Archive for category: Start-up-en

Winner of the blockchain BNP jury prize at VivaTechnology last year, Ledgys hopes to reaffirm its relevance once more this year. From June 15 to 17, 2017, the company will be attending the event again to present its Ownest application. The application is aimed at both businesses and consumers, offering a simple solution for using blockchain technology in practical cases such as logistics management or an authenticity certificate for a handbag.

Beyond the fantasy of the blockchain, what is the reality of this technology? Ledgys, a start-up founded in April 2016 and currently incubated at Télécom ParisTech, answers this question in a very appealing way. By developing their app, Ownest, they offer professionals and individuals easy access to their blockchain portfolio. Users can therefore easily visualize and manage the objects and products they own that are recorded in the decentralized register, whether that be a watch, containers or a palette on its journey between a distributor and a shop.

To illustrate the application’s potential, Clément Bergé-Lefranc, co-founder of Ledgys, uses the example of a company producing luxury items: “a brand that produces 1,000 individually-numbered bags can create a digital asset for each one that is included in the blockchain. These assets will accompany the product throughout its whole life cycle.” From conception to destruction, including distribution and resale from individual to individual, the digital asset will follow the bag with which it is associated through all phases. Each time the bag moves from one actor of the chain to another, the transaction of the digital asset is recorded in the blockchain, proving that the exchange really took place.

“This transaction is approved by thousands of computers, and its certification is more secure than traditional financial exchanges”, claims Clément Bergé-Lefranc. The blockchain basically submits each transaction to be validated by other users of the technology. The proof of the exchange is therefore certified by all the other participants, and is then recorded alongside all other transactions that have been carried out. It is impossible to then go back and alter this information.

Also read on I’MTech: What is a blockchain?

With Ownest, users have easy access to information on the assets of the products they own. The app allows users to transfer a title to another person in a matter of seconds. There are a whole host of advantages for the consumer. In the example of a bag made by a luxury brand, the asset certifies that the product does indeed come from the manufacturer’s own workshops and that it is not a fake. Should they wish to then resell the bag to an individual, they can prove that the object is authentic. It also solves problems at customs when returning from a journey.

Monitoring the product throughout its life cycle allows businesses to better understand the secondary market. “A collector of luxury bags who only buys second-hand products is totally invisible to a brand”, highlights the Ledgys co-founder. “If they want, the collector can make themselves known to the brand and prove that they own the items, meaning that the brand can offer advantages such as a limited-edition item.” Going beyond customer relations, the blockchain is above all one of the quickest and most effective ways to manage the state of stocks. The company can see in real time which products have been handed over to distributors and which have just been stored in the warehouse. Instead of signing delivery slips on the distribution platforms, a simple transfer of the digital asset from the deliverer to the receiver will suffice. This perspective has also attracted one of the world leaders in distribution, who is now a client of Ledgys, hoping to improve the traceability of their packaging.

“These really are concrete examples of what blockchain technology can do, and it’s what we would like to offer”, Clément Bergé-Lefranc declares enthusiastically. The start-up will present these examples of how it can be used at the VivaTechnology exhibition in Paris from June 15-17. Ledgys is committed to their mission of popularizing the use of the blockchain, and collaborating with another start-up for the event: Inwibe and the app “Wibe me up”. Together, they will offer all participants the chance to vote for the best start-ups. By using blockchain technology to certify the votes, they can ensure a transparent census of the public’s favorites.

Imagining how blockchain might be used in 10 years’ time

As well as developing Ownest, the Ledgys team is working on a more long-term project. “One of our objectives is to build marketplaces for the exchange of data using blockchain technology” presents Clément Bergé-Lefranc. Using Ethereum, the solution allows people to buy and sell data with blockchain. They still have a while to wait however before seeing such marketplaces emerge. “There are technical elements that still need to be resolved for this to be possible and optimized on Ethereum”, admits the Ledgys’ co-founder. “However, we are already building on what the blockchain will become, and its use in a few years’ time.”

In the meantime, the start-up is working on a proof of concept in developing countries, in collaboration with “The Heart Fund”, a foundation devoted to treating heart disease. The UN-accredited project aims to establish a secure and universal medical file for each patient. Blockchain technology will allow health-related data to be certified and accessible. “The aim is that with time, we will promote the proper use of patients’ medical data”, announces Clément Bergé-Lefranc. By authorizing access for professionals in the medical sector in a transparent and secure way, the quality of healthcare in countries where medical attention is less reliable can be improved. Again, this is an example of Ledgys’ desire to use blockchain not just to fulfil fantasies, but also to resolve concrete problems.

