With the Traveling Geeks in Paris

Publié le 12 décembre 2009 et mis à jour le 2 mai 2010 - 3 commentaires -

Dear rea­der, this is my first post in English. The rea­son is I par­ti­ci­pa­ted recently to the Tra­ve­ling Geeks tour in Paris and the rule of the game is to publish content that can be sha­red by its par­ti­ci­pants and within the Tra­ve­ling Geeks web site. So, no other solu­tion than English. Time to get really international!

In this first post, I’ll qui­ckly go through the agenda of this tour and then talk a lit­tle bit about my fel­low inter­na­tio­nal Tra­ve­ling Geeks blog­gers. We’ve spent four days toge­ther, two in a local tour and two at Leweb. That was a good oppor­tu­nity to get to know high-profile blog­gers from other coun­tries, not just the USA, and to share some views on digi­tal inno­va­tion as well as on Leweb itself. I enjoyed a lot this experience.

Cross-cultural confron­ta­tions are always fruit­ful, even when things get tough such as during and after the now famous “Scoble inci­dent” (will come to that later). I knew things wouldn’t be easy. Sho­wing many French star­tups to US influen­tial blog­gers is always risky. Only a few share the basic attri­butes of major inter­na­tio­nal players: English fluent CEOs, doing good pre­sen­ta­tions or demos, pit­ching well with star­ting from a clear pain point or pro­blem, unders­tan­ding their com­pe­ti­tion, using the right tools, etc. This confron­ta­tion is quite a good lear­ning for these com­pa­nies. It’s also good to unders­tand the per­cep­tion issues local star­tups have with inter­na­tio­nal inno­va­tion com­mu­ni­ties. And we just had blog­gers here, and none of the other deman­ding key players such as busi­ness angels and VCs.

The Paris Tour

Tra­ve­ling in the metro throu­ghout Paris, we met seve­ral star­tups, a mid-size com­pany (Par­rot) and a large com­pany (Orange).

Two star­tups had the oppor­tu­nity to pitch the TGs in length: Pearl­trees, the “web cura­tor” star­tup that was also very visible in the main ses­sion at Leweb, and Cedexis, a CDN (content dis­tri­bu­tion net­work) opti­mi­zing star­tup seen at the Club Mel­cion from Mel­cion & Chas­sagne, a com­pany pro­vi­ding stra­te­gic consul­ting to inno­va­tive startups.

About 20 star­tups pre­sen­ted in “fast track” mode. First, at “La Can­tine”, a hip place where star­tups and the local digi­tal eco­sys­tem folks meet on a regu­lar basis, where we saw pre­sen­ta­tions from about 10 Cap­Di­gi­tal spon­so­red star­tups (Cap­Di­gi­tal is a “digi­tal media clus­ter” from the Paris region). And second, at the Paris Deve­lop­ment Incu­ba­tor at rue des Haies (below), with about 10 star­tups pre­sen­ting and later, being inter­vie­wed in 1/1 by the TG bloggers.

On top of which we had seve­ral din­ner and par­ties opportunities.

The Tra­ve­ling Geeks bloggers

The detai­led list is here although a couple French invi­tees didn’t show up in the tour.

Many of these blog­gers were free­lance news wri­ters or wri­ters with a strong jour­na­lism or PR back­ground. Their age span­ned from 24 to above 50. Repre­sen­ted coun­tries were USA first, Scot­tland, Bel­gium, South Africa and France. It see­med it was the first time some French blog­gers were part of the tour. Pays d’accueil oblige…

Besides maybe Eliane Fio­let from Uber­gizmo, most of these blog­gers make a living from other acti­vies than blog­ging. As free­lance jour­na­lists, media consul­tants, PR spe­cia­lists, events orga­ni­zers, or more tra­di­tio­nal consul­ting, mostly, on media stuff. Not all of these folks focus on consu­mer stuff. There were also enter­prise focu­sed bloggers.

Des­pite the bran­ding, we didn’t have that many “geeky” dis­cus­sions beside some com­pe­ti­tion in DSLRs bet­ween the APS-C owners (Eliane, Renee, Beth) and the full frame camera owners (Robert Scoble, Rodrigo, myself). Others were using small digi­tal HD video recor­ders like the Flip, now a branch of Cisco.

But what was quite funny is the time it took  before star­ting mee­tings. After the team arri­ved in a room, it usually took about 15 minutes to set things up and get ready: plug all the hard­ware, connect to Wifi, connect to Twit­ter and start posts. Some blog­gers could even hit the “Publish” but­ton as the mee­tings ended! Defi­ni­ti­vely not my way of run­ning this blog!

So here are my fel­low blog­gers from the TG tour:

• Renee Blod­gett, is the cofoun­der of the Tra­ve­ling Geeks and has her own media consul­ting com­pany. She does PR for a dozen tech­no­logy com­pa­nies. She also runs two blogs: We Blog the World and Down the Ave­nue, focu­sing on social media trends.

• Jim “Sky” Schuy­ler is the CTO of the Tra­ve­ling Geeks, mea­ning he cares about all the IT stuff, publi­shing blogs, pic­tures and videos on the various rele­vant places (the TG site, Fli­ckr, You­Tube, etc). He is also inves­ted in pro­mo­ting free speech and e-education.

• Robin Wau­ters, is a wri­ter at Tech­Crunch Europe and a confe­rence orga­ni­zers. He’s also the orga­ni­zer of the monthly Open Cof­fee in Brus­sels, so a col­league of my friend Raphaël Labbé, from Ulike.net, who does the same in Paris. Robin is also the mana­ging edi­tor of Virtualization.com, an enter­prise com­pu­ting blog.

• David Spark looks like a mul­ti­pur­pose jour­na­list (blog, TV, radio, press) and media consul­tant. For him, every com­pany should be a media and broad­cast rich content to address its cus­to­mer base needs. I like the point. Com­pa­nies tend to believe that they can base their com­mu­ni­ca­tion on “buzz mar­ke­ting” and user gene­ra­ted content. They kind of get lazy in pro­du­cing content. It’s not the right way to pro­ceed. They have to publish more stuff on their web outreach tools. Like me, David publishes reports on his Spark­Mi­nute site, such as the latest free report “Real-Time Search and Dis­co­very of the Social Web”. Davis is quite laser sharp in his com­ments and always on point. Look for example at his cove­rage of Leweb.

• Tom Forenski, from Sili­con Val­ley Wat­cher is more focu­sed on the culture of inno­va­tion than on geek mat­ters. I had some inter­es­ting dis­cus­sions with him on the cultu­ral and skills dif­fe­rences bet­ween US and France and what French star­tups need to do to cir­cumvent their ini­tial weaknesses.

• Fré­dé­ric Lar­di­nois, is a Ger­man born wri­ter publi­shing in Read­Wri­te­Web. He is based in Port­land, Ore­gon. He’s focu­sed on social media.

• Mathew Buck­land, from South-Africa, is a real busi­ness man. He runs a sort of pri­vate incu­ba­tor, 20FourLabs as well as a web deve­lop­ment shop, Crea­tive Spark Inter­ac­tive. Oh, and btw, he runs his own blog.

• Beth Ble­cher­man, from the blog Tech­Mama and also does some consul­ting on blog­ger outreach. She has a strong enter­prise IT back­ground and is now focu­sed on digi­tal consu­mer life.

• The quiet Kim-Mai Cut­ler writes on Ven­tu­re­Beat, a blog cove­ring inno­va­tions broadly inclu­ding invest­ments and VCs. Below, inter­vie­wing Kamel Zeroual from Nyou­link / Stribe, two days before he got to win the best star­tup award from Leweb. Means she’s got some good intui­tions… .

• Ewan Spence is a Scot­tish blog­ger, wri­ter and entre­pre­neur. He did a pre­sen­ta­tion on vir­tual worls and Second Life at Leweb in 2006. He is also invol­ved in a busi­ness part­ner­ship to launch a hand­held com­pu­ter run­ning Ubuntu, the PsiXpda. So how a kilt-wearing Scot­tish guy gets through the secu­rity of the Paris City Hall when we went to the .paris party there? Hand control…

• Amanda Coolong, runs the Tech­Zulu blog. Like Scoble, her main media is video inter­views. A very ener­ge­tic woman, she lives in Los Angeles. So she likes to cover digi­tal medias. I expect to see her at the CES like many others from the TG tour.

• Robert Scoble, a pree­minent blog­ger focu­sed on the Inter­net eco­sys­tem. Also, a regu­lar spea­ker at Leweb. We did see him only half a day during this two days tour of the French eco­sys­tem. He went nuts when lear­ning that some star­tups in the Paris incu­ba­tor didn’t have a Twit­ter account, and this drove a contro­versy on the mis­takes French entre­pre­neurs make in their mar­ke­ting. Seems such bashing of the French or Euro­pean eco­sys­tems is now inevi­table at each and every Leweb, after Arrington’s sta­te­ments last year. Des­pite the rude­ness of Scoble’s point, he was right in that French star­tups don’t play enough by the inter­na­tio­nal rules of the game. I’d say that the lack of WW ambi­tion in the local eco­sys­tem and our local culture play a key role here. Only with kno­wing the roots of this situa­tion can we get around it and have star­tups strive inter­na­tio­nally. Below, a quiet Scoble, when using his pre­fer­red toy, his Canon 5D Mark II, used for taking pic­tures as well as movies. We share simi­lar prac­tices: same camera and same habit to do “things well” with digi­tal pho­to­gra­phy (such as using RAW and Lightroom…).

The French folks from the TG tour were:

• Eliane Fio­let, co-author with Hubert Nguyen of Uber­gizmo, a consu­mer elec­tro­nics blog publi­shed in six lan­guages and in the top 10 US blogs of that cate­gory. She lives in San Fran­cisco and is also a desi­gner. She runs her own design com­pany on top of Uber­gizmo. It looks like she was the gee­kiest per­son of the tour with Jim “Sky” Schuy­ler and me. She was a co-organizer of this edi­tion of the TG tour.

• Phil Jeudy, from Altaide Val­ley and based in San Fran­cisco is consul­ting for star­tups willing to esta­blish them­selves in the Sili­con Val­ley and the orga­ni­zer of study trips in the Val­ley for French com­pa­nies and entre­pre­neurs. I did get there thanks to him. He was coor­ga­ni­zing this edi­tion of the Tra­ve­ling Geeks tour. Below, enjoying life with his girl­friend Sasha.

• Rodrigo Sepulveda-Schulz, was a real blog­ger and is now more of a Twit­te­rer, and pho­to­gra­pher like me. We share the same pas­sion and gear around the Canon EOS 5D II and its wide apper­ture lenses (like the 70-200mm 2.8 below). He is the cofoun­der of the video star­tup vpod.tv.

How were these folks picked for the tour? Have no clear idea beyond that it’s people who know people who know people who got there and who have some blog­ging influence. Wha­te­ver, I thank Renee, Phil and Eliane for this fruit­ful oppor­tu­nity to meet with the geeks and even, with the French star­tups given I didn’t know all of them.

My pic­tures from the TG days before Leweb are on Picasa : day 1, day 2 and day 3.

In my next post, I’ll cover the com­pa­nies we’ve visi­ted. My Leweb confe­rence cove­rage will come later. Not real time web indeed… .

Publié le 12 décembre 2009 Post de Olivier Ezratty | Internet, Médias, Post in English, Traveling Geeks | 3 commentaires