A five minute interview with Hans Rosling, doctor, researcher and swordswollower. Hans Rosling is known for his Gapminder software and inspiring talks at TED and Le Web 3. He is one of the few people that really changed my view of the world, poverty and developing nations with his talk at my first Le Web Conference in 2006 and at the last one. I am honored he took the time to talk to me.

He talks about the change he cannot catch in statistics, his bus ride across the bay bridge. He raises the question if we are able to change the cultural concept of identity to face the challenges of the world.

More about Hans Rosling

• His wiki en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Rosling
• Gapminder software http://www.gapminder.org/
• Video of his ground breaking talk at TED
• His talk at LeWeb3 portal.vpod.tv/leweb3/392157

This Learning from the Future is the fourth episode of a interview series with people known for their forward thinking.  Inspired by the book Theory U and started at Le Web 3 2007 in Paris.

Earlier episodes

• Robert Scoble on technological developments
• Doc Searls on VRM and Mobile
• JP Rangaswami on enterprise 2.0

Made for rapidstage.wordpress.com
By Maarten Lens-FitzGerald twitter.com/dutchcowboy
Cross posted on Dutchcowboys in Dutch

I visited Paris last December for LeWeb3 and made some drawings and movies while I was there, but dropped my video camera and lost the majority of my footage and the ability to take more of it.

But all was not lost as the camera was returned to me last night, repaired. Here’s two posts I did tonight around footage I took and drawings I made that’s very meaningful to me.

Cafe in the Louvre

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My 2 Star Hotel Room in Paris and Dropping The Snap

I hope you enjoy the drawings and the movies I made, particularly the first post about the Cafe in the Louvre.

A seven minute interview with Robert Scoble, American blogger and technical evangelist. He shares his view on up and coming changes for 2008 and 10 years in the future. His apporach is that of a technologist.

According to him the following three changes will be big:
- Mobile
- Video
- Social Networks and the federation

His wiki en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Scoble
Managing Director at FastCompany.tv
Blogger at Scobleizer.com, ex-blogger for Microsoft
Co-author of Naked Converstations amazon.com/dp/047174719X

This Learning from the Future is the third episode of a interview series with people known for their forward thinking. Inspired by the book Theory U and started at Le Web 3 2007 in Paris.

Previous episodes of Learning from the Future
- Episode 1 With JP Rangaswami
- Episode 2, with Doc Searls

Made for rapidstage.wordpress.com
By Maarten Lens-FitzGerald twitter.com/dutchcowboy

A fun and short (7 min.) interview with Doc Searls. About what the most talked about changes he sees for the year 2008. His main points are that people and businesses will realize that:
- Advertising will not pay for everything, too much waste
- Doing business is built around the individual
- Telephony will be a feature on the net, the net won’t be a feature on your phone

He also talks about which of those will still be relevant 10 years later.

His Le Web 3 Presentation in video: Turning the Tables. What happens when the users are in charge?
Doc Searls is co-author of the The Cluetrain Manifesto: cluetrain.com/
Columnist and senior editor for Linux Journal: linuxjournal.com/
Fellows with Harvard’s Berkman Center, working on the VRM project cyber.law.harvard.edu/projectvrm/Main_Page
And blogger at doc.weblogs.com/
His wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doc_Searls
His twitter: twitter.com/dsearls

This Learning from the Future is the second episode of a interview series with people known for their forward thinking. Inspired by the book Theory U and started at Le Web 3 2007 in Paris. Next up is Robert Scoble, ex blogger for Microsoft, co-author of Naked Conversations.

Made for rapidstage.wordpress.com
By Maarten Lens-FitzGerald twitter.com/dutchcowboy

A short interview with JP Rangaswami, a managing director at BT Design and blogger at confusedofcalcutta.com. JP gives his view on what he thinks will be the three most talked about changes in 2008. And what will remain of those changes 10 years later. He makes some good points about the walls of the enterprise coming down, the new definition of ‘ global’ and the need for simplicity to keep up the speed of development .

He was at the 2007 Led Zeppelin Concert …
His presentation at Le Web 3 2007: portal.vpod.tv/leweb3/393628
His blog: confusedofcalcutta.com
His twitter: twitter.com/jobsworth
My twitter: twitter.com/dutchcowboy
RapidSugar: rapidstage.wordpress.com

Learning from the Future is the first part of an interview series with people known for their forward thinking. Inspired by the book Theory U and started at Le Web 3 2007 in Paris. Next up is Doc Searls, co writer of the Cluetrain Manifesto.

Well, almost two weeks have gone since LeWeb3 ended. And I had a great time in a beautiful city.

My highlights:

1. Monday night dinner with all the Dutchies. Very nice to meet a bunch of passionate people from the industry IRL.
2. Philipe Starck, Joi Ito and Marc Canter on Tuesday, as Tumblelogged here.
3. The Wednesday brought JP Rangaswami – ‘focus on output, not input’ – and the ‘television reborn’ session with a.o. Jeff Pulver and Robert Scoble, which pointed me to a few interesting online video services I didn’t know. Doc Searls is still my hero, but his presentation was a bit rushed.

