Chris Alexander

On Engineering

#LeWeb Roundup

12th December, 2010

So LeWeb 2010 has now come and gone, and I thought I would take a minute just to round up my thoughts on the event.

First of all, I thought the whole thing was superbly well organised - @loic, @geraldine and their teams did a fantastic job. Everything ran smoothly, and a nice consistent 10 minutes late throughout both of the days. The Wifi stayed up (mostly) and all of the attendees seemed happy. Only the Parisian weather (which is out of anybody’s control) caused any trouble, and even then it was only a few minutes walking for most people.

But, as ever, it was the networking that really stood out at LeWeb. They somehow manage to get just about everybody that matters in Europe and a huge chunk of people from the US together for 2 days, and even though I didn’t talk to everyone I would have liked to, I still ended up with some great conversations and contacts. Discussions with Robert Scoble (he says I have a great voice for radio?), Tariq Krim (Jolicloud CEO), Mike Butcher and Robin Wauters (TechCrunch) and Marco Kaiser of Seesmic were all definite highlights. I would have liked to talk to Denis Crowley of Foursquare but he seemed on a tight schedule and Loic and Geraldine whisked him away before I had a chance to grab him. It was also interesting to hear Jason Goldman of Twitter, Mitchell Baker of Mozilla (especially the day after the Chrome OS and Web Store announcement) and Yossi Vardi on stage.

And it’s not every day a student gets to talk to Marissa Mayer, is it? (More on that in another post).