Le Web, Meet Le Foodie

Foodie.fm, the website and application that presents you with tailored recommendations for tasty recipes and groceries, and helps you shop for them locally, yesterday announced Le Foodie, a new service specifically for attendants of Le Web Paris 11. Le Web, which takes place this December and boasts the title of Europe’s #1 Tech Event, may now be Europe’s #1 Food Event.

Le Foodie will function as an online concierge service on Twitter, providing real-time answers for all questions related to localculinary interests. Attendees of Le Web will be able to get recommendations for culinary venues and adventures tailored to their specific needs and experience. Local insight will be provided by current Parisian Lindsey Tramuta, of the food blog, Lost in Cheeseland.

Le Foodie is live now, so you Le Webers can plan your trip beforehand or get acquainted with the service before your trip. Just tweet your culinary query @Foodie_fm with #lefoodie hashtag, and see what they come up with!

Tags: December, Food, Foodie, LeWeb, Paris, Social network, Twitter

Creating a Virtual Viewing Party

By all accounts, Ali Ahmed is an ambitious man, further, the type of man to whom the word ambitious does credit. Ahmed gets things done, thinks big picture and stands by his ideas. It is good then, for those interested in the success of Lutebox, the entertainment service Ahmed founded, that he remains the driving force behind the service, because Lutebox is among the more ambitious (certainly the more broad) ideas you are likely to encounter. Whether its scope keeps Lutebox from reaching its potential or sets it firmly above competing entertainment services remains to be seen, however it is clear that Lutebox lacks in neither ambition nor leadership.

The idea behind Lutebox is to create a service which makes available to users a variety of mainstream content (e.g. movies, TV shows, sports, music videos) while building a social community around that content. The community allows users to keep tabs on the viewing patterns of their network and to schedule group screenings wherein they can watch content simultaneously with friends while on a group video conference. The idea sounds great — premium content plus the means to enjoy it with your friends — but presents a few challenges when it comes to execution.

For one, building any social network from scratch is difficult, and Ahmed seems set against incorporating external social networks. Another challenge involves obtaining the wide range of rights required for the many categories of content promised. Finally, there is the technical challenge of making sure the videoconferences don’t interfere with the content screening; Lutebox plans to offer six-way video conferencing while in your scheduled group viewing which can put a strain on most computers.

Here is where the ambitious nature of Lutebox is most apparent. A very small segment of the population has the processor power available to them to stream HD content while maintaining a video conference, let alone eight, but when the technology catches up, or Lutebox finds a way to gracefully address the problem, this kind of simultaneous viewing is precisely the entertainment experience users will demand. And if anybody can find a way to get it to them, it’s probably Ali Ahmed.

You can register for an early alpha invite to Lutebox here.

Tags: Business, Business Services, Entertainment, Facebook, Social network, Television program, Videoconferencing, YouTube

A Productive Conversation

Davorin Gabrovec is the Co-Founder of Flowr, a communication service meant to encourage true collaborative work flow.

This week, I exchanged emails with Davorin regarding collaborative productivity and the orgin of Flowr.

Tattletech: I assume that now, if your office, you use Flowr as your primary tool for organization. Before you founded Flowr, what was your project organization like? A mess of emails and shared documents like the rest of us, or were you always ahead of the game?

Davorin Gabrovec:  Before we built up Flowr, we used email, skype and scheduled meetings as our major communication tools. However, from the moment we wrote first few lines of code, we started with using Flowr for the development of Flowr and then evolved it based on our needs and our first beta users.

Tattletech: Wow. Using Flowr to develop Flowr, very Inception of you. When was the first time you had an idea that you wanted to create something like Flowr? Was it in a dream?

DG: Haha, it was not in a dream. It was came from thinking about improving our communication/collaboration issues within the small (20 employee) company which I funded before Flowr. We had been using several tools such as wikis, intranets and blogs to manage our internal information along with tons of emails and meetings, all of which were time consuming. At the same time, I was looking at social networks, which provided good examples of how you can easily get an information flow about your network, even amongst people you have never met in person.

Then I started to think about making a very easy “twitter-like” 140 character message box, where anyone inside our team could share a new idea, ask other some questions or just pass on an interesting link, without spamming the rest of the team–this would be great! We could reduce meetings, colleagues could interact when they will had time and all the information and knowledge would stay in one place. When I started talking with few of my colleagues from other companies, they loved the idea. That was the moment when two of my colleagues and I decided to build such a tool.

