- LeWeb 3: The day after – Kris Hoet makes new friends at Le Web 3
- LeWeb 3: Conference Report – David Lehenan’s round up at Read/WriteWeb
- Le Web 3: 2007 – A big hit! – Social Media blogger Tom Raftery is impressed
- LeWeb 3: Joi Ito – Running a WoW Guild – A overview of the speech given by the Japanese gaming expert
- Le Web 3: Internet start-ups get a grilling – ShinyMedia’s sum up Le Web 3’s winners
- Plus the official Le Web 3 Flickr page
Archive for the ‘Le Web 3’ Category
Links for 14.12.07
Friday, December 14th, 2007
Stuff I learnt at Le Web 3.0
Thursday, December 13th, 2007After a manic few days in Paris at the Le Web 3.0 it is good to be back home and to take stock. Personally I enjoyed this year’s Le Web much more than previous years. This time round there were no politicians, no irrelevant rows and a top notch mixture of European and US speakers. There was also a lot less on Second Life and social networking which had dominated the conference last year.
If there was a theme for 2007 it was video. Almost all the big web 2.0 names from Digg’s Kevin Rose through to conference organiser Loic Le Meur, have their own video content/sharing sites and it’ll be fascinating to see hwo sucessful they are over the coming months.
In fact it is a little ironic that in the hottest Web 2.0 space, video, the frontrunners have been founded by people who have already launched sucessful sites. I have always felt that once you have a loyal online audience you can take (some) readers with you on to other projects, and with the serial entrepeneurs this seems to be the case. If you are a big name you can speak at events like Le Web 3.0 which obviously increases the profile of your new venture in the blogosphere. You get the invitation because you have been succesful before and you then use the platform to plug your latest innovation.
The other thing that struck me was that new media is still very much a boy’s club. The whole conference had the whiff of the sort of event that David Brent would love with its litany of in-jokes, low-level bitching and monster egos. The fact that there were so few women speakers at the show didn’t help matters either.
Anyhow, it was still great fun and I’ll be back for Le Web 3.0 in 2008. It was also good to hook up with a few people I haven’t seen in a while especially Julio and Antonio from Weblogs SL in Spain (Europe’s biggest blog network), Kris from Microsoft, Yann from Webjam, Ina from Philips and Drew from Hotwire in the UK – one of only a handful of UK PRs who made the trip. See you all next year.
Btw for the full list of 20 things I learnt at Le Web 3.o go here.
Blogs react to Le Web 3
Wednesday, December 12th, 2007
Le Web 3, “The social media event of the year” wrapped up today, and the predicted buzz in the blogosphere show signs of a postive conference.
With liveblogs and microblogs capturing the action in near real-time, and plenty of video being uploaded, the event was one where what the speakers said echoed far beyond the conference hall walls.
While our friends over at Shiny Media blog TechDigest took a light-hearted look at the interview between Digg founder Kevin Rose and Business Week’s Sarah Lacy; TechCrunch posted on Mahalo, the human-powered search engine, adding social networking functionality.
Le Web 3 has become a social media star spotting event, with Robert Scoble taking centre stage for large portions of the time, and Skype founder Janus Friis talking about the much-lauded Joost internet-video service. However, there’s also room for some of the internet’s “unknowns” to get involved, with the start-up competition, which involves pitching to a judging panel including VCs and media.
Web 2.0 new blog Profy has a round-up of the winners, reinforcing some of Shiny Red’s thoughts on what 2008 has in store. The mobile internet and continued growth of video online are set to be huge next year, and two of the selected winners - PLYMedia and Goojet - will hope to make the most of these trends with their specialised technology in these areas.
Day 2 at Le Web 3
Wednesday, December 12th, 2007More interesting discussions at Le Web 3 today.
The event has been running a competition for startups to pitch their ideas to an audience of venture capitalists including Simon Levine from Accel Partners, entrepreneur accelarators like Saul Klein, and established web players. You can check out the results here and the general feedback was that this year the event has seen less groundbreaking consumer innovations (so no Facebook), and more tweaks on existing technologies, for instance editing and sharing digital photos online.
Skype founder Janus Friis later made a good point on the same theme: “With Skype we didn’t invent Voice over Internet Protocol, we just packaged it really well.”
In a rare public conversation with Le Web 3 host Loic Le Meur, Janus talked about starting Joost, the burgeoning online TV business, citing the broadband explosion of the last five years as the reason why it had become possible. So far the service has had 4 million downloads across 400 channels.
Painting a picture of how traditional tv will continue to migrate online, he said that rather than become another company providing YouTube-style user generated content, the opportunity for Joost lies in a more professional approach. “We want to build relationships with the media companies of the world because we want to build a business on legitimate content.” Content could also come from small production companies looking to distribute their material online instead of via the traditional mass broadcasters.
Janus also set out to manage expectations around the pace of growth for Joost and predicted that it could be 2011 before the company has 50-100 million users.
Maybe he’d heard the amount of anti-Facebook comments flying around the event, resulting in part from the badly-received advertising service Beacon. But then again, in an industry that celebrates the Next Big Thing, perhaps it’s inevitable that last year’s success story becomes a target of criticism.
