Archive for 'France'
With the Traveling Geeks @ Paris Incubator
The Traveling Geeks visited one of the five incubators from Paris Development, a joint venture between the City of Paris and the Paris Chamber of Commerce.
Paris Development has been in place for 10 years and has two goals: have foreign companies settle in Paris and help local startups. All in all, they incubate 100 startups representing 600 folks. 200 work in the “rue des Haies” incubator we visited, one that is dedicated to digital medias. But the presenting startups came from all the incubators from Paris. Incubated companies pay for staying in the incubator, although it’s quite modest in comparison with normal commercial offices price. And it includes all services (network, phone, welcome desk, etc). They have a long waiting list of startups and welcome only 7% to 8% of the candidates. Companies stay in the incubator for a maximum 4 years. (more…)
With the Traveling Geeks @ La Cantine
This second part of my report from the Traveling Geeks tour in Paris is focused on the companies we visited during the first two days, Monday 7th and Tuesday 8th of December 2009. With startups with short presentations, startups with long meetings, then larger companies (Orange, Parrot).
I’ll start here with the startups we met at La Cantine. I realize I’ll need more posts for the rest of this two days visits. (more…)
With the Traveling Geeks in Paris
Dear reader, this is my first post in English. The reason is I participated recently to the Traveling Geeks tour in Paris and the rule of the game is to publish content that can be shared by its participants and within the Traveling Geeks web site. So, no other solution than English. Time to get really international!
In this first post, I’ll quickly go through the agenda of this tour and then talk a little bit about my fellow international Traveling Geeks bloggers. We’ve spent four days together, two in a local tour and two at Leweb. That was a good opportunity to get to know high-profile bloggers from other countries, not just the USA, and to share some views on digital innovation as well as on Leweb itself. I enjoyed a lot this experience. (more…)
A Chat with Gary Vaynerchuk #leweb #tg09
That said, what he’s talking about is the personal touch, the value of connecting with your audience and a large reason for his success. It’s not because he’s a master of wine above and beyond everyone else.
His success is because of his resilience, his determination, his ability to connect to the every day man – in their language and in a genuine way. he wears his immigrant status on his sleeve and as second and third generation Americans, we can still relate to that. Rags to riches and of course social media makes that reality more possible than ever. The second gold rush is in play.
[youtube 70K7CkwJOLQ]
A Travelling Geeks personal retrospective
During Blog World Expo this year, Renee Blodgett asked if I would be free for the few days before Le Web, as she would be planning “a little something” with her Travelling Geeks project. In essence it was asking if I would like to meet with some of the newer French start-ups in the city in a more intimate environment than Geraldine’s 2,300 attendee strong conference.
It sounded like fun to me, so I agreed.
Tumblr Goes Real Time
Starting today, the popular light blogging platform Tumblr will publish its users’ feeds in real time. Tumblr will use the increasingly popular PubSubHubbub format to announce updates. Tumblr’s real-time hub will be powered by Superfeedr. Thanks to today’s updates, Tumblr – which has close to 2.5 million users – will now be able to send out real-time alerts to any service that supports the PubSubHubbub format.
Au revoir et merci, Traveling Geeks
I’ve spent a wonderful week in Paris, attending the infamous Le Web conference put together by Loic Le Meur and his amazing wife Geraldine. But while the event kicked off only on Wednesday, I arrived in the French capital on Sunday noon, and my motivation wasn’t tourism.
I was cordially invited by the organizers of the Traveling Geeks tours, who bring together bloggers and industry pundits from all over the world to travel all over the globe looking for great stories from equally great tech startups and established companies, to join them in the days before Le Web.
World-brand-building mistakes France’s entrepreneurs make
On Tuesday I joined up with the Traveling Geeks (a band of journalists/bloggers/influentials who visit startups around the world, picture of them above in a Paris subway station) in Paris and we saw a ton of startups. Some of them, like Stribe, were very good. But overall they just didn’t measure up. In fact, they even got me to be rude to them, which caught everyone off guard. I’ve been thinking about why they got me so angry ever since, and that’s what this post is about.
First, if you meet with journalists, influentials, and bloggers who are coming from outside your country I assume you want to build a world brand. After all, if you only want to be big in France then why waste your time meeting with USA journalists? (more…)
How to sift through Twitter’s noise? MyTweetSense, FriendBinder give it a go
Now that there are plenty of apps for reading your entire Twitter stream, here comes the hard part. How do you build filters that automatically find the most interesting bits from a stream that can contain more than 100 tweets an hour?
Two apps I’ve taken a look at the Le Web conference in Paris are giving that a shot, taking very different approaches. (more…)
Le Web: Social networking tool Stribe takes top honors in startup competition
December 10, 2009 | Kim-Mai Cutler
Stribe, a tool that helps build a social network around sites, won the top prize at the Le Web start-up competition in Paris today.
The French startup is trying to tackle the difficult problem of building social communities around content on a page, and outside of a social network. It’s a line of code that you add to your site, which creates an overlay that users can log into. They can see the most active users visiting the page and the most popular links people are sharing. (more…)
