Rodrigo A. Sepúlveda Schulz

RSS: Meet Salim Ismail, co-founder of Pubsub [english]

Quite some buzz lately about Salim (for instance here on Om’s blog), as he has just left Pubsub for new ventures. He sent an email around a couple of days ago announcing his move:

 “PubSub is about to go into its next phase and I’m separating from the company, so my email address won’t work anymore.  When I started PubSub, it was always the intent to build it to a certain point and then leave to do my next venture.  After four years (internet years, no less), that time has come.
And no, I don’t exactly know what my next (ad)venture will be… but stay tuned.  Whatever it is, I’m first taking a vacation -  I haven’t had more than a 3-day weekend off since 2002, so I’m long overdue!
And in case you didn’t know, I’m now blogging at www.salimismail.com.  For those of you unfamiliar with blogs, it’s like a journal or diary online which gets updated regularly (in my case about 2-3 times a week).”

I taped a quick interview of Salim in the Paris metro at the recent LesBlogs conference last December. Here he explains quite well what PubSub is.

Good luck on your new ventures Salim. Looking forward to it.

Update: I just reencoded the video: it seems I had a small sync problem between audio & video. Is it better now ?

RSS #029: the investing 2.0 panel at les blogs 2.0 conference (my panel) [English]

A while ago, I posted a picture of me on a panel on investing in the web 2.0 economy. I've also posted regularly about the fact that the videos of the 'Les Blogs' 2.0 conference were now online. Tonight we actually added all the ipod compatible video files, a new feed with feedburner, and checked that it works great both on iTunes and your video iPod. Mission accomplished ;)

So if you missed it, here's my panel where we talked about the Good, the Bad and the Ugly in investing 2.0. In a nutshell I said:

• The Good: the venture ecosystem is back: comapnies are founded and funded again
• The Bad: lack of ambition in Europe to create global companies
• The Ugly: me-too concepts are back too, with many entrepreneurs mimicking US models without further thought.

And here's the video of Om Malik that you can't see behind me ;) (the original one, without Jeff's editing).

RSS #028: a whole lot of interviews from Les Blogs 2.0 conference earlier this month

Download movie (.mp4)

Remember me running around with a camera at les Blogs 2.0. I talked backstaged with many people, and some have complained they were never online ! So here goes the first crowd:

• Elizabeth Albrycht, co-organising the event
• Francisque from francisque.com who blogs about everything and nothing
• Roy Lindermann, from Readspeaker.com, pre-announcing read.io
• Julien van Caneghem, from France Podcast
• Jacques Froissant, the famous Altaïde head-hunter
• Thierry Verrechia, from Atafoto, rather tired from his drive in: thanks for letting me put this segment online !
• a view from the back of the room with an army of laptops!
• Robert Scoble, super excited about his dinner with a top model, and blogging from the stage
• Anina, the numero 1 model blogger in the world
• Roland Piquepaille, a tech journalist writing about science & technology
• Charlie Schick, having trouble counting the number of blogs he has
• Alex de Carvalho, wearing the latest FON T-shirt
• Katarina, a german blogger the a /peepshow URL
• Damien, from Belgium, ready to hit on Jason Calacanis who was a no-show
• François from Shoob.com
• Denis from Shoob.com as well, looking for coffee

And as I usual, I forgot to switch on my own mic, so my sound sucks

And if you haven’t checked out the footage of the conference yet, it’s online at http://lesblogs.vpod.tv.

Video archive of Les Blogs 2.0 now online

It’s here on http://lesblogs.vpod.tv. Enjoy!

Videos of Les Blogs 2.0 not yet online (sorry)

I had hoped the teams at vpod.tv and O4media.com would be able to publish all the videos of the Les Blogs 2.0 conference online this week, as promised on stage, and by email to some of you who had asked.  Sorry… we will be a couple of days late and will not meet the deadline (the week ended a few minutes ago ).

Here’s an update on the status:

After the event last week (monday 4, tuesday 5) the team got back to Madrid by car on wednesday and took thursday off. During the 2 days of the conference, in addition to controling the display on the left, one of our team members was manning the big camera in the back and taped 10 HDV tapes of 60 to 90 minutes. We used the sound input directly from the technical room (ie. the mics in front of the speakers) and fed them directly into the camera so that it would sync with the video and be of better quality than a shotgun mic.

So, starting friday last week, each tape was acquired onto a computer during the weekend, which represented approx. 30 GB per tape. So that’s 300GB of video to edit.

One of our guys started to do so on Monday. He did it manually to make sure it was done right. If you are not familiar with video editing here is what happens in a nutshell:

• open the video file in a proper video editing software (in our case we used Adobe Premiere on a PC) and identify the proper segment of the video corresponding to each panel. Gladly we somehow changed tapes between each panel (there were 14 of them) so that part was easier.
• We then added an intro slide to each panel, added our logo (we are doing all of this for free, so that’s at least the minimum for us ) to all the footage, added a little jingle at the end, and added the name of the speakers to each of the panels as appropriate. Well that takes a little bit of time, both in human time and in terms of machine time, as the computers need to do the rendering on a 30GB file.
• We then compressed each segment down to 150–250 MB, a suitable size for you to download later this week (per panel). We then used our vpod.tv platform to generate a flash movie in 16:9 format, and extracted the audio only version of each file. To do all of this, it takes a few hours per panel (about 4 hours), so you need to multiply that by 14 times.

As of friday afternoon, we were at about 2/3 done (day one, some off-panel footage, and parts of day 2), and the guys were off this weekend. It should be finished my tuesday I think now.

