On December 9-10, in Paris, the largest Internet conference in Europe was held unobtrusively for habragers.
Until now, there was only one topic on Habré - that one of the projects of Ukrainian Privatbank was invited to LeWeb .

Disorder! The conference is large (2400 people) is really interesting, the level of speakers is very high (the highlight was Twitter inventor Jack Dorsey ), so yours truly decided to write a big report with pictures. Moreover, I managed to go there and even speak. :-)


')

Occasion

In the beginning I will tell you how I got there. The same project of Privatbank is not the only one who reached the final of the LeWeb Startup Competition , there was another project from Russia. This is the same project that we developed with kutanov , sitting in Moscow cafes - I have already discussed this in detail and, I hope, told interestingly in a separate topic this summer . About the competition itself - just below.

Main stage

The main value of LeWeb is the level of speakers. One of the organizers is Loic DeMer, the founder of Seesmic startup, a Frenchman by birth, but he is developing his project in San Francisco, where he managed to build a rather branched network in the web industry.


The first day of the conference opened with a speech by Jack Dorsey, where he first publicly demonstrated the work of his new project Square .


Briefly about what Square is: it is a bank card scanner connected via the audio input of a smartphone. Data is transmitted in the form of an audio signal and interpreted by a special software. As a result, it becomes very easy to accept payments from cards for small businesses, as well as for ordinary people.


What is interesting, when demonstrating the work of the service from the scene, it was possible to make a payment approximately from the eighth time - it didn’t work on authorization (some hundreds of visitors were already “sitting” on it), we had to switch to 3G.


Speaking of Wi-Fi. Every first visitor was with a laptop, two out of three - with an iPhone. Together, we pumped about 600GB. Moreover, 10% of the traffic fell on one, the most greedy, participant who did not admit. :-)


And Jack, in fact, is very modest. A little later, he looked into our room with startups — and turned out to be a very shy guy, despite all his achievements. :-)


Let's return to the speakers. Marissa Mayer came from Google, Michael Errington tortured her on the topic of the recently released Google products .


Tony Hsi, founder of Zappos (Amazon recently bought them for a billion). He told the background of the company .


Her Majesty the Queen of Jordan, Rania Al Abdullah. I read “on a piece of paper” a very passionate speech about the importance of social media as a driver of social change .


Robert Scoble, "the main geek of the Internet." :-) V-mainly led and moderated panels.


Forever disgruntled to all Michael Errington, chief editor of TechCrunch. Mostly interviewed and scolded iPhone. :-)


Niklas Zennstrom, creator of Kazaa and Skype. He told about his experience .


Chris Pirillo, another professional geek and part-time CNN technology reviewer. Talked about the power of communities .


Ryan Sarver, platform director on Twitter. He spoke about the importance of the ecosystem for their success .


Tim Ferris, author of the acclaimed book The 4-Hour Workweek , actively practices lifestyle design and the principle of "the impossible is possible." Talked about growing a community of followers .


Gary Vaynerchuk, undeservedly little-known businessman in our area, came from Belarus. Perhaps the most passionate speaker at the conference, told a lot and at once about everything . :-)

Startup Competition

Actually, why I came there and for the first time showed the general public task.ly. :-)
From about 250 applications from all over Europe, the organizers selected 16 projects of the early stages that competed for 3 prizes throughout the first day of the conference. The projects were divided into 4 groups of 4 participants, each had 5 minutes for the presentation and 6 minutes for questions.


We are in the first group. The hall was packed, it was very exciting. :-) (The white figure on the stage is me.)


Glavred TechCrunch Europe Mike Butcher and your humble, during the answers to questions. (You can watch the entire presentation here, starting at 39:30 .) It was great to see a very lively interest of the public, yet for many the issue of hemoreless task management is acute. And Techcranch liked us . :-)


And the prizes took the projects Stribe (France, embedded in any site "community"), Tigerlily (France, Facebook Fan Pages on steroids), CloudSplit (Ireland, control costs for cloud infrastructure). I personally liked the Shutl project from London the most.

Epilogue

In terms of organization, this was the best I've ever seen. The picture shows a jubilant team of organizers who deserve a huge plus in karma and a couple of weeks of vacation. :-)


The process was similar to a concert of some large star in Moscow - two dozen directors, sound engineers and lighting masters sat behind the audience and behind the stage, with operators with 10-kilogram cameras scurrying around. There are all prerequisites for recordings of speeches to appear in HD (on Ustream only a live broadcast is currently available).


The result: the atmosphere, content, the level of the speakers, the organization - at an excellent level. Sea of ​​pleasure. Next year I will definitely come to LeWeb 10.

Links

View all the entries from LeWeb 09 here .
Conference coverage at TechCrunch.
And to follow me and our project with kutanov can be here and here .

Thank you for not lazing to scroll to the end. :-)
_________
Pictures - Vince Kmeron .