launched initiatives to encourage startup ecosystems and boost innovation (LaFrenchTech, London TechCity, Finland’s Startup Sauna, Enterprise Ireland, […]
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Time to invest in Japan?
April 14, 2015I would posit that Japan is “the ultimate contrarian bet.” For entrepreneurs and investors in the West alike, the world’s third largest economy strikes me as being unfairly dismissed. Don’t get me wrong. At the macro level, the Japanese economy faces its share of challenges. The demographic trend is not moving in the country’s favor, […]