Startup Cafe

Categories

The tools presented in this section are selected and tested through a series of Users workshops organized by Silicon Xperience, the experimental laboratory of Silicon Sentier. The list will be regularly udpated with new tools. Please get in touch with us if you'd like to participate.

42 goals

42goals is a simple tool for tracking daily goals and keeping a log of daily activities. It helps you to set goals, record daily progress and visualize achievements. Using 42goals you can quit smoking, count cups of coffee drunk and log daily expenses.

Adobe BrowserLab

Adobe BrowserLab is an online service that helps ensure your web content displays as intended. Accurately preview web pages across multiple browsers and operating systems, navigate links, and use diagnostic tools to optimize websites efficiently.

Appbooster

AppBooster SDK for iOS and Android is a suite of tools for iOS and Android apps designed to engage and retain users. App Booster is a notification-based communication system that, with the addition of only a few lines of code to your project, dramatically changes the way you'll interact with your users.

ApéroEntrepreneurs

The ApéroEntrepreneurs take place the first Thursday of the month and are the opportunity to get together with entrepreneurs, in an informal, friendly and rather central meeting in a lot of towns around France and elsewhere.

Asana

Asana is a web based shared task list for your team. The place to plan, organize and stay in sync on your efforts.

Avdice

Avdice marketplace uses social networks to help you find the skills you need more easily. Connections are direct and free. This allows you to get freelancers at their fair value.

Aviary

Aviary is a a suite of online creative applications and an API offering a simple and free solution for creators of all genres to build, edit, and share their work.

Backbone.js

Backbone.js gives structure to web applications by providing models with key-value binding and custom events, collections with a rich API of enumerable functions, views with declarative event handling, and connects it all to your existing API over a RESTful JSON interface.

Blueprint

Blueprint is a CSS framework, which aims to cut down on your development time. It gives you a solid foundation to build your project on top of, with an easy-to-use grid, sensible typography, useful plugins, and even a stylesheet for printing.

Bootstrap from Twitter

Bootstrap is a simple and flexible HTML, CSS, and Javascript for popular user interface components and interactions.

Box

Box provides secure, scalable content sharing that both users and IT love and adopt. Box’s dynamic, flexible content management solution makes it easy to store files online, access content from mobile devices, and collaborate with friends and colleagues.

Browsershots

Browsershots makes screenshots of your web design in different operating systems and browsers. It is a free open-source online web application providing developers a convenient way to test their website's browser compatibility in one place.

Buffer

Buffer makes your life easier with a smarter way to schedule the great content you find. Fill up your Buffer at one time in the day and Buffer automagically posts them for you through the day. Simply keep that Buffer topped up to have a consistent social media presence all day round, all week long.

Build It With Me

Build It With Me is a tool that connects design & development entrepreneurs. It exists to make creating apps easier by connecting you with like-minded designers & developers with the same goal: create cool & useful apps.

CakePHP

CakePHP is a rapid development framework for PHP that provides an extensible architecture for developing, maintaining, and deploying applications.

Capybara

Tired of clicking around in your browser trying to make sure your applications work as expected? Capybara is a library written in the Ruby programming language which makes it easy to simulate how a user interacts with your application.

Cashew

With Cashew by Kawet, anyone can now build easily and quickly, professional Apps for iPhone, Android & iPad. Cashew allows you to design your mobile application on the web and preview it on your mobile for free. If you like you can publish it on the store of your choice.

Clicky

A website without analytics is like a general engaging the opposition sans intelligence. Both result in losing battles. Clicky is real-time traffic intelligence for your website. Understand how your visitors find you, how they interact with your site, and to some extent who your visitors are. Accurate logs of every visitor and click on your website combined with advanced segmentation and analysis tools help you make prudent decisions and ultimately control the destiny of your website.

