For almost twenty years, we have been reporting on the transformations of French, European and international tech. Today, what is changing is not our playing field, but our focus.
FW.MEDIA focuses its work around technologies that are sustainably reconfiguring the economy, industry and power relations: artificial intelligence, cloud, semiconductors, quantum, defense, space, robotics, energy, biotech and new digital infrastructures.
These subjects are no longer just about innovation, they now concern sovereignty, financing of industry, access to computing, supply chains, critical infrastructure, intellectual property and the capacity of European economies to create companies capable of counting on a global scale.
It is this change of era that we want to better document.
Europe has excellent laboratories, engineers, researchers, entrepreneurs and leading industrial groups, but it still faces a well-known difficulty: more systematically transforming this scientific and technological excellence into global companies, industrial capacities and strategic assets sustainably controlled from the continent.
Behind each technological advance, the same questions now arise: where are the technologies developed? Who finances them? Where are their components manufactured? Who controls the infrastructure necessary for their operation? Where are their first major customers located? And, when these companies scale, where are the value, jobs and intellectual property ultimately concentrated?
It is around these questions that FW.MEDIA intends to organize a growing part of its editorial work.
The second stage of our repositioning initiated at the start of the year is accompanied by another major change: our European edition in English becomes the flagship of FW.MEDIA.
This choice first responds to the reality of the companies we cover. A startup founded in Paris can raise funds in London, recruit in Berlin, work with a Swiss laboratory, install its computing capacities in the Nordic countries and sell its first solutions in the United States or Asia. In deeptech, ecosystems are national, but markets, capital, talents and industrial chains very quickly cross borders.
Narrating these companies only from their country of origin therefore no longer allows us to correctly understand their trajectory.
The English edition of FW.MEDIA should allow us to cover Europe as a technological space in its own right, with its strengths, its dependencies, its industrial policies, its investors, its laboratories and its future champions. Our ambition is not to produce a new general media dedicated to European startups, but to follow the players who are building technologies capable of lastingly transforming markets and power relations.
We will naturally continue to watch what is happening in the United States, China and other major global technology hubs. Understanding Europe involves constantly measuring its position in the face of ecosystems that are moving faster, investing more or industrializing differently.
FW.MEDIA/FR also maintains an essential mission.
Heir to FRENCHWEB, our French edition will continue to decipher companies, investors, public policies and the transformations which structure the French ecosystem. But it will also give an increasing place to deeptech and strategic technologies, with a more economic, industrial and geopolitical reading of innovation.
The two editions are therefore not intended to simply translate the same content.
FW.MEDIA/FR will continue to look very closely at France and its actors. The English edition will aim to broaden the framework, connect European ecosystems together and give more international visibility to the continent’s companies, researchers, investors and industrialists.
Behind this evolution remains a question which will cross a large part of our work in the coming years:
Can Europe transform its scientific and technological excellence into economic and industrial power?
Answering this question requires going beyond fundraising announcements, startup rankings and technological fads. We must monitor the construction of factories, access to growth capital, industrial contracts, public orders, computing infrastructures, supplier chains, technology transfers, acquisitions and companies that succeed in crossing the transition between scientific innovation and large-scale deployment.
This is precisely what we want to do with FW.MEDIA, from Paris, but with an editorial team and an audience focused on Europe and the world.
Telling about European technologies is a first step. Understanding how they can weigh in global competition is now at the heart of our editorial project.
Richard Menneveux
Editor in Chief, FW.MEDIA
