Tom Raftery, social media consultant, speaker, blogger and podcaster
The BBC is reporting that there will very shortly be a plugin for Skype which acts as a lie detector by analysing:
audio streams over a Skype call in real time and illustrates the stress levels of the other person
Most of my PodLeaders podcasts are recorded Skype conversations - this could add a whole new dimension to the interviews!!!
Ben Metcalf is reporting that Sam Sethi’s Typepad personal blog has been disabled.
Typepad is the company Loic Le Meur works for and Sam recently wrote a post on Techcrunch UK critical of the Le Web conference organised by Loic.
This definitely sounds too incredible to be true - it will be interesting to see how this one is explained.
Sam says his account has been deleted on Twitter.
via Ewan
[UPDATE] - Ben left a comment below to say they haven’t disabled Sam’s account.
There is a post on the web2ireland blog claiming that Techcrunch UK’s Sam Sethi has been fired by Mike Arrington!
The post author, Paul Walsh is very close to Sam so I would put a lot of faith in this post.
My sources are telling me that Sam was fired for refusing to remove a comment from the TechCrunch UK site. The comment in question was one where Loic Le Meur called Sam an asshole for putting up a negative review of Le Web 3. The comment has since been deleted.
Sam put up a post on TechCrunch UK saying he and Mike had parted ways but that post has been deleted also. I found it in my RSS reader and it said:
Following yesterday’s post about Le Web and Loic’s retort. It seems Mike Arrington has disagreed with my post and opinion believing my actions to be vindictive towards Loic. What was said between Mike and I will remain confidential but suffice to say I can no longer remain with TechCrunch UK & Ireland. It is a very sad after all the work that has gone into TechCrunch UK and Ireland. I wish all of the UK and Irish entrepreneurs well. I will be personally blogging back at www.vecosys.com and looking for something new to keep me busy. Bye �
I was just starting to enjoy Techcrunchuk after a slow start and cant believe that Michael would come down on Loic’s side on what I thought was a very fair and balanced post regarding Leweb3
Sam seems to confirm this version of events on Twitter.
Sam doesn’t seem to be answering his mobile and I have emailed Mike to try to get his side of the story - if I hear back from either of them I will update this post.
I know both Mike and Sam and have a lot of respect for both of them so I find this particularly hard to believe.
[Update] - Mike has clarified his reasons for firing Sam on his Crunchnotes site:
The actions that resulted in his dismissal were additional comments he wrote on that second post, announcing “that TechCrunch UK will be doing a series of seminars and a conference next year as well as a series of smaller meetings in conjunction with friends & partners which have been in the planning for sometime now.�
These events were not discussed with me, and certainly were not approved. The fact that he announced and promoted them while trashing a competing event was a clear conflict of interest and was not appropriate. I do not consider this to be ethical behavior.
None of this had to be aired publicly, but Sam chose to write a final post on the blog after he was terminated stating incorrectly that he was being terminated because of the original post. He has also written publicly that he was terminated because he would not comply with my demand to delete a post. That is not accurate. This is driven entirely from Sam’s ethical lapse in trashing a competitor while simultaneously promoting his own events. That’s not acceptable - readers will not be able to determine if he actually believed what he wrote about the conference, or rather exaggerated his opinions to futher his own business interests.
Here is the text of an email I just sent to Le Web 3 organiser Loic Le Meur:
Loic,
I am furious at the way you arbitrarily decided to change the Le Web conference schedule without any notification to the people who paid good money and took valuable time out of their schedules to attend.
I decided to attend the conference based on the published schedule. The schedule as published was very different from the conference which actually took place. This is false advertising as far as I am concerned.
I would like a refund of my money because I wasn’t given the conference I paid for.
Yours sincerely,
Tom.
It will be interesting to see what, if any response there will be. Has anyone else asked for a refund?
There are a lot of people at the Le Web 3 conference who are going away from the event extremely angry. Someone at lunch today said tht the conference should have been named Loic instead of Le Web.
Why? Nobody was too annoyed when the schedule was changed to allow Shimon Peres address this morning.
What really annoyed everyone was the fact that the conference was completely hijacked and changed from a conference about new web technologies into a presidential campaign for the next French election. Two of the candidates, Nikolas Sarkozy and François Bayrou were parachuted in to the conference schedule at the last minute, displacing other speakers.
Worse than that, at a conference where the majority of the delegates were not French, the two political candidates addressed the audience in French (and Sarkozy didn’t even take questions).
I have heard many people speculate that this is conference organiser Loic LeMeur’s way of furthering his own political ambitions.
The conference that was delivered was not the one which was advertised. It is not the one I paid for. I think Loic owes an apology for bringing so many people to Paris under false pretenses. I wonder will anyone ask for a refund…
UPDATE] - I see Nicole’s post on this is now at the top of Techmeme.
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