Respublica.fr: the founders are leaving

Christophe Dupont, the president and Christian Conti, the general manager, announced they were leaving. The activities of the community site are now all gathered in Paris.

This time, it is official: the adventure of Respublica.fr on the French Riviera is nearly finished (see article of last July 2nd). Christophe Dupont, president and Christian Conti, general manager at Respublica, have then announced they were leaving the management of the community site Respublica.fr in a press release published on Monday July 9th.Activities of Respublica.fr now gathered in Paris Historic managers, as noted, ”end up their mission with very positive results since Respublica.fr achieved one of the highest growth of the net during the twelve last months: +520% for the monthly audience, more than 85 million pages viewed and nearly 11 million visits per month (source Cybermétrie June 2001). These results now make of Respublica.fr the first website of French-speaking communities. The overall of activities of Respublica.fr will now be gathered in Paris, within the new Media Pole of Tiscali-France (parent company of Respublica) and Hervé Simonin, deputy general manager before, took the management.”Christophe Dupont : from Echo to RespublicaAged 28 years old, graduate of the “Ecole Normale Supérieure” of Lyon, researcher in non-linear physics, Christophe Dupont is one of the representatives of the first Internet wave on the French Riviera. Designer of the French-speaking search engine Echo, he gave birth to the eponymous company, which became a subsidiary of France Telecom in 1998. Other than the Echo search engine, now, at the heart of the portal Voila.fr of Wanadoo, Christophe Dupont is at the origin of the intranet search engine Extense. In 1998, after his departure from Echo, he designed Repsublica.fr, the first platform of French-speaking virtual communities and will found the company with the same name, which will be associated in 1999 to the access provider LibertySurf bought out by the Italian Tiscali since then.Christian Conti : already at the origin of Ove InteractiveChristian Conti, 33 years old, is another figure of the Internet wave on the French Riviera. Graduated of the ESSI (Grande école in Computer Sciences) of Sophia Antipolis, and also graduated in human resources engineering, Christian Conti was at the origin of the adventure of Ove Interactive in 1995, one of the first web agencies (it will be sold out in 1999 to RTSe, a Finnish operator). Before taking the general management of Respublica in 1999, Christian Conti had created the portal of contemporary literature Ecrire.com.