Last January, I decided to start a new blog dubbed Web.2point0.be to cross my fascination with the whole Web / Mobile 2.0 wave and the country I live in. The idea was to get a feel for what was going on here, and if people would be interested in whatever innovations (or me-too projects) local entrepreneurs were setting up. At that point, I was doing it rather for myself than for gaining a readership.

After about 5 months, I joined blognation as editor for Belgium & Luxembourg and wrote a goodbye post titled ‘Exit Web.2point0.be, enter Blognation‘. I got the opportunity to do much of the same, only on a more professional platform and surrounded by other editors from around the globe. I was happy to be involved, and especially about the fact that I’d actually get paid for doing something I had already been doing free of charge for myself. Of course, we all know what happened instead - an abrupt ending indeed. I won’t be going into detail about this and how it affected me publicly, but I’ve already made it clear that I’m looking for other things to do now.

In the meantime, I’ve managed to migrate all my blognation posts back to my original blog, unfortunately without the comments and with a few lay-out problems. I’ll be blogging there again, evidently on a much slower rythm but with the same premise, until someone picks up either blognation or the general idea behind it.

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

There were several blognation editors at the Le Web 3 conference in Paris, the annual vibrant get-together of web entrepreneurs, developers, managers and investors from around the globe, but allow me to share my own personal thoughts about the event as the first among them.

In general, the conference was just awesome, especially considering the magnitude of the whole thing (almost 2 000 participants signed present). Loïc Le Meur, the French entrepreneur who organizes Le Web while starting his new company Seesmic in Silicon Valley, has managed to grow this event from a relatively small event revolving around social media in 2004 to one of the key conferences worldwide about the future of the web as an industry. You may remember that last year, although the conference was great as well, Loïc received a lot of negative feedback from the attendees and the blogosphere (myself included) for inviting French presidency candidates on stage, thus disrupting the fixed program.

With that feedback in mind, Le Meur and his wife Geraldine have managed to turn the whole debacle to their benefit: by listening to the community they have clearly turned Le Web into an even better conference this year.

The report

Personally, I found the Le Web to be quite overwhelming. There are so many people there that you know (either in person or from reading his/her blog), that it seems like every time you turn your back you bump into someone else to talk with. The conference was split between 3 large buildings covering the keynotes and panels in one, a startup stage in another one, and a large comfortable networking space in another. I saw about 70% of the keynote sessions and few start-up demos, and in general the quality was high. From what I saw, the most interesting for me were:

• Evan Williams about Twitter (how something good can come out of taking away features rather than adding them)
• Hans Rosling (”Why books and school lectures still exist” - about exactly the same speech he gave last year, but he’s so entertaining and intelligent that I didn’t really mind hearing it again)
• The panel discussion about social media (”Is it killing our society?”) with author Andrew Keen and The Guardian’s Emily Bell
• The panel on ‘Bringing social to software’ with the inevitable Marc Canter (Broadband Mechanics), Tariq Krim from Netvibes, Hans Peter Brondmo from Plum, Patrick Chanezon from Google and Susan Kish from the European Energy Forum.
• Martin Varsavsky from FON (love seeing him speak)
• Jason Calacanis on Mahalo (had never seen him speak about Mahalo, and I found him to be very convincing)
• One of the funniest presentations I have ever seen, period: Yossi Vardi about broadband, pigeons (”Wi-Fly”) and snails. One of those things you have to have seen and can’t be put into words.
• Janus Friis about Kazaa, Skype and Joost (compelling story from a true serial entrepreneur)

Start-up competition
This year, there was a separate building dedicated to start-up pitches. Over 30 start-ups went head to head in 7 minute presentations in front of a panel of professional judges. The winners were:

1. Goojet - A mobile app that allows you to organize your phones pictures, RSS feeds, notes etc. through their website.
2. PlyMedia - A cool widget for adding media layers on top of web video.
3. g.ho.st - A web OS app.

Sidenotes
Best moment for me: Robert Scoble talking about his work at PodTech on stage in a panel on the future of TV, while TechCrunch was reporting on the fact that he’s leaving the company. Scoble managed to comment on the article while still on stage, with his screen projected for the whole audience to see. Good stuff! He talks about it on his own blog too, and Dave Winer also chips in.

