Everybody will be able to follow live and for free LeWeb, as every year. The main plenary session, the startup competition the first day and the sessions in the 400 seats second room the second day will be streamed live thanks to our partners Ustream (live stream) and Swisscom (internet connection) oh and yeah some work from our audio/video team. Oh and the Ustream team will also have a mobile camera with a third dedicated stream.

Get ready to follow everything here and switch all to Paris time as of tuesday morning, I wonder how many viewers of the stream we will get but I feel there will be even more than the current 1600 registered who will be physically present.

Please help me spread the word that everything will be streamed live and all the below players are embeddable.

LeWeb main stage

LeWeb startup competition room

LeWeb mobile stream

There will be a ridiculous number of smart and world class speakers at LeWeb this year, and many of them will be interviewed on stage by great journalists, bloggers and moderators such as Michael Arrington, Steve Gillmor, Kara Swisher, Thomas Crampton, Robert Scoble, Jennifer Schenker, Cathy Brooks and Marc Canter. I am sure they will do great preparing their own sessions.

I will emcee the main stage during the two days and will also host a few Q&As myself. As a side note these are not at all my preferred speakers or companies, it is just how the program ended up being, I "love" all our speakers regardless of who interviews them.

I would like this year to involve you in the Q&A if you like and would be grateful if you accepted to help me interview the personalities that I will have the pleasure to have with me.

If you are interested, please comment on this post on any question you think I should ask them. I will credit you on stage if/when we get to this question. My preference is a Seesmic video as I will be able to project them on stage but you could also leave a text comment on this blog post. A tweet is fine too but may be difficult to find back when I prepare the sessions so I would rather get videos or text comments thanks in advance!

We will post videos like these for all speakers on the main stage, I thought I should start with the ones I will host myself.

Here are the questions I am likely to ask to all of them and of course some specific to each. The trick is to be very nice with my guests as they accepted our invitation to speak, some of them actually help make LeWeb happen by sponsoring but yet asking some tough questions so that the conversation is interesting.

-how do you feel about the current recession: how long, how do you adapt to it?
-what are your top priorities these days?
-what do you see as the exciting future trends and opportunities for you and the entrepreneurs in the room?
-how do the entrepreneurs in the room can work best with you and your company?
-how can Europe compete and gain leadership in US / Google Internet World?

Google: Nikesh Arora, SVP, Google and President, EMEA Operations

I am also thinking about discussing with Nikesh Google's presence in Europe and how much innovation versus "just a remote office" there is. How important is Europe for Google? Are you acquiring companies in Europe? Why or why not? Why would a european company like Jaiku acquired by Google move the team to the US and not keep building it in Europe? Do you think that companies like Google should have a role in keeping economies moving forward during times like these? Google has many high impact global initiatives like Google health so why not...

ask your questions to Nikesh on this video, I will project some of them on stage.

Orange France Telecom: Didier Lombard, Chairman and CEO, France Telecom - Orange

How is Orange opening its doors to startups? How Didier is adapting Orange to a world with growing low cost voice over IP (Skype etc) and less operator controlled phones (easy access to all apps and content versus telco portals on iphone and such)? How does Orange as an ISP can adapt to the French Government's new planned laws on copyright infringement making the ISP responsible for its users behavior? What will be Orange's main activity in 10-20 years given how fast its space is changing? With the iPhone and Google phone is Europe going to lose its mobile industry leadership?

update: Om Malik just suggested a few questions I should ask Didier:
1. in the US there is a trend of metered broadband, a policy that Europeans discarded. Why do you think that is happening? Is US a third world country in comparison to Europe when it comes to broadband?2. How much bandwidth does he see average households consuming in years to come.3. How does he envision the merging of wireless, wired and video services? Why does he think that is important. 4. what are the applications that he thinks are going to become big bandwidth consumers in years to come.

ask your questions to Didier Lombard on this video, I will project some of them on stage

Meetic (#1 dating site in Europe): Marc Simoncini, Founder & CEO

Marc has created Meetic just after the Internet bubble and no VCs accepted to invest, they now regret they missed one of the best Internet company, and one of the few that was not sold to a US company, in face Marc is "Asterix in the Gaulois village" in a way. So this is an easy one for me we will go through Marcs' learnings as he built Meetic.

ask your questions to Marc Simoncini on this video, I will project some of them on stage

French Government: Eric Besson, France State Secretary for Prospectives and Evaluation of Public Policies and Internet

I would like to get an update on how Eric is going to change France with his ambitious high bandwidth plan, how the Governement is going to help the French Internet entrepreneurship and startup scene, how coordinated is it going to be with other countries in Europe, how we can (or cannot) restore european leadership with US domination and now China's explosive market? Nicolas Sarkozy just announced a 20 billion fund to help France innovate how much of that will be dedicated to help startups?

ask your questions to Eric Besson on this video, I will project some of them on stage

Publicis: Maurice Levy, Chairman & CEO, Publicis Groupe

Maurice Levy is one of the best known French entrepreneur who succeeded internationally with his communication group Publicis, that is also US based and active worldwide. I will focus on France versus the US, how to build an international company based in Paris and succeed, being in the advertising business given the fact many companies became huge without any advertising -ie Google- how does Maurice see the future of advertising? Will we still need it or will it just be replaced by word of mouth and disappear with mass media (in 10-20 years)?

ask your questions to Maurice Levy on this video, I will project some of them on stage

Cedric Ingrand and his team at LCI has just released the below Silicon Valley special edition of his show "Plein Ecran" aired on French TV. Seesmic has a few minutes dedicated to how we adapt to recession as well and more interesting as comments from Seesmic members in video (answering this video) that were aired on TV. I really like this interaction on TV that the BBC has already tried many times and hope we will see more of that many to many conversation on TV.

It is around 22:28 timestamp.

Seth Godin has a very good point and recession is already making lots of cool products or services disappear. And we will miss them. There is one good news though, is that generally we will be less demanding for free products and services that tend to be the only possible option with the web 2.0 disappearing times. Everybody will get used to see cool things disappear and therefore will be thankful to the ones that survive, accepting to pay a small fee to make sure they stay around for a long time.

Entrepreneurs should remain focused on "what is the problem you are trying to solve" (hi, Ben :) and build products that creates enough value for consumers that they will be ready to pay for. In return customers will be