French startup Hopcast came tantalizingly close to a commercial launch in Cote d’Ivoire, of its ad-hoc filesharing protocol that has great potential in markets where cellular data is relatively expensive. For now, its privacy and sustainability benefits are its only route into developed markets, but the Hopcast approach has billions of potential users in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and APAC – if it can convince operators and services to give it a chance. Co-founder Farid Benbadis explained that the approach, which is covered by a European patent, relies on an SDK inside an application. This then uses the smartphone’s Bluetooth radio to discover nearby devices. Once these devices find each other, they can begin a WiFi session, in…