We are delighted to annouce the 3 very first sponsors @LeWeb'10.
You know them... they've been with us for years now!
Thank you Freddy, Toufik and Fabrice!

Netvibes in the DemoZone	Tequila Rapido Press Lounge Sponsor	Cabinet Cotty Marchisio Lauzeral Dec 8th Welcome Breakfast sponsor

By December 2009 in its sixth year, LeWeb grew to 2500 participants, 50 countries, 300 journalists, 15,000 tagged photos on flickr,
and thousands of tweets and blog posts!

We're are pleased to announce that Paris will once again become the center of the Internet on Dec 8th and 9th, 2010.

LeWeb is going back to Les Docks

For those who were there in 2007, you must remember those 3 buildings where we expect to create again for this year an unique 2-days mini campus experience...

Mark your calendars for Dec 8th and 9th, 2010 -  LeWeb'10.
Last year was sold out, so stay tuned, and we will email you with special offers as soon as we open registration.

LeWeb has a very active official bloggers community from around the world and is proud to open its blog to guest posts from them, in addition of providing easy access to their posts about the conference. Here is a post by Vero Pepperrell from the UK.

Last week, I was kindly invited to attend LeWeb 09 as official blogger. LeWeb is a yearly, two-day conference in Paris, which takes a deep look at the web now and in the future. It's a frenzied opportunity to meet new people, see old faces and hear great talks.

While watching the world go by at Ebbsfleet Eurostar station, (the best kept secret of European travel) before heading to Paris, it hit me that we nearly halfway through December. I started thinking back on 2009, the successes and failures I've experienced or witnessed others experience. It's been an interesting year, with a few victories, but a few scraped knees also. Then yesterday morning, in one of the first talks of LeWeb, Jack Dorsey, Twitter co-founder said:

"The hardest thing about an idea is to get it started"

I'll tell you a secret: I used to really hate being rubbish at something, to the point where, when I was a teenager, I wouldn't even rehearse for my vocal music classes in front of people for fear they'd hear me do something wrong. Yet I'd happily sing in concert in front of a huge crowd at the end of the year! And I didn't speak English til I was in my teens, not because I couldn't, but because I was embarrassed by my accent.

It doesn't take much to realise that nearly everyone feels that way to a varying degree; the fear of failure can paralyse us and stop us from doing things we REALLY want to do. LeWeb is filled with people who've taken that jump, who've conquered their fears, their peers' fears, or at least sidelined them long enough to give their ideas a go. Whether it's launching a startup instead of staying in a cushy-but-boring megacorp job, launching a new wacky iPhone idea or creating and manufacturing a small-run Psion-revival pocket computer.

These people and startups risk money, energy and years of their life for something they're passionate about or think might change the world (or at least make a dent of difference). They use events and conferences as an opportunity to gain visibility, get feedback on what they've created and meet existing and potential users. Needless to say, they also leave with a few bruises from those who don't "get" their idea and either say it bluntly or tweet it publicly.

Of course, only one out of five* will break even, and only a handful will become rockstars. But some of those who failed will get back up, try something else and one day, succeed.

So as we hurtle towards 2010, why not let ourselves get inspired by brave startups and self-employed ppl who've flown the nest of safety and try doing something awesome?

Hopefully, some attendees (or some of the thousands of online viewers of the LeWeb video stream) will be inspired to do something for the greater good in the process. Whether it's organising a BarCamp event, running a charity-focused event in support of 1GOAL (as presented by Queen Rania) or providing charitable organisations with free coaching, share your wisdom with others.

As Gary Vaynerchuk said, in his usual blunt way, "Everybody's got a shot, I don't care if you are in Sillicon Valley or in France" (See his talk here) As Gary has done, from being co-owner of a New Jersey wine shop to becoming a web celeb, he's shown us that with enough passion and drive, we can achieve just about anything.

