All Things Digital

Last night, BoomTown was invited to moderate a panel for MIT/Stanford Venture Lab at Stanford University’s Business School on the topic of lifecasting.

In other words, the digital version of TMI (too much information!).

Called “Lifestreaming: The Real-time Web,” it was aimed at debating the trend toward “sharing our lives with others as they happen,” with three entrepreneurs and a venture capitalist in the space.

The panel included Bret Taylor, Co-Founder of FriendFeed; Seesmic Founder Loic Le Meur; Pownce Co-Founder Leah Culver; and SoftTechVC’s Jeff Clavier.

It was a lively discussion, which was also focused on monetization–or lack thereof–issues in the instant Internet space, in which users share every detail of their lives with friends and family in a digital millisecond.

Like I said, MTMI (much too much information!!).

In any case, here’s a video I did of the event, including snippets of the company presentations, as well as interviews with all the panelists:

Yesterday, WordPress Founder Matt Mullenweg and I jumped into the BoomTownMini and took a road trip down the lovely 280 to Palo Alto’s MacArthur Park restaurant for a lunch thrown by Germany’s Hubert Burda Media.

Burda runs an annual digital conference in Munich called DLD (Digital, Life, Design), which a lot of U.S. tech types have gone to, including me, even though the media giant is best known for its old-line magazines about fashion, cooking and crafts.

But Burda has also been dipping into the digital sector a lot, especially via the tireless tech networking of the company’s Steffi Czerny and Marcel Reichart, who have established a high profile for the company among Silicon Valley denizens.

That was in evidence at Burda’s luncheon yesterday, which was crowded with a panoply of techies and hosted by Czerny, Maria Burda, the wife of CEO and owner Hubert Burda, and well-known Israeli investor Yossi Vardi.

Czerny has been taking Maria Burda (pictured here, she is also a famous German television star, better known as Maria Furtwängler) around the Valley on a learning tour this week to meet with companies like Ning, Mozilla, Facebook, and with venture capitalists. They are also here to attend Google’s Zeitgeist partners’ event, which starts today.

Here’s a video of yesterday’s luncheon, where I was asking everyone about the troubled economic situation and more.

It includes chats with Mullenweg and Seesmic’s Loic Le Meur, BillShrink’s Peter Pham, Facebook’s Brandee Barker and Randi Zuckerberg, Wired’s Steven Levy, Vardi and Burda and Czerny:

When BoomTown last checked in with French serial entrepreneur and blogger Loïc Le Meur, he was setting up his Seesmic start-up in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill and making funny daily videos of the effort.

Now, Le Meur’s online video conversation community is ensconced in its new offices and his bank account is $6 million richer.

That wad of cash came earlier this month from high-profile angels like LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, former AOL head Steve Case, SoftTech VC Jeff Clavier, entrepreneur Mark Pincus, Goldman Sachs’s Michael Parekh, entrepreneur Ariel Poler, investor Ron Conway, FON founder Martin Varsavsky and an investment group called Atomico founded by Skype founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis.

(In addition, tech bloggers Jeff Pulver, Michael Arrington and Dan Gillmor have also invested.)

Seesmic, which is still operating in alpha mode (there are a few glitches here and there on the service, especially related to searching), is described in a lot of ways–video Twitter, video social network, video sharing tool are some examples.

(Here is a screen shot below of what Seesmic looks like, which you can click on to make bigger.)

While the service has some critics, I like the idea of it a lot, as it takes the ideas pioneered by YouTube another step.

Still, many efforts in this kind of online commenting community sometimes degenerate into self-obsession and niches of niches. And given it is video, there is, of course, a huge potential for Seesmic to be used for porn.

BoomTown talked about this and more with Le Meur at Seesmic’s offices in the video below.

We also tested out the service by making a Le Meur video about our visit, where we tried to get the community to figure out our identity from only our hand and voice. It got more than a dozen responses very quickly and it was kind of fun, given that the guesses included Queen Elizabeth and actress Christina Ricci.

(You can see those videos here.)

Here’s the video of my visit to Seesmic:

While at Seesmic, the online video conversation start-up, French entrepreneur Loïc Le Meur showed off the service by making a video about our visit.

(Here is a link to our post and video of our visit and interview with Le Meur.)

In it, we tried to get the community to figure out BoomTown’s identity from only our hand and voice. It got more than a dozen responses very quickly, and it was kind of fun, given that the guesses included Queen Elizabeth and actress Christina Ricci.

Here are two of our videos and some of the guesses below, including the correct one at the bottom:

Hand Video No. 1:

Hand Video No. 2:

Comment on Identity of Hand No. 1:

Comment on Identity of Hand No. 2:

Comment on Identity of Hand No. 3 (Patty Hartwell guesses correctly, and gets French lunch prize from Le Meur!):

OK, you might attribute it to being super-bored in the holiday doldrums. But, for some reason I cannot explain, I find myself strangely drawn to the videos being made about the start-up of Seesmic, the new video-sharing service that is being created by European entrepreneur Loïc Le Meur.

Up on his own loic.tv channel on YouTube, everything from checking out the company digs to working on a logo to hiring are on display, and Le Meur encourages community comments about the company’s direction. The videos are currently up to Day 57.

It’s a shameless gimmick, to be sure, but Le Meur’s French accent grows on you, and it is an interesting way to market your company, for certain (AllThingsD.com and D: All Things Digital only did one staff BBQ and Rodeo video, which is seen below).

While Seesmic is described in a lot of ways–video Twitter, video social network, video sharing tool are some examples–Seesmic’s obviously practicing what it preaches here: video blabbing that is often compelling.

(Here is a screen shot of what Seesmic looks like, which you can click on to make bigger.)

To get it all going, Le Meur (who also organizes the Le Web conference in Paris, which just took place) got a bunch of high-profile angels like former AOL head Steve Case, investor Ron Conway, FON founder Martin Varsavsky and Skype founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, as well as many others, to pony up millions for Seesmic’s funding.

He and his family moved to San Francisco this past summer, and he has been ferreting away ever since on the service, which will officially debut in early spring of 2008.

Here’s Seesmic’s latest, a what-are-you-doing-for-the-holidays video of its employees:

Then again, I also kind of like the flip side–the mostly hysterical, sometimes line-crossing attack review of Seesmic by Loren Feldman of 1938 Media. Actually, although Feldman trashes Le Meur’s effort, it is just the kind of thing that would probably make Seesmic the very lively place it needs to be.

Here’s Feldman:

And here’s the video of our ATD/D BBQ and Rodeo, which focuses a lot on the marinated lamb: