Friday saw the very first steps of Sandbox developing in France. Over drinks in a bar in Paris’s 2nd arrondissement, Sandboxers Bjoern Lasse Hermann, Aaron O’Hearn and I got together with some inspiring people, equally interesting and interested in Sandbox.

Attendees there are making huge impacts to ecosystems in France and Europe, some are great social entrepreneurs, others that attended are working within the creative arts and several tech entrepreneurs visited thanks to an event post in TechCrunch by its great French editor Roxanne Varza.

Here are just some of amazing projects that I heard about: Internet Virtual, a next generation search engine linking content and user interests, co-founded by Jie Meng Gerard and Gilles Poupardin, who also launched AperoEntrepreneurs the organisation  that arranges meetings of entrepreneurs across France and abroad; Harold Knoll currently arrived seeking a buyer for a solar project he conceived by himself; Olivier Desmoulin, is the designer behind supermarmite – an innovative new way for budding chefs and amateurs alike to share and rate each others recipes and good food suggestions within the community.

What most people enjoyed talking about were mainly initiating exciting ideas outside of France: developing international projects, with multiple perspectives and scale. In building the network in Paris, we’ll try to connect this amazing concentration of creative energy in Paris with our international network of Sandboxers, so that these ideas turn into reality.

Going to LeWeb next week? There will be a small dinner for Sandboxers  in central Paris on Tuesday 7th December.

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Michaela Wood is the Sandbox Ambassador for Paris; she is in the early stages of building an exciting and rapidly growing ecosystem of Sandboxers in France.

Congratulations to our fellow Sandboxers from Poken for winning Best European / Real World Gadget.

Furthermore congrats to Amiando for being “highly commended” in the category Best Web Application Or Service and to the founders of Amiando Felix Haas, Armin Bauer, Markus Eichinger, Dennis von Ferenczy, Sebastian Baerhold and Sandboxer Marc Bernegger for being listed as finalists in the category Best Startup Founder(s).

Our good friends from Amazee and Doodle got listed as “highly commended” in the categories Best Social Innovation (which benefits society) – (Amazee) and Best Bootstrapped Startup (less than 3 years old) – (Doodle).

A complete list of winners and finalists can be found here.

As part of the event, I did a series of short video interviews with several of the startups as well as with Mike from TechCrunch. You can find all the videos on YouTube here. We also seized the opportunity to do an interview about Sandbox – I interviewed Antoine and Fabian about our project, which was admittedly a tad self-referential . Check out the video below.