Talking about driving... Heading down to Ebbsfleet station, I couldn't help but be amused that it was a fairly leisurely drive, albeit one involving some of the busiest motorways in the country. Two years ago, the thought of having to drive down the M25 gave me cold sweats. I could have gone on to avoid driving like I had done until I was 25, but I reluctantly went through the scary challenge of driving lessons (it was scary in my eyes, alright!?) A few years on, I couldn't be happier that I'm on the other side of it all. In hindsight, the hardest thing was to get started.

We all need to occasionally tackle a few fears or go above what we believe we can achieve right here and right now. It takes a while, trudging through how frustratingly bad we are at something at first, but then... oh THEN we feel like we've really achieved something great!

What will YOU do with 2010?

To read more from other LeWeb official bloggers, visit the aggregated posts page - with most of them doing a far better job summarising the event than I have done!

[* Stat entirely pulled out of thin air to be representative, don't quote me on that one and see the experts for real stats]

[Photo credit: LeWeb 09 by Blogowski on Flickr, Creative Commons license]

Vero Pepperrell

LeWeb has a very active official bloggers community from around the world and is proud to open its blog to guest posts from them, in addition of providing easy access to their posts about the conference. Here is a post by Charbax (Nicolas Charbonnier) from Denmark.

Again this year, LeWeb conference in Paris France was a 2-day gathering of high-class tech bloggers, web specialists and companies from around the world. It was a great opportunity for me as a tech video-blogger at my site http://techvideoblog.com to pick up my camera and do some interviews of some of those bloggers and interesting new startups. Here are my best videos from LeWeb:

• Martin Varsavsky CEO of FON unveils the PeekFON device for unlimited email roaming accross all of Europe over GPRS for 12.90€ per month, I also ask him about the state of FON WiFi roaming, the prospect for Fem2cells in FON and future technologies such as White Spaces
• Kevin Marks and JP Rangaswami of British Telecom explain Ribbit and the threats and opportunities related to VOIP for the telecom industry
• Danish startup getinlive.com does football statistics in real-time
• Sokoz.fr is a new reverse auction startup
• Kukunu.com is a travel itinerary recommendation startup
• Tabbee by Orange is a 7" Internet Connected Tablet for the home with Opera widgets, TV remote control and more features
• PsiXpda is an Intel based MID designed and launched by Psion PDA people:
• Nokia N900 is launched

Charbax video-blogs in HD quality since 2004 and recently started ARMdevices.net to aggregate all his videos and news about the ARM powered laptops, tablets and phones that are coming out. He also admins the world's largest Archos community and updates a video-blog on the OLPC project.

FormatWeb has a very good video interview of participants around the World about their 2010 predictions. In this video: What is the web going to be in 2010 for you ? Answers by Robin Wauters, Arkady Volozh, Korben, Pablo Melchor, Robert Scoble, Vinvin, David Hornik, Eric Dupin, Jeremy Wenokur, Juan Lopez-Valcarcel, Pierre Chapaz, Ouriel Ohayon, Tony Hsieh, Christophe Pelletier & Loic Le Meur

LeWeb interviews. The Web in 2010 ? from FormatWeb on Vimeo.

LeWeb has a very active official bloggers community from around the world and is proud to open its blog to guest posts from them, in addition of providing easy access to their posts about the conference. Here is a post by Alex Barrera from Spain.

Being an entrepreneur you soon learn that people like us are rare. It's hard to find them among the usual population, specially cause we account for a very small percentage of it. Nevertheless, this percentage of entrepreneurs slightly varies from country to country. US for example has a very high percentage of entrepreneurs if you compare it with my home country Spain, who has close to none.

Because it's hard to find us, we tend to move around a great deal, or at least we try. In the US though, this concept of moving around is something natural. Most Americans move at least 3 times among different cities and many professionals go back and forth between both coasts regularly. For most of them, this is something, not only natural, but essential. It's something we, in Europe, aren't used at all. Most Europeans only travel either during holidays or for a business trip. Even in those cases, most of us bring our country culture with us. That is, there are still very real frontiers in peoples minds across Europe, even though from multiple angles (law, economy, etc.), Europe is finally one. Still, old habits die hard.

