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Le Web 08: Some Follow-Ups

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Here's a few follow-up posts to Le Web 08 that I've noted on my web travels:

Le Web 08: Virtual Goods

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Susan Wu
As some of you know, I'm something of an online gamer. That lead to me really enjoying Joi Ito's talk last year, and really looking forward to Susan Wu's talk on virtual goods this year.

Of course, Wu, who is a founder of ohai, had to go and deflate me by saying that it wasn't all about online games as soon as she game on stage...

Hers was one of the short talks so she had to rattle through the ideas quickly. So had a quick go at dispelling that idea that virtual goods are not a valid business model because they're intangible - so is love, she pointed out, and that's a pretty powerful motivator... Tencent in China is selling virtual goods on an IM platform. 66-69% of its revenue is from them. And it had to monetise via virtual goods because there was no ad money.

So, what are virtual goods? They are any intangible asset you can purchase in an online environment that improves your avatars or relationships in there. It's more than just tools to customise an avatar - there are decorative, functional and behavioural versions of them. Imvu, a chat service, sells better names, for example. 

Ideally, virtual goods are tied up with passion, relationship and interaction.  1: VGs are way of capturing passion and interaction. The little gifts you can give on Facebook are a good example: they're a gift, they're a social interaction between giver and recipient and they're a trophy that the recipient can display. 

But she finished on something that was to me, a controversial note.  She talked about the decision between time and money in an online environment, citing a new mount available to players in World of Warcraft which costs 18,000 gold - that means about 50 hours of play time to earn it. Alternatively, she suggested, you can $300 to buy the gold on the open market. "How much is your time worth?" seemed to be the question. But World of Warcraft is an environment that actually bans the sale of virtual goods, and the market in them is an illicit one. Not an example that helped her case much...

Le Web 08: Podcasting Live

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Wine Library TV Live
Scoble & Arrington
One of the small moments of genius at Le Web 08 was the way the conference closed. It's so easy for conferences to end on a down note, with a bit of a damp squib as the audience drift away into the night. No so this year's affair, which actually managed to go out with a bang.

Finishing the conference with the live recording of two podcasts - Wine Library TV and the Gillmor Gang - gave a huge lift to the final hours. Gary Vaynerchuk is a hugely charismatic and passionate guy, and his talk preaching strong personality, love for your topic, openness to others and media channel ubiquity was both compelling and inspiring. And it was only improved by seeing him working live with a wine maker to record the show.

Equally, the Gillmor Gang recording saw a bunch of intelligent, knowledgeable guys (but all guys, sadly) really getting their teeth into some of the issues that had come out of the conference. There wasn't a whole lot of Love in what was said, bar the brave efforts of Hugh MacLeod and Loïc himself. Bit it was witty, entertaining and informative. 

I'm glad I didn't leave early. It was well worth seeing.

Heart mat, originally uploaded by Adam Tinworth.


All of my photos from Le Web 08 are now available in a Flickr set.

Enjoy.


LeWeb'08 Paris 6, originally uploaded by Stephanie Booth.

Rats. Caught on camera at Le Web 08...


And so, just like in 2006, we have a surprise French politician, the finance minister, Christine Lagarde.

She's been talking about the French economic bailout plan, and then moving onto entrepreneurship. It's of more interest to the French people here, with some talk of making it easier to set up a company officially, using a two-screen online process, and other streamlining for business.

However, she put out an appeal for us bloggers to undermine the cliché that the French are a race of lazy, conservative civil servants. What do you think?

Update: Surprise guest judge - Christine Lagarde, is on stage. She's the French Finance Minister.

WiFi permitting, I'll post 'em here as they appear:

  1. Zoover - a site for user-generated travel reviews.
  2. Webnode - a free website builder for the non-technical.
  3. Viewdle -  a video indexing and search service - can target parts of a video and take you straight there.

Bronze: Zoover
Silver: Webnode
Gold: Viewdle

Le Web 08: Marissa Mayer

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Marissa Mayer
The WiFi problems continue at Le Web, so liveblogging is hard-to-impossible. However, I have a load of notes, and I'll try to get them online before the Techcrunch party tonight.

However, Marissa Mayer, vice president, search products and user experience at Google, said a few blog-worthy things that are rapidly bloggable:

  • Chrome is out of beta
  • Searchwiki "on" is likely to remain the default option. It's more about personalisation than another part of PageRank, but if tens of thousands of people downrank a result...
  • Video search is a challenge. Two likely routes: speech to text and face recognition. Speech to text is more advanced, and we might see it next year
  • Time-based searching is another thing we're likely to see in the default search next year.
I got the impression that a lot of the hard-core webby types skipped this session, which was a shame. This was the least product pitch presentation I've seen Mayer give, thanks to some intelligent questioning from Mike Arrington.

Finally grabbed some WiFi and have my first (almost) liveblog of the day up - on the Platform Love open standards session.

Today's programme is shaping up to be much better than yesterday, incidentally.
Hypothermia
No, not really, but when Ewan suggested the headline, I couldn't resist. But boy, the organisational problems (really cold, precious little food, precious little WiFi) and some dull, dull stage presentations have taken the edge off the day. But, seeing as I couldn't get into the evening party, sponsored by Netvibes, because it had a hard limit far lower than the number of attendees, I've got the time and WiFi I didn't have earlier to catch up on some posts...

Idea slightly nicked from Steph...

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