Mailjet is similar to the likes of MailChimp and SendGrid, in that it provides a way for companies to send out newsletters and their apps to send out transactional emails. While some of those rivals target marketing departments, though, Mailjet’s sights are trained on relatively small-scale developers that want to avoid the hassle of maintaining SMTP servers and the like.

“Whenever you have a web app you need to code a couple of emails – welcome, subscription, reset password – so it’s a headache for the developer to set that up,” co-founder Quentin Nickmans told me. “So we created a platform that makes it extremely easy for a developer to set up.”

Apart from these functions, Mailjet also provides tracking and ‘deliverability optimization’ of emails, so customers can see whether messages have been clicked on or opened.

The cash comes mostly from Alven Capital, which has put $2.6m into the round, with the rest coming from Airtek Capital Group chief Laurent Asscher and the eFounders incubator, which had previously provided $300k in seed funding.

Because Mailjet is mostly targeting startups, the company needs feet on the ground in each territory. And, according to Nickmans, such presence will also help with dealing with ISPs – essential when you’re trying to make your customers’ emails as deliverable as possible:

“The company has been having quite a lot of traction and… we need to hire more people in support, we need to be closer to our customers. We need to have a couple of people present in Latin America, we want to grow our support team in Canada, we don’t have someone now in Berlin who could be a developer evangelist –we want to participate in hackathons for people to get to know our API, and we want someone more locally based for ISP relations.”

Right now Mailjet has around 10,000 customers (big names include MIT and Fotolia), which it’s amassed since launching 18 months ago. The company employs a freemium model, with payments kicking in once you send 6,000 or more emails a month.

Paying customers also get a dedicated IP address that benefits from reputation monitoring. Nickmans didn’t want to detail the split between paying and non-paying customers too closely, but he indicated that somewhere between 15-20 percent were paying, which is fairly impressive.

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Looks like this year is going to be a fun event, for the theme for the year — the internet of things — is something that is core to our way of thinking. The internet of things is based on GigaOM’s core philosophy of connectedness and how it changes everything. Loic and Geraldine Le Meur, who organized the conference, just released the full lineup of speakers and sessions and it promises to be a great few days. Just listening to the Tony Fadell of Nest Labs alone is worth it.

The conference will be held on December 4, 5 and 6th. I hope to see you there at the event.

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Dailymotion Cloud, a system for hosting video outside of the company’s main consumer platform, announced on Wednesday that it was adding a slate of new features including improved live streaming, DRM support and extra money-making services. All of these, it hopes, can make it a significant competitor to other professional video hosting services like Brightcove and Ooyala.

Cloud is aimed at offering companies, advertisers and broadcasters access to the same tools that Dailymotion itself uses to distribute video to more than 100 million monthly users. Running on a flexible, usage-based tariff, customers will now have access to a customizable player that incorporates in-stream advertising, HTML5 support, and a range of syndication options.

“We’re proud to compete with some of the web’s biggest video companies, delivering a highly affordable, flexible and robust cloud-based video streaming service,” said the company’s US managing director Roland Hamilton. “Our expertise as a major independent video platform is a great bonus for all of our clients.”

The Paris company first launched the Cloud service back in 2010, and at the end of last year had 2,500 customers on the platform — not enough, apparently, to achieve its target of providing 15 percent of the company’s revenue.

Increasing the focus on B2B services is interesting, particularly given the influence of French telco Orange which owns a 49 percent stake in Dailymotion and has intentions on the remainder, according to reports.

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Local reports suggest the French authorities are investigating the software giant over claims that it has committed fraud, by secretly routing money through offshore companies to avoid corporate tax — a move which could violate the country’s laws.

French magazine Le Canard Enchaîné made the claims after Microsoft’s French headquarters were subjected to a tax raid last week.

The magazine claims that the authorities are examining whether for the past four years Microsoft has operated “a business aimed at French customers, for the French market, using the human and material resources of Microsoft France and located in France… without paying corresponding taxes.”

Corporate tax in France is currently 33 percent, but many companies — such as Amazon and Google use complicated European tax avoidance schemes to route money earned around the continent to more pleasing tax regimes, such as Ireland (where corporation tax is 12.5 percent.)

Avoidance — using loopholes in the law to minimize taxes — is legal if done properly. Evasion — the mis-statement of accounts in order to reduce tax burdens — is not. The French government have spent the last few years trying to crack down on tax cheats and championing the end of tax havens.

It’s already been a tough time for Microsoft France, which is looking to make its first ever round of redundancies after admitting that it could not overthrow Google’s dominance in online advertising.

A local spokesman for the company did not respond to a request for comment.