In my experience, most cases of cultural blindness are prompt from a lack of travelling. Even though most EU countries are very close (much closer than San Francisco from New York City for example), people see travelling there like an ordeal, like something close to an adventure.

So, why are things like LeWeb so important? Basically, LeWeb brings together not only Europeans, but plenty of other people from other countries like the US, China, Argentina, etc. During 2 days you can encounter people from hundreds of different countries, people who share, in most cases, your same interests. But this is nothing new, international conferences have existed for ages. What's new for me is that now, thanks to plenty of social media tools, we are able to maintain those worldwide connections alive, even years after the conference took place. What I'm seeing is a convergence of entrepreneurs in Europe. I feel closer to my European peers now than what I felt 3 years ago.

Finally, the Internet is breaking the cultural barriers and history heritage that for so long has separated people in Europe. Finally, different cultures are working together to keep those links alive. Finally, we are starting to be one, and not many.

For all that, for that incredible experience, for enabling Europeans spread their love all over the world, thank you LeWeb, thank you Loic and Geraldine and thank you all, citizens of the world, who by coming together are enabling an incredible world flattening experience.

Alex Barrera is an entrepreneur based in Madrid, Spain, founder at Inkzee.com and cofounder of TetuanValley, an entrepreneur tech incubator based in Madrid for global entrepreneurs.

LeWeb has a very active official bloggers community from around the world and is proud to open its blog to guest posts from them, in addition of providing easy access to their posts about the conference. Here is a post by Donna Jackson from Switzerland.

TOP APP Jack Dorsey of Twitter started us off on a high note with SQUARE definitely the favourite app. A cool payment system you can use on your smart phone, it was a hit with everyone as Loic tested it on stage with his iphone and effected a payment. He also announced twitter plans for a developers camp in San Francisco in 2010.

The business plan is expressed in the image above, my photo taken from the screen at the conference. The wifi worked well much to everyone's relief this year.

TOP SPEAKER AND FORCE FOR CHANGE must go to Her Majesty Queen Rania who blew everyone away with her flawless delivery, warmth and Tech saviness.

I was lucky enough to have a brief moment to greet her and congratulate her on her speech as she left the speakers room where she had discussions with Twitter and Facebook to bring about change in education, health and opportunity for the women and children without access to education and the services we don't give a second thought to.

TOP MOMENT meeting my NY Times Bestseller list, "Crush it" friend, Gary Vee outside the Mayors cocktail party in the magnificent City Hall of Paris. Our group snapped us together and sang out "Ah the two wine people finally together in Paris!" We had a quick catch up before we went out to eat.

The following day his session had the audience stirred up and shouting for more as he delivered his legendry thunder. Then, in an equally serendipitous moment, I was wandering down an empty street in the Marias to attend a dinner, when who should I bump into again along rue Sévigny, but Gary and two friends. We swapped winestories, spoke about our projects and he very proudly showed me his baby girl on his phone. He is truly an inspiration and his message of be grateful and execute on your plans really resounds with me. Great to see you Gary! Italy awaits your Crushing!

TOP TRUST AGENT Chris Brogan, another of my mentors, who is such an all-around nice guy. He strips out the bs from social media and tools and gets back to basics on how to connect and build trust. His book Trust Agents, also on the NY times bestseller list and in its third printing, is a must read. We got to chat and hang out. My forthcoming chat with him here will give the best indicator of his approach to marketing your company online.

TOP PARTIES definitely the boat on the Siene with a view of Notre Dame and then the Mayors cocktail party at City Hall Hotel de Ville, so beautiful with the enormous Christmas trees.

TOP MEMORIES Walking to every party and event there was, from the romantic boat on the Siene to the VIP cocktail parties and coffee/beer night, we rode the metro and I even took a late night bus back to Gare du Nord with @Vascellari and then a taxi to my hotel. My off the wall, ludicrous interview with Paul Carr writer and card, on leaving London for LA and his list.