Codesion Cloud Services

Codesion allows for the creation of the most complex software in the most efficient and cost-effective way possible by using Software as a Service (SaaS) to deploy the platform across corporate intranets as well as the Web. Codesion integrates into leading software revision control and issue tracking systems such as Bugzilla, Trac and Subversion. As a browser-based solution, Codesion works across all major Operating Systems - Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac OS X, Linux, and Sun Microsystem's Solaris.

Compass

Compass is an open-source CSS authoring framework which uses the Sass stylesheet language to make writing stylesheets powerful and easy.

CrunchBase

CrunchBase is the free database of technology companies, people, and investors that anyone can edit. Crunchbase also features a "trending" and "newly funded" section.

Cucumber

Cucumber lets software development teams describe how software should behave in plain text. The text is written in a business-readable domain-specific language and serves as documentation, automated tests and development-aid - all rolled into one format.

Dabblet

Dabblet is an interactive playground for quickly testing snippets of CSS and HTML code. It uses -prefix-free, so that you won't have to add any prefixes in your CSS code. You can save your work in Github gists, embed it in other websites and share it with others.

Delicious

Delicious is a social bookmarking service that helps you find cool stuff and collect it for easy sharing and retrieving. Delicious comes with a series of add-ons that allows you to quickly bookmarking webpages.

Digikaa

Digikaa is the social network for digital professionals. Whether you call it the web, the Internet, New Media, or any of the many other terms used to describe this fast-growing industry, it is the word ‘digital’ that is most used to decribe those people round the world who bring to life the interactive products of today (websites, mobile apps) and of tomorrow (House automation, street screens,…)

Django

Django is a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design. Developed by a fast-moving online-news operation, Django was designed to handle two challenges: the intensive deadlines of a newsroom and the stringent requirements of the experienced Web developers who wrote it. It lets you build high-performing, elegant Web applications quickly.

Doodle

Doodle eliminates the chaos of scheduling and saves you a lot of time and energy when you’re trying to find a time to bring a number of people together. Instead of using just one option, Doodle enables you to propose several dates and times and the participants can indicate their availability online.

Dropbox

Dropbox is a free service that lets you bring your photos, docs, and videos anywhere and share them easily.

Eclipse

Eclipse is an open source community, whose projects are focused on building an open development platform comprised of extensible frameworks, tools and runtimes for building, deploying and managing software across the lifecycle.

Elance

Elance, one of the world’s biggest platform for online employment, helps businesses hire and manage in the cloud for instant access to great talent. Elance offers the flexibility to staff up or down, and is faster and less expensive than traditional staffing and outsourcing

Evernote

Evernote is helping the world remember everything by building innovative products and services that allow individuals to capture, find and interact with their memories. Evernote apps are available on all major computer, web, mobile, and tablet platforms.

FileZilla

FileZilla Client is a fast and reliable cross-platform FTP, FTPS and SFTP client with lots of useful features and an intuitive graphical user interface.

Firebug

Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of web development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.

Flurry

Flurry increases the size and value of mobile application audiences, helping more than 50,000 companies in over 120,000 applications on iOS, Android, Blackberry and Windows Phone platforms. Flurry has built the world's leading data-driven ad platform for mobile apps, powered by Flurry Analytics, to deliver superior app traffic acquisition and monetization solutions.

ForgetBox

ForgetBox is an application for sending files and folders in 4 clicks. Without any size limits, it's perfect for sending these big folders of documents to your business partners. Reliable, ForgetBox will take back your transfers later if you need to put your computer to sleep. You can now focus on your business and forget everything about sending: ForgetBox will take care of it, for free.

Freelance.com

freelance.com provides both independent and consultancy-assisted workforces to businesses. Freelance.com showcases the skills of qualified contractors/freelancers to companies in the areas of IT, marketing and communication, journalism, translation, training as well as consultancy. These companies – or employers – use the services of freelance.com to help them evaluate, select and recruit the right contractor for every job.

GMail

Gmail is the mail service by Google providing over 7500 MBs of free storage space and tons more to purchase if you need it. Gmail blocks spam before it gets to your inbox, is secure and can be accessed from your phone.

