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Recap: Three editions of LeWeb Social Business Track

I was lucky enough to be the curator and host of “LeWeb Social Business Track” during the last two years. It started in Paris in 2011, then London and Paris in 2012 where a total of around 60 speakers joined us for this specific program. 

This track is all about the companies (consumer brands, B2B, non profit etc.), digital agencies, solution providers and social media experts who have shared the best strategies, practices and examples that have propelled them to success.

What’s very interesting is that this content is very low time-sensitive, and as everything that happens at LeWeb is recorded, streamed live and then published on Youtube.com/LeWeb, I recommend to anyone to have a look at it, and learn from it. In this recap, I’ll share companies’ names only, but each time executives and doers are speaking on behalf of the brand or company. 

Brands

• Renault & Lufthansa (Paris 2012)
• Lego (Paris 2012)
• Intel (Paris 2012)
• Rossignol (Paris 2012)
• Dunkin’ Donuts (Paris 2012)
• Evian - Danone (Paris 2012)
• Greenpeace (Paris 2012)
• Kraft Foods (London 2012)
• British Heart Foundation & Voice (London 2012)
• Adobe (London 2012)
• Yves Saint Laurent - L’Oreal (London 2012)
• American Express (London 2012)
• IBM (London 2012)
• Nestlé (Paris 2011)
• Dell (Paris 2011)
• Danone, IBM & Salesforce (Paris 2011)
• Ferrero (Paris 2011)
• Domino’s Pizza (Paris 2011)
• Kiva (Paris 2011)
• PepsiCo (Paris 2011)
• RedBull, Disneyland, AirFrance (Paris 2011)

Solution Providers

• Tag’By (Paris 2012) 
• Wildfire, Hearsay Social, Exacttarget (Paris 2012)
• IFeelGoods (Paris 2012)
• Gnip (Paris 2012)
• Hubspot (Paris 2012)
• GlobalWebIndex (Paris 2012)
• SocialBakers (London 2012)
• Salesforce - Radian6 (London 2012)
• Zendesk (London 2012)
• Wildfire & BuddyMedia (London 2012)
• Foodspotting (London 2012)
• GetGlue (London 2012)
• Bazaarvoice, Getsatisfaction & Zendesk (Paris 2011)
• BuddyMedia (Paris 2011)
• Tigerlily, Wildfire & Socialbakers (Paris 2011)

Agencies & Consulting Firms

• Buzzman (Paris 2012)
• Joshfire (Paris 2012)
• TRND (Paris 2012)
• McKinsey (Paris 2012)
• Work Club (Paris 2012)

To know more about these sessions:

• LeWeb Paris 2011 - Social Enterprise Track Program & Full Playlist on Youtube
• LeWeb London 2012 - Social Business Track Program & Full Playlist on Youtube 
• LeWeb Paris 2012- Social Business Track Program & Full Playlist on Youtube Day 1 & Day 2

Latest news

This is a recap of worth-sharing personal news or activities happened during previous months.

Cookening

• Cookening is going very well. We’re close to launch our alpha (we’re testing things privately since August actually). Very, very excited. 

Things I wrote:

• I did a mentor session at Le Camping with some advices about pitching your startup (on stage, during events, to the Press). My slides are on SlideShare and the video is on LeCamping website.
• My slides about the Food & Tech ecosystem, that I initially did for the Web2Day conference (video here) were a hit. PetitWeb did an article (Fr) about it in September, and I was invited to present them again during a FrenchWeb workshop.
• I wrote an article about social travel for Influencia Magazine #3 about Mobility. Available online for free (in Fr) 
• I wrote a guest post (Fr) about the new Twitter search in Greg’s blog I’m still convinced about the potential of this, but I wish Twitter would bring this feature on mobile, and make it stable…
• I’ve also written an article for the next edition of EBG book Internet Marketing 2013 that will be published in November.

