Archive by Author - Eliane Fiolet
Mendeley , “the Last.fm of Research”
[LeWeb] Mendeley is an online research papers database that connects scientists together by analyzing the connection between them and their research papers. Mendelay enables collaboration and conversations in the scientific community and aims to change the way research is done, paving the way to “Science 2.0”. Based in the UK, the startup has rapidly grown and currently offers 25,000 downloadable free research papers covering a broad range of academic disciplines, so far, 8 million research papers have been uploaded and the site counts 100,000 users.
Niklas Zennström at LeWeb
By Karsten Lemm at LeWeb 2009 – “If you want to be successful, swim against the stream, follow your own path.” That was Skype co-founder Niklas Zennström’s advice to aspiring entrepreneurs at the LeWeb conference in Paris. The serial entrepreneur, who initially gained fame and fortune with file-sharing service Kazaa, pointed out that none of the potential investors that he and co-founder Janus Friis approached wanted to put money into Skype. “The VCs in Europe felt that Skype was way too risky” and had little future, Zennström said. The Internet phone service became a big success, of course, and was sold to eBay in 2005 for $2.6 billion.
LeWeb: Chad Hurley, CEO of YouTube
Chad Hurley spoke a few moments ago at LeWeb in Paris and told us that now YouTube streams over one billion videos a day! Although he did not want to disclose the revenues, he shared that Youtube’s top users (only a handful) earn about a million dollars each. Chad Hurley briefly talked about the YouTube Formula 1 project, a blog from where Formula1 events videos are available. Chad has another pet project, the clothing brand Alaska, and he plans to open two new stores, one will be located in San Jose, California.
Twitter: Firehose for All and “Chirp” Official Developer Conference
[LeWeb] Ryan Sarver, Director of Platform, Twitter made a few interesting announcements this morning: – 50,000 applications have been developed using the Twitter APIs – Firehose will be available to all in Q1 2010, allowing any developer to get access to the Twitter data stream. – A new website for developers, coming in a few weeks – For those using oAuth (an open protocol to allow secure API authorization in a simple and standard method from desktop and web application), the rate limit is now increased by 10x, there will be an API for browser-less applications and oAuth depreciation is coming in June 2010. – Chirp will be the official Twitter developer conference hosted by Twitter in San Francisco in 2010, more info at chirp.twitter.com
MySpace Suite of API’s Leveraging Real-time Updates
[LeWeb] Today, Mike Jones, Chief Operating Officer at MySpace, spoke at LeWeb to announce the new suite of open API’s that include: (more…)
Cedexis at Club Melcion
This morning we are at Club Melcion in Paris with the Traveling Geeks. We are meeting with Julien Coulon, Cedexis co-founder and General Manager. The company is an early stage startup and does not have a website yet.
Cedexis provides a collective intelligence platform that enables next-generation traffic management strategies. It measures the best performances provided by different CDN providers and will select the best one for internet services providers. Changes in performances vary by the minute; Cedexis monitors them in real time and switch to the best performing CDN instantly. Cedexis is especially critical for video streaming websites willing to deliver the best quality. According to Julien Coulon, Cedexis co-founder and GM, the services can increase the performance by up to 70%. The company gives feedback to CDN providersas well, allowing them to increase their performances; Cedexis aims to become a certification service. Conviva in the USA provides a similar service. The pricing is a share of the cost reduction Cedexis is enabling. The developers are mostly Americans, based in various part of the world. (more…)
Traveling Geeks At La Cantine with Cap Digital
We were at La Cantine, an incubator in the heart of Paris managed by Silicon Sentier. There, Cap Digital, a business cluster supporting startups and research projects in the digital content field, presented us their portfolio of technologies. See below the list of startups, we’ll add link to the company logos as we post about them: Bearstech, Feedbooks, XWiki, TerraNumerica, MXP4, Green Watch
Musicovery, presented by Cap Digital
[Traveling Geeks] Musicovery is an interactive music discovery online service, with a cool visual interface. It lets people find songs using a 2 dimension “mood graph” based on a famous psychology model (Russell Circumplex). On one dimension it is a variation from calm to energetic, and on the other one, it is negative sentiment to positive sentiment. The mood specifications are then translated into music characteristics such as tempo, orchestral power and so on, and this categorization is done by humans. Musicovery has 1 million monthly unique visitors with 600,000 registered members, 15% of the audience comes from the US (#1).
MXP4 Presented by Cap Digital
[Traveling Geeks] MXP4 is a new interactive audio format that lets people to remix on the fly different song versions. The company has developed a suite of creative tools for artists and producers to deliver a new interactive listening, premium and personalized playback experiences to listeners. Check out the video in the full post.
Pearltrees: Visual Collaborative Web Browsing Interface
I am with the Traveling Geeks at Pearltrees’ headquarter in Paris, I already published about Pearltrees a few months ago when it was in pre- alpha, but the public beta will launch in two days at LeWeb.
Pearltrees is a visual collaborative web browsing interface: users browse the internet visually using “Pearls” that represent websites and, by connecting them, they create a network of interest, I call it the “interest graph”. The social networking component, allows users to follow each other and use other people pearls to build their “interest graph”, they can collaborate to create a common tree with pearls shared among many people.
With the Pearltrees-Twitter sync feature users automatically build pearls by tweeting urls on Twitter, and automatically tweet urls by creating pearls in Pearltrees, it will launch in two days.