ReadWriteWeb

Amazon has just announced the opening of the French Kindle Store, offering over 35,000 French-language e-books, all 28 L'Express bestsellers, hundreds of graphic novels and over 4,000 free classics. In all language, the store will offer French customers over 825,000 titles.

The first French-language Kindle is the non-touch model just released in the U.S., available for €99.00. It offers a 600x800, 6-inch screen with 1.25GB of internal storage. The release date is October 14.

YouTube and the French music-rights collection agency SACEM just announced a deal that ensures that artists are compensated when their music is played on the French version of Google's popular video sharing site. According to SACEM, "the license covers the international repertoire managed by SACEM including in particular the Anglo-American repertoire of multinational publishers, as well as other works managed by SACEM present on the platform, from the launch of the service in France to 2012." In total, YouTube now has similar deals in eight countries.

A recently leaked report [PDF] from France's State Secretary of Digital Economy reveals the government's efforts to deeply bury net neutrality for this country. This is the latest episode in an ongoing attempt to control the Internet. The final chapter could take place as soon as next month when the National Assembly starts working on a net neutrality bill. The last hope for activists lies in a small group of more open-minded MPs who will also be working on that bill.

It is important for an American audience to understand that we have nothing like the First Amendment in France, and that freedom of speech is not granted in every circumstance; any kind of hate speech, for example, is illegal. Applying censorship to the Web to make it compliant with French laws would eventually censor millions of websites (not to mention lead to blind copyright enforcement).

After years of trying to convince technologically inept relatives to stop using Internet Explorer, computer geeks worldwide may finally have something new to back up their words: the advice of the German and French governments.

The French government joined Germany today in recommending that its citizens switch to another browser in light of last week's admission by Microsoft that Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8 all contained the same security vulnerability, in which "Internet Explorer can be caused to allow remote code execution."

In the mid-1980s, Pierre Bellanger launched Skyrock pirate radio station as a continuation of his efforts with the French free radio movement. A community inclusive of a diverse voices and agendas, Skyrock inspired a generation of 18-25-year-olds who had never lent their unscripted opinions to a mass distribution medium. As Skyrock developed an IRC channel and later its own blogging software, the community evolved into what it is today - the third largest social networking site in Europe.

Yesterday, during a meeting with a number of startups in Paris, we met up with the team behind the Green Watch project. Just like Google collects data from cell phones with GPS chips to aggregate real-time traffic information, this watch measures ozone levels and noise pollution. The watch connects wirelessly to the wearer's mobile phone and sends updates to Citypulse, an open platform for receiving and storing environmental data. The Green Watch is currently only a prototype and not available for sale.

French member of parliament Valerie Boyer recently proposed a law to include a disclaimer at the bottom of all enhanced press, political, art and advertising-based photographs. Backed by 50 other French members of parliament, Boyer's efforts aim to reduce the instances of eating disorders across the country. While the attempt is certainly a noble one given France's influence on the fashion world, enforcing the legislation may be another story. While Boyer has already managed to pass a charter against inciting skinniness, policing image doctoring may prove to be a much tougher task.

We at ReadWriteWeb believe that innovation is a global business (as we noted in an earlier post on the Global Innovation Graph). The "death of distance" - the notion that the Internet makes location irrelevant - may be an exaggeration. Face to face always matters, and that will happen where hubs of expertise and capital emerge. Silicon Valley will likely remain the uber-hub for a long time. But the Internet does dramatically make it possible for an entrepreneur to start from anywhere and assemble a dream team of experts, partners, and customers from anywhere else. Innovation is not just a Valley story or a US story: it is a global story. And we want to write more about this exciting story. In this post, we'll tell you a bit about how we are starting to do that.

Parlez-vous français? No neither do I, apart from the smattering of French I learnt at the beginning of high school. But to cater to our friends in Europe, we've just opened a French language version of ReadWriteWeb. The idea was suggested by Romain Péchard, who approached us about translating our articles into French and also writing unique content about the Europe web scene. Romain and his team have basically taken the ball and rolled with it (prendre le ballon et a roulé avec lui), designing and organizing the new site.

RWW France will be covering the Web 2.0 Expo Berlin 2008 next week and they have tickets to give away if you're one of our European readers.