I popped over to Paris today to get a taster of the startup scene in France, and to draw some comparisons with the UK startup scene. No doubt there are lessons to be learned (on both sides) in terms of the differing experiences a British or French company has in starting up locally country and, perhaps, trying to think internationally. (And on that note, I have a cheeky idea of getting UK startups over to Paris one day to network with their Gallic cousins, so let me know if you are interested). In the meantime, here are my notes from the startups which presented at Seedcamp in Paris, the startup competition which roams Europe and which culminates in a week-long event later this year. (Update: the day’s event was won by won by Squareclock and MyPronostic.com. They are both now qualified for the European Final in London. Here are some photos).

I found that when French startups pitch, they play things as downbeat as a lot of Brit startups - something which they were jokingly harranged for by one VC on stage (”Be more Israeli or American about it! Harass people!).

During a panel debate of VCs and French entrepreneurs, the consensus was that French startups also need to be encouraged to share their ideas more. It’s interesting to hear this, given that France is the home of Loic Le Meur - the man who has made sharing his ideas an integral part of his business model.

Interestingly, French startup founders are rarely as respected as the company CEO in French society. This is the reverse of the UK or US scene, where founders get the respect, and the CEO is generally seen as just a business person brought in to make things run smoothly. In the US the founder is the hero. In France it’s the boss. This means that the French founder tends to want to remain as the CEO for as long as possible, whether this is in the interests of the company or not. French law only allowed for Chairman and CEO to be different roles three years ago, which means the concept of a Chairman to help guide the company is a relatively new one, and once which is bound to improve the culture for startups and founders there.

Also French startups often fall into the same trap as UK firms - they give away too much of the company to an Angel early on so, if or when they need to raise VC they don’t have enough equity to give to the VC to get to the next stage and that effectively kills its potential. Something worth remembering for all.

Here are the statups that presented at Seedcamp Paris:

Lokad.com
This is Web forecasting as a service. Customers upload data and get a forecast back. Think ‘optimising business operations like inventory management. Forecasting is not a new sector - but lokad provides low-cost forecasting for smaller companies. Founded one month ago, with a team of 4. Its young team is unusual for France, where being a young entrepreneur is the exception rather than the rule, where young people tend to get a stable job first, instead of a slightly risky one.

Voisineo.com
You meet our neighbours to exchange goods and services. Special offers from local shops etc. Convert virtual meetings into real-world exchange. 80% of French people would like to meet their neighbours but tend not to (not just a British problem then!). Young team, three, from Lyon business school (what school you went to seems to be even more important in France than in the UK and is constantly mentioned). Launched in Beta last november in Lyon for 500 users. Now launched in Feb across France and now has more than 80,000 users. They are working on their first fundraising of 300k Euro.

Whooknoows.com
Social Network, for local merchants. People sharing what they like do do and visit. You need a dentist, plumber, where do you go? Yelow pagestype search with eBay type ratings. You can search by ratings or map. The team seems strong, ex-Kelkoo, Yahoo etc. Launching Alpha in September. Maybe. (Alas, this is quite a common business model, to put it mildly…).

Winancial.com
Online personal finance manager - Finance 2.0. Need 300k Euros to develop the site. Sounds like it is not unlike Kublax or Mint.com.

Easycity.com
Local search and reviews (again). Hotels bars, etc mapped to GPS co-ordinates. Social network. Have a database of 850,000 places. After 300k investment. Hard to see how this is different from a number of similar sites…

WatZatSong.com
Fun and collaborative online music services. Music quizzes are popular, so this is a music gaming community. You sing the song and the community recognises it. Monetised via traffic, but also white-labeling for music stores. Singstar etc are doing well with virtual Kareoke, so this has an interesting chance.

Square Clock
Sophisticated online 3D modelling to improve the marketing experience of users online and speed up the buying process. Emotion is part of the experience. Mass customisation. Think MyDeco, where you design a room with products. Also there is a B2B play here. There is a lot of serious IP contained in this startup. 3D semantic modelling - in other words the application knows what it is modelling, like a chair or a vase. Can also synchronise what you design with other people designing other rooms in the same house. Seriously slick technology.

Melty.fr / Eeple.fr
Melty is a new web site aimed at youth. 30,000 members so far. It wraps a social networks around the news. It’s going to be launching a new feature called The Board, which is based on Microsoft Silverlight, where kids drop their media, like a virtual scrapbook, onto something that looks like a board that might hang in their room. I took some video, below, as the demo was seriously impressive.

