Rodrigo A. Sepúlveda Schulz

RSS #034: Live from the Netizen Launch Party [French]

It was great fun. Everything was said and written elsewhere on the blogosphere. Search for the NETIZEN tag on Flickr and Technorati.

And more symptoms about Bubble 2.0...

It seems everyone is having a great time at the Digital Lifestyle event in Munich. Loic is reporting live. And… reminds me of good & bad memories of 1998–2000…

Why did top model Anina jump in the pool ? ICQ founder Yossi Vardi explains:

 

RSS #034: Meet Catherine Barba (cashstore.fr) [French]

Download movie (.mp4)

Catherine is the founder & CEO of cashstore.fr, a French cash-back service relying on over 122 partner merchant sites.

How does it work ? You register (free) on the site, click on any of the partner sites, and proceed as usual on your e-commerce purchase using your cashtore email address. She tracks you with the email, and the merchant site tracks the originating click.

Her business model is simple: she negotiates reductions with each partner site and shares the savings with the buyer, keeping approximately 50% of it. On average you can expect to get an additional 5% off any public price + any discount you might get elsewhere for the site. Cashstore will pay you by check whenever you reach 30 euros of cashback.

I recently used her service for buying my new Mac, and I encourage you to make it your first destination whenever shopping online. The company is self-funded, and I hear it will start looking for funds soon. Good stuff.

Live from Las Vegas #029: the Google Keynote...

Download Download movie (.mov)

You asked for it, it's right here thanks to vpod.tv...
OK, the quality is rough, but I decided I wouldn't wait for my Mac to compress over 200GB again in H.264 because it took for ever. So I did a quick rough compression in 3ivx. I'll update the video with better compression over the weekend.

Indeed, GIGO... For great video quality playback, you need great video sources...

I'll update the shownotes later, but suffice to know that Robin Williams makes a number of appearances, each better than the previous one.

Enjoy.

RSS #033 / Live From Las Vegas #028: Meet Pierre Saulay, l'Echangeur [French]

Download movie (.mp4)

If you don’t know what l’Echangeur is, then you absolutely need to go and visit it: it’s a physical place in Paris where all the future trends are presented to the corporate world. That’s where I saw over 6 years ago a mini store with RFID chips, read automatically by the cashier…

Pierre took a ride with me in this video on the famous Las Vegas monorail, and tells me about his impressions of CES.

Actually, he is organizing a debrief session of CES this week on Wednesday. You have to pay for the entrance, but if you listen carefully, there’s a discount coupon embedded somewhere in this video

Huge mobile party this week in Paris for the MobileFilmFestival

Jamil Hijazi (Services Mobiles) & Rodrigo, originally uploaded by rsepulveda.

I was amazed at the huge crowd this week at the Rex Club (we got there around 10:30pm) for the party of the Mobile Film Festival held this month in Paris.

Somehow I had the impression of being back in the crazy years of 1999-2000.

Open bar for everyone for a few hours, live orchestra, waitresses behind the bar *stripping* (and I can tell you, well guarded by a HUGE security guy), many people you know showing up and even more people that you don't know...

And all this to promote the mobile industry and a 'happening' mobile film festival.

It was nice, well spirited, and glad to have been invited by the organizer, Bruno Smadja. Nevertheless puzzled by the economics behind it (although he told me, that the place more than makes a profit when they close the open bar).

I have some pictures here, but make sure you watch the winning videos here.

 

Mobize has a quick interview video of me [French]

It was taken at the first Mobile Monday Paris. It's here.

Herbie Hancock (the Watermelon man) on vpod.tv!

Make sure you rush to the new SVMmac TV, powered by vpod.tv  There’s a great interview of Herbie Hancock in the alleys of MacWorld in San Francisco recently. Loved his answer to: “is Steve Jobs a good guy?”..

Above is only the trailer. The full interview is here.

Just discovered another 3D world: Taatu

While browsing for T-shirts on Lafraise.com…

And, they have registered about 30.000 Taatu users in only 4 weeks!

Their interface is ultra-slick (just created my avatar with a beard and orange trousers…). I’m online on taatu right now in the disco...

Aren’t VCs interested in companies / projects who can aggregate users at a very fast pace ?

Update: the site for the moment is only in French & Dutch. I see autopromotion links in the interface. Indeed, a great way to sell advertisements to a very captive audience. Another B-model would be to sell subscriptions, but I like the casual feeling on this world, with no combats, just a 3D way of IRC. Actually an interface to IRC would be an awesome idea! Hum... Just for the sake of it, I'm creating a new 3D category on this blog.

My previous post on lecentredumonde.com showed that those guys didn't get it. But this universe is great. Next issue is with multiple IDs on different worlds that will allow 3D chats. Is there a standard out there for interconnecting all these worlds? I don't want to repeat the horror of Instant Messenging where we all have 5-6 IM accounts. Oh!!! (and I'm typing while I'm thinking about this): who's going to be the first to interface this type of virtual worlds with IM systems ... !?

Update 2: Actually, all the locations here are like what we had yesteryear with the minitel and private chatrooms. You can even create your own "appartment", with specifics for DISCUSSION, DATING, GAMES...

I'm running around the bar now. You can buy their virtual money (TATs) by SMS or phone ! 1,50 euros for 20 TATs. Virtual money in this system allows you to buy stuff such as furniture for your appartments.

They are also trying to get viral: you get 5 free TATs if you invite a friend. That's a low customer acquisition cost...

Update3: just came back to this world, after letting my character sit in an appartment with other people to observe their behaviour. It's really like a chatroom, and people play games together (they all run to a wall at the same time, etc.) bringing visual interaction to a chat room. I suppose this can get very sticky and enable very regular visitors to quickly create communities. They only need to extend the tools so that users can start generating new environments, new appartments, stores, etc. 3D user generated content...

Also very interesting: they have a theater in which they show trailers. They can get paid for that, and starting adding e-commerce: sell tickets to shows, and even extend the whole model for e-commerce.

They have machines in this world distributing virual magazines (the Taatumag) that you can readonscreen, and sponsored by NRJ radio, Cinebel (a movie portal), Out soon (?), netevents (?à, and playerOne.be (a game portal). Great exposure (when the community grows) for these advertisers.

There's even airfield: the popup says that in the short future you'll be able to FLY to another island (so another part of the game) for a few TATs... Another use then of virtual money to access more levels.

This company operates out of Belgium. Good stuff.

Update 4: here's a little screencapture at the picnic section. I'm just sitting there, around 3am. There is indeed some activity...

Update: readers have pointed me to HabboHotel, whose existence I had never heard of. Indeed a heftly 3rd round of financing last year by Benchmark capital for $23.5m... I should have noticed. Taatu is clearly a copycat, although I prefer it's graphical design (slightly simpler, better). BY the way we made it to the alarm:clock this morning... Funny.
There's probably room for a second player in this space. Now someone's got to figure out how to interconnect them at some point, although I expect each platform to try to reach the largest audience on its own.

A French 3D mall: center of the world

Interesting approach to an e-commerce mall. Lecentredumonde.com (the center of the world …) has added a 3D interface (actually a series of 3D pictures) to an online shopping gallery. It’s rather simple, and navigation not intuitive at first. Then when you click on a store, you go off to the store’s web page. The concept actually needs to be extended and have a presence for instance in real virtual life, like in Second Life.

In terms of business model, I guess they are trying to live off an affiliation model with bounties. But their interface is not compelling enough to go a 2nd time, nor does it incentivize me with promotions that I couldn’t get elsewhere.

So, unless they make this thing into a real online 3D mall, I’m not going back