Back from le web 3

I’m back, after little sleep and lots of exciting conversations. Except one or two very bad experiences, which I will go into later later, it was one of the best conferences I have been to. This is probably only due to the people that have been there, and not for the talks, even though there were some good ones. Being part of the blogging echo chamber, I cannot expect for all the talks to be something new though.

But let’s start at the beginning. I arrived Sunday afternoon and while the trip was planned with Henning he had to call in sick and was sweating in bed under fever while I was overlooking the Seine from my room.

Having planned to go to the pre-conference dinner I left the hotel for a quick stroll to the Eifel tower, which you see in my previous post, and joined a great group of people in the Entrepot in Paris. We even had music.

Next to the usual people I had a great chat with Jacob Share of Share select Media who organized us the space to hold the meeting and was constantly apologizing because we couldn’t order food a la carte, but only from a menu. No sweat Jacob, I had already eaten anyway. ;)

I also Tom Neumann from Liquid Air Lab, who are doing Spodradio among others. I really have to check out that mobile podcasting client. They have some great things planned for the company and I am sure some interesting times ahead, especially with the backing they have. An intense talk was with Ewan Spence, who does All About Symbian and The Podcast Network as well as a system of virtual role playing cards for Second Life. Yes, virtual cards. He was part of a pannel on Tuesday and I have to admit, that the pannel, which was one of the best, opened my eyes a little bit more to the power of virtual worlds for socializing. I had already understood that there are little better prototyping environments than second life for a virtual card game. :) If you have have a chance to speak to Ewan, do so. Full steam ahead.

Next Ingmar arrived and we headed back to the hotel, where we met Mario Sixtus, who prepared us for the fact that Le Web 3 was no longer a small conference (which we knew) but a full blown conference with press rooms and a media agency. This actually was a bit weird from time to time, because for example, there were a few comedians running around the event that didn’t fit at all, and they even interrupted Loic’s opening remarks.

One of the clear highlight, for anyone you talked to, was Hans Rosling. He IS positively amazing. You understand the power of globalization, the power of statistics, and the power of visualization. On top of that, he is just, again, very intense. He grabs you and pulls you into his world. What this video of his talk at Ted this year. It is especially interesting to see the reason behind the change in demographics, like clean water changing life expectancy dramatically, and reflecting on the situation in “third world” countries by thinking what the conditions were in e.g. Germany when your grand grand parents were born and then taking a look at a country today with a similar life expectancy today.

He also had great views on opening all university lectures when those are paid by taxes, and some other great things. Whenever you have the chance to see him talk, go go go!

Next up for me was a presentation of Ormigo in the start-up room, which took a mere 6 or 7 minutes I think and resulted in silence in the room. Thankfully one of the judges asked some, good, questions. Right when I went back to my seat, I got the first business card of a VC that wanted to chat in the next few days, and on wednesday the exact same judge that asked the questions came back to me, asking for my card to be able to have a chat because he was interested as well. Now those were productive 7 minutes ;)

The day ended with a great dinner, at a wonderful parisian restaurant, organized by Andrew Carlton from Treonauts, where we had some very good discussions about goals in life, technology, design, advertising, blogging, and who would have guessed, Hans Rosling. The woman sitting almost opposite of me (sorry, but I never asked for your card, even though I should have, to good a conversation) actually rode with him in the train it seems and Hans said that she seems to be similarly crazy as he is and hence they would get along wonderfully, which they did.

Then we headed for the party and after a long time in the queue to give up my coat, I had a good, but short time there. Having a meeting at 8:30 ment that I wanted to be in bed not too late. Sadly, it took me 1 hour to get my coat back, among others because the ticketnumber wasn’t on the coat anymore. Then it took a long time to get a cab, and I ended up needing 2 hours from deciding to leave the party to being in bed. Ah well… 4 and a half hours of sleep are plenty.

My head was rumbling anyway because I had so many good talks with people during the entire day. They are too numerous to list here really, but suffice to say that the crowd that was there, made the event worth while. What would be good for next time though, would be if you could kind of put some device in your pocket that would vibrate if you were near somebody you wanted to meet, because half of the time you don’t recognize them.

After a very good meeting on tuesday morning I arrived at the conference around 12 and was greeted with people on stage I had no clue whatsoever who they were. This actually was François Bayrou, one of the presidential candidates in france who had shown up on short notice. Before that, right at the start, Simon Perez had actually been there, whom I will have to watch on video. I was told he was great, and had good interaction with the crowd.

While the appearance of François Bayrou was unexpected, he seemed to be not taking himself to serious, and actually talked in english a lot of the time, or even translated the french of Loic himself. It was actually fun seeing the entire gang on stage switch heavily between two languages. I am happy to see though that france has a politician that can come into a dangerous crowd like this and open up for questions. But … at the same time, he had nothing to do there, because it was not a place to do a political rally. Thankfully he didn’t seem to take it as such but more as a place to see if his ideas resonate.

That directly brings me to the worst part of the conference though, which has to be talked about. Loic was very happy that the presidential candidate that he is backing was also bound to appear around 2pm but you noticed already that the crowd was getting a bit agitated about it. I admit, I wouldn’t have mind to see one or two more panels instead of hearing politicians in France talk. A political panel, sure, but … back on key. The bad thing about Nikolas Sarkozy coming was that first of all, the entire hall was closed off and searched with dogs, police was everywhere, and so was security. Guess who the security is in this picture from his talk.

The first row of people was cleared, and a special line was drawn in front of the crowd which was removed shortly before his arrival, to make believe that they are open. Amazing. The entire place was suddenly packed with media, cameras everywhere. Then Nikolas Sarkozy and introduced by Loic, went to stage, to the podium and started talking in french.

Sure, there were translators available, but it’s an international conference and you don’t do it in french. DLD isn’t in German either. There was even a stenographer present, fun to watch by the way ;)

The thing that freaked me out most though is that the guy talked for 15 minutes, obviously trying to attract the interest of the more than 60 VCs in the room (that had probably already left), said thank you, and left. Just left. No questions whatsoever. I can understand french, so it’s ok, and I sat next to Richard Wilkinson and Bruno de Penanster who thankfully gave me a bit of background info, which was good, but you don’t have somebody go on stage for a conference which is all about interaction with the audience and not have the answer questions. François Bayrou did it too! It worked! That’s a 100% nogo. The blogosphere is on fire about this at the moment.

Le Web is actually at a cross road now. It was a bigger un-conference with les blogs 1, and now is a full blown conference. You either go with the un-conference character, which it no longer was, sorry Loic, or you really open it up to speeches. Speeches won’t work, more diversity might, but only if there is somehow an option to connect with the people on stage. And seriously, for real diversity, DLD will eat your lunch. But that’s actually not something you want to go to I think.

To finish off, a great talk was the one about Second Life, which I already talked about with Ewan fighting WHO with paper swords to make a point at the beginning. Then I WHO? talk about Blyk, a mobile provider that is free and financed via ads, launching mid next year. It’s a start-up to be watched.

All in all, thanks for the conference, thanks for having me, and I am sorry about the negative backlash, but it is (even more sadly) deserved.