The hosts, Loic and Geraldine LeMeur opens the LeWeb08 conference.

A quick post about my experience at LeWeb i Paris as I head back to Stockholm full of inspiration.

This years LeWeb proved more than ever that the value of conferences lies not so much in the content of the speeches or having famous people as presenters, as in the meetings between people. LeWeb managed to gather 1700 people from 30 countries and if you are open and curious it is hard not to be inspired by talking to them. I chatted with lots of video professionals, well-known bloggers like like Robert Scoble and many others that I wold never have found without LeWeb. For example I met several great people from the Czech republic,  Eastern Europe seems to be very active in Internet business.

If you have great people the practicalities are of less importance. But I was negatively surprised to experience a much worse organised LeWeb this year compared to last year’s LeWeb. Everybody suffered from the very cold halls with bad accoustics and the lack of food and coffee througout the two long days. And like at most conferences, the Wifi did not work properly, not even for the presenters. The startups had to demo their internet businesses with slides… But the spirits were high, people made jokes about being “hardened for the recession” and the brasserie next door was packed with hungry, networking delegates. Update: here is Loic Le Meurs explanation on why things went wrong.

Since I am very interested in how to organize conferences I have collected some more insights from this experience and updated and expanded my post about “Conferences 2.0”

For me the highlight of LeWeb was the talk by Chris Anderson, the organiser of the TED Talks. He must have the world’s best job, working with the world’s most interesting minds all year around! Enjoy his talk here, it is 20 minutes that could change your life! See the video here.
Note his opening when he talks about our need of “continuous focused attention” amongst all the people in the  audience that where blogging, twittering, emailing, talking… I like the expression “continuous focused attention”, it is an important issue in these days of media noise, as real presence leads to mindfulness which we all need much more of.

There were few Swedes attending LeWeb, but I was glad to see both Jonas Birgersson and Ola Ahlvarson up on the stage. Jonas was once more evangelizing super-broadband in a panel appropriately titled “European originals” and Ola was a judge in the startup competition. I chatted with  Johan Stael von Holstein in the audience, he was more confident than ever that his latest two ventures, MyQube and Snowfish will both be global hits and take on Facebook and MySpace. Great to see that these guys still have the glow!

The Finnish entrepreneurs presented several interesting concepts in the startup competition and made the smartest PR trick with their “Sauna truck”, check out this video. This was a brilliant marketing idea that generated  this brilliant blog post by Thomas Crampton.

YouTube had a workshop about business solutions where they presented some surprising numbers:

1. 73% of YouTube visitors are over 25 years old
2. 52% are men

YouTube also presented their premium content channels that are enabling amongst all the professional media houses and organisations a new generation of video amateurs to make a living on YouTube (see NY Times article) showed some interactive functions. For example multiple language subtitling and in-video menus such as in this clip where you can select camera angle during a motorcycle ride.

Morten Lund, a colourful Danish investor/business angel talked about his recent disaster with a newspaper project where he lost some €30 million and how is now forced to sell his house. But he remained confident that some of his other 80 other startups (!) would fly and delivered a string of pearls of wisdom for entrepreneurs that I found very insightful, see the video:

• “Only people who where born rich have a problem with losing”.
• “People is everything. Good people can succeed with bad ideas, bad people can’t succeed with a good idea”.
• “Startups need money, but they should come from sales and not from continuous investor cash”
• “The chances are bigger now than ever! All the pricks have now gone back to their safe jobs. Entreprenurship is now, technology is breaking through!”

                 

(1 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)

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The LeWeb3 was one of the most professionally produced conferences I have attended in several ways.
The video projection was the best I have ever seen and the audio quality was top notch with very engaging musical intros.
I also liked the schedule with lots of time for networking in the coffe and lunch breaks. The lunch offering was a totally staggering buffet of french gourmet cuisine at it best. A two hour lunch break with hundreds of small dishes makes it easy to relax and network!

Loic LeMeur and his wife Geraldine, organizers of LeWeb3

Most of the speakers were very inspiring and I liked the mix of key notes and panel discussions. But the conference format was still 1.0, (OK, more like 1.4) it is now time at least for internet conferences to live like they preach and move to 2.0! (See my separate blog about this.)

Some of my notes from LeWeb3:

Hans Rosling
his presentations at TED have made him world famous, don’t miss them!
“Storytelling works! There are 10 000 watchers for every clicker”
“Just putting facts on the internet does not work, storytelling does!”

