Archive for People from France

What can you do with a scannable and identifiable model of Paris?

by on December 8, 2009 at 1:45 am

At Silicon Sentier, a startup collective in Paris, I interviewed Maurice Benayoun, Artistic Director of CiTu a research lab for artistic projects. One such project, Terra Numerica, is an easily digestible and programmable scan and index of the city of Paris for which others can use the data to develop applications. City planning and management examples include:

  • Walk through Paris virtually like you would in the real world.
  • Paris had a flood in 1910 and it’s feared that it’s going to happen again within the next ten years. Simulate the flood and see what the effects of such a disaster would have on the city.
  • Virtually raise and lower buildings. See what views would be like.
  • Since the database knows where all the cameras are all over the city, you can play a game where you run through the city avoiding security cameras. I asked Benayoun, “Couldn’t this tool be used by criminals?” Watch the video for his response.

(more…)

Traveling Geeks in Paris Kick Off

by on December 6, 2009 at 6:19 pm

Traveling Geeks in Paris Kick Off

The Traveling Geeks (who’s in?) arrived in Paris today and gathered in a cozy small restaurant in Le Marais to get their first demo from Mobile Globe, a low cost international mobile calls provider. (more…)

Ubergizmo is Going to Paris with the Traveling Geeks

by on December 4, 2009 at 1:58 am
Ubergizmo is Going to Paris with the Traveling Geeks

I (Eliane) landed in Paris yesterday, and I will be attending LeWeb next week as part of the “Traveling Geeks“, a group of tech bloggers and entrepreneurs, coming from the USA (mostly from the Silicon Valley), South Africa and Europe.

I have worked quite a lot to put this blogger tour together with Renee Blodgett, Traveling Geeks co-founder , Phil Jeudy, co-organizer, and Sky Schuyler, CTO. The Traveling Geeks include:  Beth Blecherman, Renee Blodgett, Matthew Buckland, Amanda Coolong, Kim-Mai Cutler, Cyrille de Lasteyrie, Olivier Ezratty, Eliane Fiolet, Tom Foremski, Phil Jeudy, Frederic Lardinois, Sky Schuyler, Robert Scoble, Rodrigo Sepulveda Schulz, David Spark, Ewan Spence, Jerome Tranié, and Robin Wauters. (more…)

Building out infrastructure for a Traveling Geeks tour

by on December 3, 2009 at 10:12 am

Traveling Geeks 2009 FranceThe Traveling Geeks are at it again. This time the destination is Paris for LeWeb and some other tech meetings.

Organizing a tour for 15 geeks was a nightmarish task for TG Co-Founder Renee Blodgett, who worked for weeks to put this one together – much shorter lead time than for previous tours. And her co-organizers Eliane Fiolet and Phil Jeudy, plus two web developers, did a heroic job.

The online developers were tasked with creating the new web site, but I came in for the last few weeks to preside over one of my (current) specialties –  ensuring that we can mash information together in real time. Here’s what it required and what I learned:

{Eliane’s photo-mosaic of the geeks – at left.Traveling Geeks 2009 France}

This trip is largely a different set of geeks than for the UK, with only Renee Blodgett, Tom Foremski, Robert Scoble and myself overlapping from the summer UK visit.

The issues: 1) mashup of geek blog posts; 2) Flickr photos; 3) conferencing.

Pickup geek’s writing from their own blogs: The biggest issue is to create a central web site that incorporates information from all of the geeks while they’re on the road. You can’t ask busy people to write up duplicate posts for a central blog — they’re busy writing for their own blogs. So the answer is to syndicate their blog posts — pick up posts from their blogs, copy them to tg.planetlink.com and insert them there, with a minimum of fuss. Ideally this is a 100% automated process. Well, surprisingly, this still is a very hand-built kind of process, although once you’re done, it can run 100% automatically. Underneath everything the site is built on WordPress, which supports blogging as well as more “static” pages. feedwordpressThere’s a neat WordPress plug-in called FeedWordPress[1] that lets the blog read RSS feeds from each geek blog and copy the relevant posts over to the TG blog for republication. But things have gotten more complex since the geeks visited London… now we need to not only bring in blog posts, but we need to deal with Twitter streams, Twitter hashtags, Flickr photos and YouTube channels. Our “bloggers” are no longer simply bloggers.