The original version of this article was published on the ParisTech Entrepreneurs incubator website.

Are chatbots the future of interactions between humans and machines? These virtual conversation agents have a growing presence on messaging applications, offering us services in tourism, entertainment, gastronomy and much more. However, not all chatbots are equal. Botfuel, a start-up incubated at ParisTech Entrepreneurs, offers its services to businesses wanting to develop top-of-the-range chatbots.

They help us to order food, book a trip or discover cultural events and bars. Chatbots are virtual intermediaries providing us with access to many services, and are becoming ever more present on messaging applications such as Messenger, Whatsapp, Telegram, etc. In 2016, Yan Georget and Javier Gonzalez decided to enter the conversational agent market, founding their start-up, Botfuel, incubated for a year at ParisTech Entrepreneurs. They were not looking, however, to develop simple, low-end chatbots. “Many key players target the mass market, with more potential users and easy-to-produce chatbots”, explains Yan Georget, “this is not our approach”.

Botfuel is aimed at businesses that want to provide their customers with a high quality user experience. The fledgling business offers companies state-of-the-art technological building blocks to help develop these intelligent conversational agents. It therefore differs from the process typically adopted by businesses for designing chatbots. Ordinarily, chatbots operate on a decision-tree basis, which is established in advance. Developers create potential scenarios based on the questions the chatbot will ask the user, trying to predict all possible responses. However, the human mind is unpredictable. There will inevitably be occasions where the user gives an unforeseen response or pushes the conversational agent to its limits. Chatbots that rely on decision-trees soon tend to struggle, often leaving customers disappointed.

“We take a different approach which is based on machine learning algorithms”, explains Yan Georget. Every sentence provided by users is analyzed to understand its meaning and identify its possible intentions. To achieve this, Botfuel works in collaboration with businesses on their databases, trying to understand the primary motivations of web-users. For example, the start-up has collaborated with BlaBlaCar, helping them to fine-tune their chatbots, which in turn allows customers to find a carshare more easily. Thanks to this design approach, the chatbot knows to attribute the same meaning to the phrases: “I want to go to Nantes”, “I would like to get to Nantes by car” and “looking for a carshare to Nantes”, something which is near impossible for traditional chatbots which dismiss various semantic formulations if the conversation doesn’t exactly match the expected discussion scenario.

Botfuel also uses information extraction algorithms to precisely identify dates, places and desired services, regardless of the order in which they appear in the conversation with the chatbot. Understanding the user is clearly Botfuel’s principal motivation. Building on this, Yan Georget explains the choices they made in terms of the issue of language correction. “People make typos when they are writing. We opted for word-by-word correction, using an algorithm based on the occurrence of each word in the language and the resemblance this has with the mistyped word entered by the user. We only correct mistakes made by a user if we are sure we know what word it is they were wanting to type.” This approach differs from that of other chatbots, which base correction on the overall meaning of the phrase. This second approach sometimes incurs errors by associating a user with the wrong intentions. Even though more errors may be corrected with this method, Botfuel prefers to prioritize the absence of misunderstanding, even if it means the chatbot has to ask the user to reformulate their question.

Chatbots, the future of online services

In addition to BlaBlaCar, many other businesses are interested in Botfuel’s chatbots. French insurance provider April and French bank Société Générale now form part of their clientele. One of the main reasons these new interfaces are attracting so much interest is, according to Yan Georget, because “conversational interfaces are very powerful”. “When using an online purchasing service, you have only to type in what you’re looking for and you’ve practically already made the purchase.” The alternative consists in going through the menu of the website of a vendor and finding the desired product from a list using search filters… this takes several clicks, and wastes several minutes, in comparison to simply typing in “I’m looking for Fred Vargas’s latest novel” into the chatbot interface.

For businesses, chatbots also represent a great opportunity to learn more about their customers. Botfuel provides an analysis system allowing businesses to better understand the links between different customer demands. By talking to a chatbot, the customer provides a lot more information than they would by simply browsing the site. It explains their interests in a more detailed way and provides better explanation for their dissatisfaction. These are all elements that can be very valuable to businesses, helping them to improve their service for the benefit of the customer.

