Tag: leweb08

LeWeb'13: Travis Kalanick and Snow in Paris in 2008 [en]

Note: discussion with Loïc, notes might be all over the place.

Unit of investment today… billions rather than millions… are we going back to the late nineties? Getting funding without revenue. What do you think?

It’s hard to get a cab here. Specially when it’s snowing. (Backstory: Travis couldn’t get a cab back in 2008 when Paris was snowed in => birth of Uber.)

LeWeb'13, Travis Kalanick

Numbers are good. People can see everything inside, transparent culture. Leaks question that, other companies can learn the lessons they’ve learned without going through learning them. Leaks give competitors a weapon and hurt Uber’s advantage.

Competition: China and North America.

steph-note: lots of number talk, not following well.

Taxis cost to exist. Scarcity.

Lifestyle: give it to me now. Ie, what we’re used to having on the internet. Uber for X => extending the concept. Right now Uber is delivering cars. Expanding to other cities.

Travis could wallpaper the walls with cease and desist letters. They even got one from New Orleans even though they’re not operating there, have no cars on the ground there. C&D letters just mean people don’t like you. They’re a nastygram. They have 3 attorney on staff at Uber. And law firms around the world that work with them.

Service in Paris is really good. It took time to get there.

Taxi organisations trying to get laws passed that outlaw competition. Basically, you have to wait 15 minutes.

Talking to the lawmakers? Waste of time. They make a service that people love. If they try to pass a law to stop it, the customers are going to speak up. Happened already.

Crazy laws. In South Korea, Uber is 100% legal. Except if the passenger is Korean. Travis was interrogated by the police 3.5 hours (police guy wanted a photo with him afterwards).

Disrupting a very old industry.

The customers slow down the political processes which are trying to outlaw Uber.

500 people in the company.

LeWeb'08: The Revenge of E-mail (Panel) [en]

[fr] Quelques notes et réflexions autour de l'e-mail.

I arrived partway through this panel, and thought it was interesting. Here are a few notes followed my some of my rambling thoughts on the topic. (I’ll jump on the occasion to point you out to my friend Suw Charman’s work on “the e-mail problem“.)

The challenge for e-mail marketing is not getting through spam, but getting into the inbox (Nick Heys, Emailvision). I (Steph) had an interesting conversation a few months ago with Hervé Bloch, country manager Switzerland for Emailvision. I’m convinced there is a space for commercial e-mail communication which is respectful, not spammy, and actually adds value. My conversation with Hervé clearly contributed to me thinking that.

Nick Heys says the bottom line is trust: don’t send irrelevant stuff, respect the person’s decision, make sure it’s opt-in&

Olivier Mathiot says the opening rate has plummeted (15% opened today). People open e-mails when they know the sender and trust the content.

Catherine Barba notes that e-mail subjects are often very bad — Robert Scoble adds that there is the same problem with post titles: few bloggers know to write good titles (for viewing in FriendFeed or Technorati).

Strategy from the public: separate accounts (I do that — one for signing up, one for human beings. I have to admit that over the last year I’ve been using my “good” address more and more to sign up for stuff& need to think about that).

Robert mentions that he gets more and more “business” stuff through DMs, which is disastrous because he can’t sort them, forward them, copy other people on the response.

Somebody in the audience mentioning that teenagers have on average 7 e-mail addresses (I find that surprising, to be honest). He says that e-mail is being used to define personas, and separate things out, and that’s where we’re going. I think he misses the point that teenagers do not behave like adults (you can’t draw conclusions about adult behavior by studying teenagers), that putting up barriers between different parts of your life is characteristic to that phase in life, and that ultimately, it is not necessarily a healthy thing when done in an extreme way.

My experience is that we are caught in between two movements: one that tends to separate out parts of our lives, and one that tends to bring our whole life together (integration). We are somewhere in the middle of that tension between two extremes, and neither of those extremes are viable: complete openness and transparency doesn’t work (we do need some privacy) and complete separation between aspects of our lives, taken to the extreme, is split personality disorder.

I do use two (or more) e-mail addresses, but it’s quite clear that over time, their usage tends to seep one into the other. I know from people who use separate addresses for work and personal exchanges that it breaks down for them too.

One completely underused “tool” (or rather, feature) of e-mail is filters. Particularly amongst non-techy people (and possibly techies too), I find that those who are most overwhelmed with their e-mail also do not use filters at all. Filters help you prioritise, keep “for possible future reference but not that interesting now” e-mails out of your inbox, and are pretty easy to set up.

Welcome to LeWeb'08! [en]

[fr] A la conférence LeWeb'08 à Paris.

Here we are& it’s started! Here I am at LeWeb’08 — and now that I’m here, very happy :-) (I’ve come to dread events in a way, but that’s the subject of another post and has nothing to do with LeWeb’08).

