The BizSpark startup of the day is Allmyapps, based in France. You will find below an interview with Thibauld Favre and Arnaud Coulondre from Allmyapps. All the best to them and congrats for being the startup of the day!
Website: www.allmyapps.com.
I'm Thibauld Favre, Allmyapps co-founder with my friend and business partner, Arnaud Coulondre. We are 2 friends from school, we both graduated from INSA Lyon and EM Lyon. I am the CEO as well as Allmyapps technical architect and main developer. Arnaud focuses on business development and on obtaining applications for our Allmyapps software catalog.
It really is an honor to us to be distinguished by Microsoft as one of the most promising startups! To be honest, when we launched Allmyapps, I was really confident we would have some success but it went far beyond what I expected. We are very proud of being Microsoft Startup of the Day!
Our mission is simple: we want people to enjoy using their computers. That means removing technical barriers that frustrate and frighten people in their day-to-day use of their computer.
Allmyapps saves people's favorite applications online to give them the ability to install and reinstall all of them in a single click.
As a Computer Science engineer, I see people getting frustrated with their computers or, even worse, limiting their use of them because they're afraid of breaking something. Computers are made to empower people and the first step towards empowering people is making sure everybody can find and use the applications they need: Installing new applications should be fun and re-installing them should be easy.
Allmyapps is self-funded and has received some funding from close supporters. Given the huge traction we are seeing on Allmyapps, we are now looking to raise about $2M so that we can take Allmyapps to the next level!
So far, besides Arnaud and I who are building the core technology, we're only working with contractors to keep the company very flexible. We also have many interns helping us.
We will start hiring in the Spring for a lead desktop developer and a lead web developer. These jobs are Paris-based.
Allmyapps aims to ease software management on Windows 7, Vista and XP. Our target platform is Windows 7 as we rely heavily on XAML and Windows Presentation Foundation (available in .NET 3) to provide our users with a clean desktop interface. We did a lot of benchmarking before choosing the technology we were going to leverage to develop Allmyapps desktop for Windows. We considered everything, from Adobe tools to Open Source solutions but .NET and Windows Presentation Foundation finally won hands down. Not only does .NET provide the best performance, but it was also much quicker to develop because of its powerful API and Visual Studio.
As the frontier between desktop and web applications becomes thinner and thinner, we see opportunities both in web-based applications and in desktop applications. For example web applications such as Seesmic & Deezer are now coming to the Desktop.
At Allmyapps, we are really impressed by the BizSpark program! At first we subscribed to the program because of our basic needs: it was critical to us to have access to Microsoft OS software and applications. Then we quickly realized that Bizspark was not only about getting access to software. Indeed, the French BizSpark team has been very supportive of us: giving us visibility, access to conferences (BizSparkCamp), and business opportunities. The Bizspark program is really not just words and marketing from Microsoft: they are real people helping real entrepreneurs and we're grateful to Microsoft for that!
Release your product as soon as you can! Modify your plans, change your planning, remove features... do whatever it takes to release a good product as soon as possible and get in the game early. Nothing is more dangerous than building a cathedral... as it will likely never be achieved.
Like a lot of people, I have incredible respect for Bill Gates. He's one of the few who has this unique combination of passion, talent, vision and business sense. The fact that he stayed at the top of the company for more than 20 years, is also incredible in this world where everything changes so fast. This stability at the top, has a lot to do with Microsoft's outstanding success!
We're really proud to be Microsoft Startup of the Day! Allmyapps is only a few months old; it is our first release and I can tell you that what it is today, is nothing compared to what we're going to release this year! So stay tuned.