I've been to that part of France often (my mother lived about an hour outside of Limoges). It's very beautiful. Long straight tree lined roads, sleepy little villages, fields full of sunflowers. Limoges is a good sized town with a small airport (LIG) with flights to the UK and other locations several times a day.
As for a startup haven? Stranger things have happened.
Trundle is my Objective-C (iOS! Mac OS X!) framework to communicate with CouchDB servers. The guys at CouchBase use it in the demo for Couchbase Mobile