And I started using Tumblr seriously for the first time, as I wrote before I went. As you probably know, Tumblr is a tool to publish short video, audio or text based messages to your own website. Let’s start with my conclusion: I still love the tool. Tumblr has definitely entered my row of favorite web apps. It is really easy to use – you have your thought published in no-time -, it is beautifully designed, and the user interaction is very slick. Hence, I will keep publishing long-form posts at this blog and use Carp’s Moleskine for the more informal, short scribble.

As Clay Shirky said almost four years ago (via Gapingvoid):

“So forget about blogs and bloggers and blogging and focus on this- the cost and difficulty of publishing absolutely anything, by anyone, into a global medium, just got a whole lot lower. And the effects of that increased pool of potential producers is going to be vast.”

Tumblr lowered the cost and difficulty of publishing again – big time.

UPDATE: I added an RSS feed of my latest posts at Tumblr at the right hand side of this blog to get an idea of what I’m doing over there.

What a Conference , what an Experience…Leweb3 has been established in my mind as one of the top Web Conferences. It’s not because I am Greek, it’s not because it was the first Internet conference I was participating .

It’s because it was THE Social Networking Experience. It’s because it gives you fantastic opportunities to chase your destiny .

The Free Ticket was the passport. The “Most Sexy Boys ” award was not what I expected to win. But it could be the beginning for the “Best International Start-Up” award .

Michael Arrington , Robert Scoble , Kevin Rose, all the Seesmic Team and many other brilliant brains have shown me the road to make my Wish Done..

And WishDone was there because it will become part of our life..

P.S: Loic, thank you for everything!

Here are some photos:

Ravis de vous avoir rencontré, revu, connu, abordé, répondu …

Cyril, Olivier, Gonzague, Michael, Ouriel, Jérémie, Loic, Eric, Philippe, Severine, Tariq, Marc, Jean-françois, Charles, Jeff, Joi, Toufik, Gilles, Otto, Franck, Florent, Cyril, Patrick, Fabien, Yves, Manuel, Thierry, Rodrigo, Shamir, Olivier, Laurent, David, Jacques, Cédric, Serge, Laurent … (et d’autres )

Zut j’ai raté …

Kevin Rose, Evan Williams, Christophe, Tristan, Christophe, Jeff, Robert, Patrick, Marc, Nicolas, Daniel, Patrice, …

Mes trois plus perso

Impossible de faire 1 seul plus, je dirai 2 plus :

1) La discussion avec Jeff Clavier à la Scala.
2) L’échange avec Mister Techcrunch.
3) La discussion avec Philippe Lagane

Mes trois moins perso

1) J’ai raté la session Twitter en pleniere.
2) J’ai causé 15 secondes à Loic, meme pas pu le remercier.
3) Pas eu le temps d’un café avec l’ami Ch@rly…

I had to do his deeper post on this event. And first of all give the deepest of all respect to the team. Its the most welldone conference I ever attended.

Program – was really worked trough – better then any other conference iI attended this year.

Speakers – the best i could imagine (Only Mygdal an Reeboot can match it – but Reboots problem is always that I dont understand how cool the speakers are until 2-3yeras later). I Still dont really understand what I do in this crowd. I must say that I had expected a REAL SUPERSTAR - Bono, Sergey, Larry or Jobs…

Food – was fantastic (above fantastic)
(Its not Loics fault that the waiters are  working according to French  law and rules – and have no problem looking right trough you

Attendees – the crowd was THE BEST AND MOST INTERNATIONAL possible.

Loic – the energy and charm beats everyone. I still have to see the brilliant intelectual and business man – but Im very sure he is inside the Showman, Blogger, Father, Husband, Frechman without attitude (nice!), International Connector, Feinschmecker (there is a whole extra dimension to this guy – the blogosphere dont know), Politician (he did help Sarkozy – is invited to the whitehouse – and had him at last year LeWeb), Entrepanuer (history shows)  and most of a überNetworker. Im so impressed.
So why dont I believe in the large conference format. Well I just think its to big and non personal – and I saw a lot of people who looked a bit lonely among the big crowd (I dare to refer to Sartre – my first and probobly last ever littertre reference). And I have to say that even I – salesman and pumped with selfconfdence – felt a little strange walking next to all these superstars I know from Blogs/Videos/Twitter/Etc – and where so so busy talking to eachother – Calacanis, Scoble…. (Guys I have even been emaiing with). Size matters

Robert Scoble live aan het reageren op het nieuws dat hij zijn huidige werkgever PodTech zal verlaten voor Fast Company. Opgenomen op le Web 3 gister middag. Hier zijn uiteindelijke eigen reactie op zn blog. Digg this!

Yesterday, i was at Leweb3 conference in Paris, and one of the best moment i had was Mr Jason Calacanis / Mahalo presentation. I loved the way he defend the Internet with so much Passion and he’s absolutely right, internet is being polluted and this is killing the community. Two years ago, i was about to create a search engine on that subject, something between del.icio.us / experts exchange – social network and google, but i had no time to move forward alone.

