Traveling Geeks

Leweb 2009 – Startups

This is my late and last post covering Leweb 2009. Like every other year (2006, 2007,2008), I will make a roundup of the presenting startups in the conference.

This year, startups didn’t have to pay to present, like in previous years. As a result, the competition seemed opened to more early stage companies and it did show. Only two had already got some VC funding and less than half had significant business angel back-up. There were fewer startups presenting: 16 instead of 30 last year. (more…)

Leweb 2009 – The Scorecard

It’s been a couple days now since Leweb 2009 ended. And I’m quite far from the “Real time web” with that report of the event, which as usual, will be split in a several posts.

This year’s edition was definitively a hit. The most important success factors of such an event are: do we enjoy these so-called “TED moments”, when speakers build an emotional connection with the audience, then, do we meet the right people there and at last, are the logistics doing well.

In the Leweb historical scorecard that I assembled below, it looks like the mix of this year’s edition has been the best so far. I just missed the first “Les blogs” in this series of events but it was rather small with only a few hundred attendees. And I don’t necessary recollect well the best “TED moments” from the 2007 and before editions. The number of attendees is an estimate. If it’s wrong, I will correct it. (more…)

Leweb 2009 – Sponsor speakers

There were many sponsor speakers at Leweb. Although they seemed to be everywhere in the agenda, there were hopefully more non-sponsor speakers!

Twitter was a preeminent company at Leweb since it was not only a sponsor but it had its CEO and founder Jack Dorsey talking. And it made a lot of sense since Twitter is a huge part of the real time web phenomenon. Jack spent also significant time in Paris, going to the City Hall for the “.paris” reception, meeting with Queen Rania, talking to @nk_m, etc. (more…)

My first batch of Companies at Travelling Geeks

Here are some of the companies from the first full day of my recent time with the Travelling Geeks project in Paris. I’m not going to write about all the companies that I met during the trip, just the ones that caught my eye and made me want to know a bit more for various reasons, both good and bad. (more…)

With the Traveling Geeks @ Orange

This is the last part of my report of the Traveling Geeks tour in Paris before Leweb.

We met with Orange to have a glimpse of all the solutions they provide to their consumer customers: IPTV, mobile solutions, web solutions, tablets, etc. It took place in the Orange Lab situated at Chatillon, in the southern Paris suburb.

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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 @ Cedexis and Parrot

We are near the end of my report of the Traveling Geeks in Paris before Leweb. One startup and one mid-sized company.

Cedexis @ Club Melcion

We met Julien Coulon, the founder of Cedexis, a former business developer at Akamai.

The company provides a Content Delivery Networks optimizing service, identifying the ones with the best performance to optimize the traffic and quality of service of your web site. It provides both analytic tools to identify the best services and provide reports to both web sites and CDN services, and an automatic switching engine to select the right ones at each and every moment. CDN performance can always change and is not predictable, thus the need for a real time optimization solution. (more…)

With the Traveling Geeks @ Pearltrees

The Traveling Geeks met with Patrice Lamothe from Pearltrees (@pearltrees) for nearly two hours at the beginning of the Traveling Geeks tour.

This guy is running the Internet startup buzz playbook like perfect, at least for a French startup: he did a tour in the Silicon Valley visiting local influencers and bloggers, sponsored the Traveling Geeks and Leweb, talking at Leweb in plenary session (twice…), creating plug-ins, buttons, that can be placed everywhere on social sites, his site is in English, and so on. As a result, he got heck of a good visibility. And we were very kindly welcomed in the company which looks like an US startup: lots of coffee and… US sized patisserie. (more…)

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.

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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.

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