Highlighting 16 of the over 400 applicants, this year's LeWeb Startup Competition, was located at the Eiffel Dock building, a perfect setup to hang out with the startups. Own lunch and café area, lounge chairs by the startup demo booths, and the startup competition stage just behind the curtain, made it easy for ideas and money to mate. And it never got too crowded nor loud. Win-Win.

Startup Focus on Making Business Social

The three finalists chosen to pitch on the LeWeb main stage also represented the overall "trend" - social. Social content curation (Paper.li), Social driving assistance (Waze), Social home cooking (Super Marmite) and Social car sharing community (Deways), winner of the special audience award. 

Only two of the 16 startups launched on stage. Nuji, one of this year's Seedcamp winners, launched their Social recommendation service to discover and share products you love, whereas Badgeville, a Social rewards and analytics platform officially kickstarted its European business for its two months old Palo Alto service.

Timeless Art of Pitching - The Dos And Don'ts
Watching the startups getting their five minutes on the spotlight to dazzle the judges and audience, I made notes on few definitive don'ts that judges really shouldn't have, but repeatedly kept asking for:

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Passion and honest intention is close to impossible to copy or fake. Practically, everyone can throw a conference, but very few understand the meaning of creating Win-Win. Geraldine and Loic Le Meur do. I thank You for that.

LeWeb itself is a true startup story, created to build ecosystem and highlight startups. Like any other startup, it has been praised and bashed along the way, but with consistency, passion, hard work (watch the beginning of this and you'll get the picture), and strong vision, it's made its way to the top now having numbers to back it up. In six years LeWeb has grown from 250 attendees from 15 countries to nearly 3 000 from 60 countries. Overnight successes, anyone? Or better yet, a hype?

People do keep coming back for a reason, and flying in all the way from Japan, happy as ever, for 20 minutes on stage. But, for all you sceptics and non believers, LeWeb offered you to stay at home, lay back and join the 250 000 online viewers, and keep you updated with the approx. 60 000 tweets sent this year. Yes, #leweb also hit number one worldwide trending topic the first day on Twitter. And for your convenience, you can also catch up all LeWeb content on HD.

My partner in crime in Paris this year, Henriette Weber, summarizes the whole experience as Epic. Passion and honest intention shines through and is required to build a viable ecosystem (The official blogger backchannel speaks clearly on the commitment). It's also what Dennis Crowley of Foursquare talked about, with both Loic and Leo Laporte agreeing on: 

"To contribute back to the ecosystem is what makes it work"

Leo Laporte adding "Mentoring is capital". Amen. The ecosystem is so badly needed, so I have to disagree with Paul Jozefak suggesting to make LeWeb invite only event in the future.

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(CC) Brian Solis

I'm really excited to be returning my second time to LeWeb, only this year as official blogger. Thank You Geraldine and Loic for invitation, and all the fine people for recommending me!

Does Your Business Stand On Solid Platform

If the last year's conference about real-time web with 2 500 participants and 300 journalists from 50 countries could be summarized as the Manisfestation of Connectiveness, this year's theme Platforms makes a perfect segway. To discuss and figure out the future of Mobile, Browser, Desktop, Tablets, TV, and Social Networks as a platform, will undoubtebly require another 8 000 cups of Nespresso! Join us!

On December 8th and 9th, Geraldine and Loic Le Meur are taking LeWeb back to the popular Les Docks with yet another great lineup of speakers. Here are few teasers:

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