Stephanie Booth's online ramblings
Robots to enhance our emotional life. Body language — humanoid robots. Aldebaran sold 4000 robots around the world, to research labs, universities, etc…
App store for robots. In 10 years time, will robots be teaching our kids? Personalized learning and education.
Bruno Maisonnier shares his vision of a world filled of robots 10 years from now. We are today with humanoid robots where we were at the end of the nineties with mobile phones.
Note: discussion with Loïc, notes might be all over the place.
Unit of investment today… billions rather than millions… are we going back to the late nineties? Getting funding without revenue. What do you think?
It’s hard to get a cab here. Specially when it’s snowing. (Backstory: Travis couldn’t get a cab back in 2008 when Paris was snowed in => birth of Uber.)
Numbers are good. People can see everything inside, transparent culture. Leaks question that, other companies can learn the lessons they’ve learned without going through learning them. Leaks give competitors a weapon and hurt Uber’s advantage.
Competition: China and North America.
steph-note: lots of number talk, not following well.
Taxis cost to exist. Scarcity.
Lifestyle: give it to me now. Ie, what we’re used to having on the internet. Uber for X => extending the concept. Right now Uber is delivering cars. Expanding to other cities.
Travis could wallpaper the walls with cease and desist letters. They even got one from New Orleans even though they’re not operating there, have no cars on the ground there. C&D letters just mean people don’t like you. They’re a nastygram. They have 3 attorney on staff at Uber. And law firms around the world that work with them.
Service in Paris is really good. It took time to get there.
Taxi organisations trying to get laws passed that outlaw competition. Basically, you have to wait 15 minutes.
Talking to the lawmakers? Waste of time. They make a service that people love. If they try to pass a law to stop it, the customers are going to speak up. Happened already.
Crazy laws. In South Korea, Uber is 100% legal. Except if the passenger is Korean. Travis was interrogated by the police 3.5 hours (police guy wanted a photo with him afterwards).
Disrupting a very old industry.
The customers slow down the political processes which are trying to outlaw Uber.
500 people in the company.
Note: this is a discussion with Loïc — I’m not that good at blogging discussions.
If you look at the past, you have to say it’s impossible to predict the future. Is MySpace the OS of the internet? Nah, not happened. Nobody really could have predicted the success of Facebook and Twitter. (Yay, Guy agrees with me. Or do I agree with him? I read The Black Swan too closely.)
BitCoin: getting away from Wall Street? Good thing. With a lot of these technologies, some is good, some is bad, but it’s still better than not having them at all.
“I don’t want any more friends.” — Not using social media to make connections, but as a marketing tool, a means to an end. steph-note: how I understand that! Guy is the person who will literally not say a word to you on a 10-hour flight if he doesn’t know you. (He says all this in a very nice way).
Guy is his brand. He loves Buffer, links everything.
steph-note: I’m seeing a difference in Guy and Loïc’s approach here. Seems that Loïc is more about the connecting than Guy who is more about content and results.
Guy’s model: earn the right to promote by providing great content. Like NPR. Other people than him do post to his account, but when he replies it’s always him. Most of his tweets go up 4 times 8 hours apart (not everyone is awake all the time, people don’t scroll back through all his tweets either).
“If you’re not pissing people off on social media, you’re probably not using it hard enough.”
“The most important thing an entrepreneur can do is make a prototype.” If you build a prototype and people like it, you may never have to create a pitch, make a forecast, a buiness plan, etc. Let’s face it, most pitches are BS. Most powerful thing you can show an investor is a prototype that is already being used.
Second piece of advice, for people outside the US: create something that is so great that the people in Silicon Valley want to copy.
“You’re so French, you just took that completely wrong!”
Third piece of advice: never ask anybody to do something you wouldn’t do (employees, customers, vendors…). steph-note: yay.
other steph-note: Guy is kinda cheeky.
Advice for finding ideas? Ideas ripped off from Sequoia Capital guy: richest vein = two guys/gals in a garage building a product they want to use. That’s very different from listening to 50+ white men in a conference telling you stuff. Create the product you want to use and hope like hell you’re not the only two people in the world who want to use it.
Guy advises more than he invests. Believes investing is more of a local phenomenon.
Intellectual property? Valuable for you if a very large company wants to buy you for your intellectual property. But otherwise… Building a model on patents is laughable. If you want to impress investors: “we have a patent pending but we don’t believe it’s a key part of our defensibility; … [insert other things that make you solid here]”. You won’t get funded with a business model which is we’re going to create technology, patent it, get copied by a large company and sue them.
