LeWeb is over as is the short week that followed it – time to put together some of the innovation notes I jotted down during the LeWeb 08, add this to the first impressions I posted on my other blog already:
- Paulo Coelho welcomed his readers and the pirates too, saying that every artist wants to have her work experienced and read. Sending in the attorneys instead of negotiators is killing business models, and yes, this is not about acting in the best interest of the author. He commented about pirates always winning, and that he’s actually seeding his books. Hmm, while he’s showing a fine understanding of todays media business model landscape I wonder what will happen to authors with the advent of ebooks? I guess not much, books are physical goods, no bonding with a Kindle for sure. It’s way more important to think about how the internet is shaping and supporting creativity …
- G.-E. Dias of L’Oreal: “It´s moving from push push push to pull pull pull.”. Big brands may finally understand how to get along with this social media stuff …
- Yossi Vardi: “Business plans are an interesting subgenre of science fiction”; “I do not read business plans” and “The driving force of Internet is not the productivity, but the abilit to serve people in their relationships” (he said some nice things about the growing importance of mashups (which works out to consolidated portable lifestreaming in my book, i.e. creating new ways of being and doing)
- Gary Shainberg “Everything is a feed these days, it’s the feedification of the web” and “How do you get paid for a service that is build on top of others services, that again is build on others services?”. Incidentally I met some guys at LeWeb that are working on that exact problem at the moment, ie. monetizing API usage and data access.
- Michael Arrington and Loic had a brawl over European vs. U.S. (err, Silicon Valley) types of entrepreneurship – as a european I side with Loic, if only because it implies a much more sustainable type of business (and hey, what’s wrong with developing deep relationships). Still I enjoyed Michael’s show. And hearing Gary Vaynerchuk speeding on about passion, honesty, belief and commitment rocked too.
By the way, picture of Metro sign above is by Kai who’s been there too.