For those of you who are not here with us, keep up with what’s going on by following the live video feed by Ustream.

Tweets, photos and posts tagged “leweb083 are aggregated in the LeWeb’08 sixgroups livecommunity and @eventtrack.

If you are blogging about LeWeb’08, you might want to add the Livecommunity bar to your site (I have to approve them but if I see stuff about LeWeb’08 on your site it won’t be a problem). Here’s the code:


<script type="text/javascript" src="http://leweb08.sixgroups.com/widgets/api/json/v/03/"></script>
<div id="sgBarContainer"><span style="font: 9px Arial, sans-serif; color: #ccc; ">Livecommunity powered by <a style="font: 9px Arial, sans-serif; color: #ccc; " href="http://sixgroups.com/" title="Community Software">sixgroups.com</a></span>
<script type="text/javascript">if(sg){document.body.style.paddingTop = "27px";sg.addWidget({type: "sgBar", vposition: "fixed"});}</script>
</div>

You can see it at work on this site.

There is also a Bloggersbase blog (with contest) that you can contribute to. Official bloggers (bloggers who received a blogger accreditation from me), don’t forget to add your publications to the “Coverage” page. (The general public doesn’t have access to this page, so if you’re not an official blogger you won’t be able to see it.)

The first five rows have small tables, each fitted with an ethernet cable and power. Most of the seats there are taken, but I still see a few empty ones. I’m on the wifi, which is behaving nicely (fingers crossed).

Right, I’m going to leave you and continue listening to David Weinberger :-)

Oh, and you can find me (and others) on irc.freenode.net in channel #leweb08&

Deadline Today For LeWeb Blogger Accreditation [en]

[fr] Aujourd'hui, dernier jour pour l'accréditation blogueur de la conférence LeWeb'08. Nous avons reçu énormément d'inscriptions, surtout de la part de blogueurs écrivant en français, anglais, espagnol, italien, allemand.

So far, 150 bloggers have requested a blogger accreditation for LeWeb’08 Paris. Wow! Good thing I figured out Google Forms just in time.

The deadline for requesting accreditation is today, end of my day.

Without getting into precise numbers, this is of course way more than the number of passes we have available for bloggers (but let me reassure you, we don’t just have a dozen or so, of course — somewhere in between).

Most bloggers requesting a pass have announced that they would blog about LeWeb’08 in English or French, which is quite natural. We will take that into account when selecting pass-holders. German, Italian, and Spanish are also well-represented. If you blog in another language than these and have a tech/business-oriented blog, do get in touch today.

Each person who filled in the form will receive an answer, whether they are selected as official LeWeb’08 bloggers or not. Selected bloggers will be announced on the 20th (next Monday), so don’t fret if you haven’t heard from me yet.

Géraldine just contacted me to point me to the page of banners LeWeb’08 staff have prepared, so go and help yourself in the meantime!

Blogger Accreditations for LeWeb Paris [en]

Update: the deadline for requests was 13.10.2008. The form is now closed. Thank you.

I’m pleased to announce that I am in charge of managing blogger accreditations for the conference LeWeb’08 Paris which will take place on December 9-10th.

For the fifth year running, this huge conference organised by Géraldine and Loïc Le Meur will receive 1500 participants from the business, media, and internet worlds to listen to an amazing line-up of speakers — gathered this year around the theme love. Just look at the programme to get a taste of what’s in store (listen to the video!) — plus great food, a startup competition, incredible networking, giant screens…

I went to LeWeb in 2006 for the first time, and I have to say I was blown away by what they had managed to put together. If you’ve never been to Le Web, it’s really worth experiencing. And if you have… Well, I probably don’t need to say much more.

This year, maybe you will one of the lucky ones to be invited there, as LeWeb is selecting bloggers, podcasters, and generally “electronic media people” from all over the world to cover the conference.

This selection will be based on:

  • their geographical and linguistic location (ever thought of language as an online “place”?)
  • their readership and influence
  • their motivation and the value they offer the conference by their presence
  • when they made their request (yes, there is an element of first come, first served in the selection).

Selected bloggers will be asked to display a badge on their blog upto the conference date and blog about it at least once before mid-November. They will be listed in an official blogroll on the conference site and will be given a “blogger accreditation” to attend the conference and cover it.

Send an e-mail to [email protected] (I’ll receive it) with Due to the rather large number of people applying, please fill in this form, which will ask you for information like:

  • your name
  • your URL
  • the country you live in
  • the language you will be blogging about LeWeb in
  • your Twitter username if you have one
  • if you’ve attended previous LeWeb conferences, and when
  • why we should invite you 🙂 (we know you’re great and you certainly deserve it, but what does LeWeb get out of the deal?)

Bloggers who are also journalists should apply for a regular press pass at [email protected].

Waiting to hear from you, and looking forward to seeing you at LeWeb in a couple of months!