How Capitaine Train Is Disrupting Train Ticket Booking Through Engineering

French startup Capitaine Train wants to improve the cumbersome process of booking train tickets online and on your phone. It’s not yet another travel agency, it’s an alternative to popular European ticket booking services with an emphasis on efficiency.

“We want our clients to leave the site as soon as possible,” co-founder and CEO Jean-Daniel Guyot told me in an interview. The company is betting everything on customer experience. Booking a train ticket should be faster, simpler and more pleasant — you don’t want to see any ads if you’re already paying for a ticket. But developing this kind of service is not as easy as it sounds. Capitaine Train had to negotiate with very large companies who are not used to talking with young and fearless startups.

From 2002 to 2009, there was an ongoing anticompetitive practice in France. France’s main railway company SNCF was found guilty of disadvantaging online travel agencies in favor of its own solutions, Voyages-SNCF and Expedia. Three days after the sentence, Capitaine Train was born.

But Capitaine Train didn’t want to become a new travel agency, and the SNCF didn’t get that. At first, the startup got a travel agency license. It wanted the same direct access to the ticket reservation system as the SNCF.

Eventually, the SNCF had to grant access to the reservation system — it was a legal obligation. But it dragged on. Guyot told me that the company was calling the SNCF every week to get a meeting. Every time, the railway company found a new excuse to postpone.

In June 2010, Capitaine Train had no choice but to talk to the press about the difficult negotiations. Many media outlets picked up the news. Oddly enough, the SNCF agreed to meet two days after the public outcry. Six weeks after the meeting, Capitaine Train had a deal in place. But it took more than a year to get there.

Slowly but surely, the startup continued its expansion plans. It signed a deal with Deutsche Bahn and other European railway companies. The startup raised $5.4 million (

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Pebble Seeds Engineering Schools With 4K Free Smartwatches In A Bid To Drive Developer Interest

Pebble today revealed a new project aimed at education in which it will donate over 4,000 smartwatches to higher ed schools including Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Stanford, Virginia Tech and many more. The donation is worth over $600,000, according to Pebble’s own estimates, but it’s clearly designed to make sure Pebble and the Pebble SDK are in the hands of the next generation of top-tier developers before they ever even hit the job market.

Now that Pebble has released its official app creation SDK, and unlocked many of the dormant features of the platform, it needs developers to get on board and start pumping out creations that really show off the potential of wrist-worn computing to push the Pebble’s appeal beyond the early adopter and gadget loving crowd who’ve already purchased one, and into the mainstream. Software sells hardware, and developers build software. In school, they’re often more willing and able to experiment with platforms that don’t necessarily have a proven ability to pay the bills, hence why it’s a good idea to give these things away to engineering students as development hardware.

Pebble only recently hit the tipping point in terms of having stock on hand in stores and online, but current inventory levels seems strong, and there’s also a sale on right now offering a $10 discount on new units. As 9to5Mac’s Seth Weintraub noted on Twitter, this sale and education donation could be taken as evidence that the company is looking to offload stock ahead of some kind of refresh.

Pebble donating watches blog.getpebble.com/2013/12/16/peb

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