[LeWeb] Mendeley is an online research papers database that connects scientists together by analyzing the connection between them and their research papers. Mendelay enables collaboration and conversations in the scientific community and aims to change the way research is done, paving the way to “Science 2.0”. Based in the UK, the startup has rapidly grown and currently offers 25,000 downloadable free research papers covering a broad range of academic disciplines, so far, 8 million research papers have been uploaded and the site counts 100,000 users.

Shutl is a platform that connects retailers with local same day-courier providers. Shutl selects the best vendor for each delivery by monitoring pricing and performance history, it works as a delivery services aggregation platform that directly connect online with the retailers’ e-commerce platforms. According to the company, the same day delivery is cost effective and often cheaper than a standard multi-days offering.

[LeWeb] Sokoz is a reverse auction site that lets people bid only during one minute per item. The auctions start at predefined times, the users have to be on time to be able to bid. It offers a wide variety of products from the latest PC to make over sessions or travel deals from trusted brands including, Sony, Apple, Ralph Lauren, Nikon, Starck and many more. At LeWeb, Sokoz is launching a new payment system, a new referral program.

By Karsten Lemm at LeWeb 2009 - "If you want to be successful, swim against the stream, follow your own path." That was Skype co-founder Niklas Zennström's advice to aspiring entrepreneurs at the LeWeb conference in Paris. The serial entrepreneur, who initially gained fame and fortune with file-sharing service Kazaa, pointed out that none of the potential investors that he and co-founder Janus Friis approached wanted to put money into Skype. "The VCs in Europe felt that Skype was way too risky" and had little future, Zennström said. The Internet phone service became a big success, of course, and was sold to eBay in 2005 for $2.6 billion.

Chad Hurley spoke a few moments ago at LeWeb in Paris and told us that now YouTube streams over one billion videos a day! Although he did not want to disclose the revenues, he shared that Youtube’s top users (only a handful) earn about a million dollar each. Chad Hurley briefly talked about the YouTube Formula 1 project, a blog from where Formula1 events videos are available http://youtubeformula1.blogspot.com/. Chad has another pet project, the clothing brand Alaska, and he plans to open two new stores, one will be located in San Jose, California.

[LeWeb] Today, Mike Jones, Chief Operating Officer at MySpace, spoke at LeWeb to announce the new suite of open API’s that include:

• Real-Time Stream API: gives push access to the full MySpace activity stream to third party sites in real-time, it can be filtered to control the amount of date seen, Google, GroovyCorp, and OneRiot are among the first to implement is.
• Status and Mood Commenting API: third party sites can integrate MySpace status and mood updates and allows users to comment from those sites, the comments are displayed in the users’ MySpace activity stream as well.
• Open Search API: MySpace profile information will be accessible to be integrated in search results by third parties. It allows users to search for people by name, MySpace profile type (eg musician, celebrity, comedian) or email address and then filter search results by gender, age and location.
• Photo Upload API: to upload photos from other sites or MySpace apps, it allows to create private or public photo albums.
• Updated Version of Post To/Share on MySpace: enables content sharing from other sites among MySpace friends, the content is displayed in real time in the MySpace activity stream, creating a link back to the third party site.

Mike Jones announced a developer contest for 50,000 USD starting January 4, the “MySpace Developer Challenge.” It will award developers who create the most interesting application using MySpace APIs. The judges will include Mike Jones - MySpace Chief Operating Officer, Ron Conway - Founder and Managing Partner of Angel Investors LP, David Glazer - Engineering Director at Google and Robert Scoble - Renowned blogger and tech evangelist. Winners will be announced at the Game Developers Conference on March 10, 2010 in San Francisco. Complete contest details are available at http://www.myspace.com /developerchallenge.

This morning we are at Club Melcion in Paris with the Traveling Geeks. We are meeting with Julien Coulon, Cedexis co-founder and General Manager. The company is an early stage startup and does not have a website yet.

Cedexis provides a collective intelligence platform that enables next-generation traffic management strategies. It measures the best performances provided by different CDN providers and will select the best one for internet services providers. Changes in performances vary by the minute; Cedexis monitors them in real time and switch to the best performing CDN instantly. Cedexis is especially critical for video streaming websites willing to deliver the best quality. According to Julien Coulon, Cedexis co-founder and GM, the services can increase the performance by up to 70%. The company gives feedback to CDN providersas well, allowing them to increase their performances; Cedexis aims to become a certification service. Conviva in the USA provides a similar service. The pricing is a share of the cost reduction Cedexis is enabling. The developers are mostly Americans, based in various part of the world.

Picture: chart with performances variations per CDN providers

Picture: Julien Coulon, Cedexis co-founder.

Cedexis is supported by Melcion Chassagne & Cie, a consulting firm geared to entrepreneurs.Three partners are based in the US and one is in Paris.