GitHub

GitHub is the best way to collaborate with others. Fork, send pull requests and manage all your public and private git repositories. GitHub uses Git: an extremely fast, efficient, distributed version control system ideal for the collaborative development of software.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the enterprise-class web analytics solution that gives you rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness. Powerful, flexible and easy-to-use features now let you see and analyze your traffic data in an entirely new way. With Google Analytics, you're more prepared to write better-targeted ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives and create higher converting websites.

Google Apps for Business

Google Apps gives you access to powerful applications to help your business work together. Google Apps for Business includes Gmail for your domain (you@yourcompany.com), calendar, documents, spreadsheets, sites and more. Get constant enterprise innovation whilst saving time and money, Google Apps allows you to focus on your business, not your IT.

Google Calendar

Organizing your schedule shouldn’t be a burden. With Google Calendar, it’s easy to keep track of life’s important events all in one place. Let your co-workers, family, and friends see your calendar, and view schedules that others have shared with you. When you know when everyone is free or busy, scheduling is a snap.

Google Docs

With Google Docs you can create basic documents from scratch or start from a template. You can easily do all the basics, including making bulleted lists, sorting by columns, adding tables, images, comments, formulas, changing fonts and more. And it's free. You can also upload your existing files. Google Docs accepts most popular file formats, including DOC, XLS, ODT, ODS, RTF, CSV, PPT, etc. So go ahead and upload your existing files.

Google Insights for Search

With Google Insights for Search, you can compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties.

Google Maps

Google Maps is a Google service offering powerful, user-friendly mapping technology and local business information -- including business locations, contact information, and driving directions.

Google SketchUp

A 3D software tool that combines a tool-set with an intelligent drawing system. Enables to place models using real-world coordinates and share them with the world using the Google 3D Warehouse.

Google code

Google's official developer site. Featuring APIs, developer tools and technical resources.

Google docs wireframe templates

A collection of Google docs templates dedicated to wireframes.

GroupCamp Project

GroupCamp Project is a cloud-based and collaborative project management software from GroupCamp. Invite your team members, partners and clients to work in online projects. If you are already using GMail, Google Docs, Google Calendar and Google Contacts, GroupCamp Project allows you to sync your tasks and your project milestones with your Google Calendar or to link your projects to your Google Docs files. GroupCamp Project works with regular Gmail accounts (Google Accounts) or with Google Apps for Business domains when installed from the Google Apps Marketplace.

HTML5 Boilerplate

HTML5 Boilerplate is the professional base HTML/CSS/JS template for a fast, robust and future-safe site.

Hacker News

Hacker news is a social news site about startup companies and hacking launched and maintained by the Y Combinator.

HeyCrowd

HeyCrowd is a social polling application to help you understand people's opinions, ideas and tastes. You can ask your questions to the HeyCrowd community or use it only for your own audience. The applications is available both on the iPhone and on the web.

High-Tech startups in France (in French)

A guide in french published by Olivier Ezratty and intended to entrepreneurs who want to engage in the creation of a digital business or those who have already done so and need to be updated about good practices and ways to get help.

HootSuite

HootSuite is a social media dashboard that lets you save your time monitoring and posting to multiple social networks, including Facebook and Twitter.

IdeasWatch

Share ideas for new products and services you would love to see on the market. Discuss them with 4000+ entrepreneurial and creative minds from all over the world. Get in touch with other people passionate about the same idea and start it together!

Instruments for Xcode

Instruments is an application for dynamically tracing and profiling Mac OS X and iOS code. It is a flexible and powerful tool that lets you track one or more processes and examine the collected data. In this way, Instruments helps you understand the behavior of both user programs and the operating system.

Investir en Direct

Investir en Direct is a community of entrepreneurs and investors that selects the best start-ups to support them financially and operationally in their development. Investors are business leaders and executives with a strong competence in an area to provide maximum value to projects.

