Netvibes 2.0 ? As announced at the web 2.0 conference in Berlin, Netvibes is about to launch on tuesday at LeWeb3 conference in Paris a new version called “Ginger”.
With more than 100 000 widgets in Netvibes ecosystem, Tariq Krim now focus on features such as a ’social networks’ or ‘friends activity’, to connect its users.
These new features should help Netvibes to compete with Facebook or Google Opensocial partners (Orkut, MySpace, Xing,..).
VP Marketing at Neurosky, Greg HYVER was at l’Echangeur, in Paris, to present its bio sensor technology and to annonce a partnership with Musinaut and its MXP4 technology.
Clic on the video below to discover it or see it on youtube
In about one week, probably during LeWeb Conference, two french start-up should officially launch new music services : Airtist.com and You.dj.
More ambitious than Deezer.com, Airtist.com should provide free, legal and “ethical” files to download. Without DRM but with advertising, Airtist.com will offer more than 13 000 files, from independent artists and labels, according to Olivier Reynaud, Airtist cofounder.
Apart from airtist.com, musinauts should also benefit from You.dj services. More open than Deezer, You.dj will invite internet users to upload their own MP3 files on its own servers. Looking like iTunes from Apple with a full Ajax interface, You.dj should allow its members to create playlists and to share MP3 files even if Romain Moyne, You.dj founder, explains he still has to negociate with music industry to make you.dj legal…
The last three days were pretty hot in French suburbs after the death of two young men, hit by a police car at the beginning of the week. Supporting villier-le-bel youth or security forces, internet users have published thousands of comments on many blogs. One of the two victims was a blogger, on Skyblog.com, and the company had to close comments on his pages, to avoid any kind of excess.
On the contrary to 2005 riots, internet users also published thousands of videos on platforms such as DailyMotion.com or YouTube, showing urban guerilla scenes but also simple interviews of Villier-le-bel inhabitants, explaining what they have saw.
Professional bloggers from Bondy Blog, hosted by 20 Minutes newspaper, also tried to cover this crisis but became victims of angry and frustrated young men.
Most american internet users know TripAdvisor.com, a web site that publishes more than 10 million reviews written by travellers themselves. Even if this site is now available in French, three start-up from the hexagon has decided to compete with this global leader.
Launched in 2006, first player is Vinivi.com, a young company headed by Gilles Granger. Using Google Mashups, Vinivi.com already gathers 14 000 reviews, 60 000 maps and almost 1 700 videos about hotels. The company also benefits from a partnership with Google, which uses its GPS datas and pictures in Google Earth.
TVtrip.com and Trivop.com do not provide written reviews but bet on video reviews. “Seing is believing” explains Thomas Owandenko, Trivop’s founder. Launched this summer, both companies already provide hundreds of video reviews about hotels all around the world.
For Paris, Trivop and TVtrip respectivly provide 187 and 206 video reviews. They logically stay far behind Vinivi (500 reviews) and TripAdvisor (1750) a leader which still do not provide yet any videos about parisian hotels.
Twitter domination or recent Jaïku buy out from Google do not stop French entrepreneurs on the ‘microvlogging’ segment. After Seesmic from Loïc LeMeur and Bloggino.com from 2or3things, a new company called Poodz.com, based in Lille, near belgium boarder, is about to launch its own platform.More generous than twitter on text messages (250 characters instead of 160), Poodz also authorises its members to upload images from their hard drive or to post photos or videos, directy from a webcam or from a mobile phone with MMS feature.
<<Poodz is a micropodcasting service rather than a microblogging service. We should introduce new video features within the next weeks>> promises Lionel Guichard, Poodz Founder, who bets on advertising, premium MMS and corporate services to get money from the service.
Still in private beta, Poodz, which already has an open API, should become public within the next weeks, maybe during LeWeb3 in Paris, where Lionel Guichard should go to find some VCs to invest in his project. 
Sylvain Huet, the man behind the code of ‘Le Deuxième Monde‘ (first French Virtual World in 1996) or ‘Nabaztag‘ (Wifi Rabbit from Violet) is back again ! This young entrepreneur has decided to team up with Philippe Ulrich (Cryo cofounder) and Gilles Babinet (Musiwave, Eyeka,..) to create Musinaut, a company editing a new interactive music format called MxP4.
<<MxP4 is a new audio format to record and to listen to music. Our idea is to bring emotion, interaction and surprise from live performances into a recorded file>> explains Sylvain Huet.
The big idea of MxP4 is to use all audio tracks created by an artist for a song. The algorithm jumps from a track to an other track, making each listened song unique. Artists can also create “skins” to help algorithm to provide different kinds of music according to their musical tastes, the weather or the hour of the day.
<<New headsets will soon be able to read electric signals from the brain and detect our mood, helping MxP4 to play a file differently if you need to relax or to be stressed>> predicts Sylvain Huet.
MxP4 file format will officialy be launched in january for the Reed Midem exhibition, in Cannes, France, gathering all music industry. 
Philippe Ulrich and Sylvain Huet
Philippe Ulrich explaining tracks management
Already known for BlastFeed, an RSS management tool, or rollSense, a content widget for blogs, french company 2or3 things revealed today “Bloggino.com”, a new microblogging platform now in public beta version.
<<With Bloggino, you can easily create a mini-blogging space, publish multimedia content (texts, photos, videos…) from the web site, a messenger software (Windows Live, Yahoo, Jabber, ICG, Google Talk…) or a mobile phone by sending SMS or MMS>> explains Patrick Ferran, 2or3 things ‘ CEO.
The company bets on these mobile et multimedia features to differenciate Bloggino from other microblogging platforms like Noumba, Pownce or Twitter on a market which already start to consolidate itself, with the buy out of Jaiku by Google.
Combining Music and communities do not only inspire MySpace, the largest social network on earth. After Skyrock.com (blog platform), MusicMakesFriends.com (music social network), MixUpload.fr (musical industry social network) or Jukebo.com (video clips search engine), it’s now NRJ that launch MyNRJ.com, a social network dedicated to music and targeting young adults.
<<With MyNRJ, internet users can now have their own homepage, express themselves and post multimedia content like photos or videos that they can share with their friends or other internet users>> explains Roland LeParc, e-NRJ CEO.
With this launch, NRJ group, which own FM stations, TV channels and a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), also expects to catch up Skyrock.com, its historical rival, which still dominate french social networks with almost 9,5 million internet users each month (ComScore September 2007).
Pierre Bellanger, Skyrock.com Founder and CEO was in Montpellier this week, for an Event called “Digiworld Summit“, to talk about the “Netamorphose” of the telecom industry.
<<Value goes from the bandwith to the code, from the network to the applications that manage information>> has explained Pierre Bellanger, who also believe that social networks are the future of telecom networks…
First french social network with more than 9,1 million users (comScore July 2007), Skyrock.com was also in Montpellier to talk about its position toward new application platformes like F8 from Facebook or OpenSocial from Google.
<<We are focus on user experience and we warmly welcome all these new applications (widgets, gadgets, …). Skyrock is already open to third party applications like YouTube, Dailymotion, Google Video, Jamendo or Google Maps. It’s only the begining and our goal is to open our platform, without any exclusivity>> adds Mr Bellanger, who seems to adopt the same strategy than Bebo, the third global social network behind Myspace and Facebook.
