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Quick notes on LeWeb 09

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  • A great opening with the conversation between Loic and Jack Dorsey. Very interesting to see how perseverant he was with his idea of what became Twitter, first experimentation in 2000 with blackberry and emails. He could not convince his friends to use it, but he continued to believe in the concept.
  • His new startup Square is also very promising, (see details here) I like the idea of using the jack port, the data is converted in an analog signal and then decoded by the software on the phone. Simple and universal as every mobile has a jack port. This will go live for everyone in march 2010.
  • Twitter firehose for everyone. That was probably the best part of the conf for me, Ryan Sarver making this announcement on stage. At Twitter, they were among the first to think that open APIs is at least as important as the website, and they make their competitors, FaceBook and MySpace, follow them. A few minutes later, Mike Jones of MySpace announced support for Pubsubhubbub. Open APIs are like fuel for developers creativity. We can thank Twitter for that. ( BTW, as Pubsubhubbub saves network and computing resources, and thus energy, it can be also a good topic for another small conference there, just kidding ;-) )
  • LeWeb is about meeting people, and that starts at the first second, right out of the metro, helping one guy with a map looking for directions: rk: “I’m Jason, CEO of RunKeeper”, me: “Well, I’m one of your users”. And that was the same during all the conf, no more cards, no more URLs, you just exchange your Twitter usernames.
  • Wifi worked, and we know this is a challenge to provide wifi to 2300 people, other providers failed during the previous editions. Thanks BT !
  • Organization was perfect, you know that it’s perfect when there is nothing to say about it, everything went smoothly. Congrats Geraldine !

Best LeWeb ever !