Traveling Geeks Head to Paris

Traveling Geeks is heading to Paris to participate in a series of meet-ups, briefings, demos and activities in and around LeWeb, the renown web and Internet conference in Europe.

The new site is live, and there's now a Facebook fan page, so please sign up and follow along for an interesting ride over the next few weeks and beyond.

The France team includes: Eliane Fiolet, Tom Foremski, Robin Wauters, Kim-Mai Cutler, David Spark, Frederic Lardinois, Matt Buckland, Sky Schuyler, Jerome Tranie, Ewan Spence, Olivier Ezratty, Cyrille de Lasteyrie, Renee Blodgett, Amanda Coolong, Beth Blecherman, and Phil Jeudy.  

Our goal is to collaborate with innovators and influencers, and then share that knowledge and insight to a collective global audience through blogging, video, social media tools, traditional media and meet-ups.

More as we get closer to the tour.

Note: Banner to the right created by Eliane.

Answers Summit Brings Together Q&A Community

Client Answers.com announces first Answers Summit, which will bring together members to meet, mingle and celebrate their growing Q&A community.

The Answers Summit's Q&A community event will be hosted December 5-6, 2009 in Atlanta, GA.  The Summit will include workshops on growing, improving and celebrating WikiAnswers, the community-generated Q&A platform of Answers.com.

A guest speaker from the Cyberbullying Research Center will conduct a workshop titled ‘The Fight Against Cyberbullying.’ A second workshop, conducted by a Performance Specialist, will focus on communicating effectively online. The conference will be addressed by keynote speakers Bob Rosenschein, CEO, and Bruce D. Smith. Additional highlights of the event include a trip to the Georgia Aquarium with a catered dinner.

Ellingson on Art: Interface Between the Spiritual, Psychological and the Material

Meet Miriam Ellingson, a Bay Area artist I had an opportunity to meet recently and was immediately drawn to her work.

She says of her work, that it has been the interface between the spiritual, the psychological and the material. Miriam believes the necessary ingredients for optimum creativity, aside from the whisper of the muse, are space, time and intention. A few of my favorites are below.

Mechanics of Being

 

   

CrunchUp Mug Shots

Mug shots taken from this past week's TechCrunch Crunchup, a one day event that brought together several interesting panels and startup demos on stage at the Intercontinental in San Francisco.

Erick Schonfeld moderates

George Zachary

 

Mike Arrington

 

Ron Conway

Brian Singerman

Paul Carr

Co-Tweet's Jesse Engle

Steve Gillmor

Jean-Baptiste Su, Renee Blodgett, Pearltrees' Patrice Lamothe

Dan'l Lewin

Sean Rad

Erick Schonfeld

 

Steve Gillmor

 

Marc Benioff

Media Streams for Entertainment OR Marketing?

The Media Streams panel at TechCrunch Crunchup included Sean Rad of Ad.ly, Ryan Amos of DailyBooth, Jesse Engle of CoTweet, Hollywood agent Robin Bechtel who represents Britney Spears and Philip Nelson of NewTek. Erick Schonfeld and Paul Carr moderated, Carr enters stage right with a fluffy furry hat on.

Robin talks about an idea did for Britney: they hit tickets for one of her upcoming concerts and sent out clues through Twitter. The grand finale was a live event in Times Square where Britney showed up in a double decker buzz to greet over 8,000 fans.

Philip Nelson of NewTek talks about how Twitter and real-time streams are being used by artists to reach out to fans. One campaign brought 50,000 fans to an artist's hotel room where they experienced personal moments in real-time.

For a Todd Rundgren concert, they did a backstage pass promotion where fans got to witness his costume changes. The result? He sold more tickets.

Co-Tweet CEO Jesse Engle talks of Twitter as a focal point where a lot of disparate messages get communicated across different places. Various marketing elements also come together.

