Le Web 3 first day

Loic’s hi — started 20 minutes late or so, so was just short “hi”.

Niklas and the future of the Internet — I can’t recall NZ really saying anything new or interesting here, just a recap of what he’s been up to recently and what’s up next.

Lorraine Twohill — Marketing Director EMEA Google. I think it’s the first time ever that I’ve seen someone from Google actually deliver a talk at an event. Not a bad one, some insights into the Google culture and management values, will need to take a look at the slides.

Hans Rosling (see Hans at TED). Professor of International Health, Karolinska Institutet,Co-founder of Gapminder, Stockholm. … WAWAWEWAAAA!!!! Now THIS was a great talk. Easily the best for me in the whole day. I have yet to understand what was its relation to the rest of the program, though. But it doesn’t really matter, as I got to see it I guess it was about bringing down ill preconceptions about the world that we have.

The giants’ outlook on Web 2.0… uh… I can’t remember anything interesting that any of them said.

Is open source turning commercial? Gil Penchina from Wikia announced that they’re going to do some sort of open hosting thing. Talked about open-source content. And Tristan from Mozilla showed a bunch of projects that use Mozilla code, The Venice Project among them.

Will there be a Web 2.0 bubble? They agreed that if there will be, it’s not as significant economically as the public market is not involved this time and thus the consequences will be far less catastrophic.

State of the Blogosphere from Dave Sifry. His usual blog increasing and doubling stats. And big French blog providers don’t ping Technorati, which makes French underrepresented on his charts.

The impact of blogs and user generated content in Europe. Cool figures from a media/user research company about the significance of blogs and how much they are trusted by consumers (short answer: trusted about as much as trusted/well-respected product review sites, and much more than the company’s own pitch). And blogs do have a real purchasing/brand impact.

The future of business. Reid from LinkedIn. In the future, your CV will have much more metainfo. Today, you just send some claims about yourself on paper. Down the road, there will be metainfo and links to validate those.

Enterprise 2.0 : distributed capitalism. Lots of buzzwords. Buzzword bingo. Lee Bryant from Headshift called distributed capitalism “a stupid name”. I’ll have to agree, moreover as they never defined it in the first place. I didn’t understand the talk.

Ecommerce… yeah. It’s nice.

Then a bunch of panels and talks about entrepreneurs in Europe vs US, localization, globalization, culture and all that. Martin Varsavsky was the most fun of the whole crowd. He said you can either ignore your identity as a company and be without a home country, appealing to everyone. Or, do what FON has done, and pick a national identity which in their case is Spanish, so they can use all the lingo around Foneras, fiesta, tapas… and people especially in Asia really like that.

Among other things, they referred to the interoperability problems in Europe. And this was indicated throughout the whole day in the SMS polls that were being conducted. Out of 1000 people, they got maybe around 50 responses for each poll. I thought of sending mine too, but out of the 36 represented countries, SMSconnect.com who powered the polls provided SMS sending numbers for only 8 countries, and my Elbonia was of course not included. So if you won’t let me send SMS, I simply won’t, easy

Then some other panels that didn’t really shine that much… Enrique Dans was a business school lecturer that showed some fun stuff he’s doing in classes, and said how teachers these days need to be less of stars and more of facilitators of networked conversations among students.

I had to run away before the last part of the last panel as I needed to take a call.

Everybody kept talking about Netvibes as a great European startup (they have their main thing in France). Maybe. I took a look at the product for 20 seconds, I don’t 100% understand what they’re doing. It’s your “homepage”, similar to Windows Live or Google personalized homepage. I guess just with better features, have to revisit. And they are of course sponsoring tonight’s party, which is very nice of them.

I myself was pretty boring through the whole day… didn’t really move around much and talk to too many people. Saw some old colleagues and other people I know. So maybe will see them at the party too later today, can’t miss that part of the show