JsFiddle

jsFiddle is a playground for web developers, a tool which may be used in many ways. You can use it as an online editor for snippets build from HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Share your Fiddle. Embedded on a blog, tweet URL to edit or result page. Using this approach, JavaScript developers can very easily isolate bugs. Many actively developed frameworks are supported - it helps with testing backward compatibility of your plugins.

Jsdoit

jsdo.it is a website where you can write JavaScript, HTML5, CSS in your browser, and share it.

KillerStartups

KillerStartups is a user driven internet startups community. Entrepreneurs, investors, and bloggers are staying informed on up-and-coming internet startups using our blog platform, where internet entrepreneurs submit their startup to see what others think about it.

Kontest

Kontest is a turnkey platform for the creation of social marketing campaigns and spread them on multiple channels. Few minutes are necessary to build a complete contest and make it available on Facebook, web and mobile.

Le Site du Zero

The newbies paradise where everything is explained ... From Zero! Courses HTML5, PHP, C, Java, Python, etc.. for all. In french.

Professional social network.

LiquidPlanner

LiquidPlanner online project management delivers on the promise of Collaborative Planning to improve team performance. LiquidPlanner provides a shared framework for goal-setting and the ability to more transparently communicate task and project status, while intelligently and efficiently aggregating information and data for managers.

Mail Chimp

A tool for designing, sending, and tracking HTML email campaigns.

Meetup

Meetup is the world's largest network of local groups. Meetup makes it easy for anyone to organize a local group or find one of the thousands already meeting up face-to-face. More than 2,000 groups get together in local communities each day, each one with the goal of improving themselves or their communities.

Modernizr

Modernizr is an open-source JavaScript library that helps you build the next generation of HTML5 and CSS3-powered websites.

MyAE

myAE.fr is a free invoicing software for “auto-entrepreneurs”. 25 000 self-employed have already using it. This online software enables you to create invoices or quotes very easily and to effectively manage your company. myAE integrates useful functionalities such as the online invoices payment directly through the internet, the turnover follow-up, the management of the unpaid invoices and so on.

Mymicroinvest

Mymicroinvest is a Crowdsourcing and Crowdfunding machine engine for entrepreneurs that wish to confront their start-up project with a community of supporters. We provide a platform for entrepreneurs to connect their business ideas with supporters, potential partners and business angels networks to achieve their project.

Namecheck

Namecheck provides you with a free search report to reveal if your brand has been taken as a domain name, social media username or trademark.

Netvibes

Netvibes is a free web site that lets you personalize your web experience. Take everything that matters to you while online — newspapers, blogs, weather, email, search, videos, photos, social networks, podcasts, widgets, games and funny applications — then bring them together in one single page, your personalized Dashboard. Make this Dashboard automatically update every time you open it. That's what netvibes does. And it does so much more.

Notepad++

Notepad++ is a free (as in "free speech" and also as in "free beer") source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. Running in the MS Windows environment, its use is governed by GPL License.

Odesk

Find the right people or bring your own. Select professionals based on work history, portfolio, feedback ratings, and test scores. Hire once or build a team! Work together as if you're in the same office Pay only for time verifiably spent working for you! oDesk's unique Work Diary is the key to knowing that time billed is time worked.

OleaPark

OleaPark is a networking mobile application that helps people interact before, during and after events: this is a networking badge 2.0. OleaPark can also analyse the impact of your event based on the participants interactions. It's a perfect tool both for the event organizer and the participants.

Opalang

Opa is a new generation of open source web development platform that lets you write secure and scalable web applications using a single technology.

PHPUnit

PHPUnit is the de-facto standard for unit testing in PHP projects. It provides both a framework that makes the writing of tests easy as well as the functionality to easily run the tests and analyse their results.

Pearltrees

Pearltrees is a place to organize, discover and share everything you like on the web. Collect web pages, turn them into pearls and organize them into pearltrees. Enrich your collections with pearltrees of other members of the community and share all of them !