My initial concept was : nowadays, it’s becoming difficult to find relevant contents on the internet, because many players started doing SEO on search engines, and companies started to monetize keywords on search results. That’s, on my purpose, part of the internet pollution. I really thought that the solution was to build a different search engine based on both human and computers ranking algorithms. The aim of this project was to provide relevant contents first (i started to think about a mix between computer rankings and human votes while using linkedin answers, every question i have asked was answered very quickly and with a relevant answer all the time).

I thought the ratio between computers rankings algorithms and human rankings would be 40% / 60%, with some special features :

- Each rating made on the websites has to be reviewed by peers

- Each website in the index has to be found in the 2 first results pages of each major search engine (ask, google, yahoo, live)

- NO ADS, every user is able to make a donation each year to the community to stop that kind of lame business.

- The search engine is opened free, but if you wanna contribute, you had to be invited by a friend only. And your friend is responsible of your voice too (if you’re doing bad things, he’ll also pay (user level downgrading and rating downgrading))

Then, i stopped my project when somebody told me that Jason has done Mahalo and he answered many of my ideas with his ecosystem. Mahalo is great, go and test it as you like (http://www.mahalo.com/) this is part of the future of the free internet.

More than words now, just watch Jason conference there :

Jason Calacanis 2007 LeWeb3 Presentation – Part 1

Jason Calacanis 2007 LeWeb3 Presentation – Part 2

Jason Calacanis 2007 LeWeb3 Presentation – Q&A

Thank you Mister Calacanis.

Compte rendu en video, merci Loic

Petite Remarque sur un goodie, ici.

Quelques Photos, ici.

La video du demarrage du web3, ici.

Evidemment, 1700 bravos à Loic, Géraldine et les 70 leweb3 team member…

TV REBORN – is it dead yet?

1. Evan Williams: Less is more

2. Kevin Rose: Bootstrap now VC (much) later

3. Snails are the future of communication – Yossi Vardi

4. Philip Sark: More is Less

5. Tal Chasolin: We need musicians.

6. 9million reasons to help – UNHCR

7. Jeff Pulver: Led Zeppelin appeared also in Paris

I’m currently at the second day of the LeWeb3 Conference. For a long time I have disliked the term “web 2.0″ for a number of reasons.

It has no clear definition, different people take it to mean completely different things.

The web is evolving, it is not released in easily defined iterations.

Doc Searls asked the question in his talk: who can define web 2.0? About 2 people in an audience of 1000 people raised their hands.

Often these terms are used to describe things that we don’t quite understand or can’t explain. I once overhead Tom Morris say that its only non-developers who use the term web 2.0.

Its scary how many time I have heard people say they want a web 2.0 app. This post talks about how innovation has become a dirty word. I think the same can be said for anything ending 2.0.

I would love to see an end to terminology 2.0 but realistically I can only ask that if people insist on using these terms they follow it by an explanation of what they actually mean.

This is going to be a quick and dirty posting. Lock up your sheep and warn Grandma.

The reason you haven’t seen much liveblogging from LeWeb3 is that I haven’t really been attending the sessions. To be honest, not many seemed that interesting to me (I’m aware, this year, that I’m not the target audience, so that’s OK with me). But aside from that, this is the first time I’m coming to an event with an explicit goal other than “watch interesting talks” and “catch up with friends and make new ones”.

Remember, some time back, when I told you I was starting a company? Well, things are starting to warm up and take shape. I’ll blog about it in more detail (probably on the train going back home this evening), of course, but here’s a tidbit for those of you I haven’t yet had a chance to speak about it directly.

LeWeb3 2007 marks the beginning of my discussions with companies interested in sponsoring the event that I will be holding early May. And so far, honestly, I’m really excited about how people have reacted (potential partners and attendees). But as I said, more details in a bit.

Back to LeWeb3: first of all, I’d like to say I wasn’t really planning on attending as I had been quite disappointed with last year, but following the nasty things I said about the event last year, Loïc kindly invited me to come and see for myself that he wasn’t going to do “les mêmes conneries” twice in a row (his words) . So, thanks for the invite, and here are a few complaints and praises.

• The wifi was flakey yesterday, though not as bad as last year. I had a bit of trouble logging on right now, but finally made it. – The food is delicious, as it was last year. I think a buffet for lunch is a really good idea.
• I didn’t like the first rows being reserved for the press — it did eliminate any impulse I might have had to liveblog.
• I like the venue. The lobby is arranged carefully, with enough small tables to fill in the empty space and encourage people to congregate.
• Shuttle bus: great. Really.
• Badges with information printed on one side only. Really. Stop doing that, conference organisers. Specially if the hangy-thing for the badge is meant to swirl around.
• Good to have video of talks in the networking area. I can write this post and keep an eye on it so I don’t miss Doc Searls. (You don’t want to miss Doc. Or David.)

Don’t hesitate and come up to speak to me, specially if you’d like to sponsor my event (I’ll tell you all about it). I’m not suffering from conference overload and oversocialisation right now and quite happy to network and chat.

This was originally posted on Climb to the Stars. View comments on the original post.

Kort maar krachtig!