pipesMash multiple feeds together: OK, so some of our bloggers have several places where they interact online. The trick is that most of these now present/expose RSS feeds, and you can read and manipulate data from those feeds to create a single mashed feed that contains only the information that you want to use. Yeah, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, all present RSS feeds that let you get at your photo-stream, your video-stream, and your tweet-stream. The trick here is to use Yahoo Pipes[2] to mash them together. Pipes will read multiple blogs’ RSS feeds, check to see if there are blog entries in a particular category, and then mash only those articles into a new RSS feed that Yahoo Pipes creates. The system is so flexible that not only can it recognize categories, but it can search through the text of a blog entry or any of the other characteristics that typically appear in an RSS feed. If one of our geeks has, for instance, three feeds, Pipes can filter each feed according to different criteria, and then can merge them together into a single feed, with things interleaved chronologically, that I can have FeedWordPress read and digest. (FeedWordPress can’t do this mashing of multiple feeds…)

Mashing the geeks’ photos: On the UK trip we used a couple of tools to help manage photos. One of those was MobyPicture, which lets you upload a photo once and have it copied to your accounts on multiple online photo sites. It’s particularly useful for mobile phone users, and there’s also an iPhone app, which I find very handy. Though I do love Moby, on this trip we didn’t need this kind of multiple uploading, so we gave all of the geeks access to a Flickr group Traveling Geeks, making the membership “Invitation only” but the viewing “Public.” They’ll upload to their personal accounts, mark the photos for the group, and we use the flickrSliDR slideshow maker to then include all photos, even the most recent, in a slideshow.

Zorap: This hot media-sharing space provides video, audio (mp3), photo and other media sharing within a common space (a room). The tech is rather demanding, so it’s not for the faint-of-heart and you’d better have a fast computer, but when it works it is marvelous. Multi-way (not just two-way like Skype) video conferencing is coming of age.

We are counting on broadly-available wi-fi support at most of the venues in Paris. Orange is supplying us with 3G connectivity to fill in when we can’t find wi-fi. Over the last two days (on my way to Europe) I have used a 3G iPhone tethered to my MacBook while on the California Zephyr (rail in the US) for 5 hours, and wi-fi on American Airlines (excellent bandwidth) within the US. So more and more I’m becoming accustomed to haveing a connection wherever I go.


[1] FeedWordPress main site (with info and download). The developer could use some donations – I donated – so if you like and use this plug-in, please donate.

[2] Yeah, I’ve used Yahoo Pipes for some time now.

[3] Yahoo Pipes has a problem with Typepad-generated “categories” that took me some hours to puzzle out. Typepad “categories” have an extra layer that appears with the XML of an RSS feed that makes filtering impossible if a post has more than one category. Rather than create a whole inscrutable article about it, let me point out that a solution has been developed, which consists of breaking the categories out into a list and then processing the elements of that list rather than trying (unsuccessfully) to parse the malformed feed. I’ll have to write an article on this later.

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Social Media Hour #34: Shredding Conventions and LeWeb 2009

by on December 2, 2009 at 12:19 am

What do Beethoven, Geeks and Paris have in common? All three were topics of discussion on this episode of Social Media Hour. Cathy starts the show with The Great Kat, a classically trained musician who’s shredding stereotypes, and music. Then it’s all croissants and crepes as the discussion turns to the upcoming LeWeb conference in Paris, yes Paris France. First up, Eliane Fiolet and Renee Blodgett of The Traveling Geeks, a group of which Cathy is an original member, talk about their plans and then it’s Chris Heuer and Dana Oshiro of ReadWriteWeb to talk about La Social Media Club House. So don your berets, pour a glass of Bordeaux and take a listen!