Photograph copyright jbor / Shutterstock.com

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News coming from Paris tells of a fresh initiative to bring free wireless access to public transport, bringing the city’s offering more in line with its cross-channel rival.

Thanks to WiFi provider GOWEX, a range of different public spaces across Paris will now have free wireless access — including railway stations, some RER commuter lines, and bus stops. It also includes three Metro stations: Place-d’Italie, Pont-de-Sèvres and Chaussée-d’Antin.

As Le Monde reports, it’s not perfect. But something, surely, is better than nothing:

The company claims that its service will eventually be deployed to other stations.

Access will only be possible in the stations themselves, not inside moving trains. Users wishing to use the free GOWEX service on their tablet or phone will have to install an application that states the rate will be 1Mbps.

There is already WiFi for some Metro travelers, thanks to an initiative from telco SFR that covers 50 stations. But that’s only for subscribers — not everyone. This move is much more like London, which is working with Virgin Media ahead of the Olympics to provide free access across some 80 underground stations.

And this is a trend that’s not just on one side of the Atlantic, either. On Tuesday Google and Boingo teamed up to provide a similar service in six NYC stations in what’s being called “the summer of free Wi-Fi”. Some of the connectivity was already in place, but it’s an interesting move — although the implication of the marketing push is that when the summer comes to an end, so will the giveaway.

Image courtesy of Flickr User bredgur

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Seesmic CEO Loic Le Meur

Started more than seven years ago, the event now claims to be the industry’s most international shindig, and now it’s about to see its first spin-off, to be held in London next month.

But when I spoke to Le Meur a couple of days ago, he admitted to me that just a few months back it wasn’t the English Channel he wanted to cross with LeWeb — it was the Atlantic. He’d just started exploring the idea of starting a LeWeb for the Bay Area, where he has lived for the past five years.

“We had started to think about doing one in San Francisco,” Le Meur told me. “But then Cameron stepped in.”

By “Cameron” he means David Cameron, the British Prime Minister.

Reports have long suggested that the British government — keen to score a victory over their rivals in France — wanted to lure LeWeb to London. Le Meur says those rumors are accurate, but he never intended to move the entire conference away from Paris. However, he says, in the end, British politicos offered such a range of assistance that eventually meant the decision to set up a second, London-based event, was easy to make.

“It was a special request from Mr Cameron,” says Le Meur. “Last year I was was a Founders’ Forum event and I was very impressed because he shook me by the hand and said ‘Loic, you need to move Le Web to London.’ We’re not moving Le Web, and we had no plans for London just two months ago. But they’ve been so helpful that we couldn’t refuse.”

That helpfulness extended to a financial commitment, too, with Tech City Investment Organization (the body charged with drumming up publicity and investment for London’s startup scene ahead of the 2012 Olympic Games) acting as the first major sponsor for the event.

But anyone concerned that the U.K. government may end up underwriting the whole affair as it tries to woo European startups to London are misplaced, says Le Meur.

“They took a top-level sponsorship, but I would say it’s about 10 to 20 percent of the whole budget,” he says. “It’s very nice and one reason we decided to go to London, but we’re still taking a risk.”

That chimes with what TCIO chief Eric van der Kleij told me last month.

Le Meur said that the early takeup for the event, which takes place on June 19th and 20th, shows there actually is “room and demand in London for us”, and that there is enough going on in the startup world to warrant a spinoff.

“Everything moves so fast in six months,” he says. “At LeWeb, nobody was talking about Pinterest. Instagram was on stage in Paris, but nobody cared very much.”

Photo of Loic Le Meur courtesy of Joi Ito on Flickr. Photo of David Cameron user under Creative Commons license courtesy of World Economic Forum.

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It’s just a few days since the French presidential election, in which Socialist François Hollande triumphed over incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy, and already the crème de la crème have the knives out for the new man in charge.

Newsdesks around the continent were no doubt grinding into action as soon as the result was announced, but now that the dust is settling it seems that the startup elite of Paris are preparing to leave in their droves.

First, the Wall Street Journal finds out that many French entrepreneurs are wary of their new president, including Loic Le Meur, organizer of Le Web conference:

Le Meur was worried by “the ambience against financial success that surrounded Hollande’s campaign. He said himself, ‘I don’t like the rich’ and ‘my No. 1 enemy isn’t Sarkozy but the financial markets’. If you succeed you should be rewarded for your success. Nothing wrong with this.”

Some were afraid of Mr. Hollande’s favoring of the public sector and a general perception that he didn’t understand the private sector.

“Mr. Hollande was supported by civil servants and trade unions. Simply put, that doesn’t help start-ups, who are by definition in the private sector and don’t have unions or means of having their voice heard by the powers that be,” said Gabriel Hubert of Teleportd, a real-time photo-sharing service.

