Florian's Blog

Sunday, May 25, 2008

Puff Daddy and Me

Puff Daddy and Me
Originally uploaded by Florian SEROUSSI

Really cool guy in the VodaFone Motorhome of MacLaren in Monaco during Formula 1 Grand Prix.

Puff Daddy and my wife

Puff Daddy and my wife
Originally uploaded by Florian SEROUSSI.

Amazing picture during Grand Prix of Formula1 in Monaco 2008.

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

CelTrek now advertising on National TV

I worked hard to bring my company to where it is now. After a successful reverse merge last year we have now gone mass market. This first TV and Newspapers campaign is to alert consumer of alternatives to their actual cellphone provider. We - at Global Roaming- offer a better product than T-Mobile and ATT for travelers. You keep your local phone number, travel the world and pay about 90% less than with your actual carrier.

It was not simple to define an ad for us. Final result is very educational. I like it. For sure next round of ads will be more artistic.

CelTrek - Global Roaming Distribution TV commercial.

Tuesday, May 06, 2008

My new venture : TWITTERFONE

TwitterFone: Send Messages to Twitter with Voice

* Allows anyone to send updates to Twitter by calling a number
* Voice is automatically transcribed to text

Twitterfone www.twitterfone.com - an Internationally backed voice to text message service launched today in the US, UK and Ireland.

Twitterfone voice-enables Twitter, a text message rebroadcast service and the hottest social networking service at the moment. With Twitterfone, people can dictate text messages via their mobile to be sent out to everyone on their Twitter social network.

Twitterfone investor and Cubic Telecom President Pat Phelan stated “Right now the million active users of Twitter use cell phones or computers to send and receive short bursts of texts to each other. Millions of messages each day are sent like this but while Twitter is one of the truly mobile social networks out there, there are times when users on the move cannot stop what they are doing to key in a message.

Twitterfone improves upon Twitter by allowing us to make a voice call which is turned into text and sent out to our network of friends. This only costs the price of a local call, no matter how many it is sent to. With hands-free kits common in cars it now means we can text each other without taking our eyes off the road and our hands off the wheel.”

How Twitter works:

Once people sign up to Twitter, they can subscribe to receive updates of users and receive them via the web or a text message. Web gurus Jason Calacanis and Robert Scoble have over 20,000 subscribers each and even the Los Angeles Fire Department and the English Government are now sending out text updates to people via their Twitter account.

An alliance of international high-tech and telecom companies provide the technology platform behind Twitterfone. Geneva-based VOX telecom provides calls routing, Redwood City, California-based Zong powers mobile enrollment and transactions, MAXroam powers the telephony intelligence system and Dublin firm Dial2Do supplies the core speech recognition which is at the heart of Twitterfone. Dial2Do CEO Ivan MacDonald stated

“We’ve been involved in the space where the phone system meets the web for a long time now, and naturally we’ve been fascinated by the rise of Twitter. Increasingly, we’ll see “web 2.0″ services that people use primarily from their phones. Projections are that mobiles will become the dominant way of accessing the Internet, and a lot of this will be done via voice interfaces. We are very pleased to see Dial2Do add even more value to an already extraordinary service.”

Phelan added “We built this because we are all avid users of Twitter and have made some excellent business connections and friendships from it. We decided to see what we could contribute to the service and with our telecoms backgrounds the Twitterfone idea fitted perfectly”.

Twitterfone is in invite beta at the moment meaning that only those that have been sent invites can join up. There will be regular releases of invites and Twitterfone says they have planned for a million sign-ups over the next year.

Twitterfone is a private company.
Its owners are Pat Phelan, Sean O Sullivan, Ivan MacDonald, David Marcus and Florian Seroussi.

Saturday, April 19, 2008

I am in the Sun Sentinel :)

Etan Horowitz wrote a nice article on video streaming. He interviewed me last week on the usage of Qik. As I mentioned to him; Qik is a perfect tool for sharing real moments in real time. You can check my Qik page on www.Qik.com/florian. Sun Sentinel article HERE.
Enjoy one of my Qiks:

Friday, April 18, 2008

Who broke my Twitter?

