17. Jean-Pascal Tranié
Viventures
Job description: Managing general partner
Age, Nationality: 40, French
Web address: www.viventures.com
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A venture capital fund created by the Vivendi Group, Viventures counts 18 U.S. and European financial and industrial corporations as participants and is behind many of Europe's best-known Internet start-ups. Tranié helped Vivendi digitize its cable networks and later, as director of multimedia for phone company Cegetel, orchestrated a merger with the French subsidiaries of AOL and Compuserve. He sits on the board of two of Vivendi's operating units: UGC, the European cinema group, and Havas, the publisher. Not surprisingly, he is interested in finding new ways of delivering content. Two of Tranié's recent investments do just that: Luxxon, a U.S. company that is developing technology to send and receive still images and live video over any type of Internet-enabled device, and Mobipocket, a French company that makes a universal eBook reader for personal digital assistants (PDAs). Investments in Europe include Beenz.com, purveyor of an electronic currency for the Web, QXL, a pan-European online auction community, and Reef, an Internet software firm.
The vision thing: "The new economy is here to stay. The next big wave will be easy-to-use interfaces to access the Internet."
Forward spin: Viventures wants to target labs and industrial groups that are under-utilizing technologies they have developed, spin the technologies out and build stand-alone start-ups.
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