Other Activities

• I keep giving lectures at business schools (that has two main benefits: practicing even more public speaking, and getting some money for Cookening). This year, I speak about collaborative consumption (slides here), how to launch on the web , tips on networking/working in the web industry, and a regular workshop about web innovation.
• I joined Sup’Internet as an advisor for the E-Business bachelor (the worskhop I just talked about is done at Sup’Internet). Objective there is to help define the program and find external speakers.
• I’m involved again in LeWeb this year, as I did for London’12 and Paris’11 editions. I’m especially in charge of curating and hosting the Social Business Track. 
• The private Facebook group for French Startupers I created is going well. We’re almost 500 now, with interesting things shared and discusses. Ping me if you wanna join.
• And if you’re interested in getting some advice for entrepreneurs and startupers, check my curation on Scoop.it

And on a personal note, I’m now a happy married man ;)

Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies 2012

It’s a tradition since I’m blogging. Every year in august, I’m waiting for the new edition of the Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, edited by Gartner. Here is the 2012 one that has just been published.

After all these years looking at it, I’ve come to the conclusion that we do not have to see this cycle as granted, but more as something that gives us some perspective, that validates some trends etc. Very often, it’ll be true, by showing the current state of a technology and the time it will need to reach maturity, but sometimes, this time is really bad evaluated, because markets change unexpectedly. I really invite you to compare the different editions (see below for links).

A few interesting things for this year’s cycle:

• 3D Printing, BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) and Social Analytics are at the peak
• Virtual words are still in the through, as last year
• Cloud Computing starts to be less trendy, which is not a surprise.
• I’m surprise to see that Gamification is considered as having not yet reached the peak
• It should take more than 10 years for the Internet of Things to have a mainstream adoption. I bet this will be at the peak next year.
• Crowdsourcing, which is part of the Web 2.0 era, is back here in the trigger. This is definitely the Kickstarter effect.
• While Speech Recognition is reaching the plateau of productivity, related technology speech to speech recognition will be soon at the peak.

And if you want to compare it with previous editions:

• 2011
• 2010
• 2005-2009

This year edition found via Syscon

We need to fight Mediocrity!

There’s a lot of mediocrity being celebrated, and a lot of wonderful stuff being ignored or discouraged 

Sean Penn

It can sound arrogant or pretentious to say so, but I really think we need to encourage people to fight mediocrity! It’s perhaps one of the most dangerous poisons of our current lives. But what is mediocrity? Mediocrity is this status between bad and good, when something is not suffisant, not qualitative. The problem of mediocrity is not only its intrinsic definition, but also, and perhaps more important, is the fact that people are satisfied with mediocrity. Fighting mediocrity is fighting its production, and also its celebration.

Mediocrity is everywhere in the tech world for example:

• Startups that limit themselves to copy a concept, or do something cheap (a good example: all the daily deals stupid websites)
• Medias, and especially blogs that write articles about topics they don’t know anything about or just because it generates trafic, so they produce crap.
• Consultants or any business guys, who just tries to do the minimum viable, and not the best.

In my post about me turning entrepreneur, I wrote something that people remembered “My project will be huge. Actually, it’s either it’s huge, or it isn’t”. I’ve thought a lot about it since I’ve started the project and met plenty of people. What I really think is that not only am I trying to build an ambitious project, not only do I want to change things, but I’m also trying to fight mediocrity as much as I can. I don’t want to take the easy way, I don’t want shortcuts that lead me to bad quality. 

And as in Sean Penn’s quote that I used to start this post, not only do we need to fight mediocrity in what we’re doing, but we also need to fight mediocrity celebration!

Oh, and I need your help. If you ever think something I say, write or produce is mediocre, please tell me. Honestly. 

The Food Picture Dilemma

Let’s pretend I’m eating a really delicious meal (that I prepared by myself or not, whatever) and I want to share a picture from my mobile.

Homemade Cassoulet

How can I decide on which social media I’ll post my pic? 

