France Archives - Serious Startups

Add Your Portfolio To Your LinkedIn Profile With French Startup Dokker

LinkedIn is undoubtedly one of the most useful tools to connect with people from your work life. However, many users have complained that their LinkedIn profile doesn’t give them an adequate platform to show off their portfolio. This can prove to be an important missing piece for marketers, artists, designers, and even writers.

French startup Dokker is looking to change that by offering a platform for portfolios to sync up with LinkedIn accounts. Dokker is free and allows users to post any kind of document to their online portfolio. Once a user builds a Dokker portfolio they can share it with LinkedIn and also Viadeo, which is LinkedIn’s number one competitor in Europe.

Services like Dokker allow for a much more robust picture of someone’s work life rather than just text and recommendations.

We got a chance to speak with Fred Ducrot, Dokker’s co-founder, General Manager and Product Designer. Check out our interview below.

Paris Startup: HeyCrowd Lets You Poll And Be Polled INTERVIEW

An interesting new startup in Paris is dealing with the realization that surveys are no fun anymore. Startups like Seattle’s PlayMySurvey are the exception not the rule. Paris startup HeyCrowd is all about polling rather than surveying.

This cool new platform allows users to set up their own polls about whatever they like and then poll the crowd. They can participate as well. Users can also participate in any of the other users polls, and then after they vote they can see where they stack up to the rest of the crowd.

HeyCrowd has positioned their platform and mobile app as “the addictive question game” gamifying the polling process rather than making it a long, lengthy list of questions. It could be looked at as a distant cousin to Quora but the questions are meant to be voting/polling type questions rather than long drawn out, ask and answer questions.

When you go to the heycrowd website or download the mobile app, the service keeps asking you questions that originated from the user base. The questions could go on forever if you’d like. HeyCrowd’s website says there are over 41,000 active questions. You can stay at the top of the page and let the questions keep moving up or you can sneak down to the questions you want to answer. You can answer as many or as few as you would like.

You can also ask whatever questions you would like and give multiple choice answers. Your question immediately goes into the rotation.

So far the questions seem playful enough. Once you answer a question it shows you in a graph how the rest of the user base answered.

We got a chance to interview Matthieu Rouif, co-founder of HeyCrowd. Check out the interview below:

French Startup: Azendoo To Take On Asana? INTERVIEW

Google Wave was a great idea and a great product. For whatever reason though it didn’t survive. The ability to collaborate on tasks and allow each team member to contribute to the overall task. It was an end to superfluously long email threads with 15 people interjecting. Google Wave organized everything in easy to read and easy to understand “waves” where you could just as easily identify who said what and who made what change.

Google ended up shutting down Google Wave and it was eventually turned into a project in the Apache Foundation’s incubator program under the name Apache Wave. Google originally cited user adoption as the reason they pulled the plug on Wave.

Earlier this year Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz unveiled Asana which they’re touting as the solution to email. Tasks can be collaborated on across multiple people, edits are maintained and credited to the editor and overall it functions as a superior product to Wave.

Now, a French startup called Azendoo is looking to shake up the collaborative work space. Azendoo simplifies project management and planning and integrates to do lists, messaging, documents, document sharing, editing and teamwork synchronization.

We got a chance to interview the team from Azendoo below. Check out the interview below: