Here’s my second and final show report from Le Web. We had been led to believe that Le Web was going to be about real-time Web. After the first day, we were wondering when that discussion would begin. But by day two we finally got some discussion on that topic.

Watch the video for a summary of day two, mostly about the real-time Web and also some of my critiques about how the show was handled. But for a full analysis of the event, make sure you read my report, The cool and not-so-cool from LeWeb.

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The post Le Web day 2: End of day show report appeared first on Inside Social Media.

Here’s my end of day show report for Le Web, the Web 2.0 conference in Paris. I’ve been in Paris for the week reporting with the Traveling Geeks (watch video of us on a train). Watch the video for a quick summary of the companies I saw, plus a quick story at the end about an outbreak Robert Scoble had at the expense of the French entrepreneurs.

Companies and links mentioned in the video.

• Square
• How Dell handles customer service and sales through social media: Interview with Richard Binhammer (@RichardATDell)
• AllMyApps
• blueKiwi
• TicTacDo
• Wikeo
• eBuzzing
• DEZineforce
• Video: Dating tech service Wuiper offers a fun way for people to meet
• DEZineforce
• TrueKnowledge
• Yatedo

The post Le Web day 1: End of day show report appeared first on Inside Social Media.

At the Le Web conference in Paris, I spoke with Richard Binhammer, better known as @RichardATDell on Twitter. Three years ago Richard, who was and still is working in public affairs, was told by his boss to start getting engaged in blogger relations. It appears that Binhammer’s move into social media was one of the many responses to the 2005 Dell Hell outburst initiated by social media consultant Jeff Jarvis, who wrote an open letter to Dell complaining about Dell’s customer service. At the time, Dell’s response was, “We don’t respond to bloggers.”

It took this dramatic situation to shake Dell up, but they finally did respond a year later with a full social media presence that’s been valuable for customer service and promoting sales. Binhammer said that Dell’s use of Twitter is responsible for $6.5 million in sales worldwide.

In the video I gave Binhammer a little bit of a hard time regarding his minimal opinion on the HP situation I had that I published here before (“Why I love public transportation and hate HP” and HP’s response). Granted, I caught him off guard and didn’t tell him the full story, but I was looking for a more concrete answer to the procedure on how he’d go around handling a single complaint like mine from someone who is established online. Off camera we talked more about how every incident is different. And I agree, there isn’t one pat answer, but there are procedures to handle things and I’m still eager to know more about Dell’s procedure.

Does your company have procedures on handling negative conversation in the social media space? If so, let us know. What procedures work? What don’t work? Eager for a discussion.

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The Traveling Geeks can’t stop recording their every movement, especially on the Paris Metro

I am still highly amused by the volume of photography and video that’s going on at the Traveling Geeks event in Paris (explanation, silly video). There is an endless number of photos that have been taken so far (full screen), and we haven’t yet arrived at our key event, Le Web, which starts tomorrow.

Here’s a video of us jammed into a Metro car going to see a bunch of startups at an incubator. On the train and in the video are Eliane Fiolet, Tom Foremski, Robin Wauters, Kim-Mai Cutler, Frederic Lardinois, Matt Buckland, Sky Schuyler, Ewan Spence, Olivier Ezratty, Renee Blodgett, Amanda Coolong, Beth Blecherman, and Robert Scoble.

For more coverage, check out my first day video report and a video interview with the artistic director of a really impressive project scanning the entire city of Paris.

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Go to dinner with the geeks and you’ll get lots of photos taken

Let me set the scene for you. More than a dozen geeks have traveled to Paris for a weeklong tech odyssey culminating with coverage from France’s premier Web 2.0 conference, Le Web. I’m having a hard time trying to determine what the difference is between “Le Web” and “The Web,” but as far as I can tell, it’s soft cheese.

Our group, the Traveling Geeks, has come from all over the world to meet, see new technology, and report about it. Everyone is blogging from multiple locations, but if you want to catch everyone’s coverage, no matter where they write it, just follow the blog Traveling Geeks (RSS).