Update: RapidStage caught it on video

Weirdest moment: David Weinberger was supposed to give the ending keynote and sat in the front row, but for some reason he didn’t, and Loïc acted very weird on stage not giving a reason and ended Le Web on the spot. I noticed a Twitter update from Loïc saying that more explanation will follow. Can’t wait.

Update:  David just commented with a link to his explanation. Summary: nothing to see here, move on.

Also worth mentioning: NineMillion.org, a charity project focused on getting 9 million small actions from people on the web. To help out you can just link to their site, create a video, or basically make any small action you can on your website or blog, to point back to their site. Just add the tag ‘ninemillion’ to any content you create. Its a worthy cause and you can find out more about here.

More?

More coverage: ReadWriteWeb, BBC, PCWorld, TechDigest, Profy, and lots of other blogs.
Photos on Flickr
Video material soon to be found on LeWeb3.Vpod.tv.
Also check out the Le Web 3 Community website powered by Movable Type.

Tags: leweb3, leweb, le+web, le+web+3, leweb307, le+web+3+07, le-web-3+2007, conference, loiclemeur, loic+le+meur

(Photo credit: Gonzague Dambricourt)

If you only come here to learn about the latest innovations from across the globe that will change the world indefinitely, please look away.

My buddy Christian Verschaeren, never short on wild ideas, claims most wish list applications out there are just not simple enough. Just in time for the holiday season, he created WANTZ.IT, which is basically a bookmarking site enabling you to create a wish list by tagging product pages of whatever you want as a present on Del.icio.us.

All you have to do is sign up with your del.icio.us account details, and tag items you want on your wish list with ‘dowant’ and they will automagically appear on your personal WANTZ.IT page (example on Christian’s personal profile page). People who know you - something WANTZ.IT determines by prompting a private question about the person whose wish list you’re watching - can reserve items. But why should I be explaining the concept, when there’s a perfectly sensible Lolcats cartoon to explain how the whole thing works?

Ah, the beauty of Web 2.0: piggybagging on other applications and content as center piece of your own app … Priceless (really)! To be fair, Christian and whoever he has working on this with him are also developing a way to use your WANTZ.IT stuff as a widget or embedded button on your blog, as well as a Facebook app. Remember: the beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Tags: wantz, wantzit, wantz.it, delicious, del.icio.us, tag, tagging, wishlist, wish+list, holiday, wishlistr, web+2.0

After AOL seemingly making its way to Belgium, it appears that Expedia is also preparing the launch of a localized version.

US-based Expedia Inc. already runs localized Expedia websites in their home country, Canada, Australia and several European countries. Until recently, Expedia.be redirected to either the French or the Dutch website, depending on your language choice. Online media agency Max apparently picked up an interview with one of their executives in a travel trade magazine stating that there will soon be a dedicated website catering Belgian travellers, which is also reflected on the current placeholder page.

Expedia and its large partner network delivers consumers everything they need for researching, planning, and purchasing a whole trip. The company was spun off a Microsoft division in 1999 and later purchased by IAC. Now Expedia is an established brand sailing under the Expedia Inc. flag, along with other travel sites like eLong, HotWire, TripAdvisor and Hotels.com.

Last weekend at Barcamp Brussels, I had a chance to talk to Dries Buytaert (also, see this video interview) about his recent announcement that he’s going to start a company called Acquia now that he’s in the final stage of completing his PhD from the University of Ghent.

Dries, in case you don’t know, is the guy that created Drupal a few years ago and has remained project lead for the development community ever since. He also founded and presides the Drupal Association that was set up exactly one year ago. He’s now entering start-up life with Acquia, and evidently Drupal is the center piece of the venture.

After thinking about the future of Drupal and the web in general, Dries concluded that the open-source project is on the right path, that everything should have an API, and that a well-capitalized company is needed to make projects like JBoss, Linux and MySQL palatable to users who might not have otherwise tried the software. From his announcement:

So what is missing? It’s two things: (i) a company that supports me in providing leadership to the Drupal community in exploring the vision I described above, and (ii) a company that is to Drupal what Ubuntu or RedHat are to Linux. If we want Drupal to grow by at least a factor of 10, keeping Drupal a hobby project as it is today, and taking a regular programming job at a big Belgian bank is clearly not going to cut it.

