Archive for 'Events'
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.
Traveling Geeks meet French Incubators at Paris Development Agency
DAY TWO
Today the Traveling Geeks saw presentations from 11 interesting startups at French incubator, the Paris Development Agency. Among them was Stribe, a company TechZulu originally interviewed at the TechCrunch50 conference earlier this year. Stribe offers a plug and play service for instantly creating a social network on any Web site. There will be more news on this front during LeWeb.
The other promising startups included: (more…)
How Dell handles customer service and sales through social media
At the Le Web conference in Paris, I spoke with Richard Binhammer, better known as @RichardATDell on Twitter. Three years ago Richard, who was and still is working in public affairs, was told by his boss to start getting engaged in blogger relations. It appears that Binhammer’s move into social media was one of the many responses to the 2005 Dell Hell outburst initiated by social media consultant Jeff Jarvis, who wrote an open letter to Dell complaining about Dell’s customer service. At the time, Dell’s response was, “We don’t respond to bloggers.”
Day 1: A mixed bag @leweb
Le Web. Day one. It started off slowly, but then got better. There was nothing terribly controversial or any ground-breaking announcements. The Twitter and Facebook talks were mainly marked with meaningless platitudes like “our success depends on your success” or there’s a “shift is happening from the static web to the social web”: too much PR and not enough heart.
Later in the afternoon, it got a bit better: Chris Pirillo of Lockergnome delivered a stirring, original and passionate presentation on “community” — and YouTube CEO and founder, Chad Hurley, gave the conference some down-to-earth and interesting insights. (more…)
TechZulu heads to Paris with the Traveling Geeks!
It’s official! TechZulu has joined the Traveling Geeks tour to Paris, France. We’re meeting with everyone from startups to serial entrepreneurs and established tech companies to compare notes on the innovation happening stateside and abroad. As part of the tour, we will also be attending LeWeb, so stay tuned for all the news coming out of the conference.
Where can you find us?
Well, in PARIS, of course (haven’t you been paying attention?) 😉
If you’d like to follow the Traveling Geeks on our many adventures, here are some ways to stay in touch:
- Here on TechZulu
- The official Traveling Geeks site
- Search the Twitter hashtags: #TG09 #TravelingGeeks
- Join our Facebook Fan Page
- Check out our tour photos
Paris Diary: The Joie de Vivre of French Entrepreneurs…
I’m bowled over by the French startups and entrepreneurs I’ve been meeting the past two days. Lots of passion, energy, smarts, and great ideas.
I’m totally surprised because I had a totally different expectation. France has a reputation for bureaucracy ( a French word), for strikes, (the taxi drivers were on strike on Tuesday), and for archaic attitudes such as a strong belief in a maintaining a work/life balance, six-week vacations, a 35-hour week, and making it near impossible to fire a worker (you will receive as much as three years full salary if you are fired).
It seems amazing that France’s economy hasn’t shattered into pieces by now, and the country hasn’t fallen below the waves of the ocean as a modern day Atlantis.
Instead, France has the highest labor productivity levels of all the G8 nations. And the quality of its entrepreneurs (another French word) is excellent.
I will be writing in more detail about some of the companies and people I’ve been meeting, later this week. And I’ll be diving into why there is such a great current of innovation happening in France.
The French model might even become a template for other countries. That’s because people from other countries are coming to France to set up their startups. Other countries risk a brain drain if they don’t act to create a similar environment.
I’ll let you know tomorrow about some of the reasons why France is enjoying an upswing its startup communities. I think you will be as surprised as I was.
[I’m in Paris all this week as part of the Traveling Geeks, a collection of journalists, bloggers, and PR people meeting with French startups and also attending LeWeb, France’s premier Web 2.0 developer and business conference.]
Traveling Geeks meet 11 Paris startups
On day 2, we arrived at the Paris Developpement Incubateurs an incubator of French tech start-ups. The Travelling Geeks, now with one added Robert Scoble, saw a rapid-fire set of 11 presentations from some very interesting companies and people:
Int13: is a French developer of next-generation games for Smartphones (iPhone, Windows Mobile, Symbian S60, Linux…). They are experimenting with mobile augmented reality games.
