mercredi 15 février 2012

Greentech Startups Require Gravity-Bending CEOs

Greentech Startups Require Gravity-Bending CEOs

“For successful cleantech companies -- and there have been 23, if success is defined as having gone public on a major U.S. [stock] exchange  the average time to go public was nine years,” said Matt Trevithick of Venrock at a recent TiE (formerly The Indus Entrepreneurs) Energy event. “Entrepreneurs in cleantech have to have extraordinary patience. This is a 10-year journey just to get started.”

“Maybe the notion of four-year option packages is obsolete [for cleantech]. That is from the IT space,” continued Trevithick.
 
The TiE event brought together venture capitalists and entrepreneurs with roots in the Indus region (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal) for a frank discussion on opportunities -- and pitfalls -- in greentech.
 
“We are used to companies that are powered by Moore’s Law that sell into an entrepreneurial environment,” said Bob Walker of Sierra Ventures. “Intel, Google, Samsung, and LG [all] have an entrepreneurial core. They’ve got to come up with the next cell phone or display technology. These are industries where if you miss a product cycle or two, you are dead.”
 
“A lot of the industries that we consider cleantech don’t operate that way,” continued Walker. “No [employee] at a municipal water plant is going to lose their job because they didn’t buy the latest technology. These people have one goal in mind: to retire, get their pension, and not make a mistake that gets them fired. If there is a new technology, [they think] ‘Let somebody else buy it; we’ll wait five years and maybe we’ll buy it then.’”
 
To succeed, greentech startups -- and particularly energy efficiency companies -- must have business models that facilitate market adoption.
 
“I worked as a facilities engineer for a couple of years,” said Rachel Sheinbein of CMEA. “We would see a lot of things that would reduce water use or energy use. [But] it was very hard. There is a principal-agent [problem]. You need cap-ex spending to see op-ex savings and those are different budgets and different motivations. […] The business model becomes [even] more important if you are going after sustainability or efficiency.”
 
“Solar is an example of an industry that has innovated incredibly rapidly to figure how out to deploy, going from direct sales to leases and community solar,” said Nety Krishna of Redpoint Ventures.
 
In addition to financing innovation, participants suggested that greentech companies should consider developing aspirational products. For example, a Tesla Roadster or Model S electric car.
 
“Hybrid vehicles are a compromise and that may be dominated by Toyota and General Motors. But an all-electric vehicle is aspirational and is the basis of a disruptive business. That is Tesla,” said Trevithick. “Tesla received about the same size loan guarantee, as did Solyndra. Tesla is a three-billion-dollar company today. Tesla is a success story. Make aspirational products. That is how you make margins.”
 
The relative importance of margins, however, is a source of debate.
 
“Cleantech entrepreneurs have forgotten … that most of the money in venture capital has been made on products that have 50 percent to 70 percent margins,” said Trevithick. “The challenge in cleantech is that you are shipping hardware, an industrial category. How do you get beyond a 20 percent to 30 percent gross margin business [that] does not have very high multiples on sales or earnings?”
 
“I am not going to put the bar at 50 percent gross margins. That is high,” said Sheinbein. “If [cleantech] companies are going to exit through acquisition, they need to be accretive. They are more likely to be accretive through EBITDA. I am looking for [companies] being accretive, more than a certain percentage gross margin.”
 
Across the board, venture capitalists agreed about the paramount importance of a startup’s team.
 
“After seven and a half years as a venture investor and 10 years as an entrepreneur, I have come to a Zen-like appreciation of the importance of the team. It is really the CEO. Each cleantech success has had a gravity-bending CEO that could cause improbable things to happen and almost will them into existence,” said Trevithick.
 
“For most of the successful cleantech companies -- defined again by an IPO on a U.S. exchange -- the team that was present at the Series A played critical roles at the post-IPO company,” continued Trevithick. “In Venrock’s experience across all sectors ... in 70 percent to 80 percent of cases, the team that was present and gave the pitch when the first check was written was the team that rang the bell at NASDAQ.”
 
After building their team, founders should be very careful not to overcapitalize. Don’t take every dollar VCs offer, panel members cautioned.
 
“Companies that are capital-efficient, disciplined, and bootstrapped are going to be able to get favorable returns,” said John Robison, of NGEN Partners. “We have seen that from companies that were acquired three or four years ago in the smart building space, Gridlogix and Richards-Zeta, where the founders were very shrewd with when they chose to sell their business before they took on too much capital.”
 
