Traveling Geeks

Orange Highlights at LeWeb #leweb

Paris Diary: The Joie de Vivre of French Entrepreneurs…

I’m bowled over by the French startups and entrepreneurs I’ve been meeting the past two days. Lots of passion, energy, smarts, and great ideas.

I’m totally surprised because I had a totally different expectation. France has a reputation for bureaucracy ( a French word), for strikes, (the taxi drivers were on strike on Tuesday), and for archaic attitudes such as a strong belief in a maintaining a work/life balance, six-week vacations, a 35-hour week, and making it near impossible to fire a worker (you will receive as much as three years full salary if you are fired).

It seems amazing that France’s economy hasn’t shattered into pieces by now, and the country hasn’t fallen below the waves of the ocean as a modern day Atlantis.

Instead, France has the highest labor productivity levels of all the G8 nations. And the quality of its entrepreneurs (another French word) is excellent.

I will be writing in more detail about some of the companies and people I’ve been meeting, later this week. And I’ll be diving into why there is such a great current of innovation happening in France.

The French model might even become a template for other countries. That’s because people from other countries are coming to France to set up their startups. Other countries risk a brain drain if they don’t act to create a similar environment.

I’ll let you know tomorrow about some of the reasons why France is enjoying an upswing its startup communities. I think you will be as surprised as I was.

[I’m in Paris all this week as part of the Traveling Geeks, a collection of journalists, bloggers, and PR people meeting with French startups and also attending LeWeb, France’s premier Web 2.0 developer and business conference.]

The Green Watch: Crowdsourcing Air Quality Measurements

Yesterday, during a meeting with a number of startups in Paris, we met up with the team behind the Green Watch project. Just like Google collects data from cell phones with GPS chips to aggregate real-time traffic information, this watch measures ozone levels and noise pollution. The watch connects wirelessly to the wearer’s mobile phone and sends updates to Citypulse, an open platform for receiving and storing environmental data. The Green Watch is currently only a prototype and not available for sale.

Sponsor (more…)

Geeks on a Train

The Traveling Geeks can’t stop recording their every movement, especially on the Paris Metro

I am still highly amused by the volume of photography and video that’s going on at the Traveling Geeks event in Paris (explanation, silly video). There is an endless number of photos that have been taken so far (full screen), and we haven’t yet arrived at our key event, Le Web, which starts tomorrow. (more…)

Traveling Geeks meet 11 Paris startups

On day 2, we arrived at the Paris Developpement Incubateurs an incubator of French tech start-ups. The Travelling Geeks, now with one added Robert Scoble, saw a rapid-fire set of 11 presentations from some very interesting companies and people:

Int13: is a French developer of next-generation games for Smartphones (iPhone, Windows Mobile, Symbian S60, Linux…). They are experimenting with mobile augmented reality games.

CityZeum: provide travel guides for the web and mobile phones, mixing UGC, with expert content and content from journalists.

Scan & Target is a 1-million-euro-funded startup, providing solutions around real-time text mining for web and mobile content (email, SMS, IM, blogs, forums, Twitter).

Rue 89 is a pureplay news website, something between Slate.com and HuffingtonPost. They focus on creating news in a collaborative way via a mixture of journalists, experts and users.

Gostai: Focuses on building a common software platform for Robots, almost like a universal Robot operating system. These guys are way ahead of most mortals.

Zoomorama cares about the “art of information” and is focused on creating a new visual way of surfing the internet and creating presentations. Not too different from innovative Hungarian presentation company, Prezi. Check out more here

Stribe A b2b, Techcrunch50 canditate that’s a plug and play service, allowing a site to instantly create a social network on any website. Sounds quite similar to something else I’m doing actually…

Path Motion. A web 2.0 recruitment play that offers users “friendly questions” to identify their ideal career path, also providing jobs that match them.

MLstate think that web development is “broken” and they want to “rethink web development for the 21th century”. They’re developing One Pot Applications (OPA), a common platform enabling easy development of SaaS web applications.

Teacheo: Is an online tutoring community with virtual classrooms. They make money by linking tutors and students. Simple, but effective. They use 3D modelling to demo items between students and tutors and have good video chat.

Stupeflix: A web service that turns your pictures, videos, and text into professional videos on the fly, just like that!

tags: Paris startups, Traveling Geeks

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Traveling Geeks in Paris: Day 1 video report

Here’s my day one report for the Traveling Geeks trip in Paris, a week long tech tour that culminates with two days at the Web 2.0 conference Le Web. The whole group was fighting jet lag and minimal sleep, but we got to see lots of great new French tech and to listen to many entrepreneurs at the early stages of their products. Watch the report. Links to items mentioned can be seen below.

• Pearltrees bookmarking organization and sharing program.
• Photos so far from Traveling Geeks tour (full screen), including the hundreds from our first dinner. Check out the Traveling Geeks photos .
• Photo of the crappy Traveling Geeks pens.
• psiXpda, small computing device.
• Video interview with Artistic Director of CiTu on Terra Numerica.
• Feedbooks – Standard distribution of eBooks.
• .MXP4 – Interactive audio format.
• Orange’s video search 2424actu, geoblocked outside of France, but will be available sometime in January 2010.
• Video of Dick Tracy watch from LG/Orange.

Related posts:

1. What can you do with a scannable and identifiable model of Paris?
2. I used to just be a geek, but now I’m a Traveling Geek
3. The cool and not-so-cool of LeWeb

Cedexis at Club Melcion

This morning we are at Club Melcion in Paris with the Traveling Geeks. We are meeting with Julien Coulon, Cedexis co-founder and General Manager. The company is an early stage startup and does not have a website yet.

Cedexis provides a collective intelligence platform that enables next-generation traffic management strategies. It measures the best performances provided by different CDN providers and will select the best one for internet services providers. Changes in performances vary by the minute; Cedexis monitors them in real time and switch to the best performing CDN instantly. Cedexis is especially critical for video streaming websites willing to deliver the best quality. According to Julien Coulon, Cedexis co-founder and GM, the services can increase the performance by up to 70%. The company gives feedback to CDN providersas well, allowing them to increase their performances; Cedexis aims to become a certification service. Conviva in the USA provides a similar service. The pricing is a share of the cost reduction Cedexis is enabling. The developers are mostly Americans, based in various part of the world. (more…)

Scobleizer: First #tg09 startup is Cedexis CEO is @juliencoulon — I have to introduce him to @rackcloud because he found way to save money with CDNs.

Scobleizer: First #tg09 startup is Cedexis CEO @juliencoulon — I have to introduce him to @rackcloud because he found way to save money with CDNs.

What can you do with a scannable and identifiable model of Paris?

At Silicon Sentier, a startup collective in Paris, I interviewed Maurice Benayoun, Artistic Director of CiTu a research lab for artistic projects. One such project, Terra Numerica, is an easily digestible and programmable scan and index of the city of Paris for which others can use the data to develop applications. City planning and management examples include:

• Walk through Paris virtually like you would in the real world.
• Paris had a flood in 1910 and it’s feared that it’s going to happen again within the next ten years. Simulate the flood and see what the effects of such a disaster would have on the city.
• Virtually raise and lower buildings. See what views would be like.
• Since the database knows where all the cameras are all over the city, you can play a game where you run through the city avoiding security cameras. I asked Benayoun, “Couldn’t this tool be used by criminals?” Watch the video for his response.

(more…)

Traveling Geeks At La Cantine with Cap Digital

We were at La Cantine, an incubator in the heart of Paris managed by Silicon Sentier. There, Cap Digital, a business cluster supporting startups and research projects in the digital content field, presented us their portfolio of technologies. See below the list of startups, we’ll add link to the company logos as we post about them: Bearstech, Feedbooks, XWiki, TerraNumerica, MXP4, Green Watch