About Us
Traveling Geeks is a consortium of entrepreneurs, thought leaders, authors, journalists, bloggers, technology innovators and influencers who travel to countries to share and learn from peers, governments, corporations, and the general public to educate, share, evaluate, and promote new, innovative technologies. The initiative was founded by Renee Blodgett and Jeff Saperstein in 2008.
Trips are funded by sponsorships from corporations, organizations and governments. The first tour was sponsored by the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a trip that successfully marked the proof of concept that could expand to other countries around the world.
Read MoreFrench Startups Give us a Sample #tg09
We received an overview of of MXP4 in Paris earlier this month, a start-up who develops, publishes and markets innovative tools and applications for musicians and record labels.
The goal? To provide a richer interactive digital experience for users. Imagine being able to trade music with fellow musicians or create a new composition from an existing mix.
Vincent Castaiget of Musicovery gave us a demo and talked to us about where they felt the music industry was headed and where they fit in.
Musicovery has a plug-in for iTunes, which allows you to listen to your own music library according to the mood you’re in or are after.
The plug-in displays right to the Itunes application window Musicovery’s mood/dance matrix. Songs from your music library are played directly and a simple click generates a playlist. It’s fairly simple to set up.
We also heard the latest from Feedbooks‘ Hadrien Gardeur, a service that allows you to discover thousands of public domain books and original books from new authors that you can read on any mobile device.
They also offer a publishing service to create e-books or you can contribute to their collection of public domain titles.
Int13 is a French developer of next-generation games for Smartphones.
The team recently added their own AR library and are including augmented reality techologies to mobile phones. They’re currently working on a handful of new releases, including:
– Crazy Kart 2 (online racing game)
– Gems (multiplayer puzzle-game for Smartphones and PCs)
– Kweekies (Mobile augmented reality artificial life game)
– Invisiballs (Kind of augmented reality billiard)
Rue89 is an independent and collaborative French news website that combines the creativity of
reporters, experts, bloggers and Internet users.
Rue89’s purpose is to unite professional journalism with Internet’s participative DNA. Any collected information is double-checked by a permanent team of journalists.
Music on the Streets of Montmartre
Even though its only 33 degrees, music warms the heart and soul on a cold December day on the streets of Montmartre.
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Thoughts on Le Web 2009
Here’s the summary – Le Web 2009 was like a diamond, a few flaws but on the whole brilliant and sparkling and deserving of its place in the Conference Crown Jewels of tech land.
And now for a little more detail… (Continue reading this entry…)
Silicon Valley Geeks Can Learn From European Geeks…
Silicon Valley Geeks and Parisian Geeks have a lot in common: lots of passion, great ideas and they speak the lingua franca of “geek.”
But there is an important difference, as Beth Blecherman at Techmamas recently found on a visit to LeWeb:
While Silicon Valley geeks put on a clean tee shirt for tech conferences, European geekstake it up a notch. Here is a random geek waiting in line for LeWeb. I told him I was chronicling European Geek Chic. He looked confused but smiled for the camera. To top it off, he and many other Euro-geeks paired the geek uniform of jeans with a nice pair of (non-sneaker) shoes.
Just to keep up with the style, I put on every black and stylish piece of clothing I had. If I had time, I would of shopped from the assortment of beautiful french scarves to take my outfit up a notch.
Please see the full post, where Beth also looks for European girl geeks, which are even rarer than here:
Techmamas: Geek is a Global Language – But Twitter is Not (yet)
My second batch of Companies at Travelling Geeks
Following on from part one, this is the nest look back at the Travelling Geeks tour of Paris pre-Le Web. Here are some more companies that caught my eye and a few thoughts on how things should be in the real world. (Continue reading this entry…)
Geek is a Global Language – But Twitter is Not (yet)
During the blogger embark on the USS Nimitz this past May, I enjoyed learning how social media is being used aboard an aircraft carrier at sea. Similarly, when I was invited to join the Traveling Geeks trip to Paris, I looked forward to experiencing social media in France first hand. Especially with – as fellow Geek Matthew Buckland referred to – a “top secret, Illuminati-type organization“. Except we were not secret about anything as we all share openly our thoughts online.
True to expectations, only moments into the first Traveling Geeks French start-ups meetings and LeWeb discussions, the similarities and differences of social media around the globe quickly came to light. Similarities were easy to see in the programming and features of application development, which quickly proved to a be a global language. As for differences, they fell primarily into three buckets (with comedy insight provided by a Current TV video on the bottom of this post): (Continue reading this entry…)
Traveling Geeks 09 Paris: Microblog via Twitter
My platform of choice during the
Traveling Geeks 09 trip to Paris was first Twitter to microblog, then loading the microblog items to a blog post (my blogging platform is Typepad). Twitter is an application that allows people to share what they are doing at the moment in 140 characters or less. My niche on Twitter is to share parenting and technology updates, so this information would fit within my framework. At LeWeb I learned about Seesmic so I hope to try that out as an interface for my next microblogging adventure. I will also be experimenting with using the BlackBerry app for Whrrl to capture “stories” on the run. (Continue reading this entry…)
Leweb 2009 – Startups
This is my late and last post covering Leweb 2009. Like every other year (2006, 2007,2008), I will make a roundup of the presenting startups in the conference.
This year, startups didn’t have to pay to present, like in previous years. As a result, the competition seemed opened to more early stage companies and it did show. Only two had already got some VC funding and less than half had significant business angel back-up. There were fewer startups presenting: 16 instead of 30 last year. (Continue reading this entry…)
Behind the Scenes with Pearltrees
Click “more…” to see the videos! (Continue reading this entry…)
Leweb 2009 – The Scorecard
It’s been a couple days now since Leweb 2009 ended. And I’m quite far from the “Real time web” with that report of the event, which as usual, will be split in a several posts.
This year’s edition was definitively a hit. The most important success factors of such an event are: do we enjoy these so-called “TED moments”, when speakers build an emotional connection with the audience, then, do we meet the right people there and at last, are the logistics doing well.
In the Leweb historical scorecard that I assembled below, it looks like the mix of this year’s edition has been the best so far. I just missed the first “Les blogs” in this series of events but it was rather small with only a few hundred attendees. And I don’t necessary recollect well the best “TED moments” from the 2007 and before editions. The number of attendees is an estimate. If it’s wrong, I will correct it. (Continue reading this entry…)