“[In recent years,] there are companies in the data center space that have been very capital-efficient and have been able to virtually hold off on taking on additional VC money,” added Robison. “Some of their competitors perhaps -- only time will tell -- overcapitalized, [which] will make it harder for the investors and the founding team to realize their financial dreams.”
 
Similarly, participants indicated that venture capitalists should not monopolize even their most promising deals. Instead, they should share deals with colleagues at other firms.
 
“I would syndicate a lot more than I did [if I could redo the past few years]. VCs are motivated by two things: fear and greed. One of them is ascendant at any time. I think it is very important to balance,” said Krishna. “When you come across a company that you think is fantastic and you have a change to take a big share, you do, not thinking that down the road, it is better have more people at the table to manage risk.”
 
Increasingly, VCs are able to share risk with large corporations.
 
“We are seeing a lot of companies across very different sectors [become] interested in building relationships with venture firms and their portfolio companies,” said Sheinbein. Large companies “will continue to come in, everyone from General Mills to Delta Electronics to all the large chemical companies and consumer products companies. […] These companies have money on their balance sheet, are interested in getting into [the cleantech sector], and have very different timelines than the venture community.”
 
Indeed, when thinking about environmental innovation, it is important to consider not only venture-backed companies, but also corporate initiatives.
 
“Five years ago, very few companies were interested in biodegradable or bio-compostable goods,” said Krishna. “But look at what Coke and Pepsi are doing today. They have completely bought in to the concept, partly because it is green and partly because it is cheaper. Those things are happening, but they did not make a venture company a billion dollars, so you do not hear about them.”
 
But not every greentech opportunity will be attractive to either venture or corporate investors.
 
“We looked at residential energy efficiency plays. We hired a business school student to count them for us,” said Venrock’s Trevithick. “He got to 108 companies in residential energy management, which led me to believe that it is easy to start a company there, but most of those companies will not make any money. We didn’t make an investment because most of those businesses will not make any money.”
 
The profitable web startups you do hear about, the Facebooks of the world, are making raising capital for greentech startups more challenging.
 
“The Groupons, the Facebooks and the LinkedIns -- and all the stuff going on with cloud computing -- are incredibly capital-efficient companies. With a small amount of capital, [investors] get to see if the company is going to succeed. That is who your competitors are if you are [a cleantech entrepreneur] trying to raise money,” said Walker. “Even those of us who are pushing cleantech deals have to compete with our [venture capital] partners for resources in our funds.”
 
***
 
Yoni Cohen has worked for greentech venture capital firms in San Francisco and Israel and reported about environmental innovation for numerous publications.


