You can also see great pictures by Romain David here.

I really discovered great speakers like the CEO of Zappos.com Tony Hsiech. Zappos is a great company that lot of CEO should get inspired. Zappos is so great that they just been bought last November for more 1billion of dollars by Amazon.

I am not kidding here, if you are running any business, you must to see this video (and the slides) and get to know more about Zappos’s company culture.

Tony Hsiech talked about how important company culture is important to be a remarkable company. The main goal is to hire great employee which will be deeply involved in the company.  For your employees inspiration is more important than motivation. The main goal of your company has to be to deliver happiness. He also said a company has to be focused on “chase vision, not the money”. People remember more how you made them feel than what you did

If you are once near Las Vegas, you can even have a free tour at Zappos Headquarter, just sign up here.

Second very great speaker (video here), Gary Vaynerchuk, Wine Library TV, Author of CrushIT. Gary Vaynerchuk is not only a good and funny speaker, he is also a genius entrepreneur. He said it’s very important to take care of the consumers, he even personally answers to every single email. He was teaching a real lesson of marketing, comparing the word of mouth converting 80% into and traditional advertising only converting 12%. So there is real change of the “game” with more power to consumers who become more and more the one spreading the information (and the advertising). More power to entrepreneur as well who need less money to start a business thanks to Internet. “Everybody have time to launch a business instead of playing Wii or watch Lost”. He also said that 3 years business plan are dead, you need to have reaction and be able to change your plan even in 3 weeks.

After that I have the chance to meet him as you can see in the picture, I can say he really follows what he said. He is very skilled, friendly and open person. All what I like.

You can watch all the video from LeWeb09 here, and see Queen Rania of Jordania, Chris Borgan( Trust Agents) , etc…

This day 2 was interesting again; I really do like the idea to take care about consumers and people. I think “delivering happiness” is the best way to be successful in what you do.

This conference was great; you can really see great people spread great ideas.  I will show you my pictures soon here too.

Have good holidays!

LeWeb opened directly with an important demonstration from Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, about a new product to pay with your phone with an application called Square. He was a victim of demo effect; he needed 10 times to be able to make a payment with his phone payment system. This system is quite impressive.  Jack Dorsey said that they should be able to offer the device for free because they would get something in return when people are using the application. Their business model is to get money from the transaction and offer one cent for each transaction to charity. Since price is usually a big part of success this would already guarantee a minimum amount of success.

Ryan Saver (an accurate name), Director of Platform of Twitter, was there to make some announcements (video). He said they were focused to provide a more unify and simple API. “In a couple of weeks” they will release a website dedicated to develop with the Twitter’s API. This should simplify the integration of twitter to any website but also the application’s developing.

Twitter will host their first conference for developer in 2010 in San Francisco.  More information will come in this website : chirp.twitter.com

I was also attending Twitter workshop about their own API, even if I am not developer I was quite amazed about the possibility of that.

Of course Twitter was not the only thing interesting during this first day; Orange announced that they will launch their own app store for mobile. They really want to control more and more the content.

Marissa Mayer Vice President of Search Product and User Experience at Google talked about Google’s strategy and Internet in general (video). She said: “Speed MUST be No 1 priority for any site or service. Kill features for speed”. Well, not really surprise to hear that from a Googler. This is to remind us to stay focused on speed when making websites.

Besides that, very good talk with other participants, very good food… As you know what happens in the backstage in these kinds of conferences is sometimes even more important than what it’s “on”.

That’s it for the most interesting things of the Day 1

I will be from the 9th to 10th at Paris for LeWeb’s conference. LeWeb is the most important web conference in Europe. The conference will gather together more than 2000 people from about fifty countries.

This year, the theme will be the “Real Time Web”, meaning all services which enable to follow information feeds in real time as Facebook, Twitter or Google with its new real time search feature. Twitter will of course be there with its founders Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone.  Jack Dorsey is also one of the main speakers and he will be presenting in exclusivity his new payment system “Square”.

So, many executives from the biggest web companies will be there (Youtube, Google, Facebook, Orange, etc…)

Personally, besides for all the knowledge that this conference will offer me, I will be there to present my e-commerce project and also to get some new professional opportunities.

I will be there to meet and talk with people around the web, so if you expect to come to this event, let me know !

When browsing in Twitter, I got to know this amazing tool for Iphone named “PicTranslator”.  PicTranslator is an Iphone application which turns your Iphone into a translator. The strength of this application is the use of the camera to translate. You just need to take a picture of what you want to translate (a sign, a menu, etc…) and the application give you back the picture in your own language.  For some languages,  the application can also spell the words, in order to help you to say them (if you need to order in a restaurant as in the introduction video).

