Written on 26th June 2009
36 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Seesmic begun its life as a “Twitter for video”, from French/SF Entrepreneur Loic Le Meur. The site received wide acclaim , great press and decent growth during the first year of its life. Recently however the growth has stuttered and no one has recognized this more so that Le Meur himself.
Visiting Seesmic now, you’ll notice a startling difference to the sites focus. Video is almost a difficult area of the site to find, with priority being given to the new Seesmic Desktop, a social aggregation (more…)
Earlier this week, Loic Le Meur asked for authority-based Twitter search. Jon Wheatly, a young coder from the UK, only needed 12 hours and numerous cups of coffee to make this possible. He developed Twitority, with which you can search within tweets from people with different levels of authority (based on how many followers you have). A hype was born. Almost every major tech blog picked it up.
Jon Wheatly
And now we report about it, but not without giving you some background. A story about a young enthusiast like Jon needs more than just a discussion about vanity and the value of Twitter authority.
In an email, Wheatly described the hype: “Things have been pretty crazy since we put the site online on Sunday. After Loic blogged about us the site started getting pick up by other bloggers and just snowballed from there.”
He also responds to some complaints about the somewhat slow search: “Because of the limitations of the Twitter API we were forced to hack around it and scrape the follower numbers for each user, per search that is performed. This is why each search takes so long. It really isn’t ideal but it’s the only way a third party can build any kind of “authority” based search. The server was really moaning last night but it survived, just.”
And what about the debate about the idea behind of Twitority?Erick Schonfeld for example, argues that not the number of followers matters, but how many times someone gets retweeted. Wheatly: “The debate is still raging about whether or not follower numbers are a good way to measure authority and honestly I don’t know. This was just something that Loic (and numerous other people) wanted so we decided to see if we could make it happen.”
It’s funny and sad. The tech scene is an industry where people travel the whole world for conferences and meet-ups, so you’d expect most to be global citizens. McLuhan’s global village and all that. Yet right after Europe’s largest web conference, almost everybody who has the guts to speak up is ranting about each other’s countries.
A-listers start a discussion – Michael Arrington criticizes Europe’s work ethic, Loren Feldman “bans” France, Loic Le Meur finds himself defending Europe all the time -, and a large group of followers starts to bash anyone whose not from their country.
In the TechCrunch discussion, it took about twenty comments when Godwin’s law was once again proved. At Loren Feldman’s, some people used vivid and hostile examples to fight prejudice: I’m French and you’re right, I shower only once a week. Right after I bang your wife. Plus, in the heat of the discussion, Loic le Meur and Michael Arrington justbroke up.
Screw all that.
I’m lucky to work for this blog. The Next Web team send me all over the world. Everywhere I came, from London, San Francisco, Geneva, Paris, Krakow, Beijing, San Francisco, Shanghai, and even crazy Kathmandu – I found people to level with. Guys and girls who are working to make their dreams come true.
Maybe they’re taking a two hour lunch – but they might as well skip some sleep to work.
Maybe their English is terrible, but they’re helping out millions of people world-wide who speak the same language.
Maybe they don’t have a passport, but thanks to the web they appear more like global citizens to me than most tech people.
As you walk around during a conference a lot of people you talk to ask the same question: “How do you like it so far?”. It is a good conversation starter. You can agree on what was good and complain about whatever went wrong. At Le Web ‘08 there was a lot to complain about and a lot to like. The speakers were very good. It is clear that Loic has an incredible international network. He has access to tech people as well as scientists, writers and politicians.
Speakers, of course, are the most important components of any conference. If you have good speakers you should have a great conference. Le Web had great speakers. But was it a great conference?
Love & Hate
The official subject of this Le Web Edition was ‘Love”. In retrospect it might have been better to call this one “Love & Hate”. People loved the speakers but hated the location, the lack of food, the low temperature of the room and the bad internet connection. Oh, and I’m sure the speakers hated the lousy help they got from the technicians. Laptops didn’t seem to work with beamers projectors, movies wouldn’t play or would be played without sound and speakers had to use hand-held microphones which meant they were either holding the microphones too close or too far away from their mouths.
A pissed off Michael Arrington
So how legitimate is it to complain about these details? We were these as bloggers, regular participants, competing conference organizers and fellow entrepreneurs so it all depends on our perspective when it comes to these issues. Fact is we were certainly not the most critical participants by far. Someone told us that Michael Arrington was so pissed of at having no connectivity he went back to his hotel the first day after lunch and didn’t come back. He even told people he wasn’t planning on coming back the next day!
