Dan ROSE, VP Marketing Development of Facebook was in Paris this morning for LeWeb3 and he annonced the launch of Facebook.fr and Facebook.de on the “first half of 2008”, probably on the second quarter.

The company, which is still focusd on its advertising solutions only plan to translate its website in french and german. No local team should be hired even if Facebook will soon hit 1 million unique visitors in France, according to Nielsen Netratings.

Value Added Social network ? Bahu.com, a French social network for students with around 300 000 members has just closed € 1 million in first round funding led by Lightspeed-Gemini Internet Lab (LGiLab).

Its founders Stéphane Soler and Fabien Guiraud, will continue to work in the company and Bahu.com will now be headed by Oleg Tscheltzoff (Fotolia, CitizenBay, Wixi…) who becomes president and also by Ouriel Ohayon, Techcrunch.fr editor and LGiLab CEO, who becomes ‘director’ and member of the board.

<<Bahu will continue to provide social features but will also be focused on promoting gifted people : writers, artists, musicians, models..>> explains Oleg Tscheltzoff, who expects to launch Bahu.com on major Eastern Europe, latin America an Asiatic markets.

According to Challenge News Magazine, Orbus, a Holding controled by AXA private Equity (80%) and Pierre Bellanger (20%) is about to sale Skyrock.com, a platform claiming to have more than 12 millions blogs in Europe and around 9 million monthly users in France. (Source comScore)

With a € 300 million expected price, Skyrock.com could interest French media companies like Hi-Media, which has just bought Fotolog, Lagardere, wich is still vera late in online services, and maybe News Corp, N°2 on French market with MySpace.fr and official owner of “Sky” brand all around Europe.

Content is the King ! Hi-Media, a european Ad Network based in France announced today that it has entered into an agreement to acquire american company Fotolog, Inc. for a combination of cash and stock valued at approximately $90 million.

Launched in May 2002, New York-based Fotolog is a social network with more than 10 million members, reaching 15 million unique monthly visitors and logging more than 3.3 billion monthly page views. Fotolog now ranks 20th on the Alexa list of the world’s most-trafficked websites.

“Hi-Media was attracted by Fotolog, which has only just begun converting its strong audience growth into revenues. We think that social networks are one of the pillars of what the Internet is and will be important in the years ahead, especially when underpinned by simple mechanisms. We are also convinced that Hi-Media can benefit substantially from Fotolog’s efforts to generate maximum revenues from its audience thanks to the advertising and micro-payment services that Hi-Media has developed over the past decade. In addition, we believe that the expertise and experience of the Fotolog teams who are joining us will allow us to reinforce“ comments Cyril Zimmermann, CEO of Hi-Media, a group which now belongs to the Web Top 100 properties.

Indeed, return on investment could be fast for Hi-Meda, which has paid this acquisition 9 dollars per members, a much cheaper price than Facebook, a platform with 50 millions members valued 300 dollars each by Microsoft…

The “Agence France Press”, one of the biggest press agencies with AP and Reuters, has decided to take a 30% stake in CitizenSize.com, a french site enabling internet users to sell press material (photos, videos) to major media companies.

Formerly known as ScoopLive, CitizenSize.com should use this money to strengten its relationships with media companies but also promote its new brand to internet users on a french market already adressed by Fotolia.com (for photos) and Eyeka.com (for videos).

At the begining of the century, the great dream behind mergers like Excite + AtHome, AOL + TimeWarner and Vivendi + Universal was to distribute any kind of content (Television, Cinema, Games, Music, ..) on any kind of screen (Computer, TV, mobile, etc…). For Vivendi Universal, this dream was called Vizzavi, a multimedia and multiscreen portal, that finally turned into a nigtmare, with the end of the internet bubble in 2001, before being replaced by ‘Vodafone Live’ on SFR phones screens.