Tattletech: What was your biggest challenge in development?

DG: Our biggest challenge was making the product beautifully designed and as simple as possible. Our next biggest challenge was scalability from the tech perspective where our CTO Vlada played his role very well.

Tattletech: Have you had to change anything major from your original design to Flowr’s current iteration?

DG: We changed the user interface two times to make the product perfect (from our perspective). After the first redesign we put several analytics in place to start measuring how users actually use Flowr. Now we are much closer to what we want Flowr to be.

Tattletech: What is the next step for Flowr? What can we look forward to in the fall?

DG: The focus for the next few months is integration with third party apps such as customer relationship management, helpdesk and project management tools, as well as further development of mobile apps and an iPad app. We hope that Flowr will become a major communication tool for every small and medium business, with basic social features and notifications from the different applications companies usually use. That way, Flowr will become a major internal collaboration and information hub.

– Jason Oberholtzer

Follow Davorin on Twitter and take a look at Flowr.

Tags: Business, Collaboration, Davorin Gabrovec, flowr, Google, Issuu, Niccolo Pantucci, Online Communities, Peter Gibbons, productivity, Social network, Social Networking, Socialcast, Twitter

Venturing Into The Plus

I want to root against Google+ so badly I can almost taste it. A failure here would make my life so much easier! This isn’t like Google Wave where I saw something that could potentially be useful, helpful and game-changing for how I could communicate with people. This is just more of the same stuff we already have.

Google+ is just sharing things with a mixture of friends, acquaintances and strangers. That’s it. Just sharing and following. The content isn’t any different than I can get from these people anywhere else; it’s the same kitty video I see on Facebook, now with a whiter background design.

So, I want to root against this new, redundant time suck. I don’t need it and I certainly don’t need more social networks to keep tabs on.

That said, I am now on Google+.

It’s research only, I swear! Strangely addicting research…but anyway, the point is that I am on Google+ despite my desire to watch it fail. I still hope it amounts to nothing, but in the mean time, I might as well check out what these circles are all about, and spruce up my profile, and well…I have to come clean. I’m hooked.

Maybe we are now hardwired to enjoy novelty in any form, but every time I sign on to Google+ it feels like getting into a new car. All I want to do is take it for a spin and see what kind of power it has. I am enjoying every bit of minutiae, every second of exploration. I mean, not that I still don’t want it to fail and all, but it is kind of fun.

I went to one of the first colleges to get Facebook, and in the early years, it had a similar feel. Simple acts of navigation were novel and everything had a weird lawless and vaguely stalkerish feel about it.

It’s this fun with form (a new system to navigate!) and function (new people to stalk!) that Google+ has going for it. I don’t think we need Google+ at all, and I still wish it would go away, but I’m pretty sure I like it, against my better judgement. As Facebook would say, “it’s complicated.”

- Jason Oberholtzer

Tags: Facebook, Google, Google Buzz, Google Wave, New People, Search Engines, Searching, Social network, Twitter

Twitter High

I’ve come to the disturbing realization that I am using Twitter to recreate my high school experience. I’m not sure if this means I’m stunted, the Internet is stunted, or the whole process of normative socialization is stunted, but I can no longer deny what I see. I am currently enrolled in Twitter High.

Let’s start with the institution. Organization and segmentation are the typical characteristics of a high school environment. Time is institutionally managed, activities regimented, and the day is broken into 47 minute work intervals with two and a half minutes for travel between classrooms. All this organization promotes compartmentalization. Math is studied for 47 minutes in this room, with these people; a bell rings and within three minutes, you change your work, your peers and your location. So goes the day. Each pursuit has its own setting.

My Internet life operates in similar compartments. I have folders of bookmarks for my different interests, times of the day where I work on different pursuits. I’ve even written myself a daily schedule that cuts my day into half-hour segments.

The activities of my day are vaguely connected by setting. Just like the high school building I took classes in didn’t change, regardless of the class, I am still on my computer, regardless of what I’m doing. And just like in high school, there is some overlap of work and peers; people of similar intelligence level or with similar interests tend to glom together. Communities form, but I’ll get back to that later.

When I open my laptop in the morning, my daily “productive purpose” plays out quite like a school day (though unfortunately, the day doesn’t end in the afternoon but rather continues until I close the laptop again for the night). I force myself to focus for periods and then let myself wander before switching gears. I haven’t bought a bell to ring when I need to change what I’m doing, but I haven’t yet ruled out the purchase.