Thus, I’m starting a Drupal company whose current working name is ‘Acquia’. Acquia’s software products will include a number of Drupal distributions — for community networks, digital media properties, corporate websites, and others. In addition to providing Drupal distributions, Acquia will build the Drupal-tuned analogue of the RedHat Network, over which we can deliver a wide variety of electronic services intended to be useful to people developing and operating Drupal websites. An example such service is an automated upgrade/update service, an uptime and performance monitoring / reporting service, a configuration management service, etc.

He’s not going at it alone: Jay Batson, a seasoned entrepreneur with positions as CEO of Pingtel, Managing Director of the SIP Forum and Senior Analyst at Forrester Research on his resume, is co-founding the company with Dries and will bring the necessary business and marketing expertise to the table.

They’re actively looking for external funding to ensure a successful lift-off, but I have this feeling that that’s only a formality.

Earlier this week, CMS Channel hosted its annual congress and awarded several websites with a CMS Award. There was one category I was particularly interested in, Web 2.0, and I was a bit surprised to find out ConnectR won the Gold Award for that category. You can see the winners for all categories here.

I knew about ConnectR’s existence, but never paid much attention to it before. Coincidentally, I went to a seminar this morning about online communities which was organized by ONE Agency, also the agency behind ConnectR. They briefly introduced the website to the audience during the presentation, and I was pleasantly surprised.

ConnectR is a social website powered by travel agency Connections, and fortunately enough they haven’t used the website as an excuse to blatantly just try and sell more travel arrangements without offering something relevant to its users. ConnectR’s goal is to reach the online community of Belgian travellers and make it possible for them to share their worldwide experiences by tagging, mapping, rating, sharing and uploading rich media content & anecdotes about their travels. You can also create your own travel guide with ‘MyConnectR’, and while testing the service I was impressed by the overall usability and responsiveness of the site.

But then I asked myself if I would actually use it to share my own travel experiences, and the answer is simply: no. There are already so many social networking websites and applications that revolve around travel (both in terms of planning, reviewing and sharing experiences) that I can’t think if anything ConnectR has to offer that I can’t already find on other sites (and much more too). Some that come to mind: Take-A-Trip (see coverage), TripAdvisor, TVTrip, … (there’s lots more).

How about you? Would you use ConnectR? Why (not)? Which ones do you prefer?

Two small snippets of telecom and ISP news:

The smallest of Belgium’s 3 major telecom operators, BASE (a 100 % daughter of Dutch KPN), has acquired one of the MVNO’s operating on their network. DixiTel was founded in February 2006 and combined low prices with a then rather innovative feature - instant mobile messaging - but never reached the critical mass it needed to report revenue numbers with black ink. All of its customers, less than 10 000, will join BASE, and the DixiTel website already redirects to Simyo, BASE’s own low-price subsidiary. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Meanwhile, another *tel, Brussels-based Coditel announced that they’re working on a 100 Mbps connection for internet and digital TV which should be available to customers in about 6 months. This is all closely related to the CODMUCA Project, which aims to “accelerate development of the technology needed to bridge the gap from 40Mbs to a Gigabit delivery on Hybrid Fibre Coax (HFC) networks.” Estimated prices and data plans have not been shared, but since the provider has already been found to be the one offering the fastest connection for a reasonable price, I for one am looking forward to their offer. Except, of course, I live in Flanders and they only operate in Brussels city …

Agoria, the Federation for the Technology Industry, has conducted a survey among 2 500 Belgian youngsters between 16 and 21 years old about their views on technology, innovation and the tech industry. The survey asked ‘Are You Ready for the Future?’. The answer? “Nah”.

Apparently, 45 % of the respondents doesn’t want to work in the technology industry, and 40 % associates the sector with routine work, lay-offs and pollution. Most of the people that were surveyed were unable to name even one single Belgian technology company. This is a big contrast to their actual behaviour and beliefs, as more than 80 % realizes the industry is very important to the nation’s welfare, creating jobs and driving innovation, and about the same percentage claims to use a computer or other device (iPod, cellphone, etc.) every day.