He did, of course, and interviewed Marissa Meyer on stage. But instead of diving right into the interview Michael took the opportunity to humiliate Loic a bit before he could rush off stage. Arrington left Marissa waiting while he asked Loic “Will there be enough food for everyone today?”. Loic, visibly stunned, said that he thought or hoped there would be. Loic was about to leave when Arrington addressed the audience “Who has an internet connection here” when about 30 hands went up he simply said “Well, that is about three times more than yesterday”. Loic kept smiling but was clearly not at ease with the situation.
And who could blame him? The cold made everyone very hungry, speakers took more time so we arrived at lunch later and the food was so delicious that we just had to eat everything. Shit happens. Wifi is notoriously unreliable and most conference have bad connectivity. So why were some people so annoyed by all this?
Expect everything to be perfect
I think it all has to do with expectations. When you pay more than €1000 for a conference and see that the best speakers in the world will be there at an event that is being held for the 5th time you expect everything to be perfect.
Loic repeated several times that they were spending more than €100.000 on the connectivity. That is one of the reasons people pay what they have to pay. So when you hear that you pay €1000 so Loic can invest €100.000 and then you find out the internet connection doesn’t work, you get irritated.
A little information please
Managing expectations is hard. At the end of the second day someone told me the largest heater in the conference hall broke down the evening before the conference. They installed a new one at night while we were out partying and the second day was slightly warmer. I didn’t know this until the end of the conference and simply thought they were simply not aware of everybody freezing. A little more information on that would have helped manage expectations.
No statue
All in all I had a great time at Le Web and saw a lot of great speakers. The sessions were inspiring and the parties were great fun. I’m sure Loic and Geraldine worked really hard and were just as disappointed at the stuff that went wrong as we were. A lot of people, including me, expressed criticism at what went wrong and we all might have a point.
The thing is, Loic did bring together a large group of extremely interesting and inspiring people and we should be happy he did. So, here is my one and only tip for Loic.
“Pay no attention to what the critics say; there has never been set up a statue in honor of a critic.”
– Jean Sibelius
Written on 14th November 2008
2 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
According to this tweet by Loic Le Meur, he’s been avidly trying out a variety of online services to pick up some ideas, presumably to improve Seesmic. One of the services he’s tried out is the now legendary HotorNot.com and I say, lets show him our support!
Are you planning on attending Le Web in Paris on December 9 & 10? If so we just found the perfect place to stay for you. Hotel Mama Shelter is Paris’ newest Philippe Starck-designed hotel and it is gorgeous. It is located at 109 rue de Bagnolet in the Saint Blaise quartier (on the edge of Paris) with 174 “digital” guest rooms.
Every room has an iMac that isn’t just connected to the Internet but also acts as a HDTV, music, radio, CD, films and DVD player. It will be very attractive to just stay in bed and just follow the Le Web Twitter stream.
If you haven’t bought a ticket to Le Web yet check this out: Loic and Geraldine Le Meur have been so nice to give a 20% discount on their normal fee. This will save you up to 300 euros. Don’t forget to also register for the Techcrunch party!
Recently, Benchmark Capital and Sequoia Capital advised startups to tighten their belts for the crunch times ahead. There’s no safe haven for startups. Except, to a degree, for those which already generate revenue and profit.
Companies that have already raised money need to monitor every penny spent from now on. Those trying to raise money will have a hard time finding investors if they don’t have a real business plan. It seems that the idea of “we’ll figure out later how to make money, first let’s concentrate on acquiring users” is dying.
One company which is trying to navigate in today’s troublesome waters is Seesmic.
Loic Le Meur, the founder and CEO of the company, just announced on his blog that it will let go seven employees (about one third of Seesmic workforce). That’s on top of another three employees who were let go already a few weeks ago. Not good news, but at least he was open and said it straight… It is very open with the press too – he was very fast in responding to some of my questions as well.
Seesmic raised about $12 million dollars so far. The last $6 million round raised a few months ago came from Wellington Partners and Omidyar Network. Seesmic acquired the Adobe AIR desktop client Twhirl which allows users to access the Twitter service directly from their desktop, and also cross post to other services (Pownce, Jaiku being one of them).
Hopefully, they will have enough money to get out on the other side of the tunnel. Good luck, Seesmic!
Now, I suppose we will hear more news about these kind of lay-off’s from other startups.
Jason Calacanis warn us that 50%-80% of the venture-backed companies will not make it or be on life support in the next 18 months.
But venture capitalist William Quigley (Clearstone Venture Partners) has a more cold-blooded assesment of the situation (via Venturebeat).
Five years after the dot com crash, investors came to realize that in fact Internet and telco centric business models (think Google, RIMM) were among the most profitable businesses of our era. This lesson is now well known. What does that mean? I believe this time around the entire tech sector will not be abandoned. If anything, there will be more conviction around the best businesses and business ideas.
This very same phenomenon is happening now in the banking sector. In the middle of the panic phase of the financial crisis, investors speak highly of BofA, JP Morgan, and US Bankcorp.
