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PICNIC at LeWeb 08
PICNIC had the pleasure of attending LeWeb 2008 in Paris hosted by Loïc Le Meur and his wife Geraldine.
This year's LeWeb took place over 2 days in the recently opened "Cent Quatre" situated on the outskirts of Paris in the 19th arrondissement. The location was a large impressive industrial building with a light open atrium in the middle, surrounded by numerous smaller intimate rooms and a theatre.
LeWeb's programme included many on the who's who in the internet industry, including inspirational speakers and challenging moderators, always graciously introduced by Loïc.
Of course PICNIC looked at LeWeb with a critical eye, noting both positives and negatives, and taking away a few learnings to improve PICNIC in upcoming editions. We know how difficult and expensive it is to get the little things right, which also happen to be the things attendees are the first to animately blog about.
PICNIC loved the theme of LeWeb this year "LOVE". Loïc compared being an entrepreneur to falling in love. Having spoken with or listened to a number of start up founders during the 2 days it appears this observation is pretty accurate, as they seemed to have a warm glow about them.
We especially liked the theme due to today's economic climate and most of the speakers did a good job of carrying the theme through their presentations or linking their speech to love in some way. However we would have liked to have heard even more of this through-out the programme.
In our view the most inspiring or convincing speakers were Chris Anderson from TED.com talking about Global IQ, Helen Fisher with her latest research about the drive to love, Suzan Wo from Ohai about Virtual goods, Dr Brian Cox from Manchester University passionately talking about the universe and Marissa Mayer from Google who despite constant prods from Michael Arrington from TechCrunch answered questions calmly and confidently and probably made the audience "love" Google even more.
The PICNIC team had heard so many reports of the amazing food at LeWeb, so by 1pm on the first day we were licking our lips in anticipation of ze french "haute cuisine" . After queuing for ages and pouncing on the service personnel when they passed with new trays of little goodies we devoured the little pots of delights. The food was indeed gorgeous, as you would expect from the French. It left you licking your lips for more, but that was the problem ... there was no more, there was not enough to go around, if fact half of the participants ran down the road to get take out.
Despite our empty stomaches, PICNIC enjoyed LeWeb and want to officially thank Loïc and Geraldine for their invite, their LOVE and "warm" hospitality.
