Rodrigo A. Sepúlveda Schulz

cashstore.fr launches v3

Lovely Catherine Barba has just (exactly 27 minutes ago) launched a rband new version of her online cashback service, cashstore.fr (at last !!!).

Now, you’ll find 3 fantastic new additions to the site:

– price comparisons (exactly liek kelkoo.fr in the old days) for over 4.2 million products

– customer feedback (like ciao.fr in the good old days)

– coupons (just above the search box!)

and other nice little features: you can now even skype the team at cashstore and have lovely voices on the other side

 

Update: ans she's just back from holidays (and sent me this pix. blogged with permission of course)

 

google video offering premium content

they don’t seem to having reinvented the rules of the game. same old tricks

 

don't forget you grant interviews every now and then

just discovered thru TVnomics who linked to it, that I gave this interview a couple of months ago, but online only a couple of days ago. The content is still accurate…

 

My pix from DigitalHollywood are up

DSC01196, originally uploaded by rsepulveda.

Here with Chad Hurley, CEO youtube.com. Find more pix here.

A chat with Mihai Crasneanu, CEO of glowria.fr

Download clip

Yesterday, at DIgitalHollywood.

have you noticed Om's new media empire ?

Gigaom is turning into a media site with great staff reporters and up to the minute story coverage. A great addition to the media scene, but how much higher than #1 spot in my blogroll can it get ? competing with Mike’s Techcrunch I’d say.

Somehow the stories are covered differently, but I see about the same strategy in both. Nevertheless Om covers more the Internet (mobile, broadband, voip), whereas Mike covers more web 2.0. I’ll try to get both in front of the camera for better discussion.

and by the way… BOOKMARK them.

Another site I reallly like: Gabe’s TechMeme. And I can’t resolve myself to read digg or slashdot anymore 

At the Digital Hollywood conference in San Jose

Download clip

Here's a quick snapshot of the venue. I took a lot of notes yesterday. Will put them up sometime. Indeed video is the talk of the town, with lots of nonsense about prerolls (hey... clips here are between 30 secs and 2 min... indeed prerolls don't make sense), and some other stuff. Best quote of the day: "user stolen content".

and ajax start page Netvibes secures a 15m$ series A with Accel !

Nice move. That’s enough money to start doing a lot of things.

Rewind… 100 million francs for netvibes… waow. And that’s a less than a year-old French company.

My only comment is that this kind of money could not really have been raised in Europe, even less in France, except with a handful of VCs. Indeed, Index Ventures was a seed investor and is back in this round, and US fund Accel now has European offices.

Other European funds need to start thinking globally when they invest; I’ve met a *lot* of European VCs in the past year for vpod.tv. And I can see the difference between a globally minded player, and a local player. Between a risk-prone co-entrepreneur (I like that way of describing your investor), and a fund manager employee… And that’s not even touching upon some ethical concerns I’ve heard / seen on the market.

I’m almost saying that from now on, European entrepreneurs should change their financing strategy: grab angel money from well connected and experienced entrepreneurs (such as Loic Le Meur, Martin Varsavsky, Pierre Chappaz…), and get your financing from anglo-saxon funds!

Congrats to Tariq and to Pierre! And to the less publicly known Marc !

and our friend Jeff Clavier scores again: Userplane acquired by AOL

Our French buddy Jeff Clavier who’s been investing in very early stage companies for the past few years is seeing some exits now. As far as we know, earlier this year, one of his portfolio companies got acquired by AOL, Truveo, a video search engine (good timing !).

Now another of this companies, Userplance got acquired, ALSO by AOL. Well done. 

a La Fraise T-shirt for dinner ?

DSC01098, originally uploaded by rsepulveda.

I went for dinner with über-blogger Vinvin (www.20sur20.net) last week. and guess who was sitting next to us ? A proud owner of a LaFraise.com T-shirt. We're surrounded ;)