Guy likes to lose money (=invest) in things he understands and uses. (Evernote, Buffer…)
Can you always identify a need for a tech startup? The answer is no. Often the need appears afterwards. Apple got that really well. Key part of entrepreneurship.
Sure, there is a demonstrated need for better batteries, and 500 companies are certainly working on it now. Not really interesting for Guy to invest or get involved in. Wants to fall in love with the thing — Google Plus. He didn’t need it but fell in love with it. Loïc: “That doesn’t make any sense, Guy ;-)”
Question to Guy: if a prospective investor asks a startup to move where the fund is, what would you do? Answer: he’d look for another investor. If you are from SF and you fall in love here in Paris, you’re not going to say “I’ll continue our relationship if you move to where I am”. Maybe a middle ground? Keep the programmers in Paris and headquarters on the West coast?
Another question on investing abroad (South Africa). Guy’s saying yes, lost opportunities. Issues: distance, doesn’t know how the country laws work, can you give options, IPO, etc. Adding speed bumps to the deal. Entrepreneur needs to make it easier for the entrepreneur to write the check. But yes, lost opportunities. The next Google could be brewing in South Africa and the American investor won’t see it.
All hail Halley Suitt Tucker, the mother of APE! (Grab a card that Guy has brought, you’ll get the book for free.)
Three macro-trends (from a behavioural point of view: not big data or mobile, but what are people doing?)
First, the transition from bureaucratic hierarchies to collaborative networks, what Here Comes Everybody talks about — technology lowers the transaction costs for collaborative action.
For example, a network like Twitter is starting to replace the newspaper (a bureaucratic hierarchy ;-)). YouTube is making everyone a video creator, good stuff surfaces, etc. Soundcloud is another one of these. Anybody creates audio or music, you don’t need a record label, don’t need to get signed, you get found by the crowd and become popular.
This trend was first visible in the entertainment industry, it’s now moving to the hotel industry (AirBnB), funding (Kickstarter), learning.
Second trend: unbundling. Has to do with how services are packaged and taken to market. Packaging and taking to market is much more efficient now, so you can buy bits and pieces now when before you needed to get the whole big thing. Newspaper vs getting your news/info from the internet. People focus on being the best at sports, or at classified, rather than doing everything.
Example: banking. Expensive to open a branch, fill it with people to serve customers. So banks did everything: mortgage, savings… So now we have things like Lending Club, Funding Circle — very specialised. Another industry that’s being unbundled is education. It was expensive to put a bunch of students in a room and have a professor stand before them in a building. Not necessary anymore, for example, Fred’s talk right now is being live streamed and probably watched by more people online than in this room. And research! Science Exchange uses a network-based model to allow researches all over the world to collaborate by using each other’s equipment for example. Entertainment is the obvious one. You used to pay your cable bill and get everything in there. Now: Netflix, Hulu, Spotify — we mix and match how we like, on our phone, the big screen, where we want it.
The third big trend is that we’re all nodes on the network because of our phones/computers. If you could keep either your smartphone or your computer, what would you keep? Most people would keep their phone. (I’d still keep my computer, I rely on it too much to type.)
Examples: Uber… impacting the taxi, rental car, and delivery businesses. Changing the world we live in! Square etc for payment: wallet on your phone. Dating: Tinder.
Summary: networks and hierarchies, everything is going to be unbundled, you are a node on the network.
Four sectors to look at.
1. Money.
Because of BitCoin, not because of BitCoin the hype thing, but because it’s a protocol. Money is going to flow on the internet the same way as content flows on the internet. It will not be controlled by any company, be it PayPal, Visa or Mastercard.
2. Health and wellness.
Not healthcare. What keeps you out of the healthcare system. Wearing devices that can report to us and others our vital signs. Fitbit, Jawbone UP and other Pebbles.
3. Data leakage
When the industrial revolution came along, we polluted a lot but waited a long time to start cleaning up. With the information age, our pollution is data leakage, organisations spying on us, etc.
4. Trust and identity.
We’ve allowed Google etc. to be our identity. But we’re giving them access to everything we do. At some point a protocol will emerge to allow us to do the same thing without the drawbacks.
Interesting: fertility app which will pay for IVF if you can’t get pregnant after a year using the app.
[fr] Quand on parle du futur, on parle en fait uniquement du présent. Toutes ces technologies existent déjà! Ce qui n'ôte rien au fait que c'est super intéressant 🙂
The theme of LeWeb this year is “The Next 10 Years”. I have to admit I’m always a bit skeptical about all this “future” talk. We always end up talking about the present, when we talk about the future. All this exciting technology is already here, but not evenly distributed, as William Gibson might say. Your future is my present. My future is already somebody else’s present. See what I mean?
