NEW YORK, September 18, 2018—Le Créative Lab North America has just announced the selection of the eight innovative French startups that will participate in the fourth edition of this development and incubation program in New York City and Montreal from November 6-13, 2018. Le Créative Lab North America program is co-produced by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy and Business France, and supported by the FACE Foundation and the Cultural Service of the French Consulate in Québec. This annual French Tech program is designed to give innovative French startups working in the cultural, entertainment, creative, leisure, and travel industries a comprehensive overview of the North American market.
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This year, the selected startups proposed products and services in fields as varied as AI, AR/VR, children’s education, digital art, museum mediation, and music. Several criteria, including the international and innovative potential of the projects, guided the jury’s selection process. The selected startups unite the fields of music, the arts and education with cutting-edge technologies like blockchain, virtual and augmented reality, internet of things and videogames. Le Créative Lab North America always looks for burgeoning companies that can combine the constantly-evolving innovations of tech with the perennial importance of visual art, entertainment, travel, culture, and creativity.
Le Créative Lab North America 2018 Startups:
Lunii/My Fabulous Storyteller is the new-generation, fun and interactive storyteller with amazing original content. It allows children to create their own adventures and navigate through worlds of wonder, because we believe that imagination matters!
For your works of art, EDITAG offers monalitag®, an IoT all-in-one solution for security needs, conservation, monitoring, supervision and storage traceability and transportation.
My Appy Tours designs experiences and serious games for children on behalf of companies in the culture, leisure, travel, retail industries… allowing them to attract, to satisfy and to develop loyalty of families.
Wipplay is a digital social network specializing in photography, with more than 50,000 photographs and major international photographers in its contests’ juries. Wipplay offers to its clients many ways to explore and exhibit art: contests, expositions, shops for collectors, and more.
Minsight by Opuscope is a multiplatform and fully integrated 3D CMS which enables anyone to easily create and distribute VR/AR/MR experiences throughout the world. Experiences are handcrafted directly in an immersive headset and distributed online. Free of technicalities, creators can unleash their imagination!
Danae HI (Laffy Maffei) is an ArtTech/FinTech based on the tokenization of digital artworks, sales of custom-made editions (2D & 3D prints/AR/VR/videos) and royalties for token holders. Both a token exchange and a cultural agency, Danae HI addresses the three pillars of the art market: Investment-Emotion-Service.
Senstroke by Drumistic is the only contact connected solution that enables you to turn any ordinary surface into a realistic-sounding drumkit. Feel what you play, record your playing and improve your drumming everywhere.
Kiupe is an educational video game studio. Kiupe produces games in collaboration with teachers and cognitive researchers. Their games help kids to learn math and music, and they are also producing an app for refugees to learn French.
Following a one-day preparatory boot camp in Paris, in partnership with FAR the new incubator launched by Créatis and dedicated to startups from the cultural and creative industries, the 2018 edition will send the eitght chosen startups to North America for a 6-day program including U.S. pitching strategies training sessions, workshops, networking events, demo nights, and personalized business meetings in New York City and Montréal, Canada.
In New York, Le Créative Lab startups will take masterclasses in marketing, U.S. business etiquette, fundraising strategies, media presence, and much more; they will also have the opportunity to visit a New York company off-site. During the leg in Montreal, added just this year, startups will be introduced to the city’s tech ecosystem and attend masterclasses about the cultural, tourism, and entertainment industries in Canada.
Participants will meet with local experts and professionals, including legal and financial advisors, in both NYC and Montreal. Workshops, pitch training sessions, demo nights, and meet-and-greets will give the startups the ability to better understand their prospective markets and the opportunity to break into these new markets.
“Home to more than 9000 startups and 1000 cultural institutions, New York is the premier city for tech, innovation and entrepreneurship in the cultural and creative industries, said Mathieu Fournet, Director of Film, TV and New Media at the Cultural Services of the French Embassy.“Montreal, on the other hand, is a burgeoning AI hub now recognized as one of the international leaders in digital art and creativity. With its proximity to French culture and access to the North American market, Montreal is a natural destination for this program, and together, New York City and Montreal are an ideal pairing for the new edition of Le Créative Lab.”
A program of the Cultural Services of the French Embassy and Business France, the 2018 edition of Le Créative Lab will benefit from a network of institutions and major French and North American incubators, namely Créatis and FAR (Paris), Made in NY Media Center by IFP (NYC), and MTLab, la French tech and Hub Montréal (Montréal, Canada).
Through this program, French start-ups in the cultural and creative fields will gain the skills to adapt their products or services to the North American consumer, to define a commercial strategy tailored to the market, and to establish initial contact with potential partners and clients in the United States and Canada.
Le Créative Lab is supported by the FACE Foundation.
Media partner: Maddyness.
More information: www.Lecreativelab-northamerica.com
ABOUT
The Cultural Services of the French Embassy promotes the best of French arts, literature, cinema, digital innovation, language, and higher education across the US. Headquartered in New York City and Washington D.C., with offices in eight other cities across the country, the Cultural Services brings artists, authors, intellectuals, and innovators to cities nationwide. It also builds partnerships between French and American artists, institutions and universities on both sides of the Atlantic. With dedicated departments in Los Angeles and New York, the Cultural Services foster the development of French and American startups in the cultural and creative sector. http://www.frenchculture.org
Business France is the national agency supporting the international development of the French economy, responsible for fostering export growth by French businesses, as well as promoting and facilitating international investment in France. It promotes France’s companies, business image and nationwide attractiveness as an investment location, and also runs the V.I.E international internship program.
Founded on January 1, 2015 through a merger between UBIFRANCE and the Invest in France Agency, Business France has 1,500 personnel, both in France and in 70 countries throughout the world, who work with a network of public- and private-sector partners. www.businessfrance.fr
FACE Foundation is an American non-profit organization dedicated to cultural and educational exchanges between France and the United States. In collaboration with the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the US, FACE supports distribution and creation in the fields of cinema, the visual arts, theater, dance, music, and literature. It also encouraged partnerships in education and research. http://face-foundation.org/
La French Tech is a global movement celebrating French innovation, entrepreneurship and startups. The NYC French Tech Hub gathers French and American entrepreneurs, top executives, investors, engineers and public leaders. With more than 170 startups in NY co-founded by at least one French entrepreneur, La French Tech is a dynamic and diverse community.
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Media Contact:
Camille Desprez: +1 (212) 439-1417
camille.desprez@diplomatie.gouv.fr
frenchculture.org
@franceinnyc – facebook.com/frenchculture – #CreativeLAB