Traveling Geeks At La Cantine with Cap Digital

by on Dec 08, 2009 at 1:06 am

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

Musicovery, presented by Cap Digital

by on Dec 08, 2009 at 12:47 am

Musicovery, presented by Cap Digital

[Traveling Geeks] Musicovery is an interactive music discovery online service, with a cool visual interface. It lets people find songs using a 2 dimension “mood graph” based on a famous psychology model (Russell Circumplex). On one dimension it is a variation from calm to energetic, and on the other one, it is negative sentiment to positive sentiment. The mood specifications are then translated into music characteristics such as tempo, orchestral power and so on, and this categorization is done by humans. Musicovery has 1 million monthly unique visitors with 600,000 registered members, 15% of the audience comes from the US (#1).

MXP4 Presented by Cap Digital

by on Dec 08, 2009 at 12:43 am

MXP4 Presented by Cap Digital

[Traveling Geeks] MXP4 is a new interactive audio format that lets people to remix on the fly different song versions. The company has developed a suite of creative tools for artists and producers to deliver a new interactive listening, premium and personalized playback experiences to listeners. Check out the video in the full post.

Pearltrees: A visual social bookmarking tool that has its own take on PageRank

by on Dec 07, 2009 at 7:44 pm
December 7, 2009 | Kim-Mai Cutler

Picture 31

If you’re the type of obsessive-compulsive person who needs to organize the firehose of information confronting you every day on the web, then Pearltrees might work for you. It’s a visual social bookmarking service that allows you keep track of what you’ve read and establish relationships between different pieces of content. (Continue reading this entry…)

The Real-Time Web – Indeed!

by on Dec 07, 2009 at 4:24 pm

pipesUnbelievable how much time it takes to keep a “live” blog functioning properly when you’re working with new software.

It’s after 1:00am and I’ve just finished wrestling with the day’s blog entries. Reformatting them to make them look better, and making sure that the feeds of more than a dozen geeks are coming in and being handled properly. (And here and there a little bit of editorial work.)

I’m afraid this is what is known as the Real-time web. [See LeWeb]Yahoo Pipes still saves me a zillion hours almost every day. I’m still monitoring 18 geek blogs in close-to-real-time and when a post is written that falls within certain limits, it has to be published. And it has to be published as close to real-time as possible. I have to review about half of these feeds and then approve the posts, but most are on “automatic” and the post is published on Traveling Geeks right away.

Yahoo Pipes is used in two ways in this environment:

First, for some of the geeks it monitors two or three blogs and mashes them together into a single feed, which is then examined, filtered, and goes to Traveling Geeks for possible publication.

Second, in some cases it takes the output of a Typepad blog (which produces a different type of feed/output) and massages it so it can be properly evaluated and processed by the WordPress software which lies under Traveling Geeks.

Without it, I would have been up until after 1:00am tonight.

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Free report “Real-Time Search and Discovery of the Social Web”

by on Dec 07, 2009 at 3:40 pm

rt_search_iconCall it good or bad timing, but I just happen to finish a report on real-time search on the day that Google announced its rollout of its integrated real-time search results within its general search results. While I had to do some last minute edits, the report is done and I’m making it available to everyone for free. It’s entitled “Real-Time Search and Discovery of the Social Web.” You can download the PDF, or view it right now on Scribd.

I’m giving the report away for free. All I ask in return is some feedback. Positive, negative, but whatever it is, please make it constructive. I’m eagerly learning as much as I can about this subject. This is an area that I think is going to grow like crazy, and we’re only looking at a thumbnail’s worth of what is yet to come.

Here are some highlights from the report.

  • Real-time search could steal away as much as $40 billion from traditional search. Google and Microsoft’s announcement to incorporate real-time search results is a good first step to prevent losses.
  • The definition of real-time search is far more varied than the definition of traditional search. You’ll see more variations in what is considered a real-time search engine.
  • All real-time search engines are far from equal. The major reason is they don’t index the same content.
  • Real-time search engines that only index Twitter are missing up to 90 percent of the real-time web.
  • One exciting new aspect of real-time search is the creation of real-time programming that will be complimentary and competitive with traditional programming (e.g. TV, radio, print, and online).

Enjoy and let me know what you think. David

December 10th, 2009 CORRECTION: The article mentioned that real-time search engine Wowd required a plugin for its use. That is not true. Current report is updated to reflect that it’s not required.

Real-time Search and Discovery of the Social Web

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Paris Diary: The International Geek Brotherhood…

by on Dec 07, 2009 at 3:21 pm

[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.]

I took the EuroStar train from London on Sunday afternoon and in less than 3 hours I was in the middle of Paris. That trip always amazes me and it is so much nicer, (and greener) than flying.

When I arrived it was raining off and on but that didn’t matter because I was back in Paris after a ten year break.

I had to find my hotel, about a couple of miles from my terminus at Gare Du Nord but being short on cash I decided to walk in roughly the right direction, trundling my wheeled travel bag across cobble stone streets, and relishing being in one of the great cities of the world. (Continue reading this entry…)

Pearltrees: Visual Collaborative Web Browsing Interface

by on Dec 07, 2009 at 2:45 am

Pearltrees: Visual Collaborative Web Browsing Interface

I am with the Traveling Geeks at Pearltrees’ headquarter in Paris, I already published about Pearltrees a few months ago when it was in pre- alpha, but the public beta will launch in two days at LeWeb.

Pearltrees is a visual collaborative web browsing interface: users browse the internet visually using “Pearls” that represent websites and, by connecting them, they create a network of interest, I call it the “interest graph”.  The social networking component, allows users to follow each other and use other people pearls to build their “interest graph”, they can collaborate to create a common tree with pearls shared among many people.

With the Pearltrees-Twitter sync feature users automatically build pearls by tweeting urls on Twitter, and automatically tweet urls by creating pearls in Pearltrees, it will launch in two days.