Well, 2 days after to be correct. LeWeb3 2007 4th edition (almost sounds like a Microsoft product name) was good, it was very good actually. The location, program, food, networking, … it was all fine. I learned about the sofa2.0, wi-fly, pesos-dollar and much more. These are my impressions… (photo from Loic).
Online identity was a big topic at LeWeb3. It started during the first panel (Web2.0:The dark side) moderated by Laurent Haug, organizer of the LIFT conference, the talks about online identity. In this discussion we heard the panel’s thoughts about online identity vs real identity, anonymity, privacy, … which sort of came back later as well during a very interesting panel moderated by Mark Canter (Bringing Social to Software) where online identity portability between social networks was one of the things discussed. The anonymity issue was brought up by Jason Calacanis in his excellent keynote as well. You should definitely check these out once the videos go online.
Evan Williams gave an interesting view on how they started looking at the initial Twitter development, looking at the features they didn’t need rather than the other way around. He also mentioned how the idea of Twitter originated from the status message that exist in IM, too bad we’re not doing more with it in Live Messenger (I did a proposal for that internally a few months ago).
Next up, Hans Rosling. I was lucky to have a beer with Hans the night before in our hotel, thanks to Tom Raftery. Both the discussion in the bar (in which we also discussed how Belgium seems to be a good experiment to see if we really need a government in the first place) as his presentation where quite good. I wrote down one quote about globalization:
“France needs the world more than the world needs France”
It basically works for every country or institution, but still ;) Next up was Philippe Starck about sofa 2.0, I’ll spare you the details, just watch the video.
I didn’t go to the Netvibes party on Monday, but we had dinner and drinks with some of the folks of Shiny Media and Jeremy Wright which was quite good. Some people have fascinating hobbies :)
On Wednesday I saw Martin Varsavsky talking about the pesos-dollar (because of Euro vs Dollar value) and how he expects acquisitions from Europe in the US because of that. Then Jason Calacanis did a good keynote about the internet pollution, talking about spam and the responsibility of every service provider to do more against it (instead of just making money off it). Jason’s solution in all this is the human involvement.
After that Yossi Vardi entertained us with the Wi-Fly which I (again) you should just watch on video when it goes live. The last keynote I saw that day was Doc Searls on what happens when the users are in charge. He made a point about something most of us know, but I think it was the way he put it that made it extra interesting:
“It’s all about the relationships, the conversation and today advertising isn’t helping you to build relationships. It isn’t building conversations. Advertising today is only trying to benefit from the relationships and conversations.”
Yes, I enjoyed LeWeb3. And as usual, apart from the presentations I enjoyed meeting new people (who doesn’t). Just like last year’s LeWeb I met a of people (old and new contacts) with whom I hopefully stay in touch. Thanks Loic, Gerladine and crew. See y’all next year.
Here are some other good write-ups:
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