Here’s what I’ve learned so far:

• “Traveling Geeks” pens look a lot better than they work. I’ve witnessed three run out of ink within one minute of use.
• Connectivity at hotel is horrible. I’m jonesing for a fast connection so I can upload some videos. I’ve got a video of an aging accordionist playing and singing “I’m Just a Gigolo.” UPDATE: I got a fast connection and I just posted the video. Take a look.
• Geeks bring their video and image capturing equipment to dinner. Things normal people wouldn’t dream to photograph will not only be photographed and videotaped, but you’ll have lots and lots of it. Here’s just the beginning of our photostream.
• The doors on the Paris Metro will try to crush you if you don’t get in or out fast enough. Tom Foremski of Silicon Valley Watcher was unfortunately our guinea pig for that discovery. Despite all the photos of everyone’s meal and the closeups of the pores on my face last night, nobody got a shot or video of Tom vs. the Paris Metro.

Special thanks to Mobile Globe for sponsoring last night’s dinner. I was privy to a rather cool demo of its mobile application that lets you make international calls anywhere in the world for just 4 cents per minute. Installs on BlackBerrys, iPhones and a bunch of other Java-enabled devices. And another thanks to Mashcast for making that silly video of all us at top.

The post The Traveling Geeks land at Le Web appeared first on Inside Social Media.

During the Traveling Geeks’ trip to the United Kingdom last month, I spent some time polling the Geeks about the productivity and must-have tools that they use during the course of a typical workday.

I did the same thing during the first Geeks trip to Israel last year and came away with a wealth of apps, some of which I incorporated into my daily routine: See Tools the alpha geeks use. Back then, the list included Qik, TweetScan, FriendFeed, Skype, Bloglines, Pandora, Foxytunes, NetVibes, Socialthing, Seesmic, Adium — and it serves as an interesting snapshot in time of what tools some of the top Bay Area bloggers and technologists were using in spring 2008.

This time around there was more emphasis on social media services like Twitter as well as multimedia apps. Among the tools in the Geeks’ arsenal: Zemanta, Tweetdeck, HootSuite, PeopleBrowsr, Mindjet, Shopstyle and Friendfeed (Twitter and Facebook are givens). Remember, this is a partial, on-the-fly list of useful tools — intended to introduce readers to some apps they might not be using — and not a comprehensive list, and it also doesn’t take into consideration any of the startup apps’ we were introduced to in the UK.

Also, whether you’re a geek or not, please add your favorite tools in the comments so we can all learn what works for you!

Here’s our rundown:

JD Lasica

• Firefox, with occasional forays into Flock and Safari; Firebug and Zemanta plug-ins

• WordPress, the open-source platform for my Socialmedia.biz and Socialbrite.org blogs

• I just started using HootSuite 2.0, a Web-based, Ajax-smart Twitter application that I find superior (so far) to the downloadable Tweetdeck and Seesmic Desktop apps. (I’m @jdlasica on Twitter.)

• Zoho Writer and Zoho Sheets, which are superior to Google Docs (though I use the latter when forced)

• Fetch tied to BBEdit, to manage files on my blogs’ servers

• Snapz Pro X, to capture images and movies from any Mac computer screen

• Flickr Uploadr, to batch-upload photos to my Flickr photostream

• Paparazzi, a wonderful tool for Mac users to capture entire Web pages — even the portions that appear below the fold

• Final Cut Express for almost all my video editing

• Gmail for email and to store files in the cloud

• Google Talk and Skype for most of my chats

• Delicious for social bookmarking in the cloud

• Google Reader to keep track of blogs and share stories to Socialbrite

• Vimeo and Blip.tv for video sharing

• VLC, the open source media player, to watch videos in almost any format

• Still alternating between iTunes and Pandora for my music jones

• Still trying to learn QuickSilver (so far unsuccessfully) for keyboard shortcuts. Considering LaunchBar.

• Google calendar to manage my events, though I need to get back to using Upcoming more.