Source : GreenTech Media

7 ways to unleash game-changing greentech innovation


7 ways to unleash game-changing greentech innovation
The key to unleashing the power of innovation in new ventures is whole systems integrated design, the modern champion of which is Amory Lovins of Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI).  Most engineering students are taught to focus on optimizing parts of systems, but rarely encouraged to look at the system as a whole.  Unfortunately, the focus on components leads designers to (as Lovins says) “pessimize the system”.
RMI has created a set of 17 principles for doing whole systems integrated design, from which I’ve abstracted some key points below, writing specifically for those trying to start ventures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and make a profit at the same time. I’ve also drawn upon the excellent book by Stasinopoulos et al. titled Whole System Design, where you can find detailed examples combined with a nicely organized set of steps for organizing the design process.
1). Create an interdisciplinary team
Your team needs a diversity of skills to truly explore almost any design space. That’s because few people have the breadth and depth of knowledge across all relevant disciplines to assess what’s possible. In addition, the process of brainstorming, if properly fostered, generates new ideas and acceptance by the team of the resulting design path (by virtue of their shared experience of brainstorming).
2). Reward the team for substantially improved designs
The goal is radical improvement, not incremental changes, and the best way to achieve this result is to pay for what you want. This sounds like a commonsense notion, but that’s often not how things are done. For example, engineers designing the heating and cooling systems in commercial buildings are usually paid as a percentage of the capital cost of the system they install, so it’s no wonder they don’t undertake whole system redesigns that would reduce capital costs.  So reward the team for game-changing innovation in whatever ways your pocketbook allows.
3). Start with a clean sheet
While learning from past efforts is helpful, radically improved designs always start with a clean sheet. That’s partly because rapid technology change has opened up previously unknown opportunities, but also because old designs embody old assumptions, and those often no longer hold. I show in the book how even talented people create artificial obstacles to accomplishing big goals, and starting fresh can allow you to sidestep that tendency.
4). Rely on measured data
Baseline values for current products as well as for accomplishing the defined task need to be based on measured data, not on assumptions or rules of thumb. That’s because only measured data conveys the current reality, while rules of thumb are based on history, and because of the rapid pace of change discussed earlier in this chapter, history is becoming less and less relevant to what is possible today.
5). Go for multiple benefits
When designing a product, each component should (to the extent possible) serve multiple benefits, to minimize costs and maximize reliability. This lesson is also true for the product itself. Efficiency or low emissions by themselves won’t sell products to the vast majority of consumers, but pairing those improvements with other benefits is the best way to ensure that low-carbon innovations are widely adopted. That means that products need to reduce emissions, save money, and make people’s lives better all at the same time. That often meanssaving time, which turns out to be one of the most valuable scarce resources we have in our busy modern lives (see my third essay for more details).
6). Incorporate feedback into the design
That means use of smart controls to make equipment operation more effective and data collection to improve both current operations and future products. With the advent of ever more efficient computing technologies, we’ll be better able to incorporate such innovations into most future products, with corresponding increases in efficiency, reductions in emissions, and improvements in meeting human needs.
7). Accept and foster a non-linear design process
Another important feature of true integrated design is that it is anything but linear, and that’s all to the good. It’s almost impossible to anticipate everything in advance, and the process of design creates new insights that would never arise without the inevitable false starts. For example, until you actually see a working prototype you can’t really know whether it’s what you want, as the team creating the first iPhone discovered as they neared the product launch.
Conclusions
The most important lesson from the whole systems design literature is that conventional incremental design practices are both pervasive and pernicious.   They leave real money on the table and slow the adoption of current technologies that could substantially reduce emissions.  Don’t let this happen to you!  Go for game changing innovation, and the climate (and your pocketbook) will be the better for it.
Source : GigaOM

mardi 14 février 2012

Une application mobile pour refocaliser l'attention des téléspectateurs


ballon de foot et tabletteKwarter est une application second-screen (deuxième écran) pour les fans de sport. Elle offre une expérience multi écrans du sport à la télé. Les passionnés ne sont plus seulement des spectateurs passifs mais deviennent des joueurs actifs.
Il ressort d'une récente étude Nielsen qu'aux États-Unis, plus de 75% des téléspectateurs utilisent un deuxième appareil pendant qu'ils regardent la TV : ordinateur personnel, tablette ou smartphone. Cependant, l'utilisation n'est liée que pour 25% à l'émission qu'ils regardent. En d'autres termes, comme les téléspectateurs sont de plus en plus multitâches, il y a de plus en plus de risques qu'ils soient distraits du programme TV qu'ils regardent. Comme ces « deuxièmes écrans » peuvent être considérés comme une source de distraction dangereuse pour les réseaux de télévision et les producteurs, certains réseaux et entreprises ont choisi de s'appuyer sur les appareils mobiles connectés pour ramener l'attention du téléspectateur au programme qu'il regarde. Kwarter est une application second-screen lancée en octobre 2011. Elle permet à ses utilisateurs de jouer avec d'autres passionnés de sport pendant qu'ils regardent un événement sportif en direct à la télé. Ce réseau social sportif améliore le vécu du sport en direct pour les principaux sports américains : le hockey, le basket-ball, le base-ball et le football.

Plus jamais seul quand tu regardes un programme de sport
 
Les événements sportifs sont déjà à la base d'un grand nombre de conversations sur les différentes plates-formes de médias sociaux : durant le dernier Super Bowl, les utilisateurs ont posté 12 000 tweets par seconde en rapport avec le jeu. Kwarter veut encore plus rapprocher les fans. Pendant qu'ils regardent une émission sportive en direct à la télé, les utilisateurs de Kwarter peuvent « entrer » dans la partie qu'ils regardent et se connecter à leurs amis, ou d'autres fans, grâce à leurs appareils iOS, pour échanger des commentaires, donner un avis, télécharger des photos ou chatter avec d'autres participants en cours de partie. « Plutôt que de simplement pousser l'information, comme les messages sur Twitter ou d'autres contenus extérieurs, Kwarter est une plate-forme de crowdsourcing, un jeu social dans lequel les fans interagissent » déclare le CEO et fondateur de Kwarter, Carlos Diaz.