Plancast

Plancast helps you find out about events and other social activities ahead of time so you don't miss out on them. Our users share the most interesting things on their calendars, making this the best place to find out about things to do, straight from the people doing them. And when you find something, it's easy to tell your friends about it by hitting "Count Me In" and sharing your new plan on Facebook or Twitter.

Plaza42

On Plaza42, each community is granted a dedicated website ; content is organized through questions & answers. Members are granted points triggered by every action on the site - points grow a reputation. In particular votes aim at evaluating contributions, their authors's and their areas of expertise. Overall Commitment to the site, is rewarded with advertising (proportional to each member's reputation), allowing members to generate leads for their personal or professional activity.

Podio

Podio gives you the power to work the way you want to on a social work platform that has everything you need to get work done, collaborate and run your entire business successfully. Build powerful apps in minutes to structure content, processes and stay on top of work from mobile devices.

Prezi

Prezi is a cloud-based presentation software that opens up a new world between whiteboards and slides. The zoomable canvas makes it fun to explore ideas and the connections between them. The result: visually captivating presentations that lead your audience down a path of discovery.

Producteev

Producteev.com is a task management platform for teams and individuals available on the web, desktop, mobile and email. Your tasks, everywhere.

RESTClient

RESTClient supports all HTTP methods RFC2616 (HTTP/1.1) and RFC2518 (WebDAV). You can construct custom HTTP request (custom method with resources URI and HTTP request Body) to directly test requests against a server.

Railscasts

Ruby on rails screencasts. The screencasts are short and focus on one technique so you can quickly move on to applying it to your own project. The topics target the intermediate Rails developer, but beginners and experts will get something out of it as well.

Remix Jobs

Temix Jobs is an IT job site for web professionals.

Ruby on Rails

Ruby on Rails is an open-source web framework that's optimized for programmer happiness and sustainable productivity. It lets you write beautiful code by favoring convention over configuration.

Sass

Sass is a meta-language on top of CSS that’s used to describe the style of a document cleanly and structurally, with more power than flat CSS allows. Sass both provides a simpler, more elegant syntax for CSS and implements various features that are useful for creating manageable stylesheets.

Simpless

SimpLESS compiles your *.less files into valid CSS.

Slideshare

SlideShare is an online platform to share presentations, documents and professional videos. It can be used to search and share presentations about subjects you are interested in or to get inspiration for your presentations.

Snippets App

Snippets is a Mac OS X application that stores the most valuable pieces of code you can reuse in different projects many times.

Socket.IO

Socket.IO aims to make realtime apps possible in every browser and mobile device, blurring the differences between the different transport mechanisms. It's care-free realtime 100% in JavaScript.

Spritepad

With SpritePad you can create your CSS sprites within minutes seconds. Simply drag & drop your images and have them immediately available as one PNG sprite + CSS code. No fiddling in Photoshop, no manual assignment of CSS styles.

Stack Overflow

Stack Overflow is a programming Q & A site that’s free. Free to ask questions, free to answer questions, free to read, free to index, built with plain old HTML. Stack Overflow is collaboratively built and maintained by your fellow programmers.

Start in Paris

Start In Paris is a monthly event where 5 startups get 5 minutes to pitch their service to the parisian tech crowd. In its short existence - just over 1 year, Start In Paris has grown to become the biggest recurring tech event in Paris, welcoming 300 to 350 movers and shakers at each meetup.

StartUpWizz

tartupWizz was founded in 2009 as a place for entrepreneurs and investors to stay informed about startups on the web. Our goal is to find some of the most disruptive, niche and interesting startups that our peers and investors want to know about.

Startup Weekend

Startup Weekends are 54-hour events where developers, designers, marketers, product managers and startup enthusiasts come together to share ideas, form teams, build products, and launch startups!

Startup digest

Startup Digest is a weekly newsletter (every Monday morning) which lists the best tech / startup events. Originally from San Francisco, Startup Digest is now present in over 70 cities around the world. Paris is the sixth largest city in terms of subscribers.