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Google+
• Path
• Instagram
• Foodspotting
• Foodreporter
• Linkedin (in the case of a dish we can easily forget Linkedin)
• Evernote Food (if you want to remember it somewhere)
• Foursquare (if the dish is from a restaurant)
• Socialgrapes (if it’s not a dish but a good bottle of wine)

Ok, I think you got the idea, and actually I could keep this list going. Of course Facebook and Twitter can generally be updated directly from the other apps (but this still isn’t the case for Google+) but there’s still a choice to make:

• is my picture a general update (then => Facebook, Twitter)
• do I want to share it a with a limited group (then = Google+, Path)
• is it primary a nice picture (then => Instagram)
• is the dish the most important (then => foodreporter or foodspotting)

I’m convinced there’s an opportunity for niche communities such as the ones around food, but it’s more and more difficult to have user mindshare…

As I explained in a previous post, I am more and more interested in new trends regarding food consumption and tools that aim at increasing the sharing experience when we eat, cook or buy food. I’m testing a lot of new (or less) new apps so please share if you have any that I should check or test. 

Entrepreneur Mode On!

In case my title was not clear enough: yes, I am now an entrepreneur, working on my own project (I won’t call it a start-up before it actually starts).

Before giving you more details about this new project, a few comments about what happened to me to be that crazy. Really, you want to create your company when everyone tells you 2012 will be bad for the economy worldwide ?  Oh yes, I want it!

I joined Seesmic a little bit less than a year ago, and it has been a real pleasure to work with the Seesmic team, especially Loic with whom everything started and with Michelle, that joined me last July to run Seesmic European activities. It was amazing to work with and learn from them.

But, there was a major problem. I’ve been surrounded by inspiring entrepreneurs for the last 5 years now, and I couldn’t resist further. I had to start my own project. I’ve learned a lot when I joined Goojet before the company was even created, and I spent 4 years busy with marketing but also various startup activities, as I was surrounded by 3 great entrepreneurs Marc Rougier, Ludovic Le Moan and Guillaume Decugis. I am grateful I’ve participated in Goojet pivot into Scoop.it, platform which is performing very well since its launch. Being Techcrunch France co-editor during one year and a half with Roxanne Varza was also a wonderful opportunity to meet and get inspired by great entrepreneurs. The best part of it for me were the two events I went to organize, Remix and Recipes.

Last year at Seesmic was very intense, full of diverse projects (social platforms and mobile apps, partnership with Salesforce, events such as SMMD or Dreamforce etc.) and was actually richer than expected, as my activities weren’t limited to Europe but concerned global marketing and biz dev needs. 

Oh, and LeWeb of course. This was an amazing event. This was my 6th LeWeb and I had already took part to the organization of some events, but this was huge. I was lucky to be the curator and host of the new “Social Enterprise Track” as well as a member of the organization. And I should be part of the organization again next year. 

Two weeks ago, I turned 28. And as 2012 is supposed to be the last year of our planet earth, I had to do something. First I proposed a few months ago (she said yes) so that’s the big 2012 project on the personal side and second, well, I decided it’s a good time to work on my own project and start my own business. And the good thing is that I have a few ideas, and one could actually be pretty huge! I am especially excited by two things: the “share economy” or “collaborative consumption” trend as well as the food industry so ping me if you want to talk about it.

I want to spend time brainstorming and working on these ideas, as well as giving me a chance to find one or two partners. So if you think there might be a fit and I haven’t send you an email yet, get in touch!

Mhh. One more thing. My project will be huge. Actually, it’s either it’s huge, or it isn’t ;)

I know I’ve not been writing very actively for this blog, but I promise next posts won’t be only about me starting or quitting jobs ;) 

Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Trends 2011

It’s perhaps the only “tradition” I’ve ever had in my blogging habits since 2005. Each year in August, Gartner releases its Hype Cycle and I am always keen to share it. 

The 2011 edition of this Hype Cycle for Emerging Trends has been released, based on 1900 technologies that have been studied. It’s a full study you can buy from Gartner, but the cycle is always available as a graphic, and here it is.

Image found on Silicon.fr

Previous editions of this hype cycle can be found here (2010) or here (2005-2009). 

What do you think of this year trends? In comparison to last year? I will post my thoughts later on but please tell me what you think.