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 MoreWorld-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? (Continue reading this entry…)
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. (Continue reading this entry…)
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. (Continue reading this entry…)
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”. (Continue reading this entry…)
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. (Continue reading this entry…)
Mendeley , “the Last.fm of Research”
[LeWeb] Mendeley is an online research papers database that connects scientists together by analyzing the connection between them and their research papers. Mendelay enables collaboration and conversations in the scientific community and aims to change the way research is done, paving the way to “Science 2.0”. Based in the UK, the startup has rapidly grown and currently offers 25,000 downloadable free research papers covering a broad range of academic disciplines, so far, 8 million research papers have been uploaded and the site counts 100,000 users.
Startups of Le Web 2009, Paris
The winner of the Le Web Startup competition was announced as Stribe — it’s a plug & play application that turns your site into a social network (not too dissimilar from the Hub actually). The runners up were CloudSplit and Mendeley.
The other startups that entered the competition included:
• CloudSplit
• FitnessKeeper
• FriendBinder
• Kukunu
• Mendeley
• Shutl
• Siteheart Inc
• Sokoz
• Sports Predictions
• Storific
• Stribe
• Superfeedr
• task.ly
• the hyper words company
• Wordy
• Yeasty Mobs
Potentially related posts
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] (Continue reading this entry…)
Paris Diary: Putting “French” Back Into Entrepreneur
The quality of the French startups we have been meeting with all week, has been very good.
It seems as if the French can once again claim back ‘entrepreneur’ instead of it being sometimes derisively labelled as an oxymoron in the French context.
But it seems to be a fairly recent phenomenon and one that relies on a compelling mix of government programs and tax breaks. While many countries have tried to encourage the formation of startups through various incentives, the French appear to have gotten the mix just right.
It wouldn’t surprise me if in the near future, some US startups might choose Paris as a headquarters because of some of the advantages they can gain here, compared with an indifferent US government. (Continue reading this entry…)
