The Webmission idea started with two Belgian web developers: Laurent Eschenauer from Liège, who created the Life Stream tool Storytlr (which he was invited to present by Google) and Xavier Damman from Nivelles, who launched Commentag, a tool that aims to organize the masses of information tha goes through the Micro-Blogging tool Twitter.
Initially, they were to go to San Francisco to attend the Google I/O conference, a huge gathering of web developers, and to stay a week to visit the local start-ups. Then the idea just grew and other start-ups, developers and Belgian web enthusiasts were kindly invited to join the mission.
As I am writing this post, they are on a plane flying above the Atlantic. A nice delegation of ten guys:
- Laurent Eschenauer (@eschnou)
- Xavier Damman (@xdamman | Tweetag)
- Jean-Yves Huwart (@JeanYves| Entreprise Globale)
- Damien Van Achter (@davanac)
- Antoine Perdaens (@tlg | MicroPlaza)
- Jérôme Cordiez (@lovely_djay | Lovely Charts)
- Arnaud Coomans (@acoomans | Commentag)
- Rayes Lemmens (mylivepage)
- Sam Piroton (@sam_piroton | Les annonces)
- Frédéric Monet (@fmonet | CityPlug.com)
Their program will be made up of several interesting visit and events like:
- Some Tourism 2.0, visiting Stanford Campus, University Avenue, etc….
- A two-day “Startup tour” going through events such as Plug And Play PACT and the 140-Twitter Conference, but also with plans (or hopes) to visit the Googleplex.
- And obviously the two-day Google I/O Conference.
Also worth noticing, on Tuesday, May 26th, five of those participants will have the opportunity and challenge to present their product at the SF NewTech gathering in SF.
The whole mission will be covered by many participants, among which the journalist Damien Van Achter, who will represent the RTBF Labs on which can read even more about the mission’s context (in French).
Thanks to that same Damien, who offers us the nice widget hereunder, you can even follow them live from this page. Another way to follow them is to follow all the Tweets about the mission on Tweetag.
Get the Webmission: 5 start-ups en démo à San Francisco.
I wish those guys a very nice trip, but also some great ideas to import back from San Francisco.