You can get a good overview in the introduction video where we can see a concrete example of the use.

This is the kind of Iphone application which makes interesting the Iphone for people travelling a lot or living abroad, and this for less than $1 in the App Store.

It’s not really an email tool, because all these new features make it non compatible with your classic webmail.  More than emailing tool, it’s more a new way of collaborate, with messages editable in real time which we can integrate all the kind of content (videos, images, etc…)

This is a tool which could be very interesting in order to collaborate with a small group.

If you want to know more about it, I suggest you to read this complete guide quite interesting.

So if you feel like to exchange your emails for “waves”, leave a comment here and I will give you an invitation as soon as possible.

Let’s start first with this acronym ‘IDNs’ for Internationalized domain names, they already exist, but not for the full domain, the last part of the domains still remain in Latin scripts. Today they are available for main global extensions as the .com .biz etc… The Korean version of Starbucks website is also available on 스타벅스코리아.com.  They are also available for local versions with for example the Spanish accent if you book a .es

After the November 16th we will be able to book complete internationalized domain names which will allow Web addresses in Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi , Cyrillic, Chinese and others.

So Chinese websites will be able to use .中国 domain names for instance.

“This represents one small step for ICANN, but one big step for half of mankind who use non-Latin scripts” said Rod Beckstrom. Despite what said the President of the ICANN, it can not be as big of a deal as it’s supposed to be.

I am quite sure that in China it will be a good success since a lot of people don’t have any knowledge of western languages contrary to Israel or India.

But anyway, we can think the most part of the website will still keep with the latin scripts for their domains name, because:

- People have their habits now, in France we are able to use domain names with our accents like é, but I don’t know any website which uses that.

- The IDNs have usually a lot of trouble to work with emails

- There is no way to have an idea to internationalize your website if you already are “so” local, because one problem which is still not resolved is how people in countries that use the Latin script will be able to access Web sites with some of the Non-Latin script domain names.

- if half of mankind use non-Latin scripts, most of them use Latin keyboards

So  this should be just a new way to localize a website for country like China and Arabic or Russian speaking countries. Therefor it is especially good if the target of the website is to reach people who are not familiar with latin scripts which makes kind of a broad audience in some coutries like the older generations for instance.

Anyway the future will tell us, after seen the success, how to consider this new localization trend.

The next step will be 4 languages more, the usual FIGS (French, Italian, German, Spanish).   We can still wonder why wait that much time, it doesn’t seem to be that hard to translate a website, especially Twitter since there is not that much text.  They maybe wanted to stay focused on the early users and now I guess they realise that their tool start to reach everybody. I can see that in France, lot of (non-tech news) websites have now  a twitter account as for example the famous sports news papers L’Equipe, Le Monde, etc…

It also should be the starting point to add much more languages soon, as Facebook did quickly after the French and Spanish version.

The way to translate, will be the same as Facebook used, it means the community (now reserved to few users) will translate and vote for the best translation.  It’s empowering the idea of a community with average knowledge on a subject is better than  an expert’s. This is debatable.

After even if it’s simple, lot of people don’t get the point of Twitter, so by launching in other languages, Twitter should reach more people who heard about Twitter, but don’t really know how it works.

So now let’s see how these translations will work and especially the impact on the non-English speaking audience.

You can get to know more about the Twitter translation programme in this video:

There were also a lot of conferences more or less interesting. These conferences were obviously often for a public with intermediary knowledge in ecommerce.  The conferences didn’t really offer advanced techniques, but I guess the paid trainings were there for that purpose.  It was a shame that the walls were so thin, and actually not real walls at all, because we were able to hear all the noise from the other conferences and exhibitions.

The big trends of this exhibition for me were:

- SEO, a recurrent trend,  there was a plenty of SEO agency, many conferences on this subject (usually crowded) . It’s a tricky science, so you can sell anything at any price because it’s hard to measure. But regarding the importance of search engines in terms of traffic in a very competitive sector, it’s a very good business.

- The “modelling”, there was a couple of exhibitors who presented very innovative products which make a virtual model of your poducts in 3D. Some even offer a possibility to consumers to model clothes and try them on “themselves” in order to know how they fit.

And also in term of e-marketing, there were presented also more common techniques (check, cash-back, blog, affiliation, etc…) and I was a bit surprised by the amount of emailing companies, which are kind of old fashioned already.

Cheers!