That being said, all the stuff that Loïc is talking about on stage right now (intelligent homes, robots, 3D-printed houses, the quantified self, drones, fun new apps…) is very much in my current zone of interest. I’m a geek who loves new toys, even though you wouldn’t guess that if you want through my stuff at home. It’s one of the things that drew me to the web at the end of the 90s: extraordinary exciting things were happening there, and only a comparatively small number of people knew that and were a part of it. I jumped in.
I’ve probably mentioned a few times recently that I feel like I lost a part of myself along the way these last years. I haven’t been feeding my inner geek. I’m hoping to be inspired these next three days.
[fr] Articles en direct de la conférence-festival Le Web (je peux pas appeler ça un "salon" comme les français).
There we are. I feel strangely relaxed compared to the last five years or so. Nothing to worry about but myself and my blog!
Ricardo took a bunch of us official bloggers around the venue yesterday evening. I was happy to see everyone I knew, and even managed to recognise Frédéric Pereira (quite a feat given how bad I am with faces). Arne and Fred were there of course, my old friends Erno, Myriam, Adam, and the incredible Halley, who danced for everybody in the party bus that drove us around Paris afterwards.
I loved the idea of a party bus — for people who like partying. Not my case unfortunately, and I have a really hard time with loud environments, like most people with hearing loss. I guess my cup of tea would be a “tea bar bus” with soft music I can’t hear, comfy sofas, tea and cake. But I’m aware I’m a special snowflake in that respect and I wouldn’t want to impose my quirks on everybody else.
You want photos?
Fred Pereira in action
Checking out the venue before it’s ready!
What’s this car?
A peek inside
Desks for bloggers, and other typing people, on the side of the stage this year (we’ll see how that goes!)
The stage, with the expected 3D printer
Charbax checking out the gear in the Blogger Lounge
A better view of the Blogger Lounge
Halley, feeling camera shy
I approve of the colour scheme
The aforementioned gear
The Googley place in the other building
And the party bus!
And now it’s starting! Note the TV-like stage, at the same height as the public. Barriers breaking down! (Ooh, exciting: meditation session in the plenary room. Interested to see what that will be like.)
[en] How to mute a facebook chat with lots of people in it. Sometimes those notifications get a bit out of hand, don't they?
Si vous utilisez Facebook autant que moi, vous vous retrouvez probablement de temps en temps dans des chats “à plusieurs”. Voire “à beaucoup”. Et comme vous avez activé les notifications en cas de message privé, à chaque fois que quelqu’un dit un mot dans le gros chat commun, votre téléphone s’affole ou votre ordinateur bipe.
La solution radicale: quitter la conversation. Quasi tout le monde sait faire ça. Mais des fois on ne veut pas quitter la conversation. On veut rester dedans, mais on ne veut pas être prévenu en super-priorité quand quelqu’un dit “:-)”.
Sachez, mesdames et messieurs, qu’on peut couper le son à la conversation. En anglais, c’est “mute conversation” — quelqu’un me dit ce que c’est en français? C’est dans le menu “roue dentée” juste au-dessus de “quitter la conversation”. Oui, je vous fais un dessin:
Voilà, en espérant que ce sera utile à certains!
[en] Been going back to the cinema recently.
J’adore le cinéma. Quand j’étais petite, on y allait rarement, mais j’aimais déjà. C’était une occasion spéciale. De l’exceptionnel. Trente ans plus tard, j’ai toujours ce même sentiment magique quand je m’installe dans mon fauteuil pour voir un film. J’ai été beaucoup au cinéma durant mon adolescence, et aussi durant une bonne partie de ma vie d’adulte. C’est une de mes “sorties” préférées.
Depuis un an ou deux (ou est-ce plus?) je peine à trouver le temps (ou m’organiser) pour y aller. J’ai laissé expirer deux cartes Pathé “5 places prix réduit, valable 6 mois” avec encore des places dessus.
Le cinéma, plus j’y vais, plus j’y vais: je vois les lancements, je me dis “oh faut pas que je rate ça”, et la machine et lancée. A l’inverse, quand je n’y vais pas, peu de choses m’y tirent, sauf une vague envie “d’aller au cinéma”. Durant mes périodes sans cinéma, je ne sais même pas ce qui passe.
Récemment, j’ai recommencé à fréquenter les salles obscures. Voici les derniers films que j’ai vus et ce que j’en ai pensé, sachant tout de même que je suis “public facile” 🙂
[en] A round-up of some companies which use social media well. Follow the links... (Most of them are in English.)
