Roll on VivaTech!

Orange will for the third consecutive year be the Platinum partner of the largest international IT event in Paris, the Viva Technology! On the 24th, 25th and the 26th of May, more than 120 start-ups will showcase their technological expertise with the help of Orange. 5G, the Internet of Things, data, security, Artificial Intelligence and new voice and sensitive interfaces will feature strongly, just as it was during the CES in Las Vegas and MWC in Barcelona. VivaTech 2018 will particularly highlight to the 80,000 participants and 8,000 start-ups expected from 103 countries, the explosive growth potential of product and service innovations in Africa. In following the footsteps of the two previous events, female representatives and leaders will also be significantly present. Certainly, the CEOs of Microsoft, IBM, Alphabet, Uber, SAP, and Cisco will be in Paris. However, VivaTech claims above all to be the global meeting place for start-ups and it is definitely with these start-ups, which Orange among other major international players will once again put their focus on. Among the 120 start-ups showcasing their innovations, a good number of them came forth as a result of the challenges highlighted by Orange for this convention and which had, like last year, the most success the among major groups. Others represent the best promotions accelerated by Orange's 14 Orange Fab programmes located in 15 countries of the world on 4 continents. I hereby propose to you a first selection of super start-ups. Roll on VivaTech!

Beyond words..

In our Orange stand this year, our leitmotiv is Innovation that matters. This reflects the concrete expression of our Human Inside business philosophy which guides all of our daily actions, making technological progress for the benefit of the greatest number of people.

IoT, IA, 5G... at Orange, we work every day around these major technological advances, not only with our ecosystems of industrial, academic, institutional partners, but also and especially with start-ups. We identify, support and promote such technological advances across all our geographical regions and through our partnership with Viva Technology. 

Technological progress makes sense only if it benefits everyone. In this sense, it can be a formidable lever for accessibility by specializing its algorithms for people with, for example, speech disorders. Voiceitt interprets sounds made by these people and translates them in real time into clear and audible language for everyone to understand. The learning capabilities of the algorithm allow the app to adapt itself to each case and interpret each voice profile and expression with cogency. The intelligent voice assistants will thus be able to render their services to everyone, in all circumstances. This example reminds us that the infra-red remote control was originally invented to cater for the needs of people living with disabilities.

Handicapped or not, remember that our voiceprint is unique, even more than our fingerprint and that it conveys much more than language. The dimensions of mood, positive, negative or alert emotions are also lodged in our voices and vary with infinite finesse.

Cochlear.ai offersartificial intelligence algorithms - accessible via the cloud – which perceive and interpret voice in its emotional dimensions and can for example help in anticipating critical situations.

Mastering voice, means being at the heart of the new universal communication interface betwee man and digital terminals. It is this same natural interface of human interaction that has existed for nearly 120,000 years! So why translate it into text to then retranslate it into a voice once it has been analysed by machines? If the retranslation process can be done away with, then that would really save us a few milliseconds of interaction. The good news is that there is a group of entrepreneurs that are already working on eliminating this process. In this case, Soundhound has made it one of its specialties. The disruption of this process of language interpretation is called "speech to meaning" or how to work on understanding the meaning of an oral request directly at the level of the sound, without going precisely through its textual translation.

Keyvan Mohajer, their young CEO, who has just raised $100M, explains that he has the fastest technology that is getting close to traditional human conversation, at least in some areas mastered by its Artificial Intelligence. Questions may also cross-reference information from several areas in a particular context expounded further in the conversation (e.g. finding a plane, where I am, in a given budget and with time constraints related to my schedule).

It is easy to understand that transition between Artificial Intelligence and human assistance is becoming a key factor in customer relationship. Techsee.me combines knowledge bases accessible in augmented or virtual reality during on-site interventions or troubleshooting by the customer in order to optimize these customer interactions. This is one of the ways to get the best out of AI, RV/RV and human assistance.

But sometimes voice is not enough to ensure the transmission of information. Here again, technology makes it possible to switch to another sense, such as touch. You will thus discover a braille watch in the Orange booth. When your fingertips touch the dial you will notice embossments which could be a message from your loved ones, or a notification of who is trying to reach you. Dotincorp has successfully developed an accessible, miniaturized technological device that guarantees privacy of electronic communications to the visually impaired..

