PACA Mobile Center boosts Marseilles' mobility cluster

By Jeremy Fain, June 4, 2007

Marseilles, Southern France, is a hot place for mobility start ups. The city has been investing heavily in promoting not only the warm climate but also the tremendous human capital & software capabilities in the region. So far, nothing so original, except this feeling of sincere and deep commitment from all the authorities there: the PACA (Provence Alpes Côtes d’Azur) region’s huge entrepreneurial potential cannot whatsoever be denied. I believe Marseilles will soon be a major player in the European software landscape.

One of the initiatives that struck me most when I visited Marseille’s innovation ecosystem a couple weeks ago was PACA Mobile Center, that I would definitely qualify as a regional best practice.

PACA Mobile Center stands on the highest floor of the incubator “Belle de Mai“, located a few hundred meters away from the central railway station from which Paris is 3 hours away only by TGV (French high speed train).

The purpose of PACA Mobile Center is to allow mobile start ups (undergoing, by definition, severe resource constraints) to test their solutions on all sorts of mobile devices available on the market (see picture).

The fee is symbolic as PACA Mobile Center is nothing else than a non-for-profit organization. The team (Alexandre & François Joseph) that manages the center seems really well organized and definitely is talented & cool.

Successful companies based in Marseille (Miyowa, an IDEAS program start up; Mobile Distillery) use the resources of the center, but not exclusively. Mobile companies travel from far away to make use of the PACA Mobile Center infrastructure – Paris-based & recent Microsoft acquisition ScreenTonic for instance.

PACA Mobile Center is a very unique initiative in Europe that I hope will be replicated to help mobility software entrepreneurs optimize the experience of their users.

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