TripSay blog

LeWeb was arranged in Paris for the fifth time last week and we were there with about a dozen other Finnish startups. With some help from Culminatum, we were also able to haul a full Sauna to the event, built on a truck! The sauna attracted quite a lot of attention, rightly so, or has anyone ever seen someone having a sauna right outside the conference place? Several interviews were given in the sauna and a lot of people used it to escape the cold at the conference, where apparently one of the heaters had stopped functioning and temperature was around 14C indoors.

The conference itself unfortunately suffered from some serious hiccups. The wifi or the wired connection did not work for most part of the conference. This is not new, since wifi seldom works at a web conference (exception to the rule: Slush Helsinki), but the wired connection usually works. When the Internet connection for Slush was built, we were able to do it with zero budget thanks to sponsors at Nebula and Cisco and some hours put in by our selves and it just worked.

There’s plenty of bashing the conference on other blogs, so I will stop it here and say a few good words.  Even after all this, I think LeWeb 2008 was the greatest conference I’ve been to so far. The venue (LeCentQuatre) was great. It had everyone more or less in the same area with the main stage being the center of everyones attention. Networking and bumping into people was easier, since people were not divided into a hundred small rooms scattered around the area. The wifi being down also gave the opportunity to concentrate on networking . There were many friends there and I met a lot of cool new people as well. In the end, people make the conference.

The end party could have been arranged better though, music was way too loud to even try to conversate, it was too small and crowded and it took forever to get service at the bar. I’m not surprised most of the people left before midnight.

The startup competition had some very cool companies, including our friends at Zipipop and the winning face recognition service Viewdle. All in all it seemed like there are several promising startups coming from Europe.

Posted by leo

Date: Monday, December 29th, 2008 at 15:04 | Category: conference, web20 | RSS Feed: RSS 2.0 feed.
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