Le Web 3: Day 1
Tuesday, December 11th, 2007
I’m in Paris for Le Web 3, the biggest gathering of social media and online brands in Europe. From Google and Microsoft to bleeding-edge start-ups, the event attracts 2,000 delegates wanting to debate the latest web trends.
Star of the show so far was a leather trouser-wearing Philippe Starck who shared his philosophy for good business and design. He believes that today most companies sell “no-products” that are 90% useless and purely intended to get people to pay for them. At the same time we are seeing a rise of “no-consumers” who take a less acquisative approach and want products that are 90% useful. “They ask, do I need a BMW or do I just buy a bicycle? This is creating a moral market. Everything you do has a political consciousness.”
Starck’s other key theme was evolution, or “mutation”: how individuals and society are in a constant state of flux – a constant theme echoed later by Google speaker Nelson Mattos who talked of “perpetual innovation” in the online world.
Blogging legend Robert Scoble had a show-stealing cameo when he was handed Starck Amazon’s new reading device, the Kindle, and asked for his opinion on the look and feel. Polite at first, the design guru couldn’t help but express some disappointment. “The designer was not courageous enough to completely disappear, it still has a few features. It’s almost modern.”
In the afternoon, Emily Bell, online guru at The Guardian, went head-to-head with Andrew Keen, author of the Cult of the Amateur which argues that social media is leading to an endless stream of user-generated trivia.
Keen showed his fundamental lack of understanding of the online space when he tried to claim that virtual worlds like Second Life are seen as a substitute for real life. Bell countered: “That’s ridiculous, my 10-year-old, my seven-year-old, even my three-year-old know the difference between TV and real life.”
She went on to argue that the biggest challenge facing media companies was to accept that there is a benefit to working with its audience, not just talking at it. “Traditional media has to understand that by opening itself up to comment and feedback it will ultimately get better.”
Keen got the biggest laugh when, just before stalking offstage, he said his next book was going to be “nothing to do with the Internet”.
Le Web 3: Catch the videos if you missed out
Monday, January 22nd, 2007There’s been a lot of conversation (and controversy) in the blogosphere after this year’s Le Web 3 event. If you weren’t able to go and want to see some of the sessions yourself, vpod.tv filmed the conference and has made all the videos available now in full-screen.
Dovetail.tv offers independent filmmakers payment
Thursday, January 11th, 2007
At last month’s Le Web 3 conference the panel for “How TV may die through distribution?” identified a key trend for TV on the internet would be more opportunites for “arthouse” films.
Dovetail.tv is a video site for independent filmmakers which has announced they will be paying artists $0.10 every time their feature film, short, TV show or music video is downloaded.
They’re not the first site to introduce the concept of paying contributors, both Guba and Metacafe offer financial reward schemes, but Dovetail’s community is more specialised and they may have seen a real opportunity to provide a platform for artists to build a fan base in the competitive film and TV industry – along the lines of what MySpace did for unsigned bands.
Le Web 3 – thoughts and thank yous
Friday, December 15th, 2006Le Web 3.0 finished several days ago now yet the fallout from the event is still a key discussion point on many technology blogs. Although there have been some fair criticism of the event (too many politicians, woeful lack of Wi-Fi, favouring of journalists over bloggers etc) for me these don’t detract from what was a great opportunity to listen to some of the web 2.0 superstars and meet some key European players.
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Le Web 3: Final thoughts from the conference
Wednesday, December 13th, 2006It’s very easy to be cynical about this whole Web 2.0 phenomenon, to think it’s based on a load of hype rather than any solid businesses models like the the first time round. However, having spent two days at the conference, I’m utterly convinced that this time it’s entirely different. The barriers to entry are much lower than before, technology has improved considerably (thanks largely to the proliferation of broadband) and entrepreneurs are making decent money – in many cases without even having to turn to venture capitalists (though of course there were still quite a few present).
For example one guy, Gabriel McIntyre from XOLO.tv told delegates how he’d made “500,000 Euros since June just by video blogging.” One of the campaigns his company had been involved in producing was for Mini. Another was for Coca Cola for its We All Speak Football campaign. “By creating interesting content people are finding they can quit their day job,” he told the audience. “It’s just all about making sure you have a recognisable brand.”
Le Web 3: Is TV dead?
Tuesday, December 12th, 2006The simple answer is no (this could be a very short post indeed). Actually the slightly longer answer is ““ at least according to a bunch of internet experts – “˜it’s not dead, it’s just the way we watch TV programmes is changing’.
So video iPods, mobile phones etc. will all be increasingly used for watching content on the move. They’ll also enable us to watch the content when we want rather than when the broadcasters want (40 per cent of TV in the US is time shifted according to stats etc.)
The big debate focused around video search with some really sensible comments coming from Blinkx.tv’s Founder and CEO Suranga Chadratillake. He made the point that it’s nowhere near as easy to find video content as it is with text because “˜metatags’ ““ such as content descriptions, user ratings etc. ““ don’t fully explain what the individual piece of video is about. “That’s why we use speech recognition to understand the content as much as possible, as well as meta tags.”¿
For Chadratillake video on the internet is set to boom. “Lower barriers to content creation and the breakdown of broadcast style distribution network will combine to make it much easier and cheaper to upload videos.”¿ Currently Blinkx searches 7 million hours of video content.