The trade federation concludes that young people are users, but not creators of technology. They also said that if this trend continues, 3 out of 4 Belgian companies will have to start looking abroad for recruitment or even outsourcing by 2015.

On a related topic, I recently read an article in De Morgen about the fact that Flemish colleges and universities don’t put enough focus on entrepreneurial  thinking. A research conducted by the Centre for Entrepreneurship (a spin-off of the Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School) showed that students in higher education are reluctant to start companies during their time at school - much less than other European countries at least. The majority of the students don’t even consider ever starting their own company in their lifetime.

So I’m thinking: why is this? What are we doing wrong? What can we do to stimulate entrepreneurship? Do you have any ideas?

Last Saturday marked the fourth edition of Barcamp Brussels. For a variety of reasons which will be of absolutely no interest to you I’m sure, I was unable to attend the first 3 editions, making this the very first session I’ve ever attended (shame on me, I know). So how was it?

I love the concept of informal gatherings between people who, like me, are interested in the wonderful world of the web and technology in general (also one of the reasons I started OpenCoffee Club Brussels in the first place). Sacrificing a big part of your weekend to something like Barcamp shows one’s commitment to sharing a vision, an opinion or whatever one considers himself to be an expert in. Big kudos in particular to organizer Peter Forret, who was a little disappointed throughout the day that only a little more than half of all the people that registered for the event actually showed up (big bummer when you have your catering sponsored for a larger crowd than expected). But the event was organized quite well - even if the location wasn’t exactly the most inspirational - so hands together for Peter!

I started the day with an open discussion with Beatrice De Mahieu from Microsoft, about social media in general, the combination of blogging & marketing, and some Microsoft initiatives in that area (their involvement with the community by sponsoring events, advertising on blogs and creating stuff like MSN Reporter).

Maarten Schenk from Six Apart gave a good overview of one of the Belgian blogosphere’s current pet mysteries, a fake blog by some guy called Steven Feys. Good laughs, but unfortunately without a big finale with the revelation of his identity.

Next up was Bruno ‘BVLG‘ Peeters from the TwitterFacts blog, who had some interesting data to share about the Belgian twitosphere and the average lifecycle of Twitter users. I pinged him to see if I can get his slides up here. Update: et voilà ! (can’t embed, apologies)

Patrick Debois gave an interesting talk about clashes in enterprise IT, dubbed ‘The Map is not The Territory’. Next up was the most interesting session of the day as far as I’m concerned, with David Verbustel, Xavier Damman and Zoé Galle introducing their new project MakeOrFund.com. I’m preparing a long post about that, so stay tuned.

Tijs Vrolix from Nocus shared his visions on mobile trends, and he also talked a bit about his graduation project - SeeYoo- a web / mobile application which allows you to arrange appointments with multiple persons easily.

Überblogger Pascal Van Hecke updated us on ‘Decentralized Social Networking’, a nice overview of the current state of identity management on the internet, and the tools that come with it.

Also, thanks to everyone who attended my own little session (about blognation of course) and for the interesting feedback I received.

On to the next one!

You can read more on Blogologie, TijsVrolix.be and BVLG.

Flickr pics: credit to Vindesign / Search more via tag barcampbrussels

Here’s something interesting I picked up when I was researching snatched .be domain names: AOL (formerly America Online) is making its way to Belgium.

As you can tell from the screenshot below, which is what you see when you visit AOL.be, the American internet services and media company operated by Time Warner is supposed to make its entry in Belgium by the end of this year. Since they have only 1 month left to live up to its promise, I’m wondering what exactly they will be launching, and why.

As you know, Google and MSN.be are the most visited ’start pages’ in this country, along with several newspaper and ISP portals. We don’t have Yahoo! here (although we do have Kelkoo, a Yahoo! property), and up until now we didn’t have AOL either. But the question is: what are they going to bring to the table that’s new? Since the website clearly mentions it’s going to be a portal site, I’m assuming it’s going to look like AOL.com but then country-specific, and I doubt that’s going to be enough to break the current hegemony of MSN and Google.

Since they haven’t yet replied to any of my e-mails looking for more explanation, my guess is as good as yours: why is AOL preparing a Belgian portal site?

In case you’re interested, here’s a map showing where AOL is active (Belgium is not also on the map but and has a link on top).