Le jeu sur un deuxième écran pour ramener l'attention sur le programme TV

Avec Kwarter, le téléspectateur se mue en joueur et est récompensé de sa participation par des prix dans la vie réelle. À chaque événement spécial pendant une partie (essai, blessure, sécurité, etc.), les utilisateurs peuvent gagner des médailles ou des trophées en jouant avec les autres fans. Ils accumulent ainsi des points et sont récompensés par des démarques « goodies », coupons ou cadeaux. Kwarter a, par exemple, conclu récemment un accord avec Domino's Pizza pour une livraison de pizza à domicile, en temps réel. En ajoutant la gamification au spectacle TV traditionnel, Kwarter entend utiliser les appareils mobiles pour ramener l'attention du téléspectateur au programme qu'il regarde sur le premier écran, c'est-à-dire la télévision. Alors que certains réseaux de télévision développent leurs propres applications second-screen adaptées à leur contenu spécifique, les applications comme Kwarter peuvent offrir une solution alternative, prête à l'emploi.

Source: L'atelier

jeudi 9 février 2012

Hydrovolts Finds Current Energy Where It Wasn’t Possible Before


Hydrovolts Finds Current Energy Where It Wasn’t Possible Before

Veolia will back plan to capture micro-hydropower bubbling up out of wastewater treatment plants

Hydrovolts believes its technology can turn the increasingly precious water flowing in ever-larger volumes through wastewater treatment plants into electricity. Veolia Environmental Solutions, the biggest environmental solutions company in the world, and therefore one of the biggest wastewater processors in the world, will partner with Hydrovolts in the effort through its Innovation Accelerator program.
There are, according to Hydrovolts CEO Burt Hamner, over 26,000 municipal wastewater treatment plants in the United States and over 100,000 industrial treatment plants. The obvious opportunity raised a question for his emerging company.
The Hydrovolts team took a small turbine similar to those the company has used to capture energy flowing through irrigation canals to a wastewater treatment plant in Port Orchard, Washington. “We wanted to see how fast we could get it installed,” he said. They did it in a day. “And it worked. And then we said, ‘Wow, we could do this with a bigger machine.’ And then, all of a sudden, we discovered a lot more places to do this.”
Ready installation is the key, Hamner said. “Because it installs so quickly without needing site modifications,” he explained, “it is inexpensive. It doesn’t have to make lots of power to pay for itself. That’s the breakthrough.”
The turbine they installed in the wastewater stream only produces “around 350 watts.” The company had it running through the recent holidays “with a data transmitter and powering a Christmas tree. It’s the world’s first pee-powered Christmas tree.”
Hydrovolts has completed one round of financing and is about to complete a $5-million-plus second round, Hamner said. “We’ve sold three canal turbines and one waterfall turbine.”
Hydrovolts, he said, has built and tested three turbines of three different sizes. “The Portable turbine is expected to retail for under $2,000. The Canal turbine has two sizes, from 2 to 10 kilowatts output, depending on water speed, for approximately $20,000 and $40,000, [respectively]. The Waterfall turbine is in development and will likely have two sizes and a modular design. Price remains to be determined.”
Hamner has been working in tidal power since 2005 and with what he calls “micro-hydropower” since 2007, but it “has never been cost-effective if you have to pour concrete or do civil engineering. You just can’t make enough power to pay it off,” he explained. “But if you eliminate the need to modify a site, and you can do the installation in a day, and you have new technologies like grid-tied microinverters that didn’t exist 20 years ago, you can now do this -- and we are.”
Hydrovolts used the multiple-Oscar-winning Autodesk design software to develop a larger turbine for the Port Orchard site.
“We expect it will make 2 to 2.5 kilowatts of power. And this is a small water plant,” Hamner said. “The plant’s flow is only 1.5 million gallons a day from a population of around 10,000 people. That’s the smallest turbine we think it’s reasonable to make, because you have to make a certain amount of power for it to be economic.”
Wastewater treatment plants for large cities in the U.S. and around the world will require bigger turbines. “We are just starting to understand the possibilities, Hamner said. “We are quoting plants that have flows of 25 million to 40 million gallons a day. Bigger cities have bigger plants. A whole river runs through a bigger city’s plant.” Such plants, Hamner said, require “more and bigger turbines.”
There is a limit. “The maximum we think you can get with this technology from any one facility,” Hamner said, “is maybe 40 to 50 kilowatts with a number of modular machines.” But that is because of the way wastewater is presently managed, he added.
“We expect the world’s water engineering community is going to get very excited about this new paradigm in water engineering,” Hamner said. “Now you need to engineer the water flow to take advantage of it.” An example is overflows where the stream is wide and thin, he explained. “They could be made narrow so the water is more focused and the energy could then be captured better.”
The Autodesk design software, Hamner said, was essential to helping potential customers “instantly understand what this thing is going to look like and how it will fit into their system.” The Autodesk record keeping system has been “critical for intellectual property protection because it documents everything,” he added. And in Hydrovolts’ newest design, Hamner said, Autodesk’s materials software minimized “the environmental impacts of materials choices. That’s very important to us because we’re committed to sustainability, not just in the product we make but in the way we make the product.”
Having chosen Hydrovolts to be part of its Innovation Accelerator program, Hamner said, Veolia is “now starting to estimate how many turbines could be used throughout their global operations, which number in the thousands of facilities.”
In addition to the Veolia partnership, Hydrovolts has won multiple awards for greentech innovation from organizations like Launch and ImagineH2O and has, Hamner said, reached out to other partners.
“We’ve signed a letter of intent to do a turbine project with the Butte Irrigation District in California. We have become a member of the Fresno Water-Energy Technology Center. We are negotiating sales and demonstrations with two other water organizations in California. And we are in sales and technology partnerships with organizations in Massachusetts.”
Hamner said Hydrovolts’ newest breakthrough opens up “a new renewable energy sector” -- and he foresees “micro-hydropower bubbling up all over.”
Source : GreenTech Media