More compelling than my general organization is my social life. Okay, it’s maybe not that much more compelling, but if I were in high school it would be! After all, that arena launched a million horrible movies, TV shows and best-selling vampire series. High school is all about socializing—trying to hang out with the cool kids and get the girls. Here is where we get to Twitter, the place the Internet goes to socialize.

In high school I hung out with a variety of different groups, which I think is a rather typical experience. I was into music, so I had my music friends. I played sports, so I had my athlete friends. I was good at English, so I had my smart friends and horrible at French, which I didn’t take seriously, so I had my slacker friends.

Here are the main groups I follow on Twitter: battle rappers, professional athletes, writers, bloggers, journalists and people in the media. It seems like I’ve filled my high school quota for cliques (though I won’t tip off which group is the “slacker friend”). I’ve managed to recreate the socialization patterns I had in high school on my Twitter stream, and in no way is that pathetic!

What is easy to miss in all the snark regarding high school is the importance of these categories when we socialize. A large reason Twitter is succeeding is the ease with which we can compartmentalize our interests and manufacture communities. I’m not a part of the world of professional sports, but I get to hang around that world. I’m no rapper, but I get to see battle rappers be creative and appreciate their process even though I’ve never battled (though if I were you, I wouldn’t test me—I got bars). However, I am a part of that loose group of introverts known as “writers, bloggers and journalists” and by participating in that clique, I get to feel some camaraderie. Twitter might benefit the writers most of all, as we wrestle with insomnia, self-doubt, and Vitamin D deficiency while staring at blank Word documents alone in our respective homes.

Basically, Twitter gave me back the ability to do what I love: hang out with people who are more interesting than I am, pick their brains, and be social in a broad sense.  My days are more like high school because of it, but I don’t mind—47 minutes of work, then a few minutes of chatting in the hallway. So it goes.

- Jason Oberholtzer

Tags: Facebook, High school, LinkedIn, Online Communities, Social network, Student, Trending and Popularity, Twitter, United States

Feeding Frenzy

We are lucky enough to be able to peek into two tech worlds. One, is a well established, revenue producing, tactile-based yet well understood world of telecommunications, i.e. how you watch TV (set top boxes, TVs, electronic program guides, Video on Demand, PVR, etc.). The other one is the topsy-turvy exciting world of web 2.0 technology that you can’t really get a grip on but you know its there and your friend Trixie uses it, so it must be ok. These are the people that bring you Facebook, the cloud, Twitter, social networks and the like.

The telco world lives pretty much in a fact-based (although somewhat altered) world of actual subscribers, content rights and a general understanding of how to move their industry forward. Now I said “general”. They don’t succumb to hype and when they get a feature that they think will make the vertical trade press wake up and listen, they go for it with gusto – currently the red hot chili in this world is “3D”, multi-screen delivery and social TV (also the cloud). Suffice it to say, they never really cave into hype.

However, in the other world – they live in a bubble that thrives off of hype and works on the premise of “if a few are doing it, we all must be doing it”. This brings me to location based social networks.

Recently there was a great article via CNN about why location apps haven’t gone mainstream yet. When CNN writes the story, it takes on a different perspective because by the time the “hype” of the start-up technology or craze (location based social networks) comes their way, they actually decide to look into it and see what in reality is going on. The article goes on to say that only 7% of all Americans actually are AWARE of location based social networks. This would have to be 7% of all Americans (around 21 million people) But if you tune into any start up technology news source, it would read as if the whole planet is using it and its growing by leaps and bounds. So many issues affect normal users that don’t affect early adopters. Most early adopters (those with smart phones like iPhones, etc. rather than feature phones) tend to care less about privacy than those outside of that market.

VCs still are funding location based start ups and they are putting more pressure on them to monetize and gain traction with users, but how many location based social networks can NON-early adopters handle? And how many of those care more about privacy than the early adopters. If early adopters don’t care about privacy nor the fact that their sign up and usage is just paving the way for targeted advertising, what happens when it hits mainstream and they do care? How will the model be adjusted then? It could be just an issue of usage = complacency, which is normally how technology gets assimilated into our lives, we just get used to it and then we can’t part with it. Or rather, its like a drug, we crave it even though we are forfeiting some of our privacy rights. After all, no one is making you sign up for these services.

Here is our take: Location as it relates to your life where you are in the moment will be relevant to the mainstream user (not early adopter). For example, I am shopping on this street, let’s see what else is around me. Not WHO is around me, but WHAT is around me. If I see that there is something near to me, I want to get there easily, and if there is a money saving voucher or coupon, I am more incented to go there.