Meanwhile Bloomberg Businessweek, looking at the same subject, details a number of individuals who are preparing to pack their bags and leave the country in the wake of the election. Their problem, it seems, is that they feel that rich are stigmatized by the French — particularly by Hollande’s proposed 75 percent tax on incomes above €1 million ($1.3 million).

“Seen from abroad, France is the last country where an entrepreneur wants to go,” Marc Simoncini, the founder of French dating site Meetic.com, said in an interview on BFM TV yesterday. “I don’t know of any British person who’s come to set up a business in France. But I know plenty of young French people who’ve gone to London to do that.”

The attacks on the moneyed class intensified during the presidential race, leaving entrepreneurs and other wealth creators feeling like pariahs, said Michel Collet, a tax lawyer at Paris-based law firm CMS Bureau Francis Lefebvre.
“The rich are fed up with being stigmatized,” he said. “Beyond the expectation of higher taxes, another important reason why our clients say they want to move abroad is that the negative perception of wealth has mounted in the past weeks.”

Sure, 75 percent seems crazy — and in fact it is: insiders say the chances are that Hollande’s campaign rhetoric was about the old-fashioned job of winning an election, instead of some deep-rooted adherence to radical socialism (in fact, he is so middle of the road that he is known as “Mr Normal”.)

Truth is that he’s much more likely to work alongside German chancellor Angela Merkel than to fight her, and the financial markets are actually anticipating free market-friendly policies and appointments.

So is the fear-mongering justified?

Only time will really tell us the answer to that. But I suspect the reality is that the problems that French businesses are faced with have almost nothing to do with party politics: Sarkozy, after all, who instituted a number of anti-Internet policies and claimed the web required “civilizing.”

The attitude of many of those interviewed in these stories also ignores the broader societal movement going on here: that there are a lot of people losing their jobs and their savings — and their dreams — because of poor financial practices happening much higher up the chain. To turn your nose up at ordinary people who are hurting while you hunt for a multimillion dollar exit for your social media business smacks of (yes) a “let them eat cake” sort of attitude.

In fact, in some odd way, you could argue that Hollande’s strategy of growth over austerity is pretty in tune with startup mentality. And it’s already clear that European investment is currently dominated by public funds. So, done right, French startups could find friends in the most unexpected places.

Still, it will be interesting to see how many of the entrepreneurs threatening to quit actually go ahead and do it — and how many are still complaining about the same old problems the next time a new President rolls into the Elysee.

Photograph of Hollande used under Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user jmayrault

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I spoke with Derek Ling, the CEO of Tianji, the company’s Chinese arm, to find out more. Based in Beijing, he started building his service 2005 and sold to his French rival two years later. Tianji now comprises the largest part of Viadeo’s business, with 10 million users spread around China. That, he told me, meant that China was an important part of the picture when it came to using the funding.

“We are thinking of using at least a third of the money to invest into China,” he said. “And that’s in three areas; product — to get better and quicker services; in marketing, to ramp up our sales side; and the third part is to look at acquisitions.”

But before you get too excited, Ling says that Viadeo probably won’t look at buying local competitors — largely because there aren’t many who have much scale. Instead, it will look for deals that can boost its sales operation or systems.

“We’re really not looking at acquiring users,” he says. “We’d be looking at existing recruiting companies with big sales forces, that’s one reason, or there are technology plays, when a startup has a technology platform we like.”

The same pattern is likely to be repeated in the other markets where Viadeo is active: use the money to improve sales (it works closely with recruiters to make the service a hiring platform), develop the technology or acquire interesting or useful properties. That covers a lot of territories, including various European markets, Brazil, India and a joint venture in Russia. But expansion in Europe and elsewhere “is not as clearly defined yet,” meaning that cracking the Chinese market could be crucial, says Ling.

“We believe the professional social networking space is about four or five years behind the U.S. — people don’t necessarily use it as a business tool yet,” he told me. “An interesting point of reference is that in 2007, LinkedIn was at 10 million users — and in 2008 it went up to 32 million. We believe we’re at a similar juncture.”

But of course when LinkedIn was at 10 million users, there was no other LinkedIn to stymie its growth — allowing it to expand to the point today when it can claim 150 million users worldwide. Taking on a big beast that already exists won’t be easy: particularly when Reid Hoffman’s got a lot of money in the bank from the company’s IPO, and the business already has users across 200 countries.

‘Interesting competition’

Ling admits that things are going to heat up, whatever happens.