CityZeum: provide travel guides for the web and mobile phones, mixing UGC, with expert content and content from journalists.
Scan & Target is a 1-million-euro-funded startup, providing solutions around real-time text mining for web and mobile content (email, SMS, IM, blogs, forums, Twitter).
Rue 89 is a pureplay news website, something between Slate.com and HuffingtonPost. They focus on creating news in a collaborative way via a mixture of journalists, experts and users.
Gostai: Focuses on building a common software platform for Robots, almost like a universal Robot operating system. These guys are way ahead of most mortals.
Zoomorama cares about the “art of information” and is focused on creating a new visual way of surfing the internet and creating presentations. Not too different from innovative Hungarian presentation company, Prezi. Check out more here
Stribe A b2b, Techcrunch50 canditate that’s a plug and play service, allowing a site to instantly create a social network on any website. Sounds quite similar to something else I’m doing actually…
Path Motion. A web 2.0 recruitment play that offers users “friendly questions” to identify their ideal career path, also providing jobs that match them.
MLstate think that web development is “broken” and they want to “rethink web development for the 21th century”. They’re developing One Pot Applications (OPA), a common platform enabling easy development of SaaS web applications.
Teacheo: Is an online tutoring community with virtual classrooms. They make money by linking tutors and students. Simple, but effective. They use 3D modelling to demo items between students and tutors and have good video chat.
Stupeflix: A web service that turns your pictures, videos, and text into professional videos on the fly, just like that!
tags: Paris startups, Traveling Geeks
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The Real-Time Web – Indeed!
Unbelievable how much time it takes to keep a “live” blog functioning properly when you’re working with new software.
It’s after 1:00am and I’ve just finished wrestling with the day’s blog entries. Reformatting them to make them look better, and making sure that the feeds of more than a dozen geeks are coming in and being handled properly. (And here and there a little bit of editorial work.)
I’m afraid this is what is known as the Real-time web. [See LeWeb]Yahoo Pipes still saves me a zillion hours almost every day. I’m still monitoring 18 geek blogs in close-to-real-time and when a post is written that falls within certain limits, it has to be published. And it has to be published as close to real-time as possible. I have to review about half of these feeds and then approve the posts, but most are on “automatic” and the post is published on Traveling Geeks right away.
Yahoo Pipes is used in two ways in this environment:
First, for some of the geeks it monitors two or three blogs and mashes them together into a single feed, which is then examined, filtered, and goes to Traveling Geeks for possible publication.
Second, in some cases it takes the output of a Typepad blog (which produces a different type of feed/output) and massages it so it can be properly evaluated and processed by the WordPress software which lies under Traveling Geeks.
Without it, I would have been up until after 1:00am tonight.
Paris Diary: The International Geek Brotherhood…
[I’m in Paris all this week as part of the Traveling Geeks, a collection of journalists, bloggers, and PR people meeting with French startups and also attending LeWeb, France’s premier Web 2.0 developer and business conference.]
I took the EuroStar train from London on Sunday afternoon and in less than 3 hours I was in the middle of Paris. That trip always amazes me and it is so much nicer, (and greener) than flying.
When I arrived it was raining off and on but that didn’t matter because I was back in Paris after a ten year break.
I had to find my hotel, about a couple of miles from my terminus at Gare Du Nord but being short on cash I decided to walk in roughly the right direction, trundling my wheeled travel bag across cobble stone streets, and relishing being in one of the great cities of the world. (more…)
The Traveling Geeks land at Le Web
Go to dinner with the geeks and you’ll get lots of photos taken
Let me set the scene for you. More than a dozen geeks have traveled to Paris for a weeklong tech odyssey culminating with coverage from France’s premier Web 2.0 conference, Le Web. I’m having a hard time trying to determine what the difference is between “Le Web” and “The Web,” but as far as I can tell, it’s soft cheese. (more…)
