Herve Cuviliez: Entrepreneur - business angel in the Middle East

With a price ratio 1:20 comparing to PCs and a vaste majority of the population living with few dollars a day, it’s a no brainer to understand why mobile penetration is 10 times bigger in emerging countries.

For that reason, we will see mobile innovations coming from those countries in years to come.
Want signs of this?
South Africa is about to release a voting system through mobile for local, regional and even national election.
Bangladesh mobile operator Grameen Phone has gave information access (information is key for a farmer, for example. It’s helping him to know to where and when to sell his production instead of relying on local resellers) to poor people through 16 millions lines.
M-banking is the future of banking in Midle East & Africa (Etisalat has released last month a mobile wallet)

I see more and more mobile innovations coming from Africa (see dreamoval), middle east and of course India & china.

Kill cliches about tech innovation always coming from developed countries and remember

from the necessity come the creativity

If you know any others innovations there, please continue the discussion by leaving comments

I went visiting the Digiport in Lille (north of france).
they provides a full range of services for IT companies from a business park to host your business to personalized support for your incorporation.

I was really impress by the quality of the infrastructure and the skills of the team.

If you are a startup CEO looking for the perfect place for european headquarter, you should really consider this place.

Cherry on the cake: By the high speed train, London is at 1h20, Brussels at 30 mins, Paris at 1h and charles de gaulle airport 40 mins.

While the vaste majority of us just getting tired of facebook, the Web 2.0 is entering into phase 2. I will say a more mature phase.
With phase 1, we learnt how to connect to each other, sharing basic information, etc… I’m talking about facebook, dopplr, linkedin, Xing and hundred of others.

With phase 2, we will learn to share informations with others forms of intelligence. I’m talking about artificial intelligence, I’m talking about robots, sensors, any kind of devices. Scared ?
To make it simple, everyday there is millions of information gathered by sensors that could be valuable for us: temperature sensors, mobile for localization, wifi hotspots, RFID chips, etc…
In fact, we are already surrendered by sensors collecting information and “socializing” between them.
This phase 2 will be the connection of this 2 kinds of social networks: us and them.
Don’t Believe me ? Need some signs ? Here is some

Tim O’Reilly at the ETech08:

the future of Web 2.0 will be applications driven by sensors

But in fact, the first person, i ever heard talking about this, is Bernard Benhamou that’s was a year ago and he made a interview (in french) about this in may 06.

and then start to google this there tons of pages on this: A good article on the economist

So what’s new ?
It’s getting real. In 2008, we will move from prospective to concreate applications.

Need another sign ?

Yahoo just released Fire Eagle (a way to share your location with sites and services online) that collect localization informations and centralize them in an unique application then you can feed this into your applications. Sources could be wifi hotspots, mobile, gps, etc…

I will continued to investigate that and invest myself and my money into this type of application.

To be continued…

I’ve found that last month in San Francisco, not in the Apple Store but at the theater!

Selling ipods like chocolate bars, i like this.

thanks Mr Jobs,

I just bumped into Unity 3D. That’s amazing, i went through a lot of 3D tools last 10 years (VRML, Nemo, etc..) but this one is real great.

It worses spending some time on it, install the plugin and start to browse the demo pages.

they present themselves as a multiplatform game development tool but I’m sure we will see other applications as branded content for example