• Facebook for wasting time

• iPhone apps: Google maps (for location), Stanza and eReader (for reading), experimenting with Twitterfon, Tweetdeck, Twittelator and Simply Tweet for Twitter, Evernote (for keeping notes online), Loopt and Google Latitude for geo-awareness, Yelp for restaurants, Rocket Taxi, iTalk and QuickVoice (for interviews and recording random thoughts)

Robert Scoble

Robert — the former famed Microsoft blogger — has gone to an all-Mac household (“I like the OS better,” he says), though he runs Windows 7 using Parallels Desktop on his MacBook Pro laptop.

Robert generally chooses his apps to run in the cloud rather than buying OEM packaged software. “I’m trying to move my life completely to the browser. Ido everything on the Internet. The only thing I do locally is video editing,” for which he uses iMovie for his personal videos.

Some of his choice apps:

• Friendfeed (“Friendfeed is my chat application.”)

• PeopleBrowsr, for social media search

• Mindjet, for mindmapping presentations

• Tweetdeck, to manage Twitter

• Seesmic, to post video and manage Twitter

• Google Docs and Spreadsheets for free office applications

• iPhone 3GS, SimplyTweet and whole bunch of other apps

• iMovie

Howard Rheingold

• Firefox

• CopyPaste Pro: “If I had to recommend only one tool for Mac users, this would be it. It remembers the last 200 objects of any media type that I cut or copied to the clipboard.”

• Skype for voice over IP

• Google Talk for chat

• Social Media Classroom (of course)

• Diigo, a research and knowledge-sharing tool

• Final Cut Express

• GraphicConverter

• Seesmic Desktop

• Powerpoint

• WordPress

• iPhone GS for video and Mobypicture and Pixelpipe apps

“Sky” Schuyler

Sky Schuyler, CTO of the Dalai Lama Foundation, served as the tech lead on our trip and time and again generously shared information about his tech habits. Some of his favorite tools:

• WordPress to power a long list of blogs

• Sky uses a Flip Mino recorder and occasionally its internal software to do rudimentary video editing.

• FeedWordPress: Sky configured this plug-in to suck our individual blog feeds into the TravelingGeeks.com WordPress blog.

• YARPP (Yet Another Related Posts Plug-in), a Firefox plug-in for Firefox that finds related posts within my blog and I have configured it with a special CSS so it also displays little thumbnails next to the suggested posts.

• PGP to encrypt email and confidential data on his computer.

• Google Docs, chiefly for sharing word docs in the cloud.

• Zemanta, the Firefox plug-in. “I can’t believe how much better my posts are, how much more relevant and complete they are.”

• BBEdit for plain text processing (“I use this more than any other app except browsers”), Apple Pages for rich and beautiful documents, and Microsoft Office and Open Office otherwise.

• OmniGraffle: Like Visio, it lets you create diagrams to group concepts together graphically.

• Sky runs Ubuntu, a Linux distribution, on a virtual machine. VMWare Fusion is the VM he uses to run Windows XP and Ubuntu 8.04; he “tests” incoming viruses by running WMWare “sandbox,” which he then throws away after infected.

• QuickTime Pro and Final Cut Express for editing video, as well as Flip4mac to output videos in .wmv and .flv formats.

• Tweetdeck, which he prefers over Seesmic Desktop.

• Ecto to blog when offline and to cross-post more easily

• Retrospect to back up photos and Apple’s Time Machine to back up everything — but he copies all his photos to physical storage data DVDs.

Meghan Asha

• Shopstyle, a shopping application that provides a visual search for online goods.

• Tumblr, a blog platform and app that lets you publish videos and pictures from your cellphone, especially useful for lifecasting or moblogging. “Tumblr is amazing — if your grandmother didn’t know how to blog, go on there, it’s life-changing,” Meghan gushes.

• iPhone apps: Mint, Yelp, Stanza (free app that lets you download and read from a selection of more than 100,000 books and periodicals), Pano ($2.99 app that lets you take seamless panoramic photos on your iPhone), and TalkBubbles ($4.99 app that lets you add dialogue in comic strip-like bubbles to your photos)

• Skitch lets you annotate websites with comments, drawings, arrows, etc., then upload the sketch to their website and share it or blog it. “It’s just plain fun,” she says.