According to UK-based Juniper Research, mobile coupons are redeemed at a 5% to 20% rate, compared with about 1% for print coupons. They recently forecast that 1 out of every 10 mobile subscribers in developed regions around the world will use mobile coupons by 2014, generating nearly $6 billion in redemption value. The fact of the matter is that consumers like coupons/vouchers. In the fourth quarter of 2008, coupon redemption was up 7.5% in the US alone. And, according to Hitwise, internet searches for discount vouchers in the UK grew by 47.5% in 2009.

We aren’t the experts, but this sort of feels a bit like maybe how the Gold Rush felt — lots of people rushing in to get their claim, but most of the claims just pinch out. Where LB social networks go from here is up to the user, and they are a fickle lot. – JLH

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Tags: Advertising, CNN, Facebook, Social network, Telecommunication, Television, Twitter

Show me the way (that is a Frampton reference)

This week in a ReadWriteWeb article on the changes of MySpace, the writer Marshall Kirkpatrick said “Facebook can’t rule the world for ever.  No one can.” We could not agree more – we believe social networking should represent a free exchange of personal data, contacts, photos, videos and any content the user want to share. Instead of a walled garden, we see a community garden that allows users interact, share, exchange, collaborate, and discuss whatever they want to.  This raises a question around social networking in general – is it “platform agnostic” or not?  Absent any substantial differences in quality, does it really matter whether you park your online persona at Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr or any of the dozens (hundreds?) of other sites?

Obviously, we don’t know exactly what the future looks like – if any of our readers do, please e-mail us!  But we do think that the future of social networking is not going to be about the providers/platforms per se, but about the larger community and how providers facilitate user interaction.  Open standards or open social may be at the bedrock of this future networking, going hand in hand with the augmented reality demonstrated by LBS.  Just a quick glance in the direction of Egypt in the past year or two, and more recently Iran, shows exactly what we are talking about: its back to the old saying that its the message (real time interaction) that counts, not the media (Facebook, Twitter, et al). – JLH

Tags: Facebook, Marshall Kirkpatrick, MySpace, Social network

JuiceCaster is so much cool

We just stumbled on JuiceCaster while doing some research on a story on location based geo tagging (we think this is the space to watch) and now are distracted. Why? Well first the name is just plain cool. Second, their value proposition is simple and does what we should be doing with content from our mobile, geo tagging without having to think to add a geo tag.  It’s automatic.

Fierce Wireless reports that JuiceCaster provides one-touch, real-time sharing of pictures and videos directly from a camera phone to many social-networking and blogging sites. JuiceCaster is about keeping people constantly connected to their online communities/social networks. The beautiful thing is that because all pictures and videos are geotagged, users can look for content based on specific location criteria. Isn’t this is what having a mobile is all about – we are on the go, we take a photo and it should be tagged from the spot where were took the photo. It should easily flow to our social networks and better yet, it should pop up on map that not only shows me where my friends are but where that content was taken or where other geo content resides. I want one big snapshot of my content and my social networks. Better yet, give me a real life screenshot of my social network and content. Seeing this already with the visual social network platform IRLConnect where you can now see geo tagged live mobile video broadcasts (via Bambuser), mobile video and photos (via MobyPicture) and all your social networks on a map. Yup, that’s what I want, a screenshot of my life. - JLH

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Tags: Bambuser, Geo tagging, IRL Connect, JuiceCaster, Mobile content, MobyPicture, Online Communities, Social network

Tattletech Hot Seat – Arjen Strijker, Founder of SOMESSO

Over in Zurich, we found Arjen Strijker, the founder of SOMESSO and entrepreneur who saw a lot of commotion and fanfare around social corporate media, but not one event that actually brought all the parties together in its evolving ecosystem to discuss, share and add value to this high growth communication channel. So, he created SOMESSO a series of conferences centered around social media usage in corporate environments. They just finished their kick off event in Zurich and on the Somesso blog you can see why it was a success. - JLH

TT: You just held a very successful corporate social media event in Zurich last month, what made you decide that Somesso was something the market needed?

AS: In my last job, I found myself rubbing shoulders with front-office bankers and other people working in financial institutions in Switzerland. I was (and still am) meeting them on regular basis and many have become my friends. Personally, I believe in social media and like to test and discuss the latest social media tools and solutions on the Internet and found myself quite often explaining to my friends in the financial world why and how they should be using these things to make new business in a better way. Although I knew already that banks and financial institutions generally are not early adopters of such new technology, I found that many people were interested but they just didn’t know where to go and how to start. After some benchmarking, it became clear that there was a need for a think-tank discussion forum / information share point (both online as “offline”) where corporate social media related issues are presented and debated. After some more market research I launched SOMESSO.

