Loïc Le Meur blog

Why marketers should start paying attention to French blogging

An article by Eric Kintz about blogging in France. Eric is VP of Marketing at HP.

Illegal services to watch TV on the web, for free

Ouriel had a look at the services that transmit free TV on the web...

Web 2.0 is at least 7 years old

Ewan points me to a Web 2.0 article in 1999...

Where are we going with all these videos ?

I like to see the web moving so fast into video now, I browsed a few this morning and randomly watched the ones below. The ones which make top rankings are humor, music and -soft- girl videos (I only watched non porn video sites of course !), you find Al Gore lost in the middle of the rest. So far I don't see much that TV does not bring us except that I chose what to watch and when. I was wondering how this will all evolve. It is more complicated than with text to find good sources so digg like video diaries will play an important role as well as "journals" presented by humans such as rocketboom to help us find the best content. Interesting to watch as onlive video space grows... Here is my random surf:
-an amazing street drummer (below)
-interesting ways to stop at red lights
-good old French music, France Gall
-good viral marketing idea with girls and more girls on webcam (soft)
-extreme Russian gymnastics on French rap music
-world record in time to open women bras
-#17 in Google Video rankings, Al Gore's movie trailer, An Inconvenient Truth
-Worst Music video ever from Finland
-horrible Chinese singer

"An Inconvenient truth", Al Gore's movie on the future of the planet

I already had the chance to see Al Gore's speech twice, in Davos and TED, and I was shocked each time. Here is the long awaited movie trailer "of the most terrifying film you will ever see". I like it, it's impressive, surprising and frightening, as Al Gore's speech is. However I was surprised when I showed it to my 10 years old son he said "oh, this can only happen in movies right ?". That may be the only drawback of having chosen cinema as a medium for this message, most people will probably think it is fiction while we can't be more in reality.

Digg of video ?

Ouriel points me Livelocker which seems like a good Digg of video. It's becoming a challenge to find good video sources, do you know other good sites like this ?
Here are videobomb and http://www.videosift.com/ as well.

Web 2.0 is a registered trademark

Much discussed these days around O'Reilly's Web 2.0 brand registration, they co-organize the conference Web 2.0. They apologized.

Google Zeitgest Europe: a few thoughts.

Eric Schmidt and Larry Page, Google CEO & co-founder

I just had two wonderful days at Google Zeitgest Europe. As I said, this was a private event and no blogging was allowed unfortunately except David Cameron and Eric Schmidt & Lary Page sessions. The event gathered about 300 people, European partners of Google, Advertisers, CEOs of large corporations, press and Internet personalities. I was invited to speak about citizen journalism and blogging and it was a great pleasure in front of such an audience. I'll remain quiet about what was discussed in details but it was basically focusing on the future of the Web, we talked about the information democratization, the recent evolution of commerce (lots about the long tail of course), entertainment 2.0, globalization, citizen journalism and generally how the world is changing. As always, I liked the ideas Larry shared with us, here are a few quotes.

About product launches in the new web environment: "Look at the movie industry, it's really difficult regardless of the budget to forecast what movie will be a success. It's the same on the web, the best way to know if a product will work or not is to actually launch it and see what happens". "Google really succeeded by giving people what they wanted, including the ads, targeted and non intrusive".

About innovation: "Focus on what people don't do yet or don't do well rather than on what everybody else is doing" said Larry about how they innovated on products where we thought everything was done (such as gmail/gtalk).

These two above quotes seem very obvious and straightforward however if you really think about how most non-web products are launched, they go usually the opposite way. They are conceived in secret without involving much customer feedback and fearing that the competition may steal the ideas when on the web today most products and services which succeed are almost built with the customers, integrating their feedback and also criticism since the very beginning. Brands that use blogs and accept open comments know exactly what I am talking about.

Anyway, I had lots of fun and met tons of incredible people (and friends such as Martin who spoke too), thanks Google friends for having invited me and the honor to speak just before Peter Gabriel ;-)

update, thanks, Pond, for your comments about my speech

In London for Google Zeitgest Europe

Off to London (actually not very far from London to be precise) for a private conference organized by Google Europe where I'll talk about... blogging, you bet. I'll keep you posted.

Update: there are only two sessions when blogging is allowed, Peter at the Times caught David Cameron Google Trending himself.

Why Quaero will fail on the BBC

Peter Day interviewed (and podcasted) me in his BBC show "In Business", "Euro Everything" on why I thought that Quaero would fail. Thanks again Peter.

"European politicians are worried about how the continent is falling behind the United States in innovation.

Some of them are placing their faith in big industrial and internet projects to boost the continent's ability to compete. But can taxpayer's money help innovation, or does it actually hinder it?
And does Europe really need a European rival to the current American-run Global Positioning System and its own version of Google? "