Beeblox
A Mobile “Wallet 2.0″. Turns your mobile phone into a virtual wallet containing loyalty cards, coupons, shopping lists, etc. This provides direct access to the consumer. You use the wallet at a Point of Sale. The wallet is shareable and is monetised on a performance based model. Addressing 20% of a 180m Euro market. Couple of international competitors but not many in this space in Europe. Looking for €500k.

Stupeflix
This team is coming out of DailyMotion and Exalead.com (which means serious street cred in the French startup community). Stupeflix automatically generates professional looking videos out of pictures, music and videos. If that sounds like Animoto, then you are right, but they say they are around twice as fast as Animoto at processing video and unlike the latter they are developing the API before the site. You upload, use templates (also customisable) on the site, then it generates a new video which can then be shared on other video sites like Daily Motion. The service is direct or via an API. Worth a look when it launches in September. Here’s a demo.

Noovolution
Personalised start page which makes RSS more accessible to ordinary users. Real time screen shots of your favourite sites. Instead of using NetVibes of iGoogle, you use Noovoution start page which has visual look and feel. You create one ID which makes it easier to access. Business model, targetted ads based on user preferences depending on the sites they select to track. Private Alpha so far, want to launch in Sept 08.

DoYouBuzz
A sort of “CV 2.0″ take on reputation management and professional social networking. In partcular they have noted that the idea of being introduced via LinkedIn doesn’t work in France where the idea is culturally an anathema, seriously.

EKOZ
Turning corporate data into more usable information. Currently they use huge relational databases, with terrabytes of data. EKOZ address these issues with a new process. They already have a client for the product, and are looking for investment.

Chugulu Games
Casual online gaming. They have a game which is a stockmarket for celebrities - buy and sell shares in Paris Hilton etc. Working on a multiplayer web platform with Flash games and quizzes.

Media No Mad
Marseille-based. Have a travel social Be-noot.com dedicated to creating a multimedia travel diary linked with a virtual network for travellers offering its members financial benefits. Monetised by ads, sponsors, sponsors put inside user videos etc

Six Squared
Geneva-based startup focused on “build and test” networks. Testing and deploying things in a reliable way does not really exist. They automate this proccess and make it seamless. Team is very experienced in grid and cloud computing.

MyPronostic
This is a predictive game on all subjects. Not just experts doing it, but everyone. If you make a pronostic about a football game and get 80% right answers then someone will want to know what you say about the next game - so the whole idea is that the betting industry does not have a similar service. Signed a deal with the Metro newspaper a white-label page for a game about the Euro 2008. Just had a 500k round of financing to develop a white-label model for large media companies. No dissimilar to HubDub, but closer to HubDub’s recently launched PunditWatch.

Progonline
An ‘Ebay of services’ where service providers meet and collaborate online. B2B trading platform with project management collaboartion tools. Service buyers pay for the tools, with 15% going to the site. Have 10,000 service French providers and 3,000 companies (SMEs). Just secured 200k investment.

BabyGo
Tools for protecting kids online. Working on a secure search engine for kids and teens. Now claims to have 500k page views a day (14m a month).

Visit Me (still looking for the correct URL)
Virtual real estate engine online. Sold direct to real state agents. Allows people to upload video of their home from a mobile.

OutWit Hub
Released last week as a Firefox extension in Beta. Information collection environment for the web. You find with Google - for example - and get it with OutWit. Simple, aimed at broad audience. experienced team, with one of the best Mozilla developers in Europe. The idea is to monetise the community of users, not the tech itslef. Looking for a second round of funding.

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Welsh broadcaster S4C and Wesley Clover have put in £9.5million of second round investment into IPTV startup Inuk Networks’ freewiretv.com product. The money wil be used to further develop the platform and fund expansion in the UK, Ireland and North America. The move is not overly surprising. Wesley Clover is the venture vehicle of Wales-based Sir Terry Matthews, one of the UK’s leading technology entrepreneurs who seeded Inuk initially (and Inuk is based in Wales). Iona Jones, S4C’s Chief Executive and Chair of S4CDM, and David Sanders, a director of S4CDM, will both join the Inuk board of directors which is chaired by Simon Gibson OBE.

Freewire potentially offers broadband providers a way of offering digital TV. Howver so far it has only been tested on academic networks capable of high bandwisth multicasting, so it remains to be seen how it will scale acorss other netowrks. We reviewed it here.