We were at La Cantine, an incubator in the heart of Paris managed by Silicon Sentier. There, Cap Digital, a business cluster supporting startups and research projects in the digital content field, presented us their portfolio of technologies. See below the list of startups, we'll add link to the company logos as we post about them: Bearstech, Feedbooks, XWiki, TerraNumerica, MXP4, Green Watch

[Traveling Geeks] Musicovery is an interactive music discovery online service, with a cool visual interface. It lets people find songs using a 2 dimension “mood graph” based on a famous psychology model (Russell Circumplex). On one dimension it is a variation from calm to energetic, and on the other one, it is negative sentiment to positive sentiment. The mood specifications are then translated into music characteristics such as tempo, orchestral power and so on, and this categorization is done by humans. Musicovery has 1 million monthly unique visitors with 600,000 registered members, 15% of the audience comes from the US (#1).

[Traveling Geeks] MXP4 is a new interactive audio format that lets people to remix on the fly different song versions. The company has developed a suite of creative tools for artists and producers to deliver a new interactive listening, premium and personalized playback experiences to listeners. Check out the video in the full post.

I am with the Traveling Geeks at Pearltrees' headquarter in Paris, I already published about Pearltrees a few months ago when it was in pre- alpha, but the public beta will launch in two days at LeWeb.

Pearltrees is a visual collaborative web browsing interface: users browse the internet visually using “Pearls” that represent websites and, by connecting them, they create a network of interest, I call it the “interest graph”. The social networking component, allows users to follow each other and use other people pearls to build their "interest graph", they can collaborate to create a common tree with pearls shared among many people.

With the Pearltress-Twitter sync feature users automatically build pearls by tweeting urls on Twitter, and automaticallt tweet urls by creating pearls in Pearltree, it will launch in two days.

The Traveling Geeks (who's in?) arrived in Paris today and gathered in a cozy small restaurant in Le Marais to get their first demo from Mobile Globe, a low cost international mobile calls provider.

Photo: RIGHT Robin Wauters, Tech Crunch Europe; Renee Blodgett, Down the Avenue, Amanda Coolong, TechZulu; Sky Schuyler, CTO of the Dalai Lama Foundation; LEFT, Kim-Mai Cutler, Venture Beat, Rodrigo Sepulveda Schulz; Tom Foremski, Silicon Valley Watcher; Olivier Ezratty. Frederic Lardinois, Read Write Web, Beth Blecherman, Techmamas.com and  David Spark, Spark Minute are there but not visible. Ewan Spence arrived later, Matthew Buckland was flying from Johannesburg, Phil Jeudy in the plane from San Francisco, Jerome Tranié, MobiFrance was not feeling well and Robert Scoble was dining with his fellow bloggers at the Social Media Club House in the Latin Quarter. You can check pictures with me (Eliane Fiolet, Ubergizmo) on Rodrigo’s blog and Flickr stream

Follow us on the Traveling Geeks blog (RSS feed) and on twitter using #TG09 and @travelinggeeks

Talk to the geeks on Twitter: @robinwauters, @magicsaucemedia, @acoolong, @jimsky7, @kimmaicutler, @rodrigo, @tomforemski, @olivez, @fredericl, @techmama, @dspark, @ewan, @matthewbuckland, @philj, @mobifrance, @scobleizer, @ubergizmo, @vinvin.

I (Eliane) landed in Paris yesterday, and I will be attending LeWeb next week as part of the "Traveling Geeks", a group of tech bloggers and entrepreneurs, coming from the USA (mostly from the Silicon Valley), South Africa and Europe.

I have worked quite a lot to put this blogger tour together with Renee Blodgett, Traveling Geeks co-founder , Phil Jeudy, co-organizer, and Sky Schuyler, CTO. The Traveling Geeks include:  Beth Blecherman, Renee Blodgett, Matthew Buckland, Amanda Coolong, Kim-Mai Cutler, Cyrille de Lasteyrie, Olivier Ezratty, Eliane Fiolet, Tom Foremski, Phil Jeudy, Frederic Lardinois, Sky Schuyler, Robert Scoble, Rodrigo Sepulveda Schulz, David Spark, Ewan Spence, Jerome Tranié, and Robin Wauters.

Ubergizmo is a media partner of the tour, and you have surely noticed the banner we have been running for a few weeks. Thanks to our sponsors France Telecom Orange, Pearltrees, Answers.com , Invest in France Agency, Parrot SA and Microsoft BizSpark for making this trip possible.

Following us:

• Follow the Traveling Geeks blog (RSS feed). It’s the main feed for all the posts made by the Traveling Geeks during the trip.
• Follow the hashtag #tg09 on Twitter.
• Check out the Traveling Geeks photos (full screen).
• Join the Traveling Geeks fan page on Facebook.

One of our partners, La Social Media Club House will be setting up camp in the Latin Quarter in Paris next week, and my friend Cathy Brooks along with other geeks will be tweeting from there, follow them at @socialmediaclub; the house residents' twitters are: @cathybrooks @chrisheuer @scobleizer @suzyperplexus @stephtara

Besides covering LeWeb, the largest, most renowned conference in Europe focused on the web and emerging technologies, the Traveling Geeks will meet with startups, venture capitalists, organizations and individuals developing and implementing technology and innovation across multiple industry sectors.