Paris, 31 March 2010 — Last week, TechCrunch Europe held its second annual TechCrunch Paris event, where 150 startups from France and nearby countries gathered to discuss the state of their markets and share seed ideas.

The one-day conference took place at Silicon Sentier’s La Cantine, a popular meeting ground for Paris-based tech enthusiasts. Talks and panels ranged from whether inexperienced French entrepreneurs can attract success, to whether women in the technology sector are still getting the short end of the parity stick.

At the end of the day, a series of preselected French startups were chosen to give a three-minute pitch of their product to the TechCrunch team, followed by a round of Twitter-based voting from the audience.

hypios.com, which presented itself as a platform that uses “intelligent crowdsourcing” to solve R&D problems for major companies, won third-place as best startup, following GameCreds, a Netvibes-style personal news aggregator for gamers; and first-place winner Allmyapps, which protects Linux and Windows users from losing access to their applications when they change computers.

“We looked at this as an opportunity to build familiarity with our model in the tech startup world,” explained VP marketing Angela Natividad, who gave the three-minute pitch in tandem with deputy CEO Greg Hermann. “What hypios does isn’t as obscure as it seems at first — simply put, our community is composed of people that love to solve problems. And they do it for companies that can take their knowledge, their research, and give it a practical application.”

“We were also lucky enough to be talking to an audience that understands the importance of courting diversity to solve problems,” Hermann added. “Response was overwhelmingly enthusiastic and we got a lot of useful feedback.”

In their pitch, Natividad and Hermann explained how hypios works with clients to formalize complex problems. It then broadcasts those problems to a multicultural and interdisciplinary community of “Solvers.” Of its 120,000 members, 35% are PhDs, and the average age is about 38, suggesting a significant level of education and life experience.

Clients remain anonymous, protecting them from competitors. It is also success-only, meaning clients do not pay if they do not find a custom-fit solution. But the diversity of perspective also benefits users in unexpected ways: Solvers often point them to existing solutions in outlying industries, saving companies hundreds of thousands of dollars in potentially wasted effort and R&D.

Read more about the TechCrunch Paris event (in French).

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Hypios combines intelligent crowdsourcing, competency discovery technology, and human outreach to deliver an optimal open problem-solving service. “Seekers” post R&D problems to the network and select a deadline and a price for the successful “Solver.” Hypios, which draws from a network of 950,000 experts across the world, has been solving R&D problems for global companies since 2008.

Press Contact

Hypios
Saman Musacchio
smusacchio(at)hypios(dot)com
Tel+33 1 77 13 67 79

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