Leweb 2009 – Sponsor speakers

Publié le 15 décembre 2009 et mis à jour le 1 octobre 2010 - Un commentaire -

 

   

There were many spon­sor spea­kers at Leweb. Although they see­med to be eve­ryw­here in the agenda, there were hope­fully more non-sponsor speakers!

Twit­ter was a pree­minent com­pany at Leweb since it was not only a spon­sor but it had its CEO and foun­der Jack Dor­sey tal­king. And it made a lot of sense since Twit­ter is a huge part of the real time web phe­no­me­non. Jack spent also signi­fi­cant time in Paris, going to the City Hall for the “.paris” recep­tion, mee­ting with Queen Rania, tal­king to @nk_m, etc.

Jack looks like a very cold guy and/or he’s quite shy. In his conver­sa­tion with Loic Lemeur, Jack told the story of how Twit­ter came out, that he thought it would be big, how users are rede­fi­ning the ser­vice (men­tions, ret­weets, hash tags, etc). His conver­sa­tion then swit­ched to a demo of Square, coming out of ano­ther star­tup he’s crea­ted, dedi­ca­ted to mobile pay­ment. His solu­tion includes a small self-powered cubic device that you attach to your smart­phone through its regu­lar mini-jack connec­tion. It’s a cre­dit card swi­per that he plans to give away (no smart­card sup­port). You then pay using a rela­ted soft­ware solu­tion and sign tran­sac­tions with the smart­phone. Jack had some net­work pro­blems during demo and his reac­tion was to say that it wor­ked eve­ryw­here besides Paris. Hum hum.

There was also a talk from Ryan Sar­ver, Direc­tor of Plat­form at Twit­ter, who made a couple announ­ce­ments. The most impor­tant is the release in Q1 2010 of its Fire­hose APIs enabling deve­lo­pers to retrieve real-time Tweets in their appli­ca­tions. Twit­ter also ela­bo­ra­ted a bit on its busi­ness model that would be based on sha­red reve­nue with appli­ca­tions deve­lo­pers. Like the Apple AppS­tore? Make sense, but it would require to close the sys­tem a lit­tle bit. Twit­ter also said that 50K appli­ca­tions where using its APIs.

Micro­soft also had a big pre­sence at Leweb. It’s been a spon­sor from the very begin­ning (at least 2005 I think). It had a large booth for its part­ners. Jean-Philippe Cour­tois, Pre­sident, Micro­soft Inter­na­tio­nal, was the second spon­sor to talk in the main ses­sion, right after Jack Dor­sey. Jean-Philippe looks like the typi­cal cold cor­po­rate guy. He’s been in the com­pany since 1984 and is pro­ba­bly among the 10 first employees still in the com­pany now. He lives in Paris and in air­lines, since he spends most of his time tra­ve­ling the world. You may still won­der if the world is enough for him (!). We could hear all the tra­di­tio­nal cor­po­rate pitch from Micro­soft: how the com­pany helps edu­ca­tion in many deve­lo­ping coun­tries, how Bing is so great, com­pe­ting inch by inch with Google, how they part­ner with star­tups with the BizS­park pro­gram, how Sil­ver­light and Azure are making inroads (he men­tio­ned 20000 star­tups on Azure, looks like he mixed that num­ber with the # of star­tups in the Bizs­park pro­gram), etc. He announ­ced a part­ner­ship with MyS­pace, see­min­gly, already unco­ve­red last March 2009, on top of exis­ting (API level) part­ner­ships with Twit­ter and Facebook.

The best talk from Micro­soft, though, was from Dana Boyd, a good expres­sive spea­ker and socio­lo­gist from Micro­soft Research. The VP run­ning the Emer­ging Busi­ness Team, based in Moun­tain Views, Dan’l Lewin, also par­ti­ci­pa­ted in some round­table that I mis­sed. But I had a chance to have a long dis­cus­sion with him on the whe­rea­bouts of Micro­soft in Red­mond. Under NDA… .

Google also had a strong pre­sence at Leweb. No booth this time, but a set of work­shops dedi­ca­ted to Chrome OS, You­Tube, Android, Wave and the likes. Wise choice even if the work­shops were orga­ni­zed in a remote loca­tion, behind the main stage.

Google was repre­sen­ted by Marisa Mayer – for a second time - and by Chad Hur­ley from You­Tube. Marisa uses an iPhone and she’s not really tal­kish on spe­ci­fic num­bers: % of mobile searches, #of Chrome down­loads. You gotta guess it beyond kno­wing that it’s just gro­wing fast! She tal­ked a lit­tle about the new Music search part­ner­ship with Lala, which is avai­lable in the US only due to licen­sing rights. IP address fil­te­ring pre­vents non US users to access it (or you’ve got to use a Proxy or VPN…). Many such ser­vices don’t show up in France. I lear­ned it’s one of the rea­sons why Micro­soft Zune is not sold in France, due to its music peer sha­ring fea­ture (but they could still disable it just for France…). Marisa didn’t tell any­thing new and it looks that she playing all the stuff she lear­ned in her media trai­ning to escape the tough ques­tions (on ongoing dis­cus­sions with news pro­du­cers, pos­si­bi­lity to have a Google Phone, etc).

Same for Chad Hur­ley who won’t dis­cuss any reve­nue num­bers on You­Tube. Just men­tio­ning the bil­lion videos wat­ched every day.

