Archive for 'Events'
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.
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…)
The cool and not-so-cool of LeWeb
This week I traveled to Paris with a consortium of fellow bloggers, the Traveling Geeks. We’ve been meeting with tech companies and French entrepreneurs all week. The tour ended with attendance at LeWeb, a two day tech conference produced by tech entrepreneur and Seesmic founder, Loic Le Meur. Here’s my summary of the best and the worst of the event, plus I included some other stuff experienced from the Traveling Geeks tour and Paris in general. For a summary, make sure you watch my end of day show reports from LeWeb (day 1, day 2) and my other end of day report from the Traveling Geeks tour.
Cool – Accordions, Accordions, Accordions – There are plenty of street performers in Paris. Most of them are carrying accordions. On my first day I saw four sets of performers hop onto a train car, play a few tunes, and jump off. On one train a duo jumped on with an accordion and a stand up bass. My favorite was the karaoke accordionist that would also take a mic for a solo himself to sing “Just a Gigolo”. (more…)
Le Web 2009, Day 2: The good, the bad and the vacuous
For day two of Le Web, this Travelling Geek slinked off to one of the side rooms for the “deep discussion” sessions. There was the word “future” in quite a few of the session titles, which caught my attention. (more…)
Startups of Le Web 2009, Paris
The winner of the Le Web Startup competition was announced as Stribe — it’s a plug & play application that turns your site into a social network (not too dissimilar from the Hub actually). The runners up were CloudSplit and Mendeley.
The other startups that entered the competition included:
• CloudSplit
• FitnessKeeper
• FriendBinder
• Kukunu
• Mendeley
• Shutl
• Siteheart Inc
• Sokoz
• Sports Predictions
• Storific
• Stribe
• Superfeedr
• task.ly
• the hyper words company
• Wordy
• Yeasty Mobs
Potentially related posts
Paris Diary: Slow Start To LeWeb09; ‘Too Many Americans’; Chandeliers and Silicon Valley Exiles…
LeWeb ’09, France’s top web conference kicked off yesterday in a cavernous hall in a grey slab-like building out in the suburbs of Paris.
Initially, there were complaints about there being ‘too many Americans’ and that the quality of the panels was poor — too much fluff and self-promotion, and little substance.
But by the afternoon things improved a lot and there was a 180 degree turnaround in opinion – at least among the people I spoke with.
It’s true that there were lots of Americans. I seemed to be constantly bumping into familiar faces, people I see all the time, such as Jeremiah Owyang, Dave McClure, Cathy Brooks, Chris and Kristie Wells, Robert Scoble, Brian Solis, Gabe Rivera, Steve Gillmor, and many more.
[Please see: Silicon Valley Goes To Paris… Le Web ’09] (more…)
Le Web: Twitter releases data firehose to everyone, now has 50,000 apps
Twitter said it’s opening up its data stream of tweets to all developers, not just Bing and Google. Ryan Sarver, who is on the platform team at Twitter, said details will be hashed out later next year.
Sarver said Twitter’s business model will be to drive and split revenue with the ecosystem of developers that have built applications around it. (more…)
Le Web: Q&A with Google VP Marissa Mayer on the future of search
Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search and user experience is on-stage at the Le Web conference in Paris. I’m live-blogging as we go:
Michael Arrington asks about the search announcements earlier this week (namely Google Goggles, local search and real-time search). (more…)
Le Web day 1: End of day show report
Here’s my end of day show report for Le Web, the Web 2.0 conference in Paris. I’ve been in Paris for the week reporting with the Traveling Geeks (watch video of us on a train). Watch the video for a quick summary of the companies I saw, plus a quick story at the end about an outbreak Robert Scoble had at the expense of the French entrepreneurs.
[youtube 8SiaiECloR0]
Companies and links mentioned in the video: (more…)