Philip talks about the webcast activity around Miss Universe where through viral communication alone a week before the event, they generated a half million viewers. While the number may not be significant compared to mainstream television, there was no promotion for weeks and months in advance.

The goal is to make contestants more accessible to their fans. Rad says, "Twitter brings a sense of honesty on the net. If you look at Twitter, you’re only as good as your content. While there is a sense of marketing and pushing on Twitter, 140 characters has value to an audience. That said, in some way, shape or form, it wants to be monetized."

Schonfeld brings Scoble up to the stage to talk about supertweet and how it applied to the discussion. Advertising is coming to Twitter, but it will be fun advertising? And what will that mean? Where will it go? The overall sentiment was that you can't f-k with editorial. So like advertising on television and elsewhere, its outside editorial, outside the core content.

TechCrunch's Crunchup: Startups Pitch Their Latest

TechCrunch's Real-Time Crunchup previewed a number of startups, some of which haven't officially launched yet and some of which announced new features and announcements today.

Baduku is an opinion engine that helps people make informed decisions or gauge public opinions about anything -- all in 50 characters.

Baduku is an intelligent organization of opinions that merges the opinions of all users and ranks them by order of consensus. Rather than having to read hundreds of individual reviews to get the whole picture about a topic, Baduku seeks out similar points/opinion in every review and then organizes it by how often a point/opinion was mentioned by different people.

Flixup is a web and mobile application that helps you discover movies and share them with your friends on Twitter and social media.

Think of the Twitter stream and filtration for movie reviews. (Rotten tomatoes Twitter style :-). They segment and analyze movie conversations to make it easy for moviegoers to understand what people are saying about a particular movie.

It spans across Twitter, then returns a score as well as tweets about a particular movie from people you follow on Twitter.

VideoLobby (great name), allows you to run professionally managed live shows. You can set your shows up to go viral and using their Twitter and Facebook integration leverages the power of your audiences social networks.

Rippol is an intelligent video discovery engine that uses The Butterfly Effect Network, a system of algorithms that allows you to discover videos you like and once you do, you can view it online in real time.

There's over 700,000 TV shows, movies, live video and clips from all over the Internet to choose from. You can learn, discover and share new content based on your passions, social graph and social impact. Friendcasting will allow you to dig into your social impact and measure it.

Marc Benioff Chats with Schonfeld & Gillmor

On the heals of Dreamforce's massive San Francisco-based event (touted as the cloud computing event of the year), TechCrunch's Real-Time CrunchUp had Marc Benioff on stage today -- a joint interview by Erick Schonfeld and Steve Gillmor.

Entertaining and provocative as always, he avoids direct answers to acquisition interest, touts their growing numbers, and complains about Microsoft's lack of features.

And, of course 'it's all in the book,' his latest which he references on more than one occasion: Behind the Cloud: the untold story of how salesforce.com went from idea to billion-dollar company -- and revolutionized an industry.

Best Table Designs in the Bay Area

Below are a sample of photos taken at this week's Dining by Design event in San Francisco, an effort to help raise money for AIDS and people who don't have healthcare insurance, which has grown this year.

DIFFA has mobilizing the immense resources of the design communities for over a decade and granted over $38 million to hundreds of AIDS service organizations nationwide.

Dining by Design Chefs & Designers Speak Up

Design Industries Foundation Fighting AIDS is one of the country's largest supporters of direct care for people living with HIV/AIDS and preventive education for those at risk. Merging care and commerce, supporters of DIFFA come from all fields of fine design and the visual arts, including: architecture, fashion design, interior design, photography and consumer product design.

They held their annual Dining by Design event in San Francisco this week.

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Organizing 2.0: Putting New York in a New Media State-of-Mind

Check out Organizing 2.0, a conference of bloggers and online organizers from the social justice world. The conference aims to serve as a way for organizers to come together and train, while also learning from each other on how to better organize in the world of new media. In a New York state-of-mind so to speak.