With the Traveling Geeks in Paris

Publié le 12 décembre 2009 et mis à jour le 4 juillet 2014 - 3 commentaires -
PDF Afficher une version imprimable de cet article
  

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.

IMG_0201

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!

IMG_9582

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.

IMG_9964

  • 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.

Traveling Geeks Day 1 by Olivier Ezratty (6)

  • 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.

Traveling Geeks Day 1 by Olivier Ezratty (9)

  • 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.

David Sparks

  • 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.

Tom Forenski

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

Frederic Lardinois (2) 

Mathew Buckland

  • 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.

Beth Blecherman

  • 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… :).

IMG_0105

  • 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…

 Ewan Spence (3)

IMG_9733

  • 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.

Amanda Coolong (3)

  • 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…).

Robert Scoble shooting Chris Pirillo

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.

Eliane Fiolet

  • 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.

Philippe Jeudy and 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.

IMG_9861

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… :).

RRR

 
S
S
S
S
S
S
S
img
img
img

Publié le 12 décembre 2009 et mis à jour le 4 juillet 2014 Post de | Internet, Médias, Post in English, Traveling Geeks | 47053 lectures

PDF Afficher une version imprimable de cet article     

Reçevez par email les alertes de parution de nouveaux articles :


 

RRR

 
S
S
S
S
S
S
S
img
img
img

Les 3 commentaires et tweets sur “With the Traveling Geeks in Paris” :




Ajouter un commentaire

Vous pouvez utiliser ces tags dans vos commentaires :<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong> , sachant qu'une prévisualisation de votre commentaire est disponible en bas de page après le captcha.

Last posts / derniers articles

Free downloads

Understanding Quantum Technologies 2024, a free 1,554 pages ebook about all quantum technologies (computing, telecommunications, cryptography, sensing):

image

Understanding Quantum Technologies 2024 Short version, a 26 pages version with key takeaways from the eponymous book.

image

The Two-Spin Enigma: From the Helium Atom to Quantum Ontology, a quantum foundations paper coauthored with Philippe Grangier, Alexia Auffèves, Nayla Farouki and Mathias Van den Bossche (paper backstory).
image

Voir aussi la liste complète des publications de ce blog.

Derniers commentaires

“Bravo Olivier! Quel boulot tu m’épates totalement et je t’adresse mes plus sincères félicitations! Je ne suis pas sûr de tout lire car je suis maintenant 100% dans l’art et la poésie et mon seul rapport à la...”
“[…] to Olivier Ezratty, author of Understanding quantum technologies 2023, the challenge for Europe is to position itself outside of where the US and China are likely end up...”
“Désolé, je suis passé à l'anglais en 2021 sans revenir au français. Traduire un tel ouvrage (1366) pages d'une langue à l'autre est un travail herculéen, même avec des outils de traduction automatique. Sachant...”
“Je suis un artiste conceptuel, certes je garde la grande majorité de mon travail dans ma tête par défaut d'un grand mécène. Mon travail de base se situe sur le "mimétisme" qui mène aux itérations et de nombreux...”
“Better than a Harry Potter! Thanks Olivier...”

Abonnement email

Pour recevoir par email les alertes de parution de nouveaux articles :


 

RRR

 
S
S
S
S
S
S
S
img
img
img

Derniers albums photos

Depuis juillet 2014, mes photos sont maintenant intégrées dans ce site sous la forme d'albums consultables dans le plugin "Photo-Folders". Voici les derniers albums publiés ou mis à jour. Cliquez sur les vignettes pour accéder aux albums.
albth
QFDN
Expo
791 photos
albth
Remise Légion d'Honneur Philippe Herbert Jul2021
2021
15 photos
albth
Vivatech Jun2021
2021
120 photos
albth
Visite C2N Palaiseau Mar2021
2021
17 photos
albth
Annonce Stratégie Quantique C2N Jan2021
2021
137 photos
albth
Maison Bergès Jul2020
2020
54 photos
albth
Grenoble Jul2020
2020
22 photos

image

Avec Marie-Anne Magnac, j'ai lancé #QFDN, l'initiative de valorisation de femmes du numérique par la photo. Elle circule dans différentes manifestations. J'ai réalisé entre 2011 et mi 2023 plus de 800 portraits photographiques de femmes du numérique avec une représentation de tous les métiers du numérique.