The Show:

Want to know more about the guests … then read on…

Traveling Geeks on Blog Talk Radio This Morning (THANK YOU team)

by on December 1, 2009 at 1:59 pm

Blog Talk Radio

This morning, co-organizer Eliane Fiolet and I were interviewed on this morning’s Blog Talk Radio’s Social Media Hour about the upcoming Traveling Geeks to France tour next week.

We are thrilled to have a top notch group of organizations and sponsors who will team up with us for this tour. More details to follow on who they are and what they do in the coming few days.

Kudos and a huge thank you to co-organizers Eliane Fiolet and Phil Jeudy as well as to Sky Schuyler, Vladimir Drndarski and Scott Henady for their technical prowess, creative mashups, plugins and workarounds when we needed them most and for without all of their help, the trip wouldn’t be a success.

Social Media Hour

Les Geeks de travel @ le web

by on December 1, 2009 at 12:13 pm

I’m off to Paris this weekend to attend Le Web (agenda here). I also need to come clean about something: I’m part of a top secret, Illuminati-type organisation known as the Traveling Geeks. The TGs know everything about everything. They knew you were going to read this post, and have also just taken your DNA […]

Click on headline link to visit matthewbuckland.com for full article

I used to just be a geek, but now I’m a Traveling Geek

by on November 29, 2009 at 5:44 pm

Just a short post to let you know that next week I’ll be reporting from LeWeb in Paris with the Traveling Geeks. This is a group formed by Renee Blodgett where more than a dozen tech bloggers attend tech functions and report on the event. Previous Traveling Geeks trips have gone to London, Israel, and South Africa.

For the end of ‘09, the Traveling Geeks’ Paris team includes Eliane Fiolet, Tom Foremski, Robin Wauters, Kim-Mai Cutler, Frederic Lardinois, Matt Buckland, Sky Schuyler, Jerome Tranie, Ewan Spence, Olivier Ezratty, Cyrille de Lasteyrie, Renee Blodgett, Amanda Coolong, Beth Blecherman, and Phil Jeudy. (more…)

Traveling Geeks Head to Paris

by on November 23, 2009 at 10:50 am

Traveling geeks to franceTraveling Geeks is heading to Paris to participate in a series of meet-ups, briefings, demos and activities in and around LeWeb, the renown web and Internet conference in Europe.

The new site is live, and there’s now a Facebook fan page, so please sign up and follow along for an interesting ride over the next few weeks and beyond.

Geeks faces The France team includes: Eliane Fiolet, Tom Foremski, Robin Wauters, Kim-Mai Cutler, David Spark, Frederic Lardinois, Matt Buckland, Sky Schuyler, Jerome Tranie, Ewan Spence, Olivier Ezratty, Cyrille de Lasteyrie, Renee Blodgett, Amanda Coolong, Beth Blecherman, and Phil Jeudy.

Our goal is to collaborate with innovators and
influencers, and then share that knowledge and insight to a collective
global audience through blogging, video, social media tools,
traditional media and meet-ups.

More as we get closer to the tour.

Note: Banner to the right created by Eliane.

Alaska HDTV: Making Money from Podcasting

by on September 23, 2009 at 4:55 pm

(This interview is part of David Spark’s (@dspark) series “Making Money from Podcasting” (read summary “9 Successful Techniques for Making Money from Podcasting”) where he interviews podcasters who are actually generating revenue from their podcasts. There are many techniques, and here’s one person’s tale of how he’s making money from podcasting.)

Kevin Kastner, co-producer of Alaska HDTV

Kevin Kastner, co-producer of Alaska HDTV

Get your own sponsors

Kevin Kastner is the co-producer of the video podcast, Alaska HDTV. He produces the show with Scott Sloan, the original founder of Alaska Podcast (the original name of Alaska HDTV). While in the Alaska Podcast incarnation, Sloan monetized the production through a relationship via the podcast network Mevio (previously known as PodShow and started by legendary MTV VJ Adam Curry – read/watch my interview with Adam Curry). At the time, he was making some ad deals with Mevio but he didn’t have much say and control about the deal. Sloan and Kastner really didn’t understand what the terms of the deals were. They simply received a check in the mail for a few hundred dollars. It wasn’t clear what arrangement Mevio had made with the advertiser and what their cut was, said Kastner.

