Archive for 'Social Media'
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…)
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…)
LeWeb day 2: End of day show report
Here’s my second and last show report from LeWeb. We had been led to believe that LeWeb was going to be about real-time web. After the first day, we were wondering when that discussion would begin. But by day two we finally got some discussion on that topic. Watch the video for a summary of day two, mostly about real-time web and also some of my critiques about how the show was handled. But for a full analysis of the event, make sure you read my report, “The cool and not-so-cool from LeWeb.”
David Spark helps businesses grow by developing thought leadership through storytelling and covering live events at Spark Media Solutions. He blogs at The Spark Minute and can be heard and seen regularly on ABC Radio, Cranky Geeks with John C. Dvorak, and KQED in San Francisco. See his business profile, contact David, or leave a comment in his blog.
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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…)
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…)
Google’s real-time search now live in the U.K.
Google’s newly announced real-time search is now not just limited to the Trends page. It’s now live across searches on Google.co.uk. (I just tried it with “Ethan Beard”, who is director of the Facebook Developer Network and is speaking on stage at Le Web right now.) The search giant announced the new feature on Monday — it pulls in public data from Twitter, MySpace and Facebook and uses it to surface content that’s been recently published and shared. (more…)
