It looks like lightning has struck on the towers of Dailymotion. Yahoo’s bid to take a $200 million majority stake in the video site — known as the ‘YouTube of France’ — by buying a stake from carrier France Telecom/Orange has been killed by the French government, which decided that it didn’t want a U.S. company to take a controlling stake in a French operation… → Read More
iOS App Discovery Service AppGratis just confirmed that it was indeed pulled from the App Store on Friday. At the time, commentators were left wondering what was wrong with AppGratis’ app. Founder and CEO Simon Dawlat wrote a long blog post explaining the full story. “AppGratis is very much up and running,” Dawlat said. “The reports of our death are greatly… → Read More
Back in January 2011, Orange acquired 49 percent of Dailymotion for $78 million (€59 million), and declared that they wanted to buy out the remaining 51 percent. But Dailymotion had to wait two years before further talks. By spending $80.6 million (€61 million) for the remaining stake, Orange acquired 100 percent of Dailymotion for $168 million (€127 million). → Read More
It keeps getting worse for French iPhone owners. The agency for telecommunications ARCEP has just announced that it would meet with the four French telcos to know if and when it should refarm Bouygues Telecom’s 1,800MHz band to bring LTE to the iPhone 5. The three other companies are begging the ARCEP to wait until at least 2014 to start this process, effectively lobbying for slowing down… → Read More
Another big Internet company is the target of Direction générale des finances – France’s equivalent of the IRS – due to tax noncompliance. The agency is asking Amazon to pay $252 million in non-reported tax and penalties. Most of Amazon’s revenue in Europe goes to Luxembourg where the corporate tax is much lower. While it’s legal, there are some subtleties in order to comply with the law. → Read More
Google France could be ordered to pay $1.3 billion to France’s equivalent of the IRS (Direction générale des finances) due to tax noncompliance in 2011. The agency has been investigating Google’s revenue in France for months. With only 138 million euros of revenue in France in 2011, the company has used tax-optimization strategies, but has always stated that they comply with the law. It denies… → Read More
Authorities in Europe today kicked off a fresh wave of scrutiny over Google’s privacy policy and called for changes to be made in how Google manages user data, describing Google’s scope as “too large”. But they also stopped short of saying Google is acting illegally in how it manages privacy or demanding a change in its wider policy. France’s data protection authority, the Commission Nationale de… → Read More
It’s ironic that for a country that invented the word entrepreneur, France has gained such a reputation for being frosty towards startups. Take French culture, where talk of money is generally frowned upon in favour of which École you went to, or your opinion on philosophy or politics. Of course, this is a huge caricature, but it’s the kind of background noise against which many French startup… → Read More
Imagine a mobile phone plan, such as the one from Free in France, with unlimited talk, unlimited SMS and MMS messages, tethering and, even more important, unlimited data with a speed reduction after 3 GB. Usually for that plan in the U.S., you would pay more than $100 for limited data with a two-year contract. In France, it costs $25 per month (€19.99, sales tax included) and there is no… → Read More
The European online restaurant reservation service LaFourchette announced that it has raised €8 million ($10.5 million) from Serena Capital and Partech at a valuation of more than €50 million ($65.8 million). This funding will be used to consolidate its leading position in Europe. New country-specific websites are said to launch soon.
Restaurant reservations online are still new in Europe. → Read More
France has developed something of a reputation in trying to tax larger companies on the Internet to use the funds to help out smaller players. The latest development in that scheme: a proposal to tax large booksellers to help French independent bookstores impacted by the rise of online giants like Amazon.
This is a development on a model that has seen proposals to tax online ads from the likes… → Read More
We don’t get to blog too often about robots made in Europe around here, which means the appearance of REETI, a new desktop robot developed by France-based robot venture Robopec, is quite a nice surprise. The REETI is designed to be a combination of a communication robot and a “multi-media tool”, according to Robopec. → Read More
A proposed French law (well, an expansion of an existing law) has supporters of Android and other non-Windows operating systems slightly upset. The law would make it so that France’s private copying levy applies to all non-Windows tablets, that is, Android tablets and the iPad. The private copying levy was first introduced several years ago and adds a “copying fee” to several forms of… → Read More
The second paragraph of HP Palm’s announcement of the Palm Pre 2 offers a bit of interesting news: this the “first device to run webOS 2.0″ will be available in France from SFR and then in the next few months from Verizon and in Canada. SFR, a well-known French carrier, is also one of the first carriers in Europe to sell Windows Phone 7 handsets. → Read More
The question now becomes, how much trouble will Google get in for its wanton stealing of private data? You’ll recall that Google was caught collecting data from people’s open Wi-Fi access points, something the company just sorta brushed off. Google shrugged its shoulders and said, “meh, whatever, we didn’t do anything wrong here.” If only the various governments of the world saw it that way. → Read More
Some weird leaks over in Franceland point to the 16GB iPad costing 499 Euro (approximately $655, depending on how low the Euro can dip). These listings appeared on Fnac’s RSS feed which means they may have been entered inadvertently and/or incorrectly.
