LeWeb

Is PayPal Here the death knell for Square?

PayPal has taken a page from the Square playbook with today’s launch of PayPal Here. This global solution allows small business owners to accept payments via credit card with a PayPal branded triangle shaped reader.

This solution is a long time coming. Square was first launched at LeWeb at the end of 2009  while PayPal were pushing their unsuccessful “bump” product. With more than ten years in the online payments space, PayPal will easily make up for lost time even though Square have had a two year head start on working with merchants in this space (and has recently been backed by Obama).

Net-A-Porter confirms details for Karl Lagerfeld range

Fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld opened the LeWeb conference in Paris this morning by confirming the details of his exclusive range with Net-A-Porter.

During the informal Q&A with LeWeb founder Loic Le Meur, Net-A-Porter’s executive chairman Natalie Massenet revealed that the new ‘Karl’ range would be available to buy from January 25 2012.

People can visit net-a-porter.com to sign-up and receive more information in the coming weeks. Massenet said that the cross-channel marketing campaign will involve social media, mobile, augmented reality and a dedicated app.

Is Google getting pushy?

During the .com boom, there was a lot of debate and discussion around ‘push‘ versus ‘pull‘. In the eyes of some, services that were able to successfully anticipate what data users would want or need and push it to them were set to would dominate the nascent information economy.

Yet arguably the most successful company to emerge from the rubble of the bubble is a company built on pull: Google.

Q&A: Patrice Lamothe of Pearltrees on personal organisation of the web

Believe me when I say you’ve never used a web application quite like pearltrees. With this application, you can literally map your personal web. Take all of the bookmarks scattered across your web browser, assign them a category and you’ve got a pearltree. It’s a new way of seeing the web. Think of it as Web 2.5.

Pearltrees was the darling of the 2009 LeWeb conference, which included
a keynote and product demonstration by pearltrees CEO Patrice Lamothe
(no relation). During the presentation, he showed this video
explaining how pearltrees works.

I met Patrice while in Paris at the LeWeb
conference. A few months have passed and
pearltrees has continued to grow. I decided to find out what has
changed and how the application has grown since its unveiling at LeWeb…

LeWeb ’08 – how not to run a technology conference?

Loic LeMeur, a popular French tech entrepreneur and blogger who runs a
Web 2.0 startup called Seesmic when he has spare time, is the organizer
of LeWeb, arguably one of Europe’s most ‘star-studded‘ internet
conferences.

The first LeWeb conference took place in 2005 and has grown from a
modest 250 attendees that first year to over 1,800 in 2007. As Paul
Carr of The Guardian notes in his report on LeWeb 2008, LeWeb has seen
its fair share of controversy and criticism in the past.