LeWeb – Startup Competition Finalists: Cloudsplit, Stribe, Tiger. So the Le Web Startup Competition is over for another year. Instead of sitting on the sidelines reporting the event, as I was last year, this year TechCrunch Europe was asked to co-organize it with Le Web. So, with together with Loic Le Meur, Ben Metcalfe and Geraldine Le Meur we filtered down the hundreds of applicants to the final 16. Although we didn’t concentrate exclusively on it, it was nice to fit in startups that were broadly releated to the realtime theme.
It was great also to see the Le Web startup event veer back to its roots as a venue for very early stage, rough and ready startups, as well as a launch-pad for more fully-formed plays that have literally launched for the first time at this event. The whole thing was live blogged on TechCrunch Europe, where you’ll find posts on every startup that presented. We had four sessions, with four startups each session. To the finalists: The winner of Gold was: The winner of Silver was: The winner of Bronze was: Stribe. (Update: December 10, 2009: Stribe won top honors at this week's Le Web in Paris) It all started with sports. After running a semi-marathon a few years ago, Kamel Zeroual wanted to keep in touch with the community that had been created at the event. But there was nothing online, not even a Facebook page.
“We said ‘OK, it’s a pity. We shared interests, spirit,’” Zeroual says of the lack of tools to reconnect the community that had participated in the race. So Zeroual created those tools. Stribe puts the social layer on websites. Zeroual envisions Stribe (“Stripe” + “Tribe”) as a tool for companies to keep users on their own site instead of using third-party services like Facebook fan pages to cultivate and communicate with their community.
“Now the conversation is safer for the brand,” Zeroual says, noting that Stribe would be an ideal service for managing product recalls, which companies need to share with their customers but do not want to blast to the world. LeWeb: Stribe’s plug and play social networks – with a differenc. [FRANCE/US] Stribe is a plug and play service to instantly create a social network on any website — not unlike competitors Ning, socialthing and meebo. It was founded in March 2008 by Kamel Zeroual, Gaël Delalleau and Demba Diallo, who launched Stribe at TechCrunch50 in September this year. Watch Stribe’s pitch at 00:17:40 The B2B offer is simple — site administrators can copy and paste a bit of javascript, and hey presto, they have a customizable, freely branded social network for their sites accessed via a small footprint toolbar that pops up at the bottom of the screen.
The differentiation happens on the Stribe network service, which allows a site’s community to interact with other communities on all Stribe-enabled sites. Moving forward, the company plans to open its API for website developers and provide more premium modules. The company describes itself as a new, multidimensional social layer interface which brings together local communities in a globally shared environment. Kamel Zeroual (STRIBE) CloudSplit - Real-time Cloud Analytics. Real-time spending insig. LeWeb: Cost-control for cloud computing from CloudSplit.
[IRELAND] CloudSplit, a real-time analytics tool working towards private beta, helps businesses understand where their cloud computing costs are going and hopefully saves them from the shock of a massive bill when the PUT and GET requests come thick and fast. This is pretty exciting stuff, when you consider that Amazon itself doesn’t have a solution like this for its own customers. Watch the CloudSplit pitch at 00:01:05 You may remember this company from their pitch at TechCrunch50. Based in Dublin, Ireland, and founded by Joe Drumgoole and Eamon Leonard, the service has VCs and cloud computing customers agog with the potential for cost savings on this essential operating expense.
In addition to giving clear graphical breakdowns (including by application type and node) of where users’ cloud spend is actually going, CloudSplit offers a real-time control and budgeting service via alerts and cut off mechanisms. Cloud Split (CloudSplit) TIGERLILY. Apostol Apostolov: If I had money to put into...