The united nations of bloggers: our cool team spent the evenings and late nights together -- @vascellari @clopin @ernohannink @icedsoul @tigertwo @hikari @MihaelaDraghici @liviacolare -- not one of us lived in the same country. We attended all the parties using the metro to crisscross Paris, walked all over the Marais and to our hotels, past the Louvre at night, very pretty, with all the twinkly lights. We made the VIP room (a nightclub) too, but nobody could afford the 20 Euro drinks, so we left and had coffee on the way home laughing till our stomachs ached and getting very little sleep.

TOP RESTAURANTS We ate out with fun bunch each night. On the first night, between parties that we walked across town to get to, we found a lovely restaurant in Saint Michel with a friendly owner called Red and ate duck and mashed potatoes followed by a crème caramel that was delicious with fabulous Bordeaux. Last night we also ate a lovely meal in a Fish Resturant in the lanes of Marais where a two course meal called a "formula", main course of filet, or Fiorentina steak, fish or whatever you wanted, was prefaced by a lovely starter. I had paté and red onion marmalade, and it cost just 13 Euro.

TOP HOTELS Admired the very elegant fashiondraped Hotel Pulitzer in rue du Fauborg, but couldn't stretch to that, so stayed in the arty bright place at Filles du Calvaire, nice area. The Hotel de Ville just down the road from Rue Curial 3 at the le web venue was affordable, clean, comfortable and friendly with free wifi. Good tip for next year if you can get in.

TOP NO REPEAT The restaurant near the Marais called L'Etincelle, 42 bis Rue de Rivoli, who robbed us, as small beer was 11 Euro and the food was overpriced and average. The sting came when Nancy discoved her phone had been nicked, and had to report it to the police. The crushing of my iphone in the street, it lasted till I got home and then crashed. Luckily I managed to download all the pics onto my apple just before it crashed.

TOP REASON TO ATTEND AGAIN NEXT YEAR I wouldnt miss it! A wonderful time of seeing old friends and meeting new ones whose blogs you've been reading for years, like Tara Hunt whose twitter handle is @Missrogue, Laura Fitton who blogs as @pistachio and Cate who blogs as @Cupcate. We expanded our minds and our inner circle of collaborators.

I also met an amazing French lady called Agatha, who recycles old mobile phones to grunge customise them as the latest trend phones, but that's my next post on Wisequeen.com. My LeWeb'09 flickr stream will give you a taste of it.

Donna Jackson started blogging professionally in 2004 and blogged on finance for b5media after living and working on four continents. She now blogs independantly on tech and startups from London to Rome. Her blog Wisequeen.com covers brandbuilding, building a social media empire using new media, VCs, Angel Investing and the Eurotech scene. She has an office in Switzerland where she blogs on the Zurich tech scene and networking, and in her spare time she nurtures her wine collection and garden at her home on Lake Como Italy.

LeWeb has a very active official bloggers community from around the world and is proud to open its blog to guest posts from them, in addition of providing easy access to their posts about the conference. Here is a post by Irene Koehler from the USA.

The theme of LeWeb '09 was "The Real-time Web," but what exactly "is" real-time? And, at what point, do real-time tools stop being new toys which only truly-geeky people use and start becoming so embedded into our everyday lives that we don't really think about them, but can't imagine living without them?

While most of the conversation at LeWeb was fairly technical and focused on what's ahead, such as exciting new applications and tech start-ups, I wondered what tools these uber-geeky folks are using day-to-day in their real lives which are simple enough for the rest of us non-geeks to use.

I invite you to hear from some of the attendees as they share a few of their favorite tools. Let me know in the comments which tool is your favorite and why you're a fan.

Specializing in working with the technologically-timid, Irene Koehler has a passion for helping businesses strategically use social media tools to increase their visibility and improve their reputation and community engagement.

LeWeb has a very active official bloggers community from around the world and is proud to open its blog to guest posts from them, in addition of providing easy access to their posts during the conference. Here is a post by Nicole Cunningham-Zaghia from Switzerland.