• Zemanta, a Firefox browser add-on that lets you easily add images to your blog posts. I started using Zemanta on my WordPress blogs after meeting the company’s CTO and hearing Susan and Meghan rave about it.

• Tweetdeck, a free downloadable app for both your computer and iPhone that lets you manage your Twitter stream.

• iMovie, part of Apple’s iLife suite, to easily edit her videos. “No boy interns,” she sighed with a wan smile.

Susan Bratton

• MobyPicture for syndicating my photos and videos from my iPhone and Mac across all my social nets simultaneously (kicks TwitPic’s booty). Susan wrote about it on her DishyMix blog.

• TweetLater Professional for scheduling tweets in advance (Susan wrote about it in her roundup of social media tools)

• Trackur for online reputation management and social listening. It’s superior to Google Alerts. (See her post on Online Reputation Guidelines.

• Testing uberVU, a social media commenting tracking and reply system, in their private beta. (See her post on this.)

• A Twitter Custom Search bookmark on her Firefox browser toolbar (see her post on how to do this).

• Skype with screen sharing (see Are You There? Skype is My Traveling Geeks Lifeline).

• Innovate Ads “video spokesperson” and video banners for my book, Talk Show Tips. See Creating a High Converting Video Spokesperson for Your Landing Page).

• iMovie with YouTube uploader

• WordPress with Zemanta plug-in (image and article recommendations) for Firefox

• Facebook

• Flickr via iPhoto uploader

• Tweetdeck on her Mac Mini

• iPhone app: Twitterific

Craig Newmark

• Pine, an old-timey email application

• Firefox

• Google calendar

• Google docs

• Google maps

• Seesmic Desktop

• Picasa

• iPhone apps, including Rimshot and Trombone (sound effects)

Renee Blodgett

• EasyTweets: manage multiple Twitter accounts, SMS and email keyword alerts, schedule, import feeds, and more
• GroupMail, a way to send personalized email marketing campaigns from your Windows desktop
• Outlook, the perennial email client, and a customized Outlook marketing tool (a proprietary tool that converts Outlook stuff to formattable stuff for export and distribution to customized groups)
• Firefox
• Google Maps
• Facebook
• YouTube
• Flip camera
• WordPress
• Typepad
• Filemaker
• Twitter
• Ad-Aware for spyware
• Acronis for data backup
• iTunes
• Skype for international conversations and chat
• NetVibes
• MobyPicture
• Sharpcast for syncing your data across the Web
• Voyij.com for travel searches
• Blurb
• Smugmug
• Flickr

Tom Foremski

• Ecto to post when offline but he is switching to MyBlogEdit and MovableType for their additional functionalities.

• He uses the su.pr url shortener from Stumbleupon for tweeting posts — now or later.

• Firefox

• iMovie 8, “a great tool for quick video editing and upload”

Ayelet Noff

Some of the tools Ayelet used most during the Geeks’ trip:

• Flickr
• FriendFeed
• iMovie
• Twitter
• Tweetdeck
• Google Maps
• Google calendar
• Facebook
• iPhoto
• iPhone

The post Coolest power tools of some top geeks appeared first on Inside Social Media.

It has been one month since the Traveling Geeks kicked off our trip to London and Cambridge with a Tweetup at JuJu in Chelsea. (I was the chief organizer of trip.) From this distance and vantage point, here are a few random impressions:

• I think too much can be made of the differences between entrepreneurship in the UK and in the United States. While it’s true that Silicon Valley nurtures a spirit of innovation marked by the mantra “Fail often, but fail fast” — an axiom that permits experimentation without demanding an immediate return to investors — it’s even more true that the businessmen and entrepreneurs I met along the way have the same fire in the belly — a burning desire to build something of great value.

• SeedCamp was a high point of the trip to many of us, and apart from the well-done, compact presentations, it was fascinating to watch tomorrow’s young business leaders mingle with each other and exchange ideas and contact information. Cross-pollination at its best. Spotify, Huddle, Skimlinks, Zemanta — these are names that may grow into notable consumer brands in the coming years, and Moo arguably already has. (Here’s my writeup; and here’s my video interview with Skimlinks founder Alicia Navarro.)