mardi 7 février 2012

Solve for X : le projet de Google prend forme

Le projet Google X commence à prendre forme : un nouveau site internet wesolveforx.com vient de voir le jour discrètement (Google en est le propriétaire) et présente une vidéo d’introduction.
Solve for X
Officiellement rien ne dit que “Google X” et “We Solve for X” est le même projet mais il y a de grandes chances, comme le mentionne androidpolice.
GoogleX/SolveforX serait donc une sorte de nouveau Google Labs, un laboratoire de vidéos technologiques présentant des idées futuristes, à la manière d’une conférence TED.


Vincent Abry

Les distributeurs automatiques en pleine effervescence

Les distributeurs automatiques se cantonnaient, il y a encore une quinzaine d’années, à des produits très classiques, dont notamment les boissons, les friandises et les snacks. Les premières innovations dans le domaine des produits frais sont apparues avec les distributeurs de fruits et de sandwiches. Aujourd’hui le distributeur automatique est un modèle économique très apprécié des consommateurs, puisqu’il garantit un accès rapide à l’aliment convoité, et ce vingt-quatre heures sur vingt-quatre. Des commerçants en nombre croissant prennent la décision d’installer ce type d’appareil en façade de leur boutique pour continuer à faire des affaires même après les heures de fermeture. Après l’installation d’un distributeur de baguettes à Paris par un certain Jean-Louis Hecht, qui avait fait grand bruit, intéressons-nous à l’histoire de deux frères exerçant le métier de poissonnier en Espagne, et qui poussent l’audace encore plus loin…
Il y a déjà onze ans que les frères Ruben et Marga Rios ont ouvert leur commerce de poissonnerie à Mungia, une petite ville située à environ vingt kilomètres de Bilbao. Ils ne purent que constater, au fil du temps, la perte de chiffre d’affaire générée par les heures de fermeture : en effet, le poisson étant un produit frais par excellence, l’achat se fait souvent à la dernière minute ou ne se fait pas, le consommateur se tournant alors vers d’autres sources d’alimentation. C’est de ce constat qu’est né, l’année dernière, le projet d’installer un distributeur automatique devant la poissonnerie pour proposer des produits frais de la mer à toute heure du jour et de la nuit.
Le distributeur propose un panel fidèle de toutes les merveilles offertes par l’écosystème marin local : les sardines, les anchois, le merlu et les crevettes se disputent la vedette derrière la vitre de la machine. Tous les poissons et les fruits de mer sont achetés quotidiennement au marché public de Mercabilbao. Les frères Rios prennent soin ensuite de les nettoyer et de les insérer individuellement dans des emballages mentionnant clairement la date de péremption de chaque produit.
Le succès commercial semble être d’ores et déjà au rendez-vous, et les deux frères ne manquent pas d’imagination pour suggérer des améliorations permanentes. Le distributeur compte ainsi désormais un certain nombre de plats pré-cuisinés à base de fruits de mer. Il est envisagé, le plus sérieusement du monde, d’ajouter aussi des appâts vivants pour les pêcheurs. Tous les produits sont proposés au même prix que ceux disponibles en boutique, afin d’assurer une complémentarité parfaite.
Origine : Innovant.fr
Pays d'origine : Espagne
Sources : http://www.seafoodsource.com/newsarticledetail.aspx?id=13943