No word on official availability or pricing but, as we recall, Apple postponed the international launch until the end of May → Read More
In previous years it’s fair to say that France has not exactly been a hotbed of entrepreneurship, despite actually coming up with the word entrepreneur. There is a general anti-business culture and talking about business or money is seen as beneath mainstream society. For instance, there are 65,000 psychology students in France – that is a quarter of the European total for that subject.
However… → Read More
Is this the greatest photo in the world? Apparently so! It’s a 26-gigapixel (!), 220-degree panorama of Paris. If it’s not the greatest photo in the world, then, according to its photographers, then it’s certainly the largest. You have to visit the site to appreciate it, obviously. → Read More
[France] Paris based dating service Smartdate has raised €1.7 million with European VC 360 Capital Partners.
Smartdate, which previously secured Angel investment from four international Business Angels for a total of €300,000, was founded by Fabrice Le Parc, who also launched be2.com in France and Benelux in 2006-07. This €2 million total amount of seed funding (one of the largest in France… → Read More
Another international airport has adopted those full-body scanners that have proven to be so controversial. Paris’ Charles de Gaulle has installed the machine on a three-month trial basis. → Read More
[France] Ok listen-up kids. Today is “Safer internet Day”. Got that? So put that web browser down right now before you take someone eye out.
But seriously folks – the day is organized each year by Insafe, a “European network of Awareness Centres” promoting safe, responsible use of the Internet and mobile devices to young people. Yes if that sounds like it’s co-funded by the European Union’s Safer… → Read More
[France] Music search and discovering service Deezer is currently caught up in a storm of controversy: its co-founder and CEO Jonathan Benassaya has effectively been forced out by his investors. After Deezer faced mounting competition from services like Spotify, it’s emerged that investors ousted the founder in order to put in place a more experienced business manager to both reorganize and… → Read More
In the intricacies of high-level European diplomacy, there’s two things Paris and Berlin can agree on: Conan is better, and you’d better not be using Internet Explorer. A French government agency is now advising citizens of the French Republic not to use Internet Explorer because of security concerns. It’s 2010, and we’re still writing “IE isn’t secure!” stories. Amazing. → Read More
Like them or not, e-books are here to stay. Personally, I don’t like them — but that’s mainly because e-book readers have been ugly, clumsy, and limited in function and selection. The tidal wave of readers we saw at CES, however, suggests that even die-hard curmudgeons like myself may soon be among the faithful. What this means, of course, is that e-books, while a real business already, are… → Read More
[France] Nomao defines itself as a personnalized search engine. It helps you to find places, based on what you like or what you Facebook friends like and where you are. Their search is using not only the data they have about the places, but also what they found on the web about them (a kind of aggregator). To show the tool what you like, you just have to use a “like” button, and to find what you… → Read More
[France] Wikio has announced on its blog (in French) that Ebuzzing has joined the “Wikio communication group”. You’ve probably heard of Wikio – you know, a kind’ve competitor to Digg and Technorati in France which expanded to Europe. But you’ve probably not heard of Ebuzzing, which is focused on France. Wikio and Ebuzzing are in fact two major players for French bloggers: → Read More
[France] Google and Yahoo have both published their most searched terms of 2009. TechCrunch already took a detailed look at the US rankings, but now let’s see what we can learn from the top search terms in France for 09… → Read More
[France] Wozaik, a Paris-based startup which is developing a dynamic bookmarking system, is giving away 200 invites for an exclusive preview of their platform to Techcrunch Europe readers. You can grab one here on a first-come-first-serve basis.
Despite still being in private alpha (a beta should launch soon), Wozaik has garnered some early attention in the French startup scene after becoming… → Read More
[France] The list of French tech firms that have raised over €1 million in 2009 that we published last week is already obsolete, and that’s great! French company Aquafadas have announced that they’ve raised 1.2 million euros with Credit Agricole Private Equity and Soridec. → Read More
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