I am one of the least-specialized of the "official bloggers". For the Lausanne Bondy Blog, I've written about makeup, minarets, and domestic violence. I don't talk tech. So why LeWeb? What is a general public blogger doing at "the" European tech conference?  The answer is simple: the real-time web is now.  As a citizen journalist and a blogger, moving forward means being where the news is- be it for a recent vote in Switzerland, or for the recent changes in technology which may affect blogging.  So here I am.  I came to LeWeb to learn about what this conference means for the end-user, for those of us who need to manipulate and use new technologies, but don't necessarily need to know all that goes into it. 

Back in the early days of the internet, I remember using BBS as a teenager, I remember the Coffee Cam, I remember doing my first web search in 1997...far from being a tekkie, I always wanted to be on top of, and use, the technology of the time.  I am the typical end-user.  2010 is no different- I want to know everything about Twitter, Facebook, Pearltrees, and use these tools to better inform myself and be a better blogger.  I came away from LeWeb with a few general thoughts confirming my own personal truths about social media and the real-time web in general, and more specifically its role in blogs and blogging.  

When blogs first started a few years ago, they were about information.  While comments always existed, they were one-sided affairs.  But now, blogging is more and more interactive.  People tweet posts, they facebook posts and put them on FriendFeed. What used to be a static URL is now transmitted in various iterations by dozens if not hundreds (or thousands of people. Social Media applications and the real-time web have changed the way blogs interact with their readers. But unlike blogs, Twitter and Facebook and the like are ephemeral. A blog page remains searchable months and years after it is published, whereas a Tweet or a status update gets lost in a matter of hours.  Twitter being down - or off and on for most of the first hour of Day 1- is proof that blogging is not dead (echoed by @stephtara on many occasion).  However, can one simply "blog" in 2010? Because social networks and the real-time web involve a fundamental shift in community and identity which blogs now need to take into account.

Community: I write for Lausanne, about Lausanne, but we have readers all around the world.  Our community of readers is not defined by Lausanne's geography.  Maybe for a love of Lausanne, but our presence is worldwide.  Social media will only increase this phenomenon. Each of our readers has their own community. So each time I post a link in my facebook feed, my high school friends in Louisiana, my college friends in Canada and in France, who would have never read the LBB otherwise, check out what we have to say. And the phenomenon repeats itself for each of our bloggers and each of our readers, exponentially.  Likewise, this worldwide community picks up Lausanne news which previously would have stayed local.  For example, a shop in Lausanne just mounted a minaret on its roof, and it was considered newsworthy enough to be picked up by the French site rue89.com, who was likely alerted to this minaret by one of its readers in Lausanne.  Social media allows you to interact with static web pages and blogs in a way that was not possible in the early 2000s and gives local news a global reach.

Identity: Social media blurs the lines between our offline and online identities. As Her Majesty Queen Rania said in her keynote, the web is more human than ever before, and personal. But even more so, our thoughts and actions are increasingly online and under our real identites. Ten and fifteen years ago, internet users tried to protect their identities- now we use Facebook and Linkedin under our real names. And this is how we interact with our "communities", which are no longer tied to where we live, but are instead the ensemble of our experiences- college friends, people met on trains or in meetings, and all this under our real names.  The real-time web is no longer an AOL chatroom in 1998.  It's a place where we aren't afraid to blur public and private personae.

So what does this mean for the Lausanne Bondy Blog in 2010? It's not my decision to make. Beyond what our community asks of us, I'm just one blogger in the fabulous, heterogeneous, young and multicultural team in Lausanne who will continue to transmit and create the news our community, be it in Lausanne or online, needs.

Nicole Cunningham Zaghia is a citizen journalist and part of the team of 15 at the Lausanne Bondy Blog, dedicated to providing news in French for and about Lausanne, Switzerland. A French version of this article is available on the Lausanne Bondy Blog's site.

 All the LeWeb sessions are posted online and free to watch at Ustream, plenary, deep discussion stages and every single pitch from our 16 presenting startups this year. 

Check the entire video archive on Ustream also available on your iPhone, just search leweb on the app store.

Hundreds of thousands of people already watched them during and after the conference making the LeWeb conference online much bigger than in the venue itself. One day the room will just become like a studio with a public, less the networking in person maybe.