Ok, some will say it was cold, and nobody could get an easy access to the internet. But we would like to thank LeWeb’08 and especially Microsoft for letting us have so many good opportunities. We attended the event from the very morning till eveybody had left, and this has been profitable since we met a lot of good potential partners.

First, some Venture Capital firms came to our booth to observe our thrilling concept and ask judicious questions. We will tell you later where these first contacts led us to.

What is also very interesting was the number of potential commercial partners that we discovered on the fair. This will give us a lot of work after the event to bring to reality some of these opportunities. Given the high number of contacts established, we might conclude on 2 or 3 businesses as from the beginning of next year.

Last but not least, we could at last meet some of the bloggers that have spoken about Yoowalk in the past. Good to see the faces behind the blogs! Some of them made vids about Yoowalk and posted them on the web. So, here you have the choice between:

• a short demonstration of Yoowalk by Adrianskardhamar

• or a (very) long explanation by Xavier, founder and CEO of Yoowalk

We are proud to announce that Microsoft has spotted our start up as one of the 12 most innovative start ups in the world! To check out, come and see us on Microsoft’s booth at LeWeb’08. Here’s the Press Release about it:

Press release

Yoowalk gets the support of Microsoft to strengthen its development

Paris, December 8th, 2008

On its booth at the LeWeb08 Internet show, Microsoft will be putting forward 12 startup companies spotted amongst the most innovative in the world.
Yoowalk is proud to announce that it has been selected by Microsoft to be part of this event.

Read more »

There has been a great amount of articles about Yoowalk. What can be observed is the number of journalists or bloggers being quite puzzled about the very concept of Yoowalk. Hey, what do these guys in Yoowalk offer ? The opportunity to walk around in a 3D web? Waoh, I’d like to see that

Here under is a list of some of the articles written about Yoowalk when it went publicly online:

• Virtualworldnews(EN)
• Mashable(EN)
• Techcrunch(FR)
• Virtualworldsmanagement(EN)
• Metaverse3D(FR)
• l’Atelier(FR)
• Generation-nt (FR)
• Neteco(FR)
• PCInpact(FR)
• MolBlog(NL)
• Killerstartups(EN)
• Mediapart(FR)
• Baixaki(BR)
• Sedentario(BR)
• CNbeta(CN)
• Enboga.javaeye.com(CN)
• Freeonline.org(IT)
• 01Net(FR)

Yoowalk already generated more than 150 articles on the web. And this is just a start…

All right, it is not quite ready, and there are still some bugs, but we can be proud to announce that we published online the publisher tool. This tool enables any publisher of an existing website to build a 3D version of his website. This 3D version is called a « walksite ».

To imagine this publishing tool, our principle was « ease publishers’ life« .

Thus, this lead to

• a drag and drop tool where the users can simply choose items from an object bank, drag it and drop it where he wants in the room. Then a simple menu enables him to include the content (text, image, video, sound, etc. …) in the objects. No need to be an ingeneer to build a walksite: anybody can do it!
• the use of xml files so that content in walksites are refreshed automatically as soon as the content on the corresponding website is renewed: no double writing of articles!
• a free tool: websites publishers will benefit from a free tool to organise a 3D space dedicated to their communities!

So, no hesitation anymore: jump to http://publisher.yoowalk.com and start building your walksite!

Hey, the statistics of November are quite encouraging!

• 90,000 visits during the month
• 15,000 registered members at the end of the month

When we launched Yoowalk on the 1st of July 2008, we would have signed immediately for such good numbers, in only 4 months!

We could not open this blog without presenting you our team!

Let’s do it right now.

Xavier is the Founder and CEO of Yoowalk. He was previously the CEO of M6web, the multimedia entity of M6, a French TV channel. Ok, being a CEO is his stuff

Jean-Vincent holds the technical part of the big thing. I think he could make a virtual world like I’d take the train to travel: so easily I can’t believe it! How can you marry all these different technologies and build such a complicated mechanics with such a small team ? I could not say. But he does it anyway.

Ludo is the Flashman: you want a couch in your room? Ludo builds it for you. A new editor to handle digital content in your walksite? Ask him once more…

Valer makes everything work together as he is our administrator. Sometimes, we run out of Internet connection. Bad time for him then. But we know he can do it! And the guy is really good at what he is doing.

Ximing is a programer. A young and talented programer. Let’s discover what he can do within the team, since he has joined us from not very long.

Jean-François is the integrator of the website. Once more someone very important so that everything runs well.

Damien has made the graphical interface of yoowalk.com. What do you think about it?

Kaizheng is our lead tester. She is doing a very professional job at identifying our bugs and following up on them. She is also currently the only girl at Yoowalk. Our princess…

And I am Stéphane, Yoowalk’s COO. I need to know how to do everything in this company, from marketing, to finance, communication, HR, administration, legal… Why days are made out of 24 hours only?

Kaizheng LIANG

Valeriu STINCA

Ximing LU

Ludovic PIQUET

JF LOUVEAU

Damien LEFERT

JV SEGARD

Stéphane CHIRIÉ

Xavier MARVALDI