Interview (Time: 17:13)

Download mp3

Mevio’s offers started getting weaker. Some deals required Kastner and Sloan to run advertisements for free with a referral code and if the advertiser closed a client, Kastner and Sloan would get paid out a referral fee. The relationship with Mevio was starting to sour. The poor offers, the lack of transparency in the deals, and the multi-year commitments caused the two of them to say themselves, we can do better on our own.

Alaska HDTVAs Kastner and Sloan set out to get their own sponsors, they quickly determined that they wanted to go after the travel and transportation industry. They picked companies and went direct to the PR and marketing departments within those organizations. The first company they targeted was Alaska Airlines. Not only did they go after employees within the company, but they also went after their ad agencies. The idea was to corner them at all angles so there would be no way they could avoid being seen, said Kastner. While they didn’t get Alaska Airlines, they did get a partner of Alaska Airlines, Bank of America, issuers of Alaska Airlines’ credit cards. Bank of America had a budget and some money to spend before the end of the quarter. It was really good timing for Alaska HDTV.

In the early days of managing their own ads, like with Bank of America, Kastner and Sloan baked advertisements into Alaska HDTV with a product placement and a pre-roll. Kastner said he avoided the CPM equation at all costs. He uses a flat rate sponsorships, traditionally three months. It’s not hard to calculate Alaska HDTV’s CPMs (between $30-$50) as Kastner gives sponsors full stat reports on viewership. While he was so eager and creative about advertising from the onset, the market has devolved, said Kastner. What they initially thought was advanced programming to entice advertisers (e.g. baking pre-rolls into shows, in-show product placements) turned out to be too confusing. Advertisers just want inserted pre-rolls where they completely control the creative. So for now, because that’s what advertisers want, that’s what Alaska HDTV sells.

Kevin Kastner, Alaska HDTV

Kastner says now that he’s made the full time switch to getting their own sponsors, they’ve increased revenue 200-300 percent. But that’s come at a real cost. It’s no longer a part time gig. Alaska HDTV is his sole source of revenue and the time he’s put into it has gone up more than ten-fold. They do seek other revenue opportunities through hired gun video production and speaking engagements.

Listen to the interview as Kastner tells the tale of his personal struggle seeking sponsors and offers some great experiential advice to others looking to head down the same path as him.

More episodes of “Making Money from Podcasting”

  • Never Not Funny (Technique: “Partial show for free – full show paid”)
  • Personal Life Media (Technique: “Build your own media network of programming and sell advertising against it”)
  • Pregtastic (Technique: “Get your own sponsors”)
  • Elsie’s Yoga Class (Technique: “Sell an iPhone application along with your podcast”)
  • Mac OS Ken (Technique: “Give away five shows for free, make them pay for the sixth”)
  • Duct Tape Marketing (Technique: “Build your brand to sell your services”)
  • ScreenCastsOnline (Technique: “Give away every other episode. Make them pay for the rest.”)
  • Izzy Video (Technique: “Give away every other episode. Make them pay for the rest.”)
  • Slate Gabfests (Technique: “Integrating sponsorship with the show’s editorial”)
  • Wizzard Media (Technique: “Got audience? We’ll get you sponsors. Or, get sponsors on your own and we’ll insert the ads” PLUS “Sell an iPhone application along with your podcast”)
  • Premiumcast.com (Technique: “Build an audience and sell premium podcasts”)
  • Manager Tools (Technique: “Build your brand to sell your services”)
  • ESPN (”Build your own media network of programming and sell advertising against it”)
  • Mevio (Technique: “Motivate your audience”)