Five years later, Vivendi was in Montpellier this week, for an event called Digiworld Summit, to annonce the launch of zaOza.com, a new project that the company intends to reveal next week for beta users and officially lanch on january 2008.

Even if most of french journalists already compare zaOza.com to Vizzavi (maybe because of the Z sound…), internal sources explained that the project were much closer from iTunes. Indeed, zaOza should help Vivendi to sell any kind of content (Music, Pictures, Paintings, television series, Cinema, Games, etc… even from other majors), on any kind of screen (Computer, Multimedia players, TV, mobiles, ..) and to any kind of subscribers (SFR or Neuf Cegetel subscribers of course but also all the other internet users).

<<zaOza will be magic>> promised Jean-Bernard Levy, Vivendi CEO, who apparently expects to add a lot of exclusive and live content to this project, which will also bet on a subscription model to differenciate itself from other platforms such as Apple Store, Sony Connect, Nokia OWI and Zune MarketPlace.

Even if France stays far behind Israel, UK or even Germany on the venture capital market (see VenturePedia Study from LibraryHouse), Found raiser Chausson Finance seems pretty optimistic in its latest indicator about the French market.

According to Chausson, 278 french start-up raised a total of € 397 million (+7%) on the first half of the year, with more than €90 million invested in software companies, almost € 70 million for Internet & E-commerce sites and around € 33 million for telecom players.

<<It’s a great come back for internet companies with a 72% increase from 2006 to 2007>> underlines Christophe Chausson, Chausson Finance CEO.

Apart from the rebirth of the dotcoms, the study also notice a 77% increase of seed investments which remains - with € 44 million - far behind early stage ( € 123 million) and second stage (€ 226 million).

On the first half of the year, The Top 5 investments were Expway (€ 25,3 million), Corevalve (€ 24,4 million), WRT (€ 19 million), Cerenicimo (€ 18 million) and Streamezzo (€ 17,1 million).

Like books, paper and pens also become electronic. Kayentis, a french company specialised in Forms Automation System (FAS) platform using Digital Pen & Paper (DPP) technology from HP and supported by Microsoft, has just raised € 6 million from VC firms : X-ange and Seventure, thanks to the found raiser Aelios finance.

<<Thanks to a range of services called Graffys, Kayentis transforms a paper business form into a form that can transmit to your I.T. System all the information written on it.>> explains Philippe Berna, Kayentis CEO.

Invented by Anoto, E-pen failed to seduce BtoC market despite a strong support from Clairefontaine or Oxford, two famous school paper producers, but seems to find custumers among professionals, looking for Information capture or Data optimization solutions.

Almost six years after its inception in November 2001, French company PolySpot, a competitor to Exalead, Sinequa, Autonomy, FAST, and even Google in the “corporate search” segment has just closed its first round of funding, raising € 1.2 million from CIC Vizille Capital Innovation.

Despite its small size, the company is included in Gartner’s “Magic Quadrant” and has already attracted over 40 customers including some big names like AGF, BNP Paribas, Banques Populaires, Lyonnaise des Eaux, and Natixis, gathering around 500 000 users for its corporate search engine.

Polyspot will use this money to invest in its new software, to strengthen its commercial teams and to open offices in other countries.

User generated content means user responsibility. Ninth french site with more than 9,2 million internet users par month (ComScore October 2007), Wikipedia has just won a trial against three people who were suing the free encyclopedia, about an article explaining they were gay activists and that information was not respecting their private life.

But according to a law known as LCEN (Loi pour la confiance dans l’économie numérique) et because Wikipedia Foundation censored the article pretty fast, a french judge cleared the free encyclopedia in this diffamation case.

“Web site hosts cannot be liable under civil law because of information stored on them if they do not in fact know of their illicit nature,” explained Judge Emmanuel Binoche in his written ruling.

According to the LCEN law, diffamation victims can still ask Wikipedia to give them IP adress of internet users who published information on the user generated platform, who now hosts more than 578 000 articles in french.