In the meantime this week:

• We upgraded our infrastructure with a dedicated server for these videos, and connected them to our backbone of 1Gb/s with a tier-1 telco operator for the progressive download of file (huh? chinese talk ? nope, this just means that at 300Kb/s per stream, about 3.000 people can connect at the same time). You saw probably what happened to Typepad over the weekend: planning for capacity is more an art than science.
• We are also using a content delivery network in addition to our bandwidth coonnection so that you get better redudancy for downloads of files, and better speeds (the tool we are using uses some P2P technology and an array of proxy servers. If this is too technical, just skip my mumbligs )
• After Typepad recovered this weekend, we set up a dedicated blog at http://lesblogs.vpod.tv (isn’t a blog the easiest way to create a website these days ?), with all the links to all the videos, downloadable audio & video formats. I think we will be able to use the comments section for each session to post links to other videos of either the sessions or of the panelists. I’ll update the main posts accordingly if you please, so that we can have a dedicated video archive for the conference. Caution:  the blog is still password protected and I’m not publishing the RSS feed yet for downloads.

To do still for us:

• finish rendering the few sessions left for day 2 – should be done tomorrow or the day after tomorrow.
• identify some of the sound issues we have on the footage (in spite of the direct link from the sound control room, the audio is very low compared to normal conditions: if you increase your audio it works. Not as good as I want it to be; we might release the videos as is for the moment, and re-render them with another audio filter and update the archive ASAP)
• generate an iPod compatible video format (easy, will do when all the footage is done) + a dedicated RSS feed for easy download in iTunes.

So, sorry to keep you waiting but we all learn by doing right ? ..

Just to thank you for your patience, here’s Loic’s Opening remarks on day one:

 

• Loïc Le Meur, Executive VP, Six Apart, France

Downloadable files:

• Video (Quicktime format) (78.0 MB)
• Audio (MP3 format) (6.2 MB)

"Les Blogs 2.0" : video from the stage

Our team at vpod.tv has actively started the post-production today of over 15 hours of video taped panels at the conference. And as you know, you need a bit more time than the length of a video to work on it and add post-production. So we are on our way to publishing the whole conference online by the end of next week. If we take an extra day, don't be too harsh ;)

In the meantime, for those of you who saw me taping the room while I was on stage on the Investing 2.0 panel, here's what you folks looked like. Enjoy.

ps: I have so much footage, that I might actually put everything up this weekend. Who knows ? ;)

Downloads: video, audio

Phew! organising logistics for a blogger conference is a HUGE headache

Waow, in spite of the fantastic efforts by the organizing team, the Internet link is going down quite often. Guys please refrain from using videos, skype, and other bandwidth intensive ressources / apps.

This morning we had issues with the cute flash chat system we had setup. In the meantime we have upgraded our server at http://dev.vpod.tv/chat to a more powerful infrastructure; you can use that as well. We are however projecting IRC on screen right now and could toggle that with the chat system.

Imagine this; the team brought in:

• 20 wi-fi access points
• a dedicated telecoms team + a 2Mb/s leased line + a main 4 Mb/s SDSL (17 Keuros !)
• over 150 electrical plugs around in the room
• air conditionning
• Live cameras & recording services

And it’s not enough! conference rooms and conferences in general these days are definitively not equipped to deal with these kind of power users. Imagine us in the future with 8 MP cameras, live podcasting, live videoblogging, etc. We really need to back all the very high bandwidth initiatives.

And to get anywhere the level of comfort you get at home here in France, you would need to provide each participant with a 4Mb/s ADSL link. Multiply that by 350 bloggers … ? 1,4 Gbps link (instead of 4 Mb/s). Telcos need to sponsor these events, don’t you think ? and for free I suppose!

 

Les blogs has started

Amazing morning here at LesBlogs ! it seems to be more of a laptop convention than a people conference. Gazillions of pictures are showing up on Flickr and elsewhere, almost at the same time as the conference is under way.

We are having some issues with a little hack we did yesterday to offer a nice easy-to-use chat service (backchannel) for you all. Please keep in mind that we are NOT in the IM / Chat business, but in the video business. We’re currently setting up our most powerful server to host the chat again and it should be up when you come back from lunch. In the meantime we are on IRC, using #lesblogs channel on freenode.

Hey, did you notice the little video stuff we are doing on the left screen ? It’s the “secret” video engine we’ve been working on for the past year. It allows us to do almost anything with video now. We should be announcing TOMORROW what we are doing with it at vpod.tv. We call the projection technology O4media or Oxygen for Media.

Kudos to Loic and his team for gathering such a great team, and for having a Wifi infrastructure that is holdind up to over 300 laptops ! And congrats for having also so many electrical plugs everywhere. More to come during the day.

And by the way, we are recording the whole conference, and should be releasing all panels online in video starting next week on vpod.tv.

VLC #004: Register for LesBlogs2 now ! Almost full!

Folks, we had a tremendous time at the first edition of LesBlogs earlier this year. Loic has assembled now again at LesBlogs 2 a fantastic list of panelists to come and talk to us about Web 2.0, blogging, podcasting, videoblogging vpodcasting , and all the latest trends in the net economy. You have to be there if you are interested in this space!

Last I heard only about 75 seats left… so make sure you book your seat now.

Listen to it straight from the horse’s mouth in the clip above.

Downloads:
– video: Download LesBlogs2_promo.mov
– audio: Download LesBlogs2_promo.mp3

update: why don't you combine thursday-friday at the IVCS event, the WE in Paris, and monday-tuesday in Paris at les Blogs 2 ? Sounds lie a great week in France for out of town people !

Party time for bloggers in Paris in December

Come and join us ! All details on this post by Neville and the official blog.

Update: registration is now open and I have just paid my fees (200€).

Now playing: Loïc Le meur - Robert Scoble: le salarié blogueur le plus connu du monde 1/2