Revolutionizing cloud storage: Cannes welcomes Hive, David Gurlé's decentralized and sustainable platform

[Extract of Press Release by Mairie de Cannes, Jun 21st, 2022]

Strengthening the attractiveness and influence of Cannes and stimulating local prosperity are the pillars of David Lisnard's action. Since 2014, this approach was materialized in particular through the city's commitment to a dynamic of innovation, promising for the future for future generations, around the sectors of the creative economy, the space industry and new technologies. In this context, Cannes is proud to welcome on its territory the world headquarters of Hive (“the hive” in English), the new startup of David Gurlé, French tech entrepreneur of international renown and founder of the unicorn Symphony.

Based in the Bastide Rouge business incubator in Cannes-La Bocca, Hive is developing a free solution that aims to revolutionize the Cloud market by creating a secure and decentralized storage platform. This is based on the peer-to-peer system and exploits the unused capacity of the hard disks of personal computers and telephones to meet several major societal challenges: reducing dependence on the current giants of the Cloud, guaranteeing confidentiality data and massively reducing the environmental footprint by eliminating energy-intensive data centers.

During the press conference organized on June, Tuesday the 21in Cannes, David Gurlé announced a world first : the launch of a new streaming service on Hive, the Airbnb of audiovisual content, secured by the blockchain. This network will bring directly closer content creators and consumers without intermdiaries and respectful of the copyrights. 

Arriving in Cannes at the age of 14, having studied at the International College and then at the Lycée Carnot before experiencing a real success story on a global scale in the United States in Silicon Valley, David Gurlé now wishes to return to his city of heart and to play a role in the economic development policy of the municipality driven by David Lisnard.

It is a great opportunity and a source of pride for Cannes to see such a project hatch locally in the digital industry. Cannes welcomes Hive, the new company of the emblematic David Gurlé, a successful entrepreneur from the Silicon Valley who studied and flourished in our city during his young years. The municipality engages the territory of Cannes in a dynamic of technological attractiveness, creative innovation promising the future to take advantage of the digital revolution. For initiators of innovative projects, Cannes has a high-tech and entrepreneurial ecosystem that promotes the development of their activity, and therefore the creation of wealth and jobs. Hive is also part of the municipal environmental protection policy with the creation of a decentralized cloud that does not require the use of data centers whose energy consumption represents considerable and constantly increasing pollution in the environment on a planetary level. I would like to thank David Gurlé for having chosen Cannes for this project and thus for recognizing the new entrepreneurial dimension of our city, and wish him full success for his solution, creative and relevant, secure and with a low environmental footprint.

David Lisnard, Mayor of Cannes and President of the Cannes Lérins Agglomeration

Cannes is my madeleine de Proust, a city to which I am deeply attached. Here I met many passionate people who, like me, had this desire to undertake and to bring Tech to a new dimension. Cannes is the lung of cutting-edge innovation in France, it is therefore quite naturally that I wanted to implement our new technology and the brilliant teams involved in its development at the heart of this ecosystem. I am very happy with the installation of Hive in Cannes, and I hope to inspire vocations among young Cannes residents, eager to innovate in tech. We have great ambitions for Hive, for the territory of Cannes, and for French sovereignty in terms of new technologies. A huge thank to David Lisnard for his trust and support in this project.

‍David Gurlé, Founder and CEO of Hive

Breakthrough technology created at Cannes-La Bocca for data sovereignty

“We are all the Cloud”. This is the philosophy of Hive, the new web 3.0 nugget imagined and created by David Gurlé to break with the current universe of online storage and calculation: a centralized market by American giants, which sees our saved data leaking to the United States including when the server farms ( terme à verifier) are installed in France and in Europe (American Cloud Act) and raises questions of independence, sovereignty, confidentiality and security of information stored and processed.

In Cannes, on the Bastide Rouge site, the French entrepreneur is developing breakthrough technology with Hive to free users from the GAFA monopoly and allow everyone to regain control of their personal data. This free platform is decentralized thanks to the use of the unused resources of computers and mobile phones, a model which allows Hive to offer the general public a greener alternative (no need for data centers which, according to the International Agency for energy, will represent 20% of global energy consumption in 2025) and sovereign (everyone controls where in the world they store their data). To do this, Hive uses peer-to-peer technology (one entity is for both client and server) where each individual can rent and share the space they are not using on their hard drive and computing capabilities to make it available for other users of the application. It is the multiplication of entities that allows the construction of the Hive network, hivenet, and the provision of the capacities necessary to save the data of the community (more explanations in the appendices).

Thus, the new Cannes company offers a revolutionary, secure, circular and green system to meet both the growing needs of digital uses and the imperatives of security and environmental protection which are major concerns of users today.

Cannes, a springboard in the personal journey of David Gurlé and an obvious choice for Hive

Son of a French diplomat and a British BBC journalist, David Gurlé was born in Istanbul in 1966. At the âge of 14, he followed his father who moved to Cannes. He found here a balanced environment in which to flourish. Passed by the International College of Cannes, the Lycée Carnot and the MJC Picaud, he then carried out brilliant studies at the Graduate School of Computer Science and Telecommunications Engineering (ESIGETEL). After France Telecom and VocalTec, he flew to Silicon Valley and then became the right arm of Bill Gates Microsoft, then participated in the deployment of Skype or Thomson Reuters.

However, his attachment to Cannes and the Côte d'Azur remained strong. In 2014, he positioned the R&D department of his company Symphony in Sophia-Antipolis. Concerning Hive, David Gurlé had no hesitation: « Cannes is the ideal place to develop our solution. It is a stronghold in terms of new technologies thanks to the proactive policy, concrete actions and massive investments in this sector made by David Lisnard. »

Thus, the Bastide Rouge business incubator, located in Cannes-La Bocca, has been hosting the Hive company since mid-May 2022. Eleven employees are currently on site and benefit from a coworking room and a meeting room.

Support for start-ups at the heart of the action of Cannes 

The arrival of Hive is part of David Lisnard's desire to make the territory of Cannes an international and exemplary environmental capital at the forefront of new technologies and the experimentation of innovative solutions.

In addition, it strengthens municipal and inter-municipal strategies for the development of sectors of excellence in the Cannes Lérins territory (creative writing, space, agritech, silver economy, tech, etc.), for hosting and supporting start-ups and companies that are seeking to set up in the region to develop their activity (Bastide Rouge business incubator, Cité des entreprises at the Georges Méliès University Campus and business hotel located near Mandelieu-La Napoule).

Thus, the technological, economic and entrepreneurial ecosystem of Cannes constitutes an adequate ground to welcome and support project leaders.