Les photos et les bios de ces femmes du numérique sont présentées au complet sur le site QFDN ! Vous pouvez aussi visualiser les derniers portraits publiés sur mon propre site photo. Et ci-dessous, les 16 derniers par date de prise de vue, les vignettes étant cliquables.
flow
Gaëlle Rannou
Gaëlle est étudiante à 42 Paris et tutrice de l’équipe pédagogique (en 2021).
flow
Jehanne Dussert
Jehanne est étudiante à l'école 42, membre d'AI For Tomorrow et d'Open Law, le Droit ouvert. Elle est aussi fondatrice de "Comprendre l'endométriose", un chatbot informant sur cette maladie qui touche une personne menstruée sur 10, disponible sur Messenger. #entrepreneuse #juridique #santé
flow
Chloé Hermary
Chloé est fondatrice d'Ada Tech School, une école d'informatique alternative et inclusive dont la mission est de former une nouvelle génération de talents diversifié à avoir un impact sur le monde. #entrepreneuse #formation
flow
Anna Minguzzi
Anna est Directrice de Recherche au CNRS au Laboratoire de Physique et Modélisation des Milieux Condensés (LPMMC) à Grenoble. #quantique
flow
Maeliza Seymour
Maeliza est CEO et co-fondatrice de CodistAI, qui permet de créer une documentation du code informatique par une IA.
flow
Candice Thomas
Candice est ingénieure-chercheuse au CEA-Leti, travaillant sur l’intégration 3D de bits quantiques au sein du projet Quantum Silicon Grenoble. #recherche #quantique
flow
Stéphanie Robinet
Stéphanie dirige un laboratoire de conception intégrée de circuits électroniques du CEA-Leti qui travaille sur des systèmes sur puces intégrés, des interfaces de capteurs, des interfaces de contrôle de qubits et de la gestion intégrée de l'énergie. #recherche #quantique
flow
Sabine Keravel
Sabine est responsable du business development pour l’informatique quantique chez Atos. #quantique #IT
flow
Céline Castadot
Céline est HPC, AI and Quantum strategic project manager chez Atos.
flow
Léa Bresque
Léa est doctorante, en thèse à l'institut Néel du CNRS en thermodynamique quantique, sous la direction d'Alexia Auffèves (en 2021). #quantique #recherche
flow
Emeline Parizel
Emeline est chef de projet web et facilitatrice graphique chez Klee Group, co-fondatrice TEDxMontrouge, gribouilleuse à ses heures perdues, joue dans une troupe de comédie musicale, co-animatrice de meetups et est sensible à l’art et à la culture. #création
flow
Elvira Shishenina
Elvira est Quantum Computing lead chez BMW ainsi que présidente de QuantX, l'association des polytechniciens du quantique. #quantique
flow
Marie-Noëlle Semeria
Marie-Noëlle est Chief Technology Officer pour le Groupe Total après avoir dirigé le CEA-Leti à Grenoble. #recherche
flow
Gwendolyn Garan
Gwendolyn est travailleuse indépendante, Game UX Designer, Game UX Researcher (GUR) et 2D Artist pour le jeu vidéo, étudiante en Master 2 Sciences du Jeu, speaker et Formatrice sur l'autisme et la neurodiversité, l'accessibilité et les systèmes de représentation dans les jeux vidéo. #création #jeuvidéo
flow
Alexandra Ferreol
Alexandra est étudiante d'un bachelor Game Design à L'Institut Supérieur des Arts Appliqués (année scolaire 2019/2020) #création #jeuvidéo
flow
Ann-elfig Turpin
Ann-elfig est étudiante en deuxième année à Lisaa Paris Jeux Vidéos (Technical artist, 3D artiste), année scolaire 2019/2020. #création #jeuvidéo