There was supposed to be a Twitter blackout. The Lobby, David Hornik's annual digital "un-conference" in Hawaii, is strictly off the record. But Silicon Valley's self-anointed elite are hardly more deferential to their local overlords than scruffy G20 protesters.
Two conservative-media journalists did some Twitter flirting, from the West Wing; David Shuster proved incapable of linking to others and the Huffington Post's CEO transition was deemed odd. The Twitterati confused one another.
Paris is lovely in December. And even lovelier if someone else is footing the bill! Oblivious to the world's economic meltdown, 1,500 self-involved, self-indulgent opinionators have flown to France for Le Web, a meet-and-greet on the tech circuit.
"At Seesmic, a video blogging service, the day of reckoning — when it runs out of the $6 million it raised in May — will come in three years. To make the money last, Loïc Le Meur, the chief executive, recently laid off seven employees, or one-third of his staff, and cut all projects not directly related to the video…
Seesmic has laid off 7 employees — a third of its staff. Never heard of Seesmic? You must be doing something right with your life. The startup was ridiculous from its very conception as a tool for embedding videos as comments on blogs. Only to people who spend all day reading and commenting on blogs did that sound…
Loic Le Meur! Gabe Rivera! Joi Ito! Don't feel bad if you've never heard of them. BusinessWeek.com's latest 25 Most Influential People on the Web is a mashup of billionaire powerbrokers with a randomized handful of those folks you run into at that same little tech conference that happens under a different name every…
Dashingly awkward entrepreneur Loic Le Meur was last seen making conferencegoers squish up in their seats with his "How to find the G spot" presentation earlier this year at Supernova. This December, Le Meur may bring yet more sensual discomfort to the attendees of his Le Web conference, organized by his wife…
BoomTown's Kara Swisher went to Palo Alto’s MacArthur Park restaurant for a luncheon hosted by Germany’s Hubert Burda Media yesterday, the organizers of the DLD conference. A target of her shaky videocam work: Facebook flack Brandee Barker, who hid behind a fern. Asked if Microsoft was buying Facebook, Barker shouted,…
Click to viewSeesmic, an online-video startup, is laying off some employees working to create original clips for the short-form video site. The official explanation, from newly unemployed video host Rachael Joy: "Seesmic's not a content site, never has been. It's a conversation tool." Joy was host of the startup's…
Please tell me someone has pictures of Seesmic founder Loïc Le Meur giving small-time technology investor Michael Arrington Segway riding lessons outside 330 Ritch for the TechCrunch50 conference's closing party. For now, I'll have to settle for Siqi Chen, left, and Alex Le, right, the guys behind Facebook widget…
TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington just wants to get a scotch and hit on girls at the Seesmic party at 330 Rich, but ended up stuck in the multi-hour-long line outside the closing night party. Dutiful Seesmic founder Loïc Le Meur personally came out to escort him past the velvet ropes. For a second there, people…
At the brand new Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco last night, the team at European VC firm Wellington Partners celebrated the addition of an outpost in Palo Alto to their existing offices in London and Munich with a swell mixer. The hors d'oeuvres? Cheese gougères, tiny lamb chops, mushroom napoleons,…
Egobloggers Jason Calacanis, Robert Scoble as well as startup PR clearinghouse Michael Arrington all want to know: How amazing is it that after two years of using Twitter, they've each already got nearly half as many "followers" on FriendFeed after just a few months? Asking the question, each offer hypothetical…
Metcalfe's Law, first forumlated by Robert Metcalfe, states that "the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the system." The problem is, that as actual humans connect, the number of people you can connect to instantly swells far past Dunbar's Number, or "The Rule…
$1795 a head is a lot to pay for a sex ed lesson, let alone a tech conference, so why not combine the two? That was apparently the idea behind "Liquid Conversations" at Supernova, which nearly ran off the rails when panelist Loic Le Meur demonstrated his startup Seesmic, which the ebullient founder describes as "…
CARLSBAD, CA — A rumor sweeping the press corps here at the D6 conference: TechCrunch's Michael Arrington was set to stream Bill Gates's presentation live, but organizer Kara Swisher, who wanted to keep video restricted to her AllThingsD.com website, put the kibosh on it. Arrington abandoned the effort, but cited…
TechCrunch's Michael Arrington and Frenchman Loic Le Meur got into a 140-character Twitter war this afternoon. The topic? The TED conference and French military history. Arrington said TED is lame because he wasn't given a free pass: "I defame anything cool that ignores me, until it stops doing so. it's worked so…
Blogger turned entrepreneur Loic Le Meur has raised $6 million to inflict on the world a decades-old technology thoroughly rejected by consumers: videomail. He calls it Seesmic, and has repackaged videomail as "video conversations." Really, what this means is that the same people who film videoblogs you promise to…
