Mayel de Borniol
Mayel de Borniol
is a 26-year-old entrepreneur, with a great interest in the global
challenges facing us, attentively following the theories, inventions,
and
wild dreams of scientists, philosophers, and fiction writers alike, be
they optimistic or precautionary, utopian, or dystopian.
He discovered the web in 1995, and has been creating things online ever
since. After his studies in Paris, he cofounded several startups, and
participated in many different projects. He enjoys exploring the world
and would love to speak dozens of languages to be able to communicate
with everyone.
Mayel is passionate about most everything related to technology (new
paradigms & interfaces, virtual & augmented reality, security & privacy,
open source & patents, mobility, nanotech, robotics & AI, singularity),
media (online, dematerialized, user-generated, social), society
(overpopulation, famine, migrations, space exploration, and travel…),
environment (climate change, renewable energies, scarcity of
resources…), and especially how they all interact and shape our
future.
He enjoys discussing these subjects, and sometimes writes about them on
his blog…
His rampant imagination, outside-the-box thinking, and dissatisfaction
with accepted norms, combined with the engineer’s passion in finding
solutions and implementing ideas, bring him to always be thinking about
and actually trying to build the “next big things”.
With a constant scrutiny of new innovations, technologies, and startups
around the world, he tries to have a clear vision of the current
state-of-the-art, and is always thinking up new uses that could benefit
from them, and what could result from their convergence.
He is what some call a “MacGyver”: his duct tape engineering methods
enable the rapid creation of innovative and feature-rich applications in
a very short time, leveraging and bringing together the latest advances
of any relevant research, open source projects, APIs, etc. He’s
constantly creating “working prototypes” of new apps and services,
collaborating on them with a global network of programmers and
designers.
His latest project is Babelverse, with the mission of
breaking down language barriers.
Babelverse is the first application for real-time voice translation,
powered by a global community of human interpreters.
Anybody will be able to use it to obtain on-the-spot interpretation, in
any language, and it creates a new source of income for multilingual
speakers all over the world.
He also runs ANETech Labs, an internet R&D company,
with many interesting projects, for example:
- Mexia, a framework that combines various open standards, and technologies to enable a new form of “media experience” which combines content that used to cater to traditional forms such as books, magazines & newspapers, film, radio, music, comic strips, etc. It will enable every kind of author and artist to collaborate and easily create new works that really take advantage of the digital revolution. It is built using the latest capabilities offered by HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, as well as recent evolutions such as multi-touch interfaces, while being gracefully degradable, to be compatible with virtually any device and platform.
- 6Dimensions: A suite of augmented reality applications. 6DCulture for example, for people visiting archaeological sites, museums, etc, to go beyond simple sightseeing, and have an educational and informative experience.
In 2005 he cofounded podcast portal Podemus.com (directory, blog platform with 25,000 blogs, audio & video hosting, ad platform…), which was the leading such service in Europe. It managed to contend with Apple’s iTunes directory in France, working with most of the major radio and TV networks, and most independent content producers. It also partnered with RTL, the leading European media group, to provide authors with a revenue stream through advertising.
In 2007 he went on to create online TV station LeLab.TV with some friends. Aside from the creative aspects, he designed and entirely developed the online and mobile broadcasting platform, and set up a digital studio using commodity hardware and hacked together software, which gave LeLab the same capabilities as traditional studios for 1/100th of the cost (live and on demand).
Meanwhile, he also participated in a Master’s research project at the Hypermedia Lab of Paris 8 University, called “Digital creation, innovation & information” which consisted of an online platform for the collaborative production, sharing and enrichment of scientific or educational information in the form of video lectures, wikis, databases, etc.
Some of the innovative stuff he created during that time (before they started appearing on sites like YouTube) includes:
- Integrated chat with friends or others viewing the same video
- Dynamic and multilingual subtitles (input and translation by the authors or user-contributed, wiki-style)
- Display of related information and links, time code synchronized with the video
- Upload of a video onto many 3rd-party sites in 1-click and tracking of stats on all platforms
Read his LinkedIn profile.
