Friendly, warm, inspirational. If someone asked me to pick three adjectives to define the latest edition of LeWeb these would be the ones. Oh, and snowy, surely. Because snow wrapped up Paris during the two days of the conference and made things look a bit different from the usual. LeWeb has become an impressive event that always leaves a tail of comments and praises among its participants. Logistically speaking, I believe this year’s edition was the closest to perfection: getting back to Les Docks was definitely a good move because Le CentQuatre was too dispersive; the food and the beverages where top quality and the wifi connection was pretty good.
As usual, big numbers were listed and discussed on stage and the popularity of services like Foursquare, Zynga Twitter, Google and Facebook was once again crowned by several panels and workshops. For the first time LeWeb introduced Ignite presentations (my friend Luca Sartoni gave a very inspirational one) and I think it was a great idea to offer the stage to some selected participants who were not necessarily entrepreneurs or Scobles. I also noticed the influence of the TED/DLD approach on LeWeb and I liked it: there were at least three high level presentations given by professional speakers who really attracted the audience (one of them was Bertrand Piccard, who talked about solar energy-powered airplanes).
I was particularly and pleasantly impressed by the presence of Asian participants and speakers; people who shared insights into the Japanese and Chinese trends and made me discover that DeNA Global, a Japanese social gaming company that sells virtual goods for mobile virtual worlds, can make up to $517m in a year. Overall, it’s been great to be, once again, part of this and I must mention the good time I had with my old and new friends in the French capital, which added even more fun to this experience. Kudos to Geraldine, Loic and the whole crew for the amazing job.