Amen to that!
Tough times. Tough decisions.also read my blog post http://www.loiclemeur.com/english/2008/10/tough-times-tou.html
Written on 10th October 2008
3 COMMENTS Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer
Friday Flashbacks is a new article series we’re going to try and establish here on The Next Web blog, in which we look back at what happened in this week one year ago. The aim is to get some insight in what had us – “us” being tech bloggers in general – buzzing last year, and if all that noise was worth it or not.
(I was trying to make this a weekly series but skipped a few weeks. You don’t mind, do you?)
So where does last year’s buzz stand now?
October 8, 2007 – Loïc Le Meur launched his new startup, a video conversation platform dubbed Seesmic, with a review on TechCrunch. (Michael Arrington later disclosed he had personally invested in the company). The company is still going strong, even made an acquisition last April with Twhirl and recently raised another $6 million round co-led by Omidyar Network and Wellington Partners, where Le Meur is a Partner. Competitors are jumping onto the scene nowadays, examples given 12seconds, Phreadz and TokBox.
October 9, 2007 – Google acquiredJaiku, the Finland-based mobile IM and presence company. The terms of the acquisition were never disclosed. Jaiku didn’t continue to grow as much as Twitter did in terms of users and traffic, and the only posts that are being published on the Jaiku blog since the acquisition seem to be about maintenances and outages. The service was ported to the Google App Engine and moved to the search engine’s infrastructure, and they made invitations unlimited. That’s about it. As far as I’m concerned, Jaiku fell off the grid and unless Google has some major plans with it, I suspect it won’t make any headlines anymore.
October 10, 2007 – Mozilla announced they were serious about building a mobile browser. The project was given the codename “Fennec” and is still under development. Nobody really knows when Mozilla plans to release a beta version. Anyway, Fennec will face competition with IE Mobile, the iPhone and Android browser, Opera Mobile / Mini, SkyFire, etc., but based on the prototype concepts introduced last June, it looks like it might just be a worthy one.
As you might know, I’m co-organizing BLOG08 – the international blogging conference in Amsterdam on October 24 (see button in the sidebar). Edial Dekker and I have invited famous blogging heroes like Mashable’s Pete Cashmore, Gapingvoid’s Hugh MacLeod, and CEO of Lookery, Scott Rafer to inspire (corporate) bloggers all around the world. So far, people from Poland, the US, Sweden, Estonia, United Kingdom, Germany, Belgium, Spain, and the Netherlands have purchased tickets.
Nobody from France yet, but this might change as we recently ran into French hero Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur. Business Week just called him one of the 25 most influential web people. We couldn’t resist the temptation of interviewing him. He talks about why he started blogging, how his blog developed, the Les Blogs conference, and that we should focus on micro- and videoblogging.
By the way, if you want to come to BLOG08, buy your ticket before October 10th with the “thenextweb” code. Not only will you get a 45 euros discount (price: 150 euros) but you also have the chance of winning an invite for the speakers dinner at Boris’ place.
Just received an email from Loic Le Meur with the Le Web 08 program. This Paris-based two day conference still one of Europe’s hottest web gatherings. Our dear web celebs from Silicon Valley feel the same way, as Michael Arrington, Steve Gillmor, Dan Farber (Editor-in-Chief, CNET News), Om Malik (GigaOm), Robert Scoble, and Kara Swisher cross the ocean for this gig. The theme of the fifth edition is love, oui, l’amour:
For 2008 technology will still play a central role in the proceedings, but we will expand our talks by bringing an even more unique topic to the stage – love. And that is love in all permutations from romantic love (of course) to love of innovation, entrepreneurship, to the way in which our now truly connected “global village” can be a platform for championing critical social issues.
The full program is after the click. See you in Paris on December the 9th and 10th! (more…)
Written on 26th June 2009
36 COMMENTS 
Seesmic begun its life as a “Twitter for video”, from French/SF Entrepreneur Loic Le Meur. The site received wide acclaim , great press and decent growth during the first year of its life. Recently however the growth has stuttered and no one has recognized this more so that Le Meur himself.
Written on 31st December 2008
In the TechCrunch discussion, it took about twenty comments when Godwin’s law was once again proved. At Loren Feldman’s, some people used 
Written on 10th December 2008
Are you planning on attending Le Web in Paris on December 9 & 10? If so we just found the perfect place to stay for you. Hotel Mama Shelter is Paris’ newest Philippe Starck-designed hotel and it is gorgeous. It is located at 109 rue de Bagnolet in the Saint Blaise quartier (on the edge of Paris) with 174 “digital” guest rooms.
Written on 11th October 2008
One company which is trying to navigate in today’s troublesome waters is 
Written on 10th October 2008
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show off, the future of the Web. (More info 