• Appreciated the free exchange of ideas at the Econsultancy Roundtable, including London2012 director Alex Balfour’s frank take on the give and take between broadcast television and new media at the London Games.

• Enjoyed getting to know all of the geeks better: Meghan Asha, Sarah Lacey, Sky Schuyler, Susan Bratton, Craig Newmark (pictured above), Robert Scoble, Ayelet Noff and especially Howard Rheingold, who rarely travels in a pack despite his book Smart Mobs. See my short video of Howard in front of King’s College discussing the themes of his closing keynote at Reboot Britain, an event that provided a perfect kickoff to the week.

• The Monday morning roundtable with Tristan Wilkinson, Intel UK’s Director for Public Sector, nicely framed many of the week’s discussions, with a thoughtful exchange about a social media literacy gap taking the place of a hardware digital divide.

• I had the good fortune to be seated, during a dinner in one of Cambridge’s historic colleges, next to two fascinating entrepreneurs: to my left, the founder of mobispeech, maker of CapturaTalk (“take a picture, hear the word and understand,” a mobile OCR technology app particularly useful for people with disabilities such as dyslexia and those learning English as a second language). Download a free 30-day trial of CapturaTalk here. I’ve lost the fellow’s name — he didn’t have a business card, alas — but I found his sense of humor captivating. “We practice what we preach and hire dyslexics. Almost everyone on staff. Honestly, proofing our marketing materials has been a problem,” he said with a laugh.

• To my right was seated William Tunstall Pedoe, founder-CEO of True Knowledge, which is about to make a splash in the search marketplace. (Enter a question, get an answer back.) Here’s Renee’s video interview with William.

• Did you know that Cambridge is celebrating its 800th birthday this year?

• I think we were all enthralled by the stunning landscapes throughout our journey, from the fabulous view atop the BT Tower (thanks again to JP Rangaswami for the fabulous dinner) to the historic architecture of Cambridge. Here are my photo sets of London and Cambridge. Is there a more civilized way to top off a business-heavy day of appearances in Cambridge than with punting on the Cam while sipping champagne? I think not.

• An afternoon at Cambridge Consultants proved what I’d long suspected: that Europe is ahead of the United States when it comes to marketplace efficiencies and government incentives to reduce our carbon footprint, as the demo of a green kitchen with smart metering amply demonstrated. (The U.S. needs to play catch-up — fast.) Too, the glimpse we got into the future of wireless medical devices was especially illuminating.

• The technology piece of the trip came off better than I expected, thanks to the generosity of our sponsors (BT, Intel, NESTA, East of England, Nokia, Skype, Pure Digital’s Flip); here’s my debriefing with our tech lead, Sky Scuyler, who made the week go smoothly.

• Another highlight came with a light-night game, led by Susan Bratton, that stripped away social conventions and laid bare some of the secrets we carry with us. Thank you, Sarah, Robert, Susan, Ayelet, Rocky and Paul Carr of the Guardian for a memorable evening.

• Jane Austen jokes aside, Craig Newmark is a very fun guy to travel with.

• Had a rollicking good time at the Guardian podcast with Robert Scoble, Sarah Lacy, the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones and the Guardian’s Emily Bell and Matt Wells. Here’s my writeup.

• We do owe one final shoutout to our sponsors for making this trip happen, in particular Ken Kaplan of Intel (with Christine Ngo also of great help), Roland Harwood of NESTA, Karyn Barnes of East of England International (pictured above with Craig) and JP Rangaswami of BT. We owe you our everlasting gratitude.

• Also a big thank you to my partners in crime, Traveling Geeks co-founders Jeff Saperstein, who brought a welcome calmness to the proceedings, and Renee Blodgett, who produced a big chunk of the media and brought in some needed sponsors at the end.

