Kara Visits Seesmic and Chats With Loïc Le Meur

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: