20 December 2010 — It has been a hectic 2+ weeks for me and my various teams as we attended and covered three major events: the IQPC Exchange on e-Discovery held in Munich, Le Web in Paris, and the eBook Summit in New York.   So I am a wee bit late to the box on our “take away” post for LeWeb. 

It was only my second time at LeWeb and one cannot help but be reminded of the William Gibson statement “The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed”.  There was the usual excitement of hearing from Tony Conrad, Armie Hammer, Jeremiah Owyang, Brian Solis, etc. 

But as one expects at these kinds of events it is the meeting/interaction between attendees that creates the spark/the networking.  

And I suppose it goes without saying that one is simply gobsmaked by the technology.  Mozilla wants to do nothing less than reinvent the browser itself.  As Mitchell Baker, chairperson of the Mozilla Foundation and the former CEO of Mozilla Corporation, said:  “We’re not trying to integrate our browser with our business stack or our services; we’re trying to build an innovative way for people to manage their experience across multiple websites.”  Her presentation of the new browser which pulled in video, news, Twitter, etc. in real time was a show stopper.   Her thoughts on Facebook:  “identity should never be tied to one platform. I don’t want it to own me.”  For her full presentation click here.

Too much to take in 2 days.   But all the presentations are now on Youtube (link at end of this post) for a more studied review and there have been some great post-LeWeb blog comments.  I have collected a number of those blog comments and have them at the end of this of this post. 

But first my thoughts, comments and pick-ups from the conference.  Somewhat random although I have tried to group them: 

General thoughts: 

• The weather did not keep the numbers down.  It was very well attended. The organizers said there were 2,700+ attendees.  Every session was full.  And there were more American attendees than last year.  Folks got to see how far ahead of the U.S. the French are with respect to technology … in some things.  Some of my American colleagues could not believe how the internet is so fast and reliable throughout Paris.  And there were baffled why their iPhones worked better in Paris than in the States.  The New Yorkers:  “Paris Metro:  brilliant cell phone/wireless signals.  NYC: the dead zone.”
• Having lived in Europe now for 6+ years (with a new flat in Paris) I echo Eric Schwartzman who said on his blog (link at end of this post):  “The French really understand and value the concept of public spaces.  Paris is full of gardens, squares, museums and cafes which are designed more for intimacy than headcount and through-put.  At any venue, if the objective is to make sure people have a good time, ambiance is just as important as floor space.  This is something that seems to evade our national consciousness, where public space are, for the most part, shopping malls. Le Web’s organizers brought that sensitivity to conference as well, which made it more comfortable and easier to meet people”
• The Nespresso stand was pretty popular.

Some (oft repeated) trends/predictions by speakers at the conference (and around the bars and Nespresso stand): 

• While 2010 was a sort of “set-up” year for social business, 2011 will be the “Year of Integration” (integration, staffing, advertising, measurement) which was highlighted by Jeremiah Owyang in his keynote speech (see his speech and other maerial on his web site by clicking here)
• Blogging is down but Facebook and Twitter are up, with “blogging” defined as uploading videos, writing blog entries, posting comments to news articles and writing online product reviews.  Most of this comes from a Forrester Research study floating around the conference.  Forrester also has a category called ”conversationalists” whom it defines as people who post status updates on social-networking sites and microblogging services such as Facebook and Twitter.
• The Google Chrome notebook “not a slam dunk” and there was a lot of “con” talk about it (which I cover in more detail below)
• This cloud computing thing:  it may catch on     Actually, lots of chatter about the rise of the virtual computer.  Virtualization (I know; needs a full post) has made it easier to add new servers or storage devices with extra capacity coming from computing clouds such as Amazon Web Services (who were at LeWeb).  This is all going toward what we have already written about extensively:  IT systems will no longer be a capital expense, but an operational cost, like electricity.
• There were a lot of Americans at the conference (more than last year, for sure) and they chatted about the “bring your own computer” or “BYOC” trend that is increasing in the U.S..  We have seen it in Europe, too. 
• The big drive toward deeper connections between devices and the storage and processing of personal data.  Ah, yes, cloud computing.  Google thinks that homes will eventually have 20 or 30 devices that are all connected to the internet.  And not just PCs, cellphones and tablets.  TVs, refrigerators and microwave ovens as well.  
• The profusion of new types of applications for synchronization (which is directly related to my comment immediately above).  Typical sort of app? Add a phone number on your Android mobile phone and it will automatically appear in the contact list on your PC.
• The international expansion beyond the English language and “the West”.  There has been a boom in smartphone sales and websites in India, Brazil, Indonesia and other emerging countries.  This will be THE market.  More below under The magic (and marketing) of language.
• “Walled gardens” and the hoarding of customer data.  Not just the Google-Facebook shoot out.   Media companies thinking twice before licensing content to Google or anybody, and rushing towards tablet computers for new sources of revenue means that many of them are withdrawing free content from the internet.  We’ll be covering that in depth at the FT digital media conference in London next month.    

