Meeting Maria

I was glad to have been able to talk to Maria Sarkis for a short while at lunch today.  She is an accomplished Lebanese artist who is looking to establish a presence in the Paris art scene.  I mentioned the Galerie Simonoff (which had been started a couple of years ago by my friend Jean-Baptiste Simon, now in Photography at Wanted Paris) and Envie d’Art.   Any suggestions ?  Get in touch with Maria on her website or through Facebook where she hosts her own group.

Marketing Bubble Broken - The Web 3 Disaster

I’m laughing my pants off ! Although I personally like Loïc Lemeur because he is very enthusiastic and makes things happen, and I also enjoyed his first TypePad meetings which led later to the first Les Blogs meeting that I attended and also enjoyed, I am kind of glad that the marketing bubble has broken, and that some people are seeing the light. Thanks Ross for pointing that out to me since I didn’t attend Les Blogs 2 or Web 3.

What a joke ! At XWiki we focus on the enterprise market and we pride ourselves on doing real good fundamental R&D in the area of large scale distributed collaborative work and integrating those features in a highly flexible and extensible product like XWiki. We have adressed most of the usability issues through some hard work started in 2005 when we were 2 people and executed in 2006 leading to the XWiki 1.0 skin architecture and the XWiki Open Source Edition 1.0 beta 1 released later on this afternoon at JavaPolis. We now have a reloaded stellar management team with the likes of Vincent Massol as CTO and Stephane Laurière coming from Mandriva with an advanced research agenda in the area of the semantic web, 13 other great people covering London, Bucarest, Saigon and various places in France and Paris, and of course Ludovic Dubost our CEO and founder.

The funny thing is that XWiki is a great platform for Web 2.0 applications, probably the hottest open source enterprise wiki on the planet ! So come talk to us you Web marketers if you’re ready to provide real value to your market segment and let’s get 2.0 right before moving on to the next version.

XWiki Is Supported By The Pacte PME

XWiki has been admitted to the Pacte PME, a non governemental organization which is supported by the French Ministry of the Economy, Industry and Finance, that aims to foster the establishment of business relationships and contracts between major accounts that signed the pact such as BULL, La Poste or Thales and SMEs. It is a partial response to concerns about competitiveness and the development of SMEs since for reasons tied to leveling the competitive arena here in Europe it seems it will be quite a while before we have the equivalent of the Small Business Act. We already have two meetings lined up, one with La Poste and the other with a group concerned with digital asset management and semantic analysis. Thanks Pacte PME for the opportunity to reach out to these accounts !

The APCE Finally Gets RSS

The APCE is a government agency here that does a great job in getting important news out to upcoming and ongoing entrepreneurs.  They finally got an RSS feed !

Scientipôle Initiative Supports XWiki

Ludovic and I were happy to both receive a check for 20.000 euros yesterday from the hands of Pierre Audibert, director of Scientipôle Initiative.

Ludovic’s Check

My check.

Scientipôle is a really great initiative that helps entrepreneurs fund their R&D intesive business. They have been doing this for a number of years and the effort is scaling well.  They now have a seed fund that has already started investing in promising start ups here.  Many thanks to Christophe Camillieri, Denis Pansu of the FING, Daniel Joutard, Cyril Rollinde, and Pierre Audibert and all of those who supported us in getting this far.  This money will be put to good use helping to support our current growth rate.

Xavier Niel Wins Entrepreneur of the Year Prize

Nice video clip (French) of Xavier Niel, founder and Director of Strategy at Iliad, on the lentreprise.com web site taken at the prize ceremony. I really liked his description of successful business development. He mentions that it all starts with a bit of luck, finding something that starts to grow and the with the right people leads to something else, etc.. that assures sustained development. A real entrepreneurial strategy. Good job Niel !

Via FreeNews.