Archive for Enterprise from France

Traveling Geeks meet French Incubators at Paris Development Agency

by on December 9, 2009 at 9:12 am

Traveling Geeks

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…)

Marissa Mayer Talks About Wave, Music Search and the Future of News

by on December 9, 2009 at 8:19 am

leweb_dec09a.jpgIn an interview with TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington at LeWeb today, Google’s Marissa Mayer discussed some of the new product that Google announced over the last year, including the recent integration of real-time news streams into the default search pages, Google Music Search and Google Wave. Talking about the future of search, Mayer expects that people will soon do searches by talking to their phones, or through services like the newly announced Google Goggles.

Sponsor (more…)

Le Web: Chris Pirillo’s pillars of community

by on December 9, 2009 at 6:29 am

Chris Pirillo, founder of Lockergnome, is a philosophical and passionate person. He’s a humble guy and a funny, engaging speaker. He’s someone who loves technology, community and gadgets — and is a great speaker. At Le Web he gave us some original thoughts about “community”. It’s a bit fluffy (and if you’re a cynic, you may say “vacuous”), but if you think about every one of these points below carefully, there’s quite a bit of insight and deeper truth to them. It makes a difference from the many business-oriented slides we see that tend to be literal and practical.

So, what is the essence of community? Community…

…lives inside us. Where I go, community goes. We create it based on our preferences, like dislikes and the people we link up with.

…is becoming increasingly distributed, as we distribute our ideas and thoughts across social networks.

…requires tools that can’t be built (so don’t try), ie if its us, we can’t scale ourselves.

…is a commodity, but people aren’t. It’s easy to set up a website or blog, but the people and voices behind it are what makes it unique, special.

…cannot be controlled, but can be “guided”.

…is no longer defined by physical boundaries. You probably have more in common with a geek living on another continent than your next door neighbour.

…grows its own leaders. the best leaders come organically out of a community, and is not an appointed one. It’s crucial that communities grow it’s own leaders for credibility and respect reasons.
…is the antithesis of ego. Community is myself and everyone else, not just me or my Twitter stream.
… is everywhere, inside you. It’s what you share, your passions — and it’s this that will spell success. tags: Chris Pirillo, community, lockergnome, pillars of community

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Day 1: A mixed bag @leweb

by on December 9, 2009 at 5:12 am

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…)

The Green Watch: Crowdsourcing Air Quality Measurements

by on December 8, 2009 at 2:51 pm

green_watch_logo_dec09.jpgYesterday, during a meeting with a number of startups in Paris, we met up with the team behind the Green Watch project. Just like Google collects data from cell phones with GPS chips to aggregate real-time traffic information, this watch measures ozone levels and noise pollution. The watch connects wirelessly to the wearer’s mobile phone and sends updates to Citypulse, an open platform for receiving and storing environmental data. The Green Watch is currently only a prototype and not available for sale.

Sponsor (more…)

Traveling Geeks meet 11 Paris startups

by on December 8, 2009 at 5:34 am

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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Traveling Geeks in Paris: Day 1 video report

by on December 8, 2009 at 4:54 am

Here’s my day one report for the Traveling Geeks trip in Paris, a week long tech tour that culminates with two days at the Web 2.0 conference Le Web. The whole group was fighting jet lag and minimal sleep, but we got to see lots of great new French tech and to listen to many entrepreneurs at the early stages of their products. Watch the report. Links to items mentioned can be seen below.

Related posts:

  1. What can you do with a scannable and identifiable model of Paris?
  2. I used to just be a geek, but now I’m a Traveling Geek
  3. The cool and not-so-cool of LeWeb

Cedexis at Club Melcion

by on December 8, 2009 at 2:47 am

Cedexis at Club MelcionThis 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

by on December 8, 2009 at 1:06 am

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

MXP4 Presented by Cap Digital

by on December 8, 2009 at 12:43 am

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.