The wonderful world of stats:

• There were 4.688 unique devices at Leweb
• 71% of the devices at LeWeb were Apple,10% Intel, 5% HTC
• Twitter was used from 2,602 Tweeting devices
• Total traffic 1.12TB
• The peak bandwidth usage was 12% of the Gig pipe fiber
• Every time LeWeb changes venues it costs them another 50k euros to break the streets and drop gigabit ethernet so we can surf during the conference
• WordPress.com is getting about 300 million unique page views a month from 30 million publishers that make up 10% of the websites on the web
• Americans spend 28% of their media time online, yet only 13% of total ad spending is devoted to the internet.
• Paper.Li is growing by 1,000 papers a day
• YouTube now has 35 hours of content uploaded every minute.
• According to Google, more than 300,000 Android handsets are activated each day.   According to Apple, they shipped 14.1m iPhones during their 3^rd quarter (to September 25) or roughly 150,000 a day.
• About 28 per cent of U.S. mobile phone subscribers have a smartphone
• A quarter of French Internet users now access the Web from their mobile devices.  By comparison, in 2009, just 14% of French web surfers did so from their phones.
• According to Cisco, mobile data traffic surpassed voice traffic for the first time in 2010. 

Law, legislation and things governmental

• I met a chap from Interpol.  His focus is on-line gambling sites.  These sites generate billions of dollars and euros.  The algorithms/tech behind almost all these sites was developed by the U.S. firm GTech … and scores of Russian-based firms, mostly controlled by organized crime.  Shocking.
• Emergent technologies will always leave legislation in the dust.  In a world characterized by technologically driven change, governments necessarily legislate after the fact, perpetually scrambling to catch up, while the core architectures of the future, increasingly, are erected by entities like Google

Venture captal/investment 

• VCs are investing more money in social media than in any other internet technology
• Overall, internet investments accounted for 36% of total spend VC spend, beating the second-placed healthcare industry to be the largest recipient of VC money.
• The second most popular destination for VC spending on internet firms was the advertising category.  This will continue to be a hot area for VC firms thanks to a range of new ad technologies such as mobile, in-game and social network advertising.
• A “Silicon Valley” trend:  instead of going public, the companies that do show potential now get gobbled up by the Googles and Facebooks and Microsofts of the world. At the same time, valley giants like Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, Intel and Cisco Systems continue their acquisitions of larger tech companies.
• “The Valley” is increasingly becoming the bastion of social media and related user apps, and decreasingly a centre for developing “the next big technological thing.”  
• Lots of chat (which needs a separate post) about the changing nature of the types of technological innovation being carried out. 

Open source, unified communication, “the web as operating system …”, etc. (bit of a mixed bag, this) 

• I have more exposure to unified communications from the litigation/e-discovery side (for a post on one of my sites click here).   From the tech side the “great debate” is: open or proprietary?  New found LeWeb mate Carmelo Zaccone (@Carmelo on Twitter) keyed me into this article.
• There was an American chap at the conference with a CR-48 in tow (Google’s grand plan to move us from local PCs to the web).  He’s one of 60,000 testers working with/ironing out the kinks.  Good points:  instant on/off functionality; cheap, low-powered machine.  The bad:  the “no desktop” a bit hard to adjust to; internet connectivity is essential – no connection, nothing can get done. 
• This whole “operating system is now the whole web” has all levels of pro and con.  Big chat point:  look at WikiLeaks.  Amazon Web Services dropped Wikileaks, shut it down citing its terms of service.  No appeal.  Concern for any business when considering using a cloud service?  Sure is.  You certainly can’t trust the Web 100% if there is that threat of closure without any recourse.  Other folks spoke about how YouTube shut their company  accounts for weeks.
• Bigger issue:  if you use the Web as a place to store all your information then the service closes — catastrophic outcome.  Granted, you need a service that provides ways to export data.  But without standards in “the cloud” what do you do? 

