Archive for 'People'
Scoble, Newmark and Foremski talk about the Traveling Geeks trip in London
This is a re-post from Techcrunch Europe.
Robert Scoble, Craig Newmark and Tom Foremski discuss what they have learned so far on the Traveling Geeks tour in London and what differences they see between Silicon Valley and the London tech scene.
“Augmented Reality, GPS, RFID, things like this make the world a more beautiful place,” @IndySaha.
Indy Saha, Group Planning Director/Digital Strategy Director, TBWA/LONDON "The Disruption Agency"
“Why? Because I want to know the truth”: Mike Butcher
@Mike Butcher, uk.techcrunch.com and mbites.com
Skype’s Blogger-in-Chief & Robert Scoble Chat about Social Media
Below, I’m interviewing Robert Scoble and Skype’s blogger-in-chief Peter Parkes about how blogging has changed over the years and how Skype is using blogging and social media in Europe and the rest of the world.
The Guardian Dialogues
Last night, The Guardian featured three of our Traveling Geeks (Robert Scoble, Sarah Lacy, JD Lasica) on stage with British counterparts for a lively discussion on the demise of the newspaper as we know it and the emergence of Twitter and other less “professional” upstarts as seen by conventional media outlets.
This is a tired argument. Perhaps Sarah Lacy said it best in her wonderfully witty way, ” Maybe we should just shut down the newspapers now and avoid the ordeal of watching the slow death.” JD chimed in that it is like “Shooting dinosaurs in a barrel.” Robert, Sarah and JD each suggested that media companies must change to survive and perhaps incorporate social media, Twittering, and more democratic means of information gathering and distribution into their economic model. Basically, change or die was the message.
However, this topic is fairly narrow. While media journalists are clearly concerned about their own paychecks and pensions, this is much bigger than just whether the Guardian and other print media can survive (the moderator even had the Chutzpah to single out our own Craig Newmark and tongue-in-cheek accuse Craig of deliberately eliminating newspaper classifieds, which had been a honey pot for newspapers).
The Barbarians are at the Gates in every sector of the communications industry. Advertising agencies are being decimated by the Google model, Encyclopedias and paid resource media have been annihilated by Wikipedia, Network television conglomerates have been supplanted by Cable subscription channels and digital narrowcasting, and the movie studios are enraged by You Tube and other web sources to download feature films outside the movie theatres, on and on with the music industry and I-Tunes , etc.
In other words, the journalism industry is not unique in its economic viability being challenged. The Internet/digital media content delivery model is not just a hiccup, but a tectonic shift. Our Traveling Geeks are players and informed commentators in that shift.
We are here in Britain to both listen and engage with our counterparts. So far, it has been a great ride.
My Impression of UK and Euro Entrepreneurs from Today’s Seedcamp NESTA “Speed Dating” Adventure
We started off the day today with a fun event created by Reshma Sohoni and Alasdair Ball of SeedCamp. SeedCamp is an early stage fund that also provides exacting business support and grooming for UK and European start ups who are socially-oriented. Typical investments are up to 50 thousand Euros for about 10% of the business.
By the caliber of the entrepreneurs and the quality of the business ideas I witnessed today, Reshma and her team are making smart investments and providing wise and plished council for the entrepreneurs they back.
Every single one of the thirteen companies was, in my estimation, a great idea combined with a terrific leader or team. The most successful to date include Spotify, the European version of Rhapsody’s “all-you-can-eat for one monthly fee” celestial jukebox; Huddle, which bills itself as the collaboration tool for the MySpace generation (I will do a separate post on Huddle for you as I know you will want to try it) and Moo.com, the on-demand printing company with a smart solution for mass-customized printed products like business cards, stickers and “moo cards” which are their own smaller, clever creation that’s become a standard with the social set.
Other companies that stood out for me were SkimLinks not only because Alicia Navarro was the only female CEO, but also because she’s in a very hot category – website monetization infrastructure. More on SkimLinks arresting start up story and how it works in a very smart way in another post.
The one person with whom I didn’t get to meet but still was very impressed with their initial presentation was Stupeflix. Perhaps the name doesn’t translate well in the US – why would someone want to start the beginning of their company name with a word that sounds like stupid? Nonetheless, this is beyond a cute video creation tool like Animoto, Stupeflix allows you to use XML to slightly change the assets within any video to create multiple unique versions of a video. Best explained by example, they showed a weather video where the location and temperature were automatically changed for various locations on the fly. You could master one video and then have unlimited versions automatically customized by city.
Andraz Tori of Zemanta gave me a quick and helpful demo of his blog writing suggestion tool. This authoring suggestion tool provides related links, images, related stories and more which make every blog post have more robust content and links. I’ve been using it so far this week and can tell you I would not give this tool up now that I’ve used it.
Another tool I have not yet tried but know will be addictive is UberVu. This is one of a new breed of social meta tools, like MobyPicture (recent post about MobyPicture) that aggregates comments from across one’s social sites into a single interface where you can see comments from your followers to your posts, all threaded together in a single application. You can reply to those threads within UberVu and it will place your replies back out in context without requiring you to do so much webpage traveling. UberVu’s idea of providing reporting for rollup data will significantly help the social media managers and social listening companies keep track of all their conversations in a single UI. There’s a business model in this one, though it may take a few attempts to right-size the offering and prices.
I have to run off to The Guardian – we’re doing a podcast round table there. It’s pouring rain like hell and I wish I could just keep telling you about the companies we met today. I promise to write more to you about some of the individual companies, many of whom are in early or private beta.
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Please check out the Traveling Geek’s Blog for complete…
Please check out the Traveling Geek’s Blog for complete coverage of the trip. It’s being updated every hour by each of us, so you’ll never know what you’ll get.
(Photo: Howard Rheingold, Sarah Lacy, Joe, Renee Blodgett, Jeff Saperstein)
Accel Partners London Hosts the Traveling Geeks #TG2009 Who is Coming to Lunch? Find Out!
Accel Partners is hosting the Traveling Geeks to meet a number of the companies in which they’ve invested, including Seatwave, Playfish, Alfresco, Weeworld, Mind Candy & Wonga.
Here’s who we’ll meet:
- Errol Damelin, founder and CEO of Wonga
- Kristian Segerstrale, founder and CEO of Playfish
- John Newton, founder, Chairman and CTO of Alfresco
- Joe Cohen, Founder and CEO of Seatwave
- Michael Smith , Founder and CEO of MindCandy
- Celia Francis, CEO of WeeWorld
Thanks to Sonali de Rycker not only for lining up such an amazing group of CEO’s and for bringing in Indian food for lunch – my special request. 
Sonali is Indian (yay!) and we are in good hands for a delicious lunch to fortify us for this meet and greet. I had to find a way to sample the famous British Chicken Tikka.
I’ve been checking out each company and have already created my Avatar on WeeWorld. Do you like my van?
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Do I look like that?
Well, last night, British Telecom hosted a dinner for the Traveling Geeks, best described by Renee Blodgett.
Let's just say that the image on the left, well, the wings are vestigial, the hat is not. (that is, that's me with the hat.)
