Paris Archives - Serious Startups

Paris Startup AIRTAG Is All About Mobile Shopping INTERVIEW

A startup in Paris called AIRTAG is offering a complete suite of mobile shopping tools for retailers and e-tailers. The startup was founded by Jeremie Leroyer and Cyril Porteret who also cofounded Haiku which was sold in 2004 for $10 million euros.

AIRTAG’s complete suite of products has every facet of mobile shopping covered. AIRSHOP enables shoppers to order and pay in advance for groceries and fast food using their mobile phone. AIRFID is the rewards and loyalty card arm of the company. AIRPASS is a mobile wallet of sorts adding loyalty cards, gym keytags and even transportation passes. AIRTAG kit is the companies development tool kit for developers to interact with their PayPass applications.

The company’s stable of clients already includes McDonald’s, McCafe’, Reebok, Dior and many other globally well known brands. This has prompted AIRTAG to deploy offices throughout the world including a recently opened office in New York. They plan on adding partnerships in both the US and Canada from the New York office.

Mobile shopping and payments have grown into a huge industry and right now it’s still anyone’s game. Google got off to a very rocky start with Google Wallet. Three of the four major US wireless carriers teamed up to help create ISIS an alternative to Google Wallet which was supposed to have seen a larger national footprint heading into this years holiday season.

According to the co-founders of AIRTAG, Japan is light years ahead of the rest of the world when it comes to allowing smartphones to manage people’s lives. Since selling their first startup to Japanese investors both Leroyer and Porteret have spent a lot of time in Japan where they noticed everyone used their phones for everything including bus fare, key locks, and payments. AIRTAG’s hope is to help replicate that system across the world.

We had a chance to interview the AIRTAG team. Check out the 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:

Paris Startup: LimeApp Is The Daily Deals Site For Online Services INTERVIEW

There are daily deal sites everywhere. Groupon and LivingSocial started a phenomenon for products, weight loss facilities, canoe trips, adventures and even cupcakes. You can find a daily deal for just about every tangible product known to man, heck you can find 20 deal sites these days.

LimeApp is a daily deals site that’s sole focus is online services. Think apps, cloud based storage, web hosting, things like that. As the LimeApp team told us in an interview, they specialize only in intangible products.

Some of the deals available on LimeApp today include 100 gb of cloud storage from Elephant Drive for $49 (retail value $99), Email marketing from ActiveCampaign for $99 (a $250 value), and professional banner creation from Canned Banners a $90 value for just $59.99

LimeApp tops everything off with a money back guarantee.

We got a chance to talk to the LimeApp people in the interview below.