Tonight opened Wikio, the new project of Pierre Chappaz (founder of Kelkoo sold to Yahoo for about 500mUSD but also board members of Photoways, adviser at Index Ventures and Investor in NetVibes). Wikio is in French for now but should be available very soon in 5 languages.
It is a news search engines scanning media sources and blogs in addition to be totally collaborative (publishing/sharing/voting/commenting). A news search engine managed by users (thing Google news in local + digg but scanning 10k sources includes media and blogs). The baby is really rocking and it is one of the best news search i have seen so far (first feed back is amazing)
For those who read french, Guillaume Belfiore covered it in TechCrunch France
I am also a private shareholder of Wikio (and i prefered not to publish that post on TechCrunch).
Pierre asked me sometime ago to become shareholder of Wikio with other great guys like Loic Le Meur, Martin Varsavsky (founder of FON), Jeff Clavier, Freddy Mini (ex ZDnet and founder of Musicme). This was announced today but happened before i joined officially LightSpeed Gemini Internet Lab.
It is an honour for me to be part of this and Wikio team has made a fantastic job.
Version Ouriel:
"Pierre asked me sometime ago to become shareholder of Wikio"
http://ouriel.typepad.com/myblog/2006/06/announcement_wi.html
Version Kelblog:
certains me demandent: "est-ce que je pourrais participer à Wikio au moins comme investisseur?"
:)
Posted by: henri | 19 June 2006 at 10:32 AM
hey, now that's fun !
http://vi.apa.name/?p=51
Posted by: zerchauve | 19 June 2006 at 03:51 PM
henri. Pierre answers in his blog .
http://kelblog.typepad.com/chappaz/2006/06/fte_sur_le_lac.html
In my case he asked me...
ps: "certains" in french does not mean "tous" :)
Posted by: ouriel | 19 June 2006 at 09:05 PM
However it seems like you are not to be trusted by the french :
http://vi.apa.name/?p=51
Posted by: Terry | 20 June 2006 at 12:05 AM
Finally I don t know if this guy is angry against
Ouriel TechCrunch (who did not published/selected him) or Ouriel Ohayon (who did not invest on its "so-called" alternative solution and chose Wikio at the end)...
There is no podcast of your interview but I guess I won t need it to understand why you did not select his product.
I already left a comment on TC anyway. (I still have some difficulties with the brazilian keyboard as you can read there).
Posted by: orel | 20 June 2006 at 05:23 AM
I don't know if its just me but i have a hard time getting used
to the layout of wikio.
I applaud the project but would improve the design and navigation
Posted by: Daniel Travolto | 24 May 2007 at 03:06 PM