BBC Technology editor Darren Waters got a privileged chat with Seesmic founder and prominent French entrepreneur Loic LeMeur in a London pub last night and was evidently impressed after a demo:
Within minutes of posting the video to Seesmic, he had replies from the community all around the world, including from members sat around the corner in the same bar.
LeMeur confirmed the company, which has $6m in funding, is working on a mobile phone version of Seesmic – although they had better hurry up given the plethora of startups already offering this service. The startup has backing from Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, and people like Ron Conway, one of the original investors in Google, and (interest declared) TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington (but that’s not why I’m posting this).
LeMeur will be in Davos at the World Economic Forum next week working with CNN who will use Seesmic video replies to questions posed by LeMeur on the channel as an experiment.
Seesmic already has a number of UK advocates and users, but some have been less than impressed by its somewhat tricky interface, calling it crappy, buggy, bloated [update: rest of the sentence was “adorable, prototype proof of concept thing they knocked up, but my legs are just tired from using bicycle pedals to fly an aeroplane.”] and just plain crap. But then again it is still in an invite-only Alpha release.