“Reid has been watching the Chinese market for quite a number of years already,” he says. “It’s going to be an interesting competition coming up. But our biggest weapon is that we’re local: no U.S. internet company has succeeded in the Chinese market. We have a headstart on users, and a lock on the elite — like university graduates.”

Plus, he says, China is not a homogenous market — something that many outsiders do not realize.

“We have about 18 percent of our users in the Greater Beijing area, about 11 percent in Shanghai and around 10 percent in Guangdong Province,” he says. “But each province in China is equivalent to a country in Europe — both in terms of size, but also cultural differences.”

One thing that the money won’t be used for, however, is to push the business towards an IPO. After plans to go public last year were shelved, Ling says that Viadeo is focusing on building out — not selling up.

“We’ve made a decision to focus on growth without the distraction of the public market,” he told me. “There’s a lot of growth that needs to take place… so there are no plans to IPO in the near future, but it’s certainly on the horizon.”

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Now the company is cranking it up a notch, with a fresh injection of funding of $32 million that’s aimed at turning it into the site the rest of the world uses to do business.

The investment, headed by the French Sovereign Wealth Fund, Allianz, Jefferies and a number of Middle Eastern funds, also includes backing from existing shareholders like Idinvest and Ventech.

In particular, there is a lot of focus on Tianji, its Chinese operation, which is already the biggest network of its kind in the country, and growing fast.

Here’s the blurb:

Viadeo’s success is based predominantly on its “multi-local” approach to Professional Social Networks, which focuses on leveraging and honoring the local language, business and culture of its members. This strategy has allowed the group to be very successful in emerging markets. In China, for example, Viadeo’s subsidiary Tianji has seen tremendous growth in the last year, going from 100,000 to 500,000 new users per month with a total member base of 10M.

“We’re a global society where critical business connections span multiple languages, geographies and cultures,” said Dan Serfaty, CEO, Viadeo. “We have always been laser-focused on our ‘multi-local’ approach, which goes beyond simple translation and focuses on catering to, and understanding the business and cultural needs of each market. This approach has awarded us tremendous growth and success in both European and emerging markets.”

Viadeo, which we identified as one of the European startups to watch last summer, has been consistently profitable since 2009 and bought a number of smaller, rival services on its way.

This latest move is a confirmation of the company’s change of direction: it had originally considered going public itself last year, but decided to put that scheme on ice in order to focus on expansion on fast-growing emerging markets.

With that in mind, the money will be useful, but the strategy is more important. How will it compete with LinkedIn — which will surely come under increasing pressure to expand its global footprint now that it’s a public company? And will it be using the cash to build, or to acquire?

I should be speaking to CEO Serfaty later this morning to get some answers.

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The company is hoping all that changes today, with the public launch of another product, Jolicloud Me, that it hopes can finally get the sort of broad use it’s been chasing.

The idea behind the service, which was announced it was opening up today at the London Web Summit, is that it can be a central repository for all the material you store and share online — effectively becoming your filesystem for the web.

Users log in, link up to accounts at Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere, and the service goes to grab all the photos, videos and files that you have shown interest in. The master list is stored inside Jolicloud, allowing you to rapidly find material you’re looking for — wherever you happened to put it. That could be a great idea for those whose lives are stretched across several different services that have significant overlap.

It’s actually pretty simple to use, and seems to be well-designed to pull together your data with speed. On logging in for the first time I authorized Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Flickr and within a minute or so it had built a library of nearly 3,000 items. There’s plenty of room for expansion (it currently support Picasa too, but not much else) and the interface is easy to navigate and search.

In doing all of this, Jolicloud is taking elements from a range of different cloud-based services — iCloud, Evernote, Dropbox — and even some of the juice from bookmarking and favoriting services such as Pinterest at one end or Stellar at the other. Monetization right now seems to be missing, but it’s easy to imagine people paying for a service that effectively backs up everything they do on the web, across different platforms.

While Jolicloud Me doesn’t replace the other products that the company has worked on, I get the feeling that this could be a breakthrough of sorts for the business.

Co-founder and CEO Tariq Krim has a good track record in spotting interesting technologies that are pushing towards the mainstream, but he has always struggled to turn those into mass-market consumer plays. Take, for instance, Netvibes, the widget and RSS dashboard service he built that tapped into some interesting trends but ended up being sold.

Since being funded three years ago with more than $4 million from Atomico (Niklas Zennström) and Mangrove Capital, the business has spent most of its time building products that get usurped by Google (the Jolibook/Chromebook, for example) or, frankly, that nobody seems to have really wanted.

Will this be the moment when it pays off?

Update: I mistakenly used the word backup in the headline — implying that Jolicloud Me actually makes a backup copy of your items on the web. This isn’t the case: it’s effectively a search engine for content that exists online.

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