Beyond the interfaces, our lives are put into data and this trend raises the question of trust and responsibility for processing and even storing our data. The proposal of Umbo to monitor people or places that are dear to us is a novel concept. This concept relies on cameras that can be installed on the fly and an algorithm based on neural networks which enables rapid learning of the recognition of what passes through the camera beam that is autonomous, anonymized and does not need data storage. Abnormal alerts or detections can trigger recording and provide rapid information.

Beyond the present…

Communicating according to the available or desired senses is made possible by the combination of Artificial Intelligence algorithms, new terminals and translations between sounds, intentions and emotions, text or touch. These technologies associated with virtual or augmented reality, in 360° immersion now offer us the ability to travel in time, .. and creativity.Rendr.fr has thus taken up the challenge of rebuilding the ancient city of Palmyra in 48 hours. During the Culturathon event organized by the Louvre-Lens Valley, Rendr's team proposed to rebuild virtually the ancient city, currently located in Syria. Closer to us, the seaside town of Le Touquet invites you to immerse yourself in the context of its 1930s era.

If the present is enough for you, Gogowego opens the city with its hustle and bustle and services to you via a bot and a "proximity" cloud platform that progressively learns from the needs of visitors and inhabitants and optimizes the available fields of information. And to combine cultural discovery and physical fitness, Kiplin invites you for a walk. Its fun, collaborative and modernised treasure hunt is adapted to be used in family or business contexts in order to unite teams around exciting challenges that the hunt offers.

But the present is already such a complex notion. Our ultra-connected world which is full of anticipation algorithms announces that "real time" is already behind schedule. In the event of an attack, for example, the availability of crowd information aggregated in real time and analysed - between strong and weak signals, noise and relevant information - can make a crucial, even vital difference. Nunki.co has taken up the challenge of enhancing our vision and understanding of exceptional situations straight from those people who are closest to where these events are unfolding.

And to easily imagine the connection of this type of service with headphones connected to the cloud type Bragi (which reminds me of the Mars de Nave instant translation headphones presented at CES 2018). A true voice remote control of our lives, these headphones are even more discreet than those ones of Apple and allow connectivity at software level, of any type of bot or service algorithm. You place your orders by voice and receive useful information in real time without the need to type on your smartphone.

The use of Nunki could also coordinate with the Waryme alert button available on smartphone. A press on the virtual button or simply a particular agitation of the smartphone, and the application can geolocate users who have triggered the alert, discretely monitor their environment when these users cannot express themselves freely.

For sustainable development in Africa

The education of young African women is a strategic priority for the continent. Isahit is helping such women in Cameroon, C?te d'Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Congo and Senegal raise additional income to finance their studies by carrying out micro-tasks, such as data entry or algorithm control, for one to two hours a day.

Another important issue on the continent is pollution and recycling. For example, 90% of plastic waste is not recycled in C?te d'Ivoire. It is both a major environmental problem and an opportunity to create green jobs. Coliba, a start-up company, uses technology to recycle and upcycle plastic waste through a web, mobile and SMS application. It gives individuals and businesses the opportunity to recycle their waste while providing a reliable supply of materials for the local and international industry. The user of the Coliba platform is geolocated in real time and the recovery of his plastic waste is done in less than thirty minutes. In return, households are rewarded with points which are redeemable based on the volume and quality of the recyclable materials provided.

Globalized innovation offers good practices that can be copied from one continent to another. This is particularly the case for e-agriculture or the ability to manage crops and harvests by optimizing yields, costs and selling prices on the markets. Listenfield's APIs ecosystem integrate, for example, fragmented agri-environmental data in order to facilitate predictive analyses by the users. The mission of this start-up which was discovered and accelerated by OrangeFab Asia is to make agriculture sustainable and profitable through local decision-making based on data.

Data once again is the basis of traceability of goods and valuables: once produced, agricultural harvest will follow a value chain of intermediaries in order to be processed and sold. Accountability of supply chain actors can be ensured by Ownest.io's blockchain platform which follows successive transfers of liability for goods. This highly innovative solution enables you to visualize and manage in real time who are the liability owners of your goods in a fragmented transport logistics context. Ownest won the Orange Digital Start-ups Contest organized by Orange Consulting with ParisTech Entrepreneurs.

Finally, why not imagine that drones from DroneHive, leading provider of expert services for aerial data collection are going to use drones at the industrial scale with 5G. May each one of us book a flight from their hives (docking stations for drones) in order to gather more of its capability data. The management of shared aerial inspection networks would allow significant gains in human intervention in the agricultural field but more generally in equipment maintenance.

By the way, to see all this and much more, visit the Orange stand on J 09!

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