The magic (and marketing) of language 

• Social networks remain at heart a communications tool, more than e-mail.  While in the U.S. users stay in contact with 53 people on average through social media (up from 31.2 last year), worldwide the trend was similar: users now keep in touch with 52 friends through social, compared with 38.8 in 2009.
• The U.S. is a bit myopic and over time it might get creamed because it doesn’t really do language/culture
• While you need to start with your local market you need to think outside the box, think “the world”. 
• Yes, English and Chinese are still in the “50 billion users” pool but there has been dramatic development in on-line spend in many languages other than English.
• The next languages for dramatic on-line spend: Arabic and Spanish
• In the U.S. it’s big because Hispanics represent the nation’s largest and fastest growing minority group. As their buying power nears $1 trillion, Hispanics living in the United States wield a powerful influence on the American consumer economy.
• And the international expansion continues:  in 2005 the top 250 retailers operated in 5.9 countries on average. By 2010, that number has increased to 7.8 countries
• Interesting point:  people want the same customer service they get from an in-store experience when it comes to e-commerce.  So you need to give web visitors the option to speak with a customer service agent in their local language and can help to replicate the personal service they look for in a physical store.  Big results from:  live chat, with the option of live translation, which enables e-commerce operators to offer the same experience to their consumers they would find in a retail outlet and the experience can now be localized.
• Biggest complaint from Europeans surveyed:  annoyed by a lack of customer service online
• As David McClure said “you need to know the language/the culture to succeed. Move there.  Learn the language, the culture.  Every country is different”.  Just a few examples from the atg study of European on-line customers: comparing is the favorite benefit of online shopping in France; a third of Germans surveyed like the speed and efficiency of shopping online best; 1 in 5 Britons prefer reading peer reviews and comments before making a buying decision; around 1 in 10 in the Benelux region like having information e-mailed or texted to them best 

New discoveries (for me at least) and favorite events and comments 

• I learned about optogenetic: at the intersection of genetic, virology and optics
• Although cognizant of singularity, the talk by Salim Ismail of the Singularity University on singularity and brain computing interface was an eye-opener
• The Facebook technical workshop: we ain’t seen nothing yet.  Do these guys ever sleep?
• Some of the most interesting stuff was from Carlos Ghosn, the CEO of Renault Nissan who spoke about the new apps coming within cars (very iPad like) and the docking system that will replace radio/GPS displays
• The discussion panel on “Photography: From Analog Artists to Digital Mainstream” was a great explanation on the role of social media and platforms in image making, promotion and publishing.
• Dave McClure “You don’t need to be in Silicon Valley, but Silicon Valley must be IN YOU” and “Silicon Valley is NOT Mecca. The world is changing. It’s moving East”
• One nice, juicy bit was Microsoft admitting trying to buy Facebook; it still has a 1.6% piece.
• Google’s Marissa Mayer was pushing it’s next big thing “Contextual Discovery” 
• Brian Solis:  “the social web is not powered by technology as much as it is by people. While it is the responsibility of social networks and services to ensure that privacy settings are in our control, as well as easy to understand and manage, the consequences of our actions ultimately fall on us. And as a result, what we say, share, and do online is there for others to discover. The web has a long memory and what people discover is usually theirs to interpret without the benefit of our explanation. As it is today, we’re reactive rather than proactive with the digital shadows we cast”. 

Links to the presentations and other reviews 

• You can watch all of the presentations at LeWeb on the LeWeb YouTube channel by clicking here.  
• Renee Blodgett’s “My Recap of LeWeb 2010”.  She includes a Pearltree for the best of what happened at LeWeb and it includes video, blog posts, speakers, the schedule and more (click here).
• Press-Citron has a great recap in French (click here). 
• Krishan Lal’s review “Silicon Valley Dominates LeWeb” (click here)
• Irene Koehler’s “What Was the Hottest Topic at LeWeb 2010? Wikileaks” (click here)
• A nice recap from Ted Forbes who was invited to be on the photography discussion panel about the role of social media and platforms in image making, promotion and publishing (click here)
• Eric Schwartzman’s “Le Web 2010: What I Thought of the Conference” (click here)
• Paul Jozefak, who has been coming to LeWeb for a number of years, has great review review titled “Annual Takeaways from LeWeb2010” and he tracks the development/size of the conference … and fears LeWeb has reached its peak and will become too “corporate”.   For his review click here.
• Angela Natividad has a good review “Wrappin’ LeWeb2010” with links to the key presentations, plus interviews she conducted throughout the conference.  Click here.