TT: You have put on events before in both venture and technology, what was the most challenging thing about putting on a social media event like Somesso?

AS: As the SOMESSO Zurich `08 audience experienced themselves last month, the most unique feature of SOMESSO is its exceptional mix of participants. This was also the most challenging issue about organizing this event: although I strongly believe in the strength of communities, no one could guarantee that all these different groups of people would mix and interact with each other to build new bridges and synergies to each others’ worlds. The audience ranged from sales and marketing experts to recruiters, agency traditional and new media specialists, entrepreneurs and VCs. We found that even at the first break everyone was interacting. It was rare – and pleasing – to see all these different categories of people sharing their ideas about corporate social media and presenting their latest projects and discoveries to each other. We are going to work hard to keep all future SOMESSO events with this same environment so we can satisfy all of the attendees’ networking expectations while recognizing the importance and enormous potential of social media in driving companies’ business values.

TT: Do you think that Somesso has legs? In other words what makes it stand out amongst all the other social media events in the market today?

AS: Yes. The purpose of SOMESSO is to bring together a unique mix of participants from a wide range of industries to discuss and debate the corporate social media trend on continuous basis throughout Europe. Different from all general Web 2.0, new tech or new media conferences, SOMESSO is a highly focused event that covers only the corporate angle of social media. At SOMESSO attendees can find answers to questions like “how will social media change the way a company does business?”, or “how do companies start building their short-term corporate social media strategy?”, or “how does a corporate social media strategy impact employees and external networks?”.

Also, due to the strong variety of people from different industries, the networking part at SOMESSO Zurich `08 was highly valued by the audience. Both the diversity of newcomers to corporate social media, as well as the diversity of industry experts that attended the event ended up doing business together. All this at a one-day event in a European city – next up London.

TT: You are Dutch and Tattletech is very fond of Dutchman, but you live in Zurich – do you see a difference in the approach to social media by country?

AS: Yes, very much.  SOMESSO Zurich was a success because we listened to our audience and gave them what they wanted to hear and learn. By example, Switzerland is still a pretty conservative country, which was reflected at the conference, as many companies – regional and multinational – had not started to look at social media tools or implementing a corporate social media strategy for their organization before they went to SOMESSO.

Furthermore, it was important for this event that we discussed the topic both from a starting point of view, as well as to provide the latest insights and fads on the subject (as the corporate social media and new media experts were strongly represented too). It was successful; the two groups complemented each other and created more discussion that could be handled in just one single day. By the way, this is why SOMESSO has also an online Twitter community where lots of continuous business is being created even now. The SOMESSO Facebook group continues to have new members request to join on a daily basis.

Our next event, SOMESSO London `09 on May 15, will have a more advanced and global character, which reflects in both speakers and topics, as well as in the general setting of the event. Due to a successful first event, we’ve caught the attention of several global industry leaders who want to participate at SOMESSO London and even SOMESSO Barcelona and Copenhagen – the other two cities scheduled for a SOMESSO event in 2009.

TT: If you weren’t doing this, what would you be doing?

AS: This is always a tricky question…  I would probably be working on one of the other business plans that I’ve been compiling over the past few years. Really all of them are (in)directly related to bringing people together to increase their business (not their love-life, in case you might ask .

Tags: Facebook, New media, Social network, Somesso, Twitter

Download this! Loopt and iPhone

So today TechCrunch ran a story about how Loopt (which turns your iPhone into a social compass – jeepers, we love that tagline!) has surpassed Facebook and MySpace in terms of which is downloaded more – apparently Loopt which embraces location based services is the 20th most downloded application for iPhone. Okay so to put into perspective, since June 2008, there have been more than 6,000 applications created for the iPhone. And since you know love math, that translates into the top 1/3 of the top 1% -fancy!

And for a sidebar that isn’t related since Tattletech is jet lagged, a great story on NPR about all the games that have been created for iPhone- we specially like this one game created by Neil Young (not the singer) who used to be at Electronic Arts who calls his move “temporary insanity” which means he will do really well.

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Tags: Entrepreneurs, Facebook, IPhone, Loopt, MySpace, Social network, TechCrunch, Twitter