Face­book was also there through a talk from Ethan Beard, Direc­tor of the Face­book Deve­lo­per Net­work who tal­ked about Face­book Connect and Iden­tity management.

Pearl­trees was the pree­minent spon­so­ring star­tup in the show. Patrice Lamothe appea­red twice. First day in a chat bet­ween its CEO, Patrice Lamothe, and Robert Scoble. Explai­ning the concept of Pearl­trees with a nice car­toon. He tal­ked a lit­tle about mone­ti­za­tion which will mix ads and fre­mium usage. He tal­ked about ope­ning Pearl­trees APIS to auto­mate the crea­tion of pearls and laun­ched offi­cially his beta at Leweb. In his second appea­rance, on day 2 of Leweb, Patrice did show a demo of Pearl­trees and how it cura­ted Leweb rela­ted content. I already wrote on Pearl­trees, and while its mar­ke­ting exe­cu­tion is so far excellent, I still doubt this solu­tion will become really mains­tream. I hope for him that I’m wrong.

Orange laun­ched its App Shop through a talk of Chris­tophe Fran­cois, Vice Pre­sident Mobile Mul­ti­me­dia. Most tel­cos have made such announ­ce­ments either in 2008 or 2009. They envy the Apple Apps­tore and would like to main­tain some close rela­tion­ships with their consu­mers. Obviously for a car­rier, its App Shop will sup­port all mobile ope­ra­ting sys­tems besides the iPhone. The shop leve­rages the Orange Part­ner pro­gram, crea­ted 5 years ago. Orange also had a large booth where I saw the UI of the future Intel / Sam­sung IPTV set-top-box. Still in very rough shape. The STB will be intro­du­ced only at the end of 2010.

Mobile Roa­die is a tools part­ner from Leweb. Michael Schnei­der did show the iPhone nice appli­ca­tion he deve­lo­ped for Leweb. His com­pany sells an iPhone deve­lop­ment platform. 

Bri­tish Tele­com was the most use­ful part­ner at Leweb this year. They’ve build the net­work for the event and it rocked! We can now for­get the Swiss Tele­com snafu from 2008. They pro­vi­ded inter­es­ting data on the infra­struc­ture of Leweb : 2/3 of the connec­ted devices were from Apple, inclu­ding half of it being iPhones. BT ser­ved a 1 Gb/s connec­tion, uti­li­zed at a maxi­mum 26%, pro­ba­bly because most users were connec­ted to email and Twit­ter. The top user sucked 10% of the bandwidth!

At last, there was one ins­ti­tu­tio­nal spon­sor­ship with the City of Paris repre­sen­ted at Leweb by Jean-Louis Mis­sika, its Deputy Mayor res­pon­sible for Inno­va­tion, Research and Uni­ver­si­ties. He did present some digi­tal inno­va­tions deployed in Paris and the link bet­ween the past and the future such as sewers built in the late 19th cen­tury and now used for opti­cal fibers. He explai­ned why the City can­di­dacy to a “.paris” DNS domain at ICAHN. He plans to redis­tri­bute domains and sub­si­dize it depen­ding on the size of busi­nesses. It will cost Paris $75K to acquire this domain name. The can­di­dacy pro­cess is quite com­plex and takes a while. 

This list wouldn’t be com­plete without men­tio­ning two talks from long time close friends of Loic Lemeur:

• Ouriel Ohayon, Co- foun­der of Appsfire.com who pre­sen­ted the results of an iPhone appli­ca­tions contest he orga­ni­zed. His Apps­Fire solu­tion is about sha­ring your favo­rite iPhone appli­ca­tions lis­tings. The data col­lec­ted can then be sold by Apps­Fire to com­pa­nies inter­es­ting in the iPhone appli­ca­tions mar­ket. Real time? A bit stretch.

• Tariq Krim pre­sen­ted Joli­Cloud, his ope­ra­ting sys­tem for net­books. With a vision of a world of free com­pu­ters, HTML5 used against eve­ry­thing other midd­le­ware and API for deve­lo­ping appli­ca­tions, and “always on”. He also explai­ned how Joli­Cloud can also be ins­tal­led on recy­cled net­books given away to others.

So, how to sum­ma­rize this? Well, most of these ven­dors indeed invest in the real time web and publish more APIs for deve­lo­pers to create new breeds of appli­ca­tions. Search is going to become real time as well, using content from real time social net­works like Twit­ter and Face­book, crea­ting new imple­men­ta­tion chal­lenges. Gro­wing mobile usages will acce­le­rate the trend towards the real time web. It’s also a world of plat­forms. Each and every major social net­work exposes its set of APIs and attract its sheer num­ber of deve­lo­pers (50K apps for Twit­ter, 350K for Face­book, etc). All social net­works now inter­t­win their eco­sys­tems in a tough com­pe­ti­tion for deve­lo­per bandwidth.

With so much data and exchanges in the wild, iden­tity mana­ge­ment and trust could become issues for any user. Young users “live” in Face­book and it nearly repla­ced their base ope­ra­ting sys­tem as the main user inter­face layer. Most of them share their life real-time without caring much about its impact. It’s indeed a new world of openness.

Publié le 15 décembre 2009 et mis à jour le 1 octobre 2010 Post de Olivier Ezratty | Google, Internet, LeWeb, Microsoft, Post in English, Silicon Valley, Startups, Traveling Geeks, USA | 9668 lectures