Panel: The Internet’s impact on design
This was a somewhat confused panel discussion, as it consisted of very different types of peope that did not know anything about each other.
Rafi Haladjan, the creator of the smart online rabbit Nabaztag (rabbit in Armenian). This rabbit is much more interesting than it looks, since it is a good example of an important trend: EVERYTHING will be internet-connected, not just computers and mobiles. The moderator missed this trend and Rafi should have demoed the rabbit. (I have just ordered one to get the feeling)

Panel: Monetization in the Web 2.0 world
A trio of entrereneurs presented their models, it showed just how difficult it is to come up with ways to earn real revenue.
A successful blogger mentioned that he made $25 last month from Adsense ads on his blog…
Another entrepreneur reported having bought a Facebook ad campaign with 1 million impressions that generated just 3 (three) clicks.
My conclusion: Nobody knows what will be the keys to monetization, but ads as the only revenue model is not working now and probably not in the future either, as the competition for ad dollars increase tremendously.

Panel: making things personal: investing
Morten Lund, Danish entrepreneur and investor
“I believe in revenue and profit” (applause from the audience).
“I don’t invest in porn and entrepreneurs that are assholes”
“I go for stupid things that make real money online like nails, eye glasses, socks”

Another investor gave the tip: “Don’t invest in companies selling to big companies, since big companies never buy anything! They have like 18 month selling cycles…”

Why Enterprise 2.0… isn’t
JP Rangaswami from British Telecom Design was very inspiring:
” I don’t worry about Google’s policy of letting their employees use 20% of their time for their own projects.
I worry about the other 80%! Why do they still have the punch-clock thinking?
At my office, we focus on the output rather than the input!. What do I care when or where my people are doing their work?”

Evolving entrepreneurship
Martin Varsavsky came on stage with the message that there are indeed investement opportunities also in Europe, and that our 22 languages can be turned into something good. He also mentioned that 17% of Googles total revenue comes from the UK market alone!
His blog is a must fo everyone interested in internet-related entreprenership and international business.

The Future of TV
This is my own favourite topic, excellently moderated by Jeff Pulver, http://pulver.com/ a very energetic and typical American (Hawaii shirt and all)
“TV got the idea of Web 2.0 first and they have corrupted it! Using audience phone-ins and user-generated content such as American Idol…”
Also in the panel was the experienced blogger Robert Scoble, his videoblog at http://www.podtech.net/scobleshow/

Other interesting video services that were mentioned:
Asterpix, a new, highly interesting video site reviving the old concept of “Hypervideo”, (interactive video). There are clickable areas in the video that lead to notes and links. You can also see annotations in a list and use them to navigate inside a video clip. Very smart!
http://www.blogtv.com/
http://www.kyte.tv/
http://dotsub.com/

Janus Friis
(co-founder of Kazaa, Skype and Joost) made one his his rare appearances. Being an unusually shy Dane, he gave an inspiring, laid back and personal tale of the serendipity of his entreprenurship, from Kazaa to Skype to Skype. He and Niclas have disrupted the music industrcy and the telephony industry and they are now re-inventing television, not a bad feat! See also his blog

Also interesting is the fact that they have invented nothing new, they “just” saw that nobody was using the existing technologies to make really simple solutions and then market them. When Skype was launched, it had been possible for years to talk via MSN chat, but Microsoft had not realized that this possibility could be used to replace telephony.
But Joost is a more complex service, since it depends on offering good content and therefore deals with hundreds of programme rights holders around the world. But the biggest obstacle to overcome before Joost is a Skype-like success will probably be to make people more active in their viewing habits. Coach-potatoes are more common today than the stats show, even among the young!

Also, there is a link missing that can enable us to watch Joost on our big-screen TV in company of our friends and relatives. I see two ways for this:
1. come up with a simple Joost set-top box that connects to the TV (or have Apple integrate Joost in a smarter Apple TV model)
2. Integrate Joost into the digital cable TV offering from the triple-play operators.

The only mishap at LeWeb3 was the strange ending. The last two sesssions was somewhat disconnected from the conference topic and the speakers suddenly found themselves alone on the stage. One of the speakers that I wanted to hear, (David Weinberger) was inexplicably dropped from appearing on stage. All this caused the energy in the room to drop at the end and people left the conference with a feeling of anti-climax.
A grande finale session with uplifting foresights into the future was sorely missed!

                 

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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