La semaine dernière, à la conférence 200 Ideas (super, faut que je vous en parle, pas là, allez voir le site, il y a toutes les vidéos et les slides), je rencontre Christian, qui me pose une question très pertinente.
On est en mode “réseautage”, couleur “faut vraiment que je bosse sur mon pitch et je vais t’en faire la démo”.
Alors il me fait: “Médias sociaux. Hmm. Alors qui sont les entreprises qui utilisent bien les médias sociaux?” (je cite de mémoire).
Et moi: “.” (Comme dans les BDs Achille Talon.)
Suivi de “Euh… ouais, je devrais être capable de répondre à cette question, hein?”
Lui: “Oui…”
Bref. Je lui ai promis un e-mail, et en faisant un peu de recherche pour l’e-mail en question, je me suis dit que ça pouvait faire un billet de blog. Que voici.
Déjà, en préambule, disons que “bien utiliser les médias sociaux”, c’est vaste. On peut utiliser les médias sociaux pour beaucoup de choses (qui ont tendance à se mélanger, mais séparons quand même):
Tout ceci n’est pas forcément visible. Comment savoir si une boîte utilise super bien les médias sociaux pour leur communication interne? Ou ce qu’ils font côté veille? Et la stratégie? Je veux dire, comment réfléchissent-ils à ce qu’ils font? Dur de savoir tout ça sans accès insider.
Après, il y a les outils. Une boîte peut être géniale sur Twitter et catastrophique sur son blog. Ou bien utiliser Vine super bien mais pas Facebook.
Sans plus attendre, quelques exemples d’entreprises qui utilisent bien les médias sociaux. C’est pas exhaustif, c’est un peu en vrac, c’est même pas forcément les meilleurs (qui suis-je pour juger?), mais c’est un début. De quoi vous inspirer en tous cas! Suivez les liens…
Le magasin bio américain (aussi surnommé par certains “Whole Paycheck”, parce que oui, c’est plus cher), se débrouille plutôt pas mal en matière de médias sociaux. Vous pouvez lire un case study sur slideshare, une interview avec leur “Interactive Art Director”, une petite analyse de leur utilisation de quelques gros réseaux, ou encore une brève présentation de leur utilisation de Twitter (où on parle aussi de Best Buy et Southwest). Ils ont un blog, “Whole Story”, bien sûr.
Champions du service client sur les médias sociaux.
La compagnie d’aviation a un blog exemplaire, Nuts About Southwest. Voici un article sur 5 leçons marketing à tirer de leur présence médias sociaux.
Plus près de nous et à une autre échelle, j’aime bien ce que fait la CGN sur Facebook.
Blogs
Côté blogs, eh bien, il y a à lire! Quelques articles-listes pour démarrer:
Le blog d’entreprise (ou en entreprise) est loin d’être mort! Plongez dans ces listes, vous en ressortirez certainement quelque chose.
Leur campagne-réponses sur YouTube était mythique. Voici un case-study parmi des centaines d’autres.
La fête sur Twitter
Quand on est confortable avec l’outil et sa culture, ça peut donner ce genre de délire. Ça commence avec Tesco Mobile, ça continue avec Yorkshire Tea, et ça finit par inclure des dizaines d’autres marques.
Vine
Vous connaissez Vine? Oui, ça s’utilise en marketing.
Et encore?
Dans mes explorations, je tombe sur un article présentant 5 bons exemples d’utilisation de médias sociaux dans le “retail”. Google est notre amis à tous…
A part ça, il faut bien sûr mentionner Zappos et QoQa. Et LEGO! Il y a certainement d’autres boîtes incontournables qui font du bon boulot sur les médias sociaux… à vous de les présenter dans les commentaires!
[fr] Dans quelques semaines, je serai à la conférence LeWeb à Paris, cette fois en tant que "simple" blogueuse officielle!
For the first time in many years, I’ll be in Paris in December for LeWeb as a “simple” Official Blogger. After five years of setting up and managing the Official Blogger Programme, first alone, then with Fred and Arne (and always with Géraldine!), I’m really looking forward spending a few “relaxed” days at LeWeb.
Yes, I actually used the word “relaxed” in the same sentence as “LeWeb”. Given how huge and fast-paced the mega-conference-festival is, it’s surprising, but I can tell you that “not being in charge of anything” makes it feel like a picnic.
Lift and LeWeb are the two conferences I have attended consistently since 2006, the year I quit my job as a teacher and became a full-time “social web” freelancer.
So, what’s in store? The theme this year is forward-looking, and in addition to attending the sessions (some of the speakers blew me away last year), I will be catching up with old friends (if I can catch them) and hanging out in the startup/demo areas on the lookout for cool tech.