Goojet, a French startup which is best described as a new kind of platform for mobile widgets, has come out of stealth mode to launch a full-blown public version. The desktop portal allow users to configure the set of widgets they want to appear on their mobile phone. On the mobile side, a java-based application (which runs on over 300 handsets and the iPhone this summer) gives access to the Goojet “space”. Goojet’s widgets are HTML-based, which means they can run a lot of different kinds of applications. The idea is that users share these widgets as they might share an object in a social network. Currently an API and an SDK are being written to open the platform, as well as the ability to interact with other services. Goojet has a 20-people team based in Toulouse and Paris.

Naked, the UK-based social messaging startup which closed last week mere months after launch and days before it released a beta after a failed attempt to raise more financing, may yet be revived. Sources are telling me the startup is trying to re-animate in Belgium, home to at least two of its co-founders.

One of them, Belgium-based Tom Casaer, has put an advert on LinkedIn for a:

“Software and Infrastructure lead at Naked
preferably Belgium; not a must”

I’m sure plenty of software and Infrastructure leads out there would be gagging to join a liquidated startup, however, Naked still has fans out there willing to give it a go. Perhaps there is life after death afterall. Perhaps they have secured new financing? I have emailed Tom to find out.

Naked ran out of money at the end of April and an administrator was appointed in May to wind it up and liquidate the assets. All 12 employees were made redundant.

However, it’s not yet clear if the code for the Naked application - which mashes up Twitter and email functions - is an asset which has been bought cheap by the former founders, or if they are re-starting the project under a totally new guise. If you have some inside information on this, you know where to find me.

Meanwhile here’s one of their former employees on the whole Naked experience: “It was great fun working there, but the way it imploded, my word, incredible.”

TechCrunch UK is taking the TechCrunch brand on a little road-trip (OK, plane trip) around Europe this summer and afterwards, making face-to-face contact with Europe’s best and brightest startups. We just held a great meetup in Barcelona for instance. Where possible I’ll be holding a TechCrunch meetup in the cities I visit (keep track via Dopplr), usually with a local partner. So here’s where I’ll be going next:

Paris
Seedcamp Paris
June 6th
Come and say hi as I’ll be at this influential competition for French startups.

Berlin
June 11th
Berlin TechCrunch Meetup!
It’s gonna be huge… stay tuned for an update shortly on this.

Warsaw
June 12th
TMT.communities’08
A great new event in New Europe. I’ll be speaking at the conference.

Rome
June 20th
TechGarage
Come and say hi, as I’ll be at this cool new event for startups and VCs in Rome.

Dublin
Techcrunch / TechLudd Mashup
June 26th
A TechCrunch meetup held in conjunction with TechLudd (the Irish startup networking event). Watch TechCrunch UK & Ireland for details of the event, to be announced soon. Save the date! (A little more info is here).

Istanbul
June 28th
TechCrunch and Webrazzi, Turkey’s leading Web 2.0 blog, are co-organising a Meetup, featuring demos from Turkey’s best and brightest startups. Please contact Webrazzi’s Arda Kutsal for more information.

Athens
July 1st
Athens TechCrunch meetups co-organised with George Tziralis and Open Coffee Greece. Please get in touch about sponsorship.

Barcelona
July 4th
Mobile 2.0 Europe
TechCrunch UK is supporting the after-party for Europe’s hottest mobile 2.0 startups.

Zürich
July 17th
TechCrunch Meetup Co-organised with Zurich’s Wuala and Doodle, and supported by Geneva’s Newscred. Yes, we want to mash-up startups from both those cities! Please get in touch about sponsorship.

Oslo
September 4th
Proposed TechCrunch Meetup Co-organised with Secondbrain. Please get in touch about sponsorship.

Stockholm
September 11th
Proposed TechCrunch Meetup Co-organised with Twingly. Please get in touch about sponsorship.

Hamburg
September 25th
Proposed TechCrunch Meetup Co-organised with Jimdo. Please get in touch about sponsorship.

Other TechCrunch Events in Europe:

And TechCrunch UK has started organising other events, including a recent London Meetup TechCrunch Dinners (our first was with Scott Rafer here). We are looking for other notable speakers for panels and events, so please get in contact if you are going to be in London at some point and we’ll schedule you in.

