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…)
Written on 16th June 2009
7 COMMENTS Martin Bryant, Co-founder, Social Media Café Manchester
Popular Twitter and Facebook app Seesmic Desktop has today been upgraded with a number of new features and a new community website has been launched.. However, support for Seesmic’s bread-and-butter product, video discussion, is still curiously missing. It’s leading us to wonder if the team at Seesmic have any future at all planned for their video platform.
New features for version 0.3 RC1 (it’s no longer tagged as a ‘Preview Release’) include the ability to crosspost to multiple Twitter accounts simultaneously, with an option to allow the app to automatically switch between accounts depending on whom you are replying to.
URL shortening service Bit.ly is now more tightly integrated with Seesmic Desktop. Support for their API means you can track the number of clickthroughs from Bit.ly URLs generated within the app. Support for services like Posterous and Twitpic can now be set on an account-by-account basis.
Written on 17th December 2008
1 COMMENT Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Seesmic’s Loic Le Meur has just announced a brand new update to the Seesmic platform and excitingly, it’s available for public testing here. Le Meur iterates and re-iterates that the new site is experimental, not without glitches and available specifically for user feedback (so ensure you give it!).
The reason for the major update? Well according to Le Meur, to ensure future features/updates are added faster, smoother and easier.
Updates
On his blog, the Seesmic founder shared a list of updates:
no more huge flash except in the player. We heard you, it was the #1 request of the community. The new Seesmic should be light, fast to load and easy to access.
white and not black. Colors are always a debate but a majority of members wanted white. White is good for seesmic-ing as it lights your face in the dark (more…)
If you’re doing something with technology and you’re not leaving comments on Techcrunch, using Seesmic, you’re an idiot. An idiot!
Gary Vaynerchuk is a vlogger with a good story. He transformed an ordinary New Jersey-based wine store into a world famous online media company (that still sells wines). As you can imagine, Vaynerchuk is recognized as an expert on personal branding. Hence the invites for conferences like Web 2.0 Expo New York and Blogworld Expo. During the latter he said the words I started this post with.
So I’m an idiot. I guess he’s right. The Seesmic comments on TechCrunch really stand out. Everybody can put a name to the face and after a while, people probably start recognizing these video commenters at conferences.
It worked for Loren Feldman, the infamous vlogger from 1938media.com who made fun of tons of A-listers with an army of puppets. I’ve the pleasure of welcoming him at BLOG08 in Amsterdam next week. When I tell people about his BLOG08 keynote, most of them say: “I know him! He’s the cursing guy from the Techcrunch comments” (yes he curses and swears a lot to make his points).
Will I stop being a non-vlogging idiot? And will you?
Since I know Vaynerchuk is right, I’ll have to get started with vlogging. I got the i-sight thing going on, a Seesmic account, and.., tons of excuses not to start. I’m in an office full of people, where do I record the videos? I don’t have time for it. It’s just plain scary. I could go on for a while.
Obviously I’m not the only idiot. You probably are as well. Why aren’t you vlogging? Why aren’t you leaving comments on Seesmic? And is it really the future of blogging?
I hope these questions will be answered during BLOG08, where not only Feldman will speak, but also vlogger and Mobuzz host GabeMac will make an appearance. But I also hope we can start a discussion here. Do you agree with Seesmic founder Loic le Meur, who told me during an interview that my blog conference should be about vlogging, as that’s the future? Let’s figure that out together.
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.
Le Meur was in his San Francisco-based office, watching a big LCD screen where the desperate person was depicted. “People emailed us that he looked very serious”, Le Meur said, “the guy was about to kill himself, what do you do?”
So while hundreds of Seesmic members tried to convince the man to not kill himself by posting comments on his videos, Le Meur called his lawyers. “We’re a US-based company after all”. They advised him to call the police, which Le Meur did.
“We gave the police his IP address. After twenty minutes, they knocked on his door somewhere in the middle of the US”. An interesting example of a case where security is more important than privacy.
Update: check out Loic’s comment, he actually gave the email address.
The press loves entrepreneurial kids. Every time a young kid pulls something special off, a newspaper is eager enough to give the lad an wide-spread page. The new press, bloggers et al, seem to have the same habit. Teenage entrepreneurs like Jessica Mah (who was a speaker at The Next Web Conference) and Zooomr founder Kristopher Tate have been receiving a fair amount of attention, partly thanks to their age. And now there’s a new kid on the block. His name? Daniel Brusilovsky. His age? 15 years.
Daniel has just launched Teens in Tech, a publication platform for kids who fancy new media, in private alpha mode. Basically, it’s a Wordpress multi-user installation with a fancy layer – really cool logo – and a forum.
Daniel Brusilovsky at Supernova
As TechCrunch’s Jason Kincaid notes, Daniel seems to know everybody. His board of advisers includes web influentials like Loic Le Meur, Robert Scoble (old enough to be Brusilovsky’s father) and some folks at TechCrunch and Apple. When we – meaning The Next Web team – visited the Valley in June, we met Daniel at Seemics’ HQ and Supernova.
Loic Le Meur told us he expects the young entrepreneur to create value by creating a community of young folks engaged in new media and tech and that is a great platform for companies (like Seesmic) to plug their service. The old marketing formula still works: teenagers have plenty of money to spend and they’re the future. A 1000 teenagers armed with webcams would be a welcome crowd to the Seesmic community.
Le Meur and others also know that young lads like Brusilovsky still attract enough media attention to create a hype. A young entrepreneur is just plain charming – so the group of web influentials happily welcome him in their circle of Internet fame and fortune.
I can’t respect this kid, or his company. As Luke said, its a complete joke. I have no intentions at even visiting Teens in Tech. Also, watch your acronym, people may think its a naughty site.
This post has also lowered the journalistic quality on TechCrunch.
Daniel Brusilwhatever has only been featured because of his connections. Shame on TC.
We experienced the same when we posted the announcement about Jessica Mah coming to Amsterdam:
She is 17, ok, and made high school with 15 years. 600 people read her blog, and dices will be thrown to see if someone will be talking about her in 2 years time. She is not a great speaker! (Drivingsouth)
Although some people support Mah and Brusilovsky – “I wish I was that productive back then”, the general opinion seems to be that the young entrepreneur must really have something special to offer. They get the attention, but then they have to prove they’re worth it. I’m sorry Brusilovsky, but the teenage charm factor isn’t here to stay.
Written on 20th June 2008
0 COMMENTS Patrick de Laive, Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of The Next Web Conference. Twitter: @patrick
Yesterday I speculated that Seesmic raised a Series B. The news just got out, Seesmic raised 6 million dollars from Omidyar Network and Wellington Partners. Nice detail is that Loic Le Meur also took a role in the Wellington Partners team (as a Venture Partner).
Loic is happy with his The Next Web Award and 6 million dollars on the bank.
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 16th June 2009
Popular Twitter and Facebook app 
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One company which is trying to navigate in today’s troublesome waters is 
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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 
