Le Web’11

An awesome list of speakers succeed over three days: Sean Parker (ex-Napster ), Eric Schmidt (Google), Marissa Mayer (Google), Mike McCue (FlirpBoard), Daniel Ek (Spotify), Denis Crowley (Foursquare), Allen Blue (LinkedIn), Phil Libin (Evernote) and I could continue the list forever, not counting that it started with Karl Lagerfeld himself, sketching his portrait live on an iPad. The hottest startups as well as the most established high tech leaders come to be on stage. You have an awesome number of sponsors, of tech companies exhibiting, and more than 500 startups apply to participate to the startup competition, 20 of them reaching the final stage, the climax culminating with the election of the winner by a highly distinguished panel (Meetic Simoncini, Iliad Niels and so forth)

At a different - and much more modest - scale, we, KDS, organize some events. The connections, tenacity, sense of making the show it requires to create this kind of “place to be” cannot be overstated. We can be extremely proud and thankful to Loïc for establishing what will maybe become a franchise and in any case the most important conference of this kind in Europe.

Social, Local, Mobile. Of course we all repeat this ad nauseum. Still these concepts have created one of the most creative framework in history. It favoured the blossoming of thousands of new start-ups. Of course some of them look alike and of course not all projects you see are revolutionary. Too many people come with small ideas representing an infinitesimal variation on something that already exists. It remains that never entrepreneurship has been so lively and if US takes the lion share of dominant companies, remember that that Europe counts companies like Badoo, Spotify or Rovio (Angry Birds) which aim at dominating their space.

My most salient moments in no particular order.

George Colony, CEO of Forrester lists 3 thunderstorms:

1)     Web is dead and replaced by App-Internet. CPU power doubles every 18 months and so does storage capacity. Network throughput also progresses but at a lower pace. Consequently you have with your iPhone in hand more CPU power than Cray Supercomputers were offering 20 years ago. As network cannot feed this power, you use the capacity of the local device hence the Apps.

2)     Social is saturated. For now the winners are known and people spend already more time on social Internet than on TV. Any new social network is doomed because people don’t have any more time available.

3)     Next territory for social is the enterprise. There is as much productivity to gain by sharing in the enterprise world and penetration of social there is still very low.

I was most impressed by three individuals: Eric Schmidt, Sean Parker and Daniel Ek.

• Google is obviously in an uphill battle on the smart phone market and was often challenged on stage but Ice Cream Sandwich is a heck of a cool new Androïd version that frankly cracks it. More importantly, the way they are weaving their web by intertwining all their product lines: search, social (Google +), mobile (Android) and Chrome is a model of superiorly smart company strategy.

• Sean Parker session took place in the afternoon instead of morning and he looked quite tired. He obviously wanted to pay tribute to the reputation he owes to the movie (Social Network). Sean Parker is best known for being the founder of Napster, an early investor in Facebook and now an investor in Spotify. There is a special intensity when he talks. If he vows entrepreneurs to work on big game changing projects, it does not look like the usual Silicon Valley bragging bullshit; he means it. A full report of what he said can be found in many blogs and I want to avoid redundancy: why he is an entrepreneur more than an investor, why Gowalla surrendered, what lessons he learned from Napster failure, the challenges faced by the music industry and more.

• Daniel Ek, Spotify, is more the model of the first Amendment of the entrepreneur Constitution: vision, will and execution are what it’s about. He is an entrepreneur by essence because he is not afraid of addressing a big problem and he is not stopped but what look like insurmountable hurdles. But it’s not enough to see a problem and a solution; you need to have the drive to make it happen. Some have it. He is young, he is sure of himself in a good way, I mean no lack of modesty. He looks simple and laid-back while overwhelming you more than many more alpha-male looking personalities.

Some expected trends: mobile everywhere. Mobile Apps, mobile apps, mobile apps. There is nothing wrong with it, this is where the world is now. And some genuinely less expected moments I loved. 

Your mind is already wandering towards your dinner, end of afternoon of first day, Virgin Galactic CEO, George Whitesides. And what you see is a kind of airline offering you a trip towards the space. Their spaceship is carried by two airplanes up to 50 000 feet and then brings you at Mach 4, 300 000 feet above the earth.

Yes, Charles Branson, completely crazy, has decided he would operate an airline sending passengers into the space for 100 000 dollars. And you could buy your ticket at LeWeb (still too expensive for me but you get so excited at the idea you almost want to pay immediately).

And George says you will go through three major life changing experiences:

(1) weightlessness,

(2) looking at our dear globe from that distance,

(3) watching the space from beyond the atmosphere. 

After a crazy marathon runner who would also deserve a mention there comes Ariel Garten, CEO Interaxon. Interaxon develops systems, here games, which you command with your brain, thanks to helmet enabling sensors to be put above your head. Science fiction, huh? You command actions by “focusing”. Then you reach a score and you can pass several levels but you also get a report of your brain activity during the game. Of course this is the infancy, it works when it works and don’t worry, nobody can read your thoughts. But you see it in action and it’s …scary. 

And Deb Roy, head of a MIT lab and CEO of Bluefin. Listen to what people willing to blaze new territories can think of. He covered his own house with cameras and filmed continuously his family from the date of birth of his son until he was three years old. Terabytes and terabytes of data. His goal was to analyse in what circumstances language appears. Then with video/sound analyzing techniques he extracts words like “water” and correlates the progress on pronouncing “water” with what his son as well as his parents were doing, where he was when hearing the word and what he had in sight around him. We heard a fascinating 40 seconds sample consisting of successive pronunciations of water over two years condensed in 40 seconds.

How it’s shaping and how the young boy is closer and closer to the right way to say it, sometimes moving slightly backward. In Bluefin Deb applies the same approach to correlate TV shows with Twitter activity and content and location of tweets. 

These are not necessarily the most frequently covered parts of LeWeb but these are moments that will remain carved in my mind and that have made the event unique.