Twitter is a conversation tool – I consider it to be a revolution. 140 characters long messages to say it all. No bullshit, no turning around. Just plain instant thinking.

I’m a big Twitter fan – that’s no news to you. 1200 followers, 4000 tweets, 700 direct messages…impressive you think. Well no!!

Some guys decided to break the rules –yeah…I know there are no rules. Anyway Jason Calacanis decided to be #1 tweeterer and offered a free mac book Air to reach 20.000 followers. Since then Twitter has turned into a racetrack. Schumacher aka Scoble was leading for many months, Barack Obama came in and broke all the figures with over 23K follower…and no ones give a shit…

Twitter is hijacked from its primary purpose. Here we go with EgoTwitter. Mine is bigger than yours 

So you can ask me the difference between my 1200 followers and that new guy who registered last week and already has 2000 followers- and the answer is: NETWORK. Like many-hopefully-we build a network over time creating an interesting noise; sharing tips; helping out. Like a relationship.But you can’t buy friends. Never worked!! Twitter is no exception.

Paul Walsh is launching a new venture and to drag new users- he uses that stupid trick: Buy the audience. It doesn’t look too good for a start- unless your business is boring… Sorry Paul !

I’m not against giving away prizes…or receiving prizes…in fact one idea will be to have a group contest where all prizes would be presented. Few mac book Air – Steve Jobs will be happy; cards; travels; phones; plasma…I think its called eBay

But here – if you want to break Twitter and get 40K followers you can do the following. Register @HugeBoobs, upload a picture of a nice blond with prominent 00 and start twittering of your loneliness; add every single user on public time line for 3 weeks and BINGO!!I can guarantee you’ll end up in top 10 users. No give-away – just grabbing the attention.

Moderation, no moderation THAT is the question! I followed Shel Israel’s interview of Twitter founders –BTW Shel was really good on this one; Loren Feldman really saved Shel he just doesn’t know it yet. Anyway - I saw a product manager giving numbers; stats; I hate that mostly in a conversation tool. Do you do statistics about your friends? How many time they called you today? Do you rank keywords in your conversation? That’s bull…

There are 2 kinds of usage. First one I’ll call it Broadcasting Mode. Fucking annoying. I un-followed Guy Kawazaki for this reason.200 tweets per day with hyperlink.Duh!! Have you heard about RSS feeds?? What are you trying to do? The worst usage someone can do of Twitter is definitely Broadcasting. At least if you think of getting into it be very specific in your profile and avoid: “prolific blogger avid for new conversation…”.

Second is called Conversation Mode. The only interesting one. Open text message platform making an incredible noise based on sharing; debating and creating content. Everyday I find interesting stories cool links helpful tips and meet incredible people. I selected 3 service providers found on Twitter. Just like that! Twitter is delivering 5% of its potential; we can do much better if we de-pollute our timeline.

I understand they have a business to run BUT they must understand Twitter is driven by its population – not the other way around. We decide what we want it to become. No one else! If I had the audience I would prove it by launching a strike. No tweets for 4 hours to stop few egocentric guys from using OUR tool as a self-promotion platform.

I may be naïve - you’re right I can hear you- everyone is promoting himself on Twitter. Ok ok…but let’s put some efforts into it. Start a conversation. Do not buy my friendship with a laptop or a GPS! Buy it with words; trust and confidence.

You can have no rules when there is an auto regulation – Wikipedia kind of. Twitter does not have it yet! I hope they’ll get it before it looses its momentum. This is the only place where I see a failure.

PS: 2 things I want to add. Don’t ask me for lists. Black list; white list is not my cup of tea. I’d rather change people than ban people. No one deserves to be put aside. Secondly I don’t like boycotts. Something I can’t and won’t do.