Loïc Le Meur

Seesmic Lays Off Half Its Staff as It Pivots Back to Social Cross-Posting

Liz Gannes in Social on March 22 at 2:12 pm PT

San Francisco start-up Seesmic laid off 18 employees this week, bringing its staff down to 15 people.

Seesmic Raises $4 Million in Funding From Salesforce.com

Kara Swisher in News on February 1, 2011 at 5:39 am PT

In an interesting social enterprise move, popular social networking collaboration tool Seesmic is taking a $4 million investment from Salesforce.com, as well as from Softbank. The San Francisco-based Seesmic has one of the top desktop and mobile applications for monitoring a consumer’s various feeds from Twitter, Facebook and more.

Is the Facebook "Like" Button Like a Twitter RT? Loic Le Meur Talks About the Impact of the Giant Moves on Start-Ups

Kara Swisher in News on April 27, 2010 at 10:12 am PT

Here’s an interesting interview BoomTown did with Seesmic Founder and CEO Loic Le Meur, whose status update client is one of the more popular ones, at the Facebook f8 developers conference last week. In it, he talked about the various new features of Facebook that make it “very, very close to Twitter.” While it is true that Seesmic is more than just a Twitter client, Le Meur has to hope that competition between the microblogging service and the social networking giant is a good thing for smaller start-ups in their ecosystem, such as Seesmic.

LIVE from New York: Twitter Pitches Ads to Madison Avenue

Peter Kafka in Media on April 13, 2010 at 10:39 am PT

Twitter has quietly been reaching out to marketers about its new ad platform for a few months, but now it’s a full-fledged marketing blitz. COO Dick Costolo takes his marketing message to ad buyers.

Loïc Le Meur Speaks About New (and Improved?) Seesmic!

Kara Swisher in News on September 18, 2009 at 4:11 am PT

When BoomTown went to visit serial entrepreneur Loïc Le Meur early last year at his San Francisco HQ, he was stoked about the prospects of his “video conversation” community start-up. Fast-forward to today and the entire business plan of Seesmic has been upended, with the video part pretty much junked. Now Le Meur is focused almost entirely on his social media desktop client, as well as Web and mobile versions, which began as a dashboard for Twitter. If at first you don’t succeed, dump and change again–the motto of Silicon Valley!

Twitter: Where Nobody Knows Your Name–The Sequel

Kara Swisher in News on December 29, 2008 at 6:00 am PT

BoomTown’s been just one week gone and yet another goofy, traffic-generating debate “erupts” in the blogosphere involving the usual suspects and the favored hyped Silicon Valley company of the moment, Twitter. The new bone being gnawed on is something I can hardly grasp the point of–some drivel argument about what constitutes the authority of a tweet. While tweet status would seem only important to, say, a Warner Bros. cartoon character like Sylvester, all I can think is: Who cares? That’s because the fact remains that Twitter is simply an unknown to most average people in a way other tech trends have not been.

An American (Well, Lots of Them) in Paris for Le Web

Kara Swisher in News on December 8, 2008 at 10:00 am PT

BoomTown just got to Paris, as in France, to attend and moderate sessions for the third annual Le Web conference. Le Web is organized by Loïc and Geraldine Le Meur, with 1,500 people signed up to hear a range of Internet players, many of whom are from the U.S., tomorrow and Wednesday. Silicon Valley speakers include Marissa Mayer of Google, LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman and Dan’l Lewin of Microsoft. And some interesting European execs include France Telecom Orange Chairman and CEO Didier Lombard and Jacques-Antoine Granjon, CEO and co-founder of a very interesting fashion sale site, Vente-Privee.com.

A Picture's Worth a Thousand Words–So What Does a Big Smile in a Layoff Story Mean?

Kara Swisher in News on October 27, 2008 at 9:42 am PT

Happy days aren’t here again, it seems. Still, I am not quite sure what to make of his big, happy smile on Seesmic founder Loïc Le Meur’s face, which went with a story in the New York Times about start-ups cutting costs. In fact, the whole Seesmic crew is grinning awfully hard, putting a very game face on recent layoffs that cut the staff at the video blog service by more than a third.

Debating the "Real-Time" Web at Stanford University

Kara Swisher in News on September 17, 2008 at 8:15 am PT

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.

Kara Visits Burda's DLD Luncheon in Silicon Valley!

Kara Swisher in News on September 17, 2008 at 3:23 am PT

Germany’s Hubert Burda Media threw a big luncheon in Palo Alto yesterday, which was stuffed full with Silicon Valley types. It was hosted by the company’s Steffi Czerny and Maria Burda, the wife of CEO and owner Hubert Burda, as well as well-known Israeli investor Yossi Vardi. Burda runs an annual digital conference in Munich, called DLD (Digital, Life, Design), even though the media giant is best known for its old-line magazines about fashion, cooking and crafts. So here’s the video!