• I owe a debt to the Malmaison hotel, which shipped the sport coat I left in my room, and to Clare of Econsultancy, who made sure my LP-Micro strobe was sent back across the pond. Now if I could just locate my wits.

Cross-posted to the Traveling Geeks site.

Related articles

• Meghan Asha on highlights of Traveling Geeks UK (socialmedia.biz)
• Introducing Traveling Geeks London (socialmedia.biz)

The post Final reflections on the Traveling Geeks trip appeared first on Inside Social Media.

During the Traveling Geeks‘ visit to Seedcamp in London last week, I sat down for a short interview with Alicia Navarro, founder and CEO of Skimlinks, an affiliate marketing service aimed at publishers that want to make money from their shopping recommendations. It’s an alternative to traditional affiliate marketing from sites like Amazon, where you get paid a commission for referrals but need to jump through a number of hoops when working with multiple sites.

With Skimlinks you add one line of code to your site and it takes care of updating your site with marketing links automatically. Sites where products and services are discussed — particularly those covering fashion, technology, gadgets, parenting, autos and home and lifestyle — are the ones that stand to benefit most from Skimlinks.

Some large sites are already pulling in $10,000 per month “without having to do anything — that’s the beauty of it,” Alicia says.

Naturally, inserting commercial links in the middle of your editorial content raises all kinds of issues, so Skimlinks has developed best practices and guidelines. “We believe very passionately in the importance of maintaining editorial integry,” Alicia says. Editors can stay completely focused on creating high-quality content without having to deal with integrating affiliate marketing links into their sites. “Skimlinks monetizes it after the fact, so editors can be agnostic and completely unaware of what is monetized and what isn’t.”

If you run a site that sends people off to different shopping sites, it’s definitely worth a look — Skimlinks turns shopping links into affiliate marketing links on the fly. Individual bloggers, forums, user-generated content sites and social shopping sites and large publishers (iVillage, Hearst Digital) are now using Skimlinks to generate an additional revenue source. Users tend to like the approach, says Alicia, because you then don’t need to run so many banner ads.

As Alicia points out, the era of banner advertising is largely over, and sites will need to look to multiple revenue sources: some ads, sponsorships and a service like Skimlinks. “We’re seeing a lot of publishers looking to us as their main business model,” she says.

Watch or embed the video on Vimeo

Related

• Alicia Navarro discusses good.ly, a url shortener that benefits charities, in this 1-minute video

• What is Affiliate Marketing? (problogger.net)

The post Skimlinks: Make money from your blog appeared first on Inside Social Media.

One of the real highlights of the Traveling Geeks trip to the United Kingdom last week came when we were treated to “speed dating” session with the top start-ups of Seedcamp.

This, after all, is one of the chief goals of the Traveling Geeks: to suss out young or little-known start-ups hear their stories, and throw a spotlight on the ones that resonate with us.

So we were thrilled when Sherry Coutu and Reshma Sohoni of London-based Seedcamp (Twitter: @seedcamp) arranged for us to meet their top start-ups, both collectively and one on one. Every one had a compelling consumer-facing service. Here are the ones that particularly struck a chord:

Huddle.net

Twitter: @huddle
Email: [email protected]
Site: huddle.net

Huddle.net offers a collaboration, sharing and project tools platform for getting stuff done. Specifically, Huddle provides secure online workspaces where users can share files, collaborate on ideas, manage projects and organize virtual meetings. P&G, Toshiba, Panasonic, Nokia and Unicef are among the customers using Huddle.

In February, Huddle partnered with InterCall, the world’s largest conferencing provider, to provide services to their 1 million-plus customers. And last month BusinessWeek named Huddle one of their “50 most promising startups” around the globe.

Heady stuff for founders Andy McLoughlin and Alistair Mitchell, who gave me a five-minute rundown of the site’s services. While I’ve been impressed by Basecamp‘s recent improvements, I saw enough in my session with Andy and Alistair that persuaded me to try out Huddle in an upcoming project with one of my clients or co-conspirators.

Zemanta

Twitter: @zemanta
Email: [email protected]
Site: zemanta.com

Andraz Tori (pictured at top), CTO of Slovenia-based Zemanta, sat down and gave the company’s six-word pitch: “Zemanta is an author’s best friend.” Turns out that it’s not just a marketing pitch.

I just started using Zemanta today and can see why it’s so addictive. As a blogger on WordPress who uses the Firefox browser, I’m perfectly suited for Zemanta’s services. I had previously come across Zemanta only on other bloggers’ posts and didn’t pay much attention to the link at the bottom of blog posts that would summon up related posts.

But Zemanta offers a slick and convenient way to spruce up your blog posts.It looks over your shoulder while you’re crafting a post (or even an email) and suggests images, related articles, links and tags to use. A simple click and the image or link now becomes part of your post. Zemanta draws from a large pool of available images, many of them carrying Creative Commons licenses. That’s one of the coolest features — mouse over the image and you’ll see its terms of use (generally free).

“I just love Zemanta,” said fellow Geek Meghan Asha. “It’s just cool to be able to have those images right there, all free and legal to use.”

Well put. I’m a believer now .

Spotify

Twitter: @spotify
Email: [email protected]
Site: spotify.com

In my book “Darknet” I wrote about the ongoing clash between the music companies and music fans who just want easy access to digital music. Spotify is one of the first companies to come along with an answer.

Through its simple-to-use interface and licensing deals with the major music labels, Spotify offers music fans instant access to their favorite music. The service enables on-demand streaming of tons of audio content through a free, ad-supported model and a premium paid model. London-based Lastfm and US-based Pandora are two similar music listening services, and SoundCloud is a great way to share music and audio files (see Robert Scoble’s video interview with One of Europe’s brightest startups: SoundCloud).

Scoble has been a big fan of Spotify, and I can see why.

Moo

Twitter: @overheardatmoo
Email: [email protected]
Site: moo.com

I’ve been a fan of Moo cards for years — they’re a staple at Silicon Valley events — but didn’t realize, until founder-CEO Richard Moross laid it out for me, just how many kinds of business cards and stickers Moo offers.

A lot: the company prints of cards a month for customers in 180 countries. Their customer base consists of 40 percent North Americans, 30 percent from the UK and 30 percent from the rest of the world, chiefly Europe. The best part: The cards are completely personalized. In the past, I’ve uploaded 50 different images for a stack of 100 business cards at a cost of about $20. Crazy-cheap.

How do they work that magic? Richard called the process “printfinity” — a proprietary system that lets the company print cards of any kind, with any image, in a scalable way. They’ve applied for a patent on the process.

In the depths of the current recession, Moo has seen a 300 percent uptick in consultants buying business cards. In addition, Richard said, “Lots of people are turning their hobby or craft into a shed business.” You can order as few as 50 cards.

Moo has become one of the fastest-growing print businesses in the world, with “extremely high margins,” Richard told me. “We’re trying to make boring business cards a thing of the past.”

I”ll be ordering my next batch of cards from Moo.

Stupeflix

Twitter: @stupeflix
Email: [email protected]
Site: stupeflix.com

Stupeflix is a web service aimed at people and companies that want to generate videos automatically from their pictures, music and footage. The company uses technologies allowing faster than real time video rendering, as well as the generation of tens of thousands of videos a day using one server only if you’re running a business. The public API that Stupeflix offers to developers is one of a kind in the flexibility and level of control it allows.

See the Box of Tricks blog for Video podcasting made easy with Stupeflix.com.

Other companies that resonated: Skimlinks (a new way to do affiliate marketing — I have a video with CEO Alicia Navarro that I’ll post soon), uberVU (a real-time conversation search engine — I’ve requested an invitation to their private beta), School of Everything (a training marketplace) and Qype (similar in some ways to Yelp, it’s a crowdsourced reviews site).

Related

• Susan Bratton: My impression of UK and Euro entrepreneurs from today’s Seedcamp Speed Dating adventure

• Craig Newmark: Seedcamp at NESTA, part of the Traveling Geeks tour

• Tom Foremski: UK Diary: Tuesday – Guardian Newspaper Media Panel . . .

• Tom Foremski: UK Diary: Tuesday – Back To Soho and Dinner With Agency.com

The post Seedcamp winners meet the Geeks appeared first on Inside Social Media.

Behind closed doors in offices from the media centers of New York to the entertainment capital of Hollywood, content programmers and code jockeys are no doubt trying to figure out how to marry traditional television with social networking.

Does the lean-forward experience, interactivity and backchannel chatter of social networks have a place in the tightly controlled, lean-back world of television? I’m among those who believe the two will wed in a satisfying way, though we’re likely five to 10 years from that happening. I blogged about Intel and Yahoo’s experiments with the Cinematic Internet (or Widget Channel TV) last year, and I’ve written over the years about the largely discredited experiments with “interactive television.”

But a week ago today, in the corporate offices of BT in London, the Traveling Geeks were treated to a 10-minute presentation by Tanya Goldhaber, a graduate student at MIT just finishing up an eight-week internship at BT, about “Social TV.” We were so intrigued that we kept tossing questions to her well after her allotted time.

Peer-influenced viewership

As audiences continue to fragment, as more of us multitask with laptops on our laps while we’re watching TV, as the major social networks continue to amass millions of more members each week, and as the Internet finally comes to our living rooms with a new generation of devices like Boxee, it’s only a matter of time before television becomes social.

Goldhaber showed some screenshots of what a prototype social TV screen might look like. (Prototypes I’ve seen at the Intel Developers Network and at LinkTV a few months ago take it in similar if somewhat different directions.)

I suspect most of us don’t want to see a CNN-like crawl of our friends’ comments at the bottom of our prime-time programming. But I certainly would like to know if my friends were enthralled by a one-time PBS special, or if DirecTV was televising the ninth inning of a no-hit game, or if one of my friends was interviewed by a news crew.

Goldhaber noted that today’s Electronic Program Guides are all but impossible to navigate, and she cited studies that people would rather get viewing recommendations from a friend than from a computer. In survey of TV viewers, 37% of respondents said they started watching their favorite TV show because of a friend’s recommendation or word of mouth.

I asked Goldhaber if, a few years out, social networks might lead to “swarming behavior” among TV viewers, causing quick spikes in viewership for little-known niche programs based on social influencers’ actions. Certainly possible, she said.

I’d be intrigued by a system that automatically feeds me information about what my friends are collectively watching, instead of having to wait for them to tell me through a kind of tweet burst. And I’d also be interested by a peer, or friend of friends, recommendation system that elevates obscure but high-quality independent Web programs.

Social TV could reshape the television landscape — which is why you’ll never see the major networks lead this transformation. Like Napster and Apple in the music industry, the innovation will come from the bottom up, well outside of the media and entertainment industries.

BT and open source

I’ll be honest: Before I visited the UK, I assumed that BT was Britain’s version of AT&T: monolithic, imposing, not terribly open to innovation. An evening of conversations and an afternoon of presentations at BT has disabused me of that notion.

BT’s purchase of Silicon Valley-based Ribbit (I met Ribbit exec Crick Waters, now BT’s EVP for Strategy and Biz Dev) has led to a remarkable amount of creative ferment around opening up the BT platform to outside developers. (Take, for example, openbroadband.bt.com: “Power your apps with programmable broadband. Join our partner ecosystem.”)

On Saturday afternoon I had a short discussion with Howard Rheingold about BT and our host, JP Rangaswami, managing director of BT Design (pictured above — Howard refers to him as BT’s “CIO”). Howard said that unlike America’s “fear-driven” telecoms, BT has the opportunity to reinvent itself as a “network platform” that extends well beyond traditional telecommunications by tapping into the Net’s wellspring of connectivity.

However that eventually pans out from a business perspective, JP and his team are on the case.

Related

• Howard Rheingold: Will BT let JP create the first open network operator? One scenario for the mobile Web

• Tom Foremski: UK Diary: Tuesday – It Never Rains But It Pours . . . More BT Innovation

• Meghan Asha: BT’s Programmable Broadband!

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