Archive for 'People'
Leweb 2009 – Gurus and illustrious speakers
Let’s talk a bit about these “TED moments” from Leweb, when speakers really shake the audience and create a strong emotional connection. In most cases, it was with substance. There were at least 4 to 5 such occasions at this year’s Leweb.
It’s always amazing to watch the differences of communication styles between speakers. Corporate speakers tend to care about every word they say, keep a stable voice, and they avoid to hurt anybody as if their legal department was hiding behind the black stage curtain. Some were even reading their speeches, huh oh. On the contrary, good speakers move, shake hands, speak loud, use common sense, and they make a hit. Could you have both? I wish Corporation could. In the long run, they’ll have to. Otherwise, fireside chats with Loic were fine.
So, let’s look at the main session speakers in a decreasing impact order: (more…)
Paris Diary: LeWeb Roundup – Vacuous Social Media Messages; LeWeb A Pay-To- Present Platform; and YouTube Millionaires…
(LeWeb conference floor – photo by David Spark.)
The beauty of the blogging approach to news is that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. If someone has written up a great story, you can simply point to it instead of trying to recreate it.
At LeWeb I was part of the Traveling Geeks group, and the group was producing a lot of great content. Here is a selection: (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.
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…)
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…)
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: Q & A with Twitter, Square creator Jack Dorsey
Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter who just launched a new payments startup called Square, is on-stage at the Le Web conference in Paris today. I’m live-blogging as we go:
Loic Le Meur: How did you get the idea for Twitter?
Jack Dorsey: It took a long, long time. When I turned 15 years old, I became fascinated by how cities work. I became obsessed with maps. I taught myself to program to put a map on the screen. I taught myself how to put a map on the screen, and put dots on the map. But they had no meaning whatsoever.
So I found taxis and public databases to provide meaning for the dots. But more importantly, I had this very important picture of what was happening in Manhattan from St. Louis. But what was missing were the citizens.
So I built something in 2000, but no one was using it. And in 2006, I was working at Odeo — it was a Podcasting company with Ev and Biz. We were looking at SMS and how to fit podcasting in group communication. The idea for Twitter came up again, and we had two weeks to build it. So we did. (more…)
