French Startups to Look Out For

#1

Post by Torlock » Sun, Nov 03, 2013, 3:18 PM UTC

French Startups to Look Out For
rerral.com

Re: French Startups to Look Out For

#2

Post by abolibibelot » Sun, Nov 03, 2013, 5:08 PM UTC

Capitaine Train is super useful. The official SNCF (French State owned railways company) site is unusable and tries to upsell you everything but the actual tickets. Capitaine Train has a minimalistic design, fast search and has niceties like .ics to remind you of what you bought.

(I'm in no way affiliated to Capitaine Train)

Re: French Startups to Look Out For

#3

Post by sarhus » Sun, Nov 03, 2013, 5:13 PM UTC

Not in that list, but I think Smartmeup is quite interesting too: http://www.smartmeup.org/index.php?skip=1

Machine Learning + Realtime face recognition

Re: French Startups to Look Out For

#4

Post by seszett » Sun, Nov 03, 2013, 5:17 PM UTC

abolibibelot wrote: post #2

Capitaine Train is super useful. The official SNCF (French State owned railways company) site is unusable and tries to upsell you everything but the actual tickets. Capitaine Train has a minimalistic design, fast search and has niceties like .ics to remind you of what you bought. (I'm in no way affiliated to Capitaine Train)

Yeah, I always wondered how this could be. Capitaine Train is making money just selling train tickets, without any kind of ad at any point of the process, and that's their only revenue.

On the other hand, we have the official SNCF website, which doesn't even have to be financially successful itself (since SNCF already makes money on the ticket itself), but is littered with ads, slow, ugly and unhelpful. And even PDF train tickets come with half an A4-page worth of ads.

How can this be possible?

EDIT: just looked at the train ticket I printed today, well ok, I was wrong, there is no ad on it anymore, but I'm sure there was at some point.

Re: French Startups to Look Out For

#5

Post by bsaul » Sun, Nov 03, 2013, 5:26 PM UTC

seszett wrote: post #4

abolibibelot wrote: post #2

Capitaine Train is super useful. The official SNCF (French State owned railways company) site is unusable and tries to upsell you everything but the actual tickets. Capitaine Train has a minimalistic design, fast search and has niceties like .ics to remind you of what you bought. (I'm in no way affiliated to Capitaine Train)

Yeah, I always wondered how this could be. Capitaine Train is making money just selling train tickets, without any kind of ad at any point of the process, and that's their only revenue. On the other hand, we have the official SNCF website, which doesn't even have to be financially successful itself (since SNCF already makes money on the ticket itself), but is littered with ads, slow, ugly and unhelpful. And even PDF…

seszett : it probably depends if you're paying for regular tickets or iDTGV which is a separate organization from SNCF, selling train tickets through the same website. They put ads on their tickets, but they're kind of a low-cost train operator.

Re: French Startups to Look Out For

#6

Post by hokkos » Sun, Nov 03, 2013, 5:27 PM UTC

abolibibelot wrote: post #2

Capitaine Train is super useful. The official SNCF (French State owned railways company) site is unusable and tries to upsell you everything but the actual tickets. Capitaine Train has a minimalistic design, fast search and has niceties like .ics to remind you of what you bought. (I'm in no way affiliated to Capitaine Train)

VoyageSNCF has come a long way, and I now prefer it to Capitain Train because it shows the price on a month.

Re: French Startups to Look Out For

#7

Post by Spone » Sun, Nov 03, 2013, 5:33 PM UTC

seszett wrote: post #4

abolibibelot wrote: post #2

Capitaine Train is super useful. The official SNCF (French State owned railways company) site is unusable and tries to upsell you everything but the actual tickets. Capitaine Train has a minimalistic design, fast search and has niceties like .ics to remind you of what you bought. (I'm in no way affiliated to Capitaine Train)

Yeah, I always wondered how this could be. Capitaine Train is making money just selling train tickets, without any kind of ad at any point of the process, and that's their only revenue. On the other hand, we have the official SNCF website, which doesn't even have to be financially successful itself (since SNCF already makes money on the ticket itself), but is littered with ads, slow, ugly and unhelpful. And even PDF…

Capitaine Train is a registered travel agency, so they can resell SNCF tickets while getting a commission.

Re: French Startups to Look Out For

#8

Post by tbassetto » Sun, Nov 03, 2013, 5:47 PM UTC

I "only" knew Capitaine Train, Lima and Bunkr.

I would recommend you to check https://sketchfab.com and https://en.mention.net

Re: French Startups to Look Out For

#9

Post by ialex » Sun, Nov 03, 2013, 5:56 PM UTC

tbassetto wrote: post #8

I "only" knew Capitaine Train, Lima and Bunkr. I would recommend you to check https://sketchfab.com and https://en.mention.net

i would also recommend http://pixfirst.com awesome SaaS for photographers it helps photographers sell photos online, they store photos for and you set the price, sends email to client once photos uploaded, you can tag photos and create albums out of those tags so people only see their photos, it is a really interesting startup.

Re: French Startups to Look Out For

#10

Post by xacaxulu » Sun, Nov 03, 2013, 5:58 PM UTC

I love seeing posts like these! Allez les français!!