David Lenehan was at LeWeb3 in Paris, on behalf of Read/WriteWeb. Here is his overview.
The LeWeb3
Conference kicked off yesterday morning in Paris and has just finished up
this evening. Our host Loic Le Meur of
Seesmic opened the
event with much fanfare, flashing lights and European techno music. He
acknowledged the criticisms of last years event, and promised that they
learned from the feedback they received. The conference was split between 3
large buildings covering the keynotes and panels in one, a startup stage in
another one, and a large comfortable networking space in another. This is one of
the better conferences I have been to in recent years. Wifi worked for the most
part, there was very healthy amount of new startups demoing, the VCs and angels
were out in force, and the keynotes – although too relaxed and light at times –
were mostly interesting and engaging. Pretty much 100% of the conference is
going to be available for free to watch online soon
here, so check out the
videos if there is anything you would like to have seen. Here are a few of the
highlights…
Image: cwmac
Janus Friis – Joost
Janus Friis is a founder of Kazaa, Skype, Joost and Atomico Investments.
He is not someone who regularly talks at these events so it was a rare treat to
listen to someone of his caliber and experience. He talked about Kazaa’s quick
rise to fame and the years of litigation that followed. From there they went on
to build Skype, an organization that quickly had hundreds of employees and
eventually sold to ebay for $2.6b. With his new venture Joost just passing the 4
million user mark, he recalled a time when he was going to talk to TV stations
about distributing their content and being told “Are you the guy from Kazaa? we
have some people in our legal team that would like to talk to you first!” He is
also now involved with a new investment firm called
Atomico
ventures. He is a master at building disruptive technologies and a very
interesting person to listen to.
Evan Williams – Twitter
Evan’s talk was one that I found to be particularly interesting. He asked
the crowd to think about what new things could be created by stripping down and
simplifying existing products, as opposed to building more feature rich ones.
Twitter being the perfect
example of this idea. A blogging platform with pretty much every useful feature
removed! It is an interesting alternative approach for product development and
one that I think is worth exploring for anyone building web apps today.
Marc Canter bringing social to software
Unfortunatly I missed this panel with Patrick Chanezon (Google), Tariq
Krim (Netvibes), Hans Peter Brondmo (Plum), Susan Kish (European Energy Forum)
and Marc Canter (Broadband Mechanics). But most people I talked to today said
that it was one of the best discussions that happened. You can see a video of it
here when they have it
uploaded.
Interface design and user experience
I found Shadram Izadi’s (from Microsoft) talk on interface design fascinating.
He showed some videos of
Microsoft
Surface and a new product called
Thinsight
in action. These computers are focused on having more than one person using them
at a time, and using your fingers and hands to interact with them. The Thinsight
screen is so sensitive that you can use a fine paint brush to draw on it and it
will pick up every stroke. You can see some videos of them in action
here.
Startup Competition
This year at LeWeb3 there was a separate building dedicated to startup pitches.
Over 30 startups went head to head in 7 minute presentations in front of a panel
of judges. The winners were:
- Goojet – A mobile app that allows you to organize
your phones pictures, RSS feeds, notes etc. through their website. - PlyMedia – A cool
widget for adding media layers on top of web video. - g.ho.st – A web OS app.
Other startups of note that demoed their wares were: Erepublik,
Split Games
and Holistis. Saul
Klein also brought along some of the
seedcamp winners to
demo (Kublax,
BuilderSite).
Image: cwmac
NineMillion.org
Towards the end of today we had a short presentation from the childrens charity
NineMillion.org.
To raise awareness they are hoping to get 9 million small actions from people on
the web. To help out you can just link to their site, create a video, or
basically make any small action you can on your website or blog, to point back to
their site. Just add the tag ‘ninemillion’ to any content you create. Its a
worthy cause and you can find out more about
here.
Conclusion
There were a lot more interesting discussions happening that I have not
covered here. There was so much good stuff going on between the 3 buildings it
was hard to sit down and focus on any one thing. Loic and Geraldine have turned
LeWeb3 into a really great conference, possibly the best web conference of the
year. Some of the keynotes and panels were a little too light and relaxed at times,
but the startup action and networking really made up for it.
A good time was had
by all at the Netvibes and Shopping.com party. Pretty much all of the web 2
‘glitterati’ were here in force [Ed: except for me of course]. I will definitely be coming back here
next year. If you are interested in seeing some of the keynotes and panels, you will be
able to get all of the video from
here once it is published.