AirBnB à la conquête du marché français

AirBnB, site de partage d’appartements et porte-étendard de l’économie du partage, poursuit son expansion et ouvre un bureau à Paris. Deux des trois fondateurs historiques, Brian Chesky et Joe Gebbia, étaient à Paris pour célébrer le lancement de la version localisée du site et annoncer la nomination deOlivier Grémillon à la tête de Airbnb France. Nous les avons rencontrés afin d’évoquer leur ascension fulgurante et parler de la spécificité du marché français.
Il y a quatre ans, fraîchement sortis de leur école de design,  Joe et Brian cherchent à trouver un moyen pour payer le loyer de leur appartement à San Francisco. Une célèbre conférence sur le design a lieu dans la ville au même moment et plusieurs participants se plaignent de voir tous les hôtels entièrement complets.  Ils ont alors l’idée de partager leur appartement le temps de la conférence et de créer ainsi un Bed & Breakfast à moindre frais et plus convivial. A court de lits, ils feront dormir leurs invités sur des matelas gonflables (en anglais Air Bed). En quelques jours, ils créent un site vitrine qu’ils nomment Air Bed & Breakfast et reçoivent trois invités pour toute la durée de la conférence. AirBnB était né. Vous connaissez la suite. 5 ans plus tard, AirBnB est une entreprise valorisée à plus d’un milliard de dollars (après des levées de fonds s’élevant à 119,8 millions de dollars), vient de dépasser les 5 millions de nuitées réservées et connaît une croissance globale de 500%.
Toutefois, comme me l’ont précisé Joe et Brian, le site a connu un période de non-adaptation et pendant de nombreux mois, le site a peiné à décoller. Seule la conviction que leur service répondait à un véritable besoin les a poussés à continuer. D’ailleurs, Brian exclut absolument le mythe du “service bien construit qui amène naturellement des utilisateurs”. Répondre à un besoin est une chose, susciter l’envie du consommateur et fidéliser une communauté en est une autre. Le développement du site est d’ailleurs intimement lié aux retours d’expérience des utilisateurs. L’impressionnante infographie publiée récemment par l’entreprise, donne raison à leur volonté d’avoir continué.
Pour AirBnB, l’ouverture d’un bureau en France est devenu quelque chose de naturel. Spécifique et clé, le marché français l’est pour plusieurs raisons. Premièrement, la startup californienne bénéficie d’une grande notoriété en France et surtout à Paris. La capitale française est, d’ailleurs, le deuxième marché d’AirBnB après New York en nombre de nuitées réservées. Ensuite, les français sont de plus en plus nombreux à se tourner vers AirBnB (180 000 nuits réservées, 5 fois plus qu’en 2010). Enfin, la France est la première destination touristique au monde et avec l’émergence de sites concurrents comme HouseTrip, Wimdu ou encore Sejourning (dont on parlait ici), AirBnB cherche à rester le leader incontestable et à mieux comprendre un marché peut-être plus difficilement pénétrable que d’autres. Car, hormis Paris, l’offre est encore ténue, la faute à des hôtes français peut-être plus conservateurs et méfiants qu’ailleurs. La marge de progression est donc encore énorme (notons tout de même que la croissance de la startup en France était de 400% l’année dernière). Ainsi, en plaçant Olivier Grémillon, aidée par une équipe d’une vingtaine de personnes, et en ouvrant une version française de son site (AirBnB.fr) le géant américain affiche ses ambitions. Depuis Paris, l’équipe couvrira également le Maroc et la Belgique.