Survey for Facebook

Survey for Facebook is the easy way to create and share a survey on Facebook. Have your survey published on your page in less than 5 minutes.

SurveyMonkey

Millions all over the world are positively hooked on SurveyMonkey. Businesses, schools, and all types of organizations are using SurveyMonkey for customer satisfaction surveys, performance reviews, market research, and much more.

Symfony

Symfony is a PHP framework for web projects. It speeds up the creation and maintenance of your PHP web applications. Replace the repetitive coding tasks by power, control and pleasure.

The Trac Project

Trac is a Free bug tracking and project management system

Toluna Quick Surveys

Toluna QuickSurveys is an innovative and real-time Survey tool. The Do-It-Yourself solution allows to launch quick surveys. Create your own free survey of up to 15 questions by using your own contacts (emails, social networks, web visitors…) or using the Toluna online community (4 million members worldwide) with the credits of your Toluna QuickSurveys account. Global results and charts by key demographic profiles are automatically displayed in real-time. Collect representative Consumer opinions on your New Product or gain Insight for your R&D and Marketing decisions. Toluna QuickSurveys can provide thousands of consumer feedbacks in less than 24h in the main countries.

Unfuddle

Unfuddle is a secure, hosted project management solution for software development teams.

Usabilla

Usabilla integrates usability tests in your daily work-flow and helps you continuously improve your web site's user-experience and conversions. Combine qualitative and quantitative research and find out what your users think and do with context sensitive feedback.

User-agent switcher for Chrome

The user-agent switcher for Chrome is an extension that makes some sites work that don't usually work in Google Chrome. Installing this extension allows Google Chrome to access content intentionally or unintentionally blocked by the website. Also, if you're building a site that needs to work in multiple browsers, you probably want to know what it looks like on a mobile device or a different platform without actually having that device or platform in front of you. It's useful for just taking a quick glance at how a site looks on a different platform.

Vim

Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing. It is an improved version of the vi editor distributed with most UNIX systems.

WeTransfer

WeTransfer is a free and easy digital file transfer service. You can send 2GB per transfer - as often as you want.

Wimi

Wimi is a cloud-based platform providing collaborative tools and synchronization (files, calendars, tasks, contacts) that simplifies your projects and daily business. Wimi centralizes your company’s data and makes it accessible from most devices : computer, iPhone, iPad, Android, offline mode. Wimi fully integrates with Google Docs and Google Contacts. Wimi gathers features similar to Dropbox, Sharepoint and iCloud (professional data) under a single platform.

Worketer

Worketer is a recruitment network of new technologies, built around technical and functional skills.

Zend framework

Extending the art & spirit of PHP, Zend Framework is based on simplicity, object-oriented best practices, corporate friendly licensing, and a rigorously tested agile codebase.

eWorky

eWorky is a collaborative web tool that enables you to find the workplace you need wherever you are (WiFi hotspots, business centers, coworking spaces, meeting rooms, etc.). You will soon be able to share your office or book meeting rooms online.

github

GitHub is an open source and free version control for software development and so much more. Whether you're working on your favorite open source library or a hit application with coworkers, GitHub's web interface and its powerful code review make collaboration easier.

jQuery

jQuery is a fast and concise JavaScript Library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development. jQuery is designed to change the way that you write JavaScript.

neo-nomade

Tired of looking for a place to work? Neo-Nomade helps you connect with great workspaces (website & mobile app). Wifi Cafés, flexible office space, coworking, meeting rooms...

nodejs

Node.js is a platform built on Chrome's JavaScript runtime for easily building fast, scalable network applications. Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices.

seleniumhq

Selenium automates browsers. That's it. What you do with that power is entirely up to you. Primarily it is for automating web applications for testing purposes, but is certainly not limited to just that. Boring web-based administration tasks can (and should!) also be automated as well.