We are also planning a major TechCrunch event in London, to be announced shortly. And we want to do other meetups around Europe (and I mean all of Europe, including Eastern Europe), so please get in touch about sponsoring and co-organising those with us. We’re currently missing a few countries as you can see. Thanks!

Writer and soon to be author Paul Carr - in between a recent travelogue of adventures in the US and prior to the launch of his book “Bringing Nothing to the Party: True Confessions Of A New Media Whore” - has come up with a new site. Skewering the Web 2.0 startup scene with a new take on British irony, Haikurious is satire written in the style of Haiku poetry. Think Gaping Void in three line verse (and no cartoon). My favourite so far is below:

Today Scotland-based prediction market startup HubDub, launched a new feature. PunditWatch is tracking ten pundits across four categories, politics, technology, entertainment and sports. Whenever someone makes a prediction on the tracked site, Hubdub either places the prediction in an existing HubDub market or they create a market for it. Every pundit has a shadow HubDub account as if they were playing HubDub themselves. Then HubDub’s users see those markets and start trading them, and the value of the predictions goes up and down. For example, on 12th of May we predicted that the 3G iPhone would launch in May, but the value of that prediction started to go down as May played out. Oh well. Currently, many of the open predictions for the top tech blogs are around the 3G iPhone. So we’ll have to see who wins that one…

Prediction markets are being touted as the new way to really engage users, and create more value for content providers. There are a few out there already: BluBet (more of a game than a market), The Industry Standard re-launched (with mixed results) aiming at tech, Pikum in the UK is majoring on sports, and HubDub is aiming at general US news (though it happens to be based in the UK).

Of course the serious point to all this is that HubDub will use PunditWatch it to drive users to pile in and make predictions and back their favourite news sites. To my mind this is a lot more fun than the model which the re-launched Industry Standard has come up with, and the numbers speak for themselves. Most of the Standard’s hover around the 50% mark, which indicates that not many people are actually trading on them. The Standard has 72 questions open at the moment. HubDub has 1,512.

Brussels-based social media tracking startup Attentio, has received a 600,00 Euro investment from five new private shareholders well known in Norwegian business circles, along with further investment from existing shareholders. The round takes Attentio’s pot to a total of 1.5 million Euros raised since 2006. Attentio’s goal is to monitor blogs, forums, networks, YouTube and building tools that can analyse the content.

The new board now includes Ole Jorgen Fredriksen (ex. Co-Chairman of NASDAQ-listed InFocus and ex. CEO of ASK/Proxima) and Bjorn Haugland (founder of Confirmit, the stock listed provider of market research software). Other board members are chairman Per Siljubergsasen (founder of Attentio and one of the founders of Kelkoo, acquired by Yahoo), Jarl Fronth a Norwegian Lawyer and professional Board member, Benoit DeBecker marketing director of Cytec and Simon McDermott (ex. Cisco and Intel and founder of Attentio).

Clients include Microsoft, Johnson & Johnson, Lexus and a number of agencies. Recently, similar US service Umbria was acquired and TNS bought Cymfony.

The Attentio Brand Dashboard (SaaS) is mainly sold through advertising and PR agencies, but I’ve been trying out the impressive blog trend search engine Trendpedia and been pleasantly suprised at its power to map key words and phrases. It has the makings of an interesting web app. Here’s a search for TechCrunch - the results allow you to roll-over the graph and see what highs and lows the search term hit at that time. Very cool.

Startup MVNO Blyk, which provides a cheap mobile service to young people in return for sending them “targetted” ad messages, has launched a media shop designed for advertisers and agencies to source information from. So far there are campaign results from brands including Penguin, COI, L’Oreal, Boots and Brylcreem. Ad campaign briefs can also be sent directly from the site.

However, there remains some questions about the service which launched in September last year.

Rumours circulated a while back that teenagers were switching off the messaging from advertisers. However, I have made some enquiries from people who ought to know and the opposite would appear to be the case. Apparently the 16-24 year olds which Blyk restricts the service to are lapping up the free airtime they get in exchange for ads.

One source says: “Stories like this are hilarious and made up by people who don’t know what the hell is going on in new media. Blyk is more powerful than anyone realises. Blyk isnt going to shoot down any negative press as it is often no bad thing people take their eye off the ball.”

I also hear that Blyk has been successful enough for it to start preparing to roll out to several more countries from its European base.

If all this is true, then Blyk may be onto more than many critics first thought - that targetted advertising via mobile is not as annoying as it might sounds, especially to a media-savvy youth audience.