These new perspectives revealed by chatbots are promising, but Yan Georget would also like to moderate expectations and alleviate certain fears surrounding the service: “The aim of chatbots is not to replace humans in the customer experience. Their purpose is to use conversation as an interface with machines, in place of the interactions that we currently have. When a computer operating system changes, habitual users have to readapt to this new interface. With chatbots, the conversational interface doesn’t change, conversation is flexible. The only thing that changes is the additional features that a chatbot can gain with each update.” In terms of the “intelligent” nature of the chatbots, the co-founder remains cautious in this respect. With a doctorate in artificial intelligence, he is aware of the ethical limits and risks associated with an unbridled boom in this field of technology. The focus is therefore on the issue of non-supervised learning in chatbots, which gives them more autonomy when dealing with customers. For Yan Geroget, the example of Tay, Microsoft’s chatbot which was made to become racist on Twitter by its users, is very significant. “The development of chatbots should be supervised by humans. Auto-learning is too dangerous, and it is not the kind of risk to which we are willing to expose businesses or final users.”

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Chatbots: an educational tool?

On 29th June at Télécom ParisTech, Botfuel and ParisTech Entrepreneurs came together for a meet-up dedicated to discussing chatbots and education. In this sector, intelligent conversational agents represent a potential asset for personalized education programs. From revising for your exams with Roland Garros through the chatbot Messenger “ReviserAvecRG”, to finding your path with the specialist careers advisor bot “Hello Charly”, aimed at young people between the ages of 14 and 24, or even practicing writing in a foreign language, chatbots undeniably offer a real range of tools.

The meet-up provided an opportunity to share and present experiences and concrete examples from specialist businesses. This event comes as part of the launch of the incubator’s “Tech Meet-ups” program, meetings focusing on technology and the future. The event is therefore the first in a series that will be continued in October with the next “Tech Meet-up”, which this time will be dedicated to the blockchain.[/box]

Several weeks after the CES, what remains of this key event for digital innovation? In addition to offering participants a stage for presenting their products, the event provides a place for intense networking and exchanges with future users. For start-ups, the CES accelerates their path towards leaving the incubator and provides a major boost in developing their brand.

Let’s take a quick trip back in time to January 9, 2017. The Consumer Electronics Show, better known as the CES, has just opened its doors in Las Vegas, triggering an avalanche of technology amid a flurry of media attention. Over the course of this 4-day event, the start-up and digital technology ecosystems buzz with activity. On January 12, the CES then came to a close. One week later, the return to normal can seem quite abrupt following a show that monopolized the attention of the media and technology stakeholders during its short existence. So, was it just a fleeting annual event? Are start-ups merely heading home (those who do not live in the nearby “valley”) after a short-lived fling?

Of course not! Despite the event’s ephemeral nature, start-ups come away with both medium- and long-term benefits. For Sevenhugs, 2017 was its third consecutive year participating in the event. The start-up from an incubator at Télécom ParisTech has presented two products at CES since 2015. It began by hugOne, a product for monitoring and optimizing sleep, followed by the Smart Remote, a multipurpose remote. Announcing new products at the event means, first of all, increasing press coverage, and therefore visibility, in a very competitive ecosystem. But it also means the start-ups benefit from meeting after meeting with business partners.

“During CES, we had meetings with distributors, retailers and potential partners every 30 minutes,” explains Louise Plaquevent, Marketing Director at Sevenhugs. “With so many of these different professionals in the same place, it is possible to establish a lot of contacts that will be helpful throughout the year as we look for partners in Europe and the United States,” she adds. Therefore, CES also represents a springboard for entering the American and global market, which would be less accessible without this gathering.

Presenting a product to get critical feedback

Louise Plaquevent also points out that participating at CES exposes the products to the public, resulting in “comments and opinions from potential customers, which helps us improve the products themselves.” The Smart Remote was therefore presented to the public twice in Las Vegas: first in 2016, then again in 2017 as an updated version.

Michel Fiocchi, Director of Entrepreneurship at Mines Saint-Étienne, also shares this view. His role is to provide technological support to the school’s start-ups, founded by students and researchers. “For two of our start-ups — Swap and Air Space Drone — their participation at CES allowed them to refocus their products on clearly identified markets. Through conversations with potential users, they were able to make changes to include other uses and refine their technology,” he explains.

The event in Las Vegas provides a boost for the young entrepreneurs’ projects. Their development is accelerated through the contacts they establish and the opportunity to expose their products to users. For Michel Fiocchi, there is no doubt that participating at CES helps start-ups on their way to leaving the incubator: “There is a very clear difference in the dynamics of start-ups that have participated and those that haven’t,” he stresses.

Finally, participating at this major digital show offers benefits that are difficult to calculate, but may be just as valuable. Louise Plaquevent reminds us, in conclusion, that despite the event’s short duration, it is an intense experience for all the companies that make the trip. She points out that “CES allows us to get to know each other, and unites the teams.” This aspect is particularly important for these smaller companies with fewer employees.