With the Traveling Geeks in Paris
Post de Olivier Ezratty du 12 décembre 2009 - Tags : Internet,Médias,Post in English,Traveling Geeks | 3 Comments
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:
The French folks from the TG tour were:
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 and Leweb 2009 are on the galeries in this blog running the custom Photo-Folders plugin.
In my next post, I’ll cover the companies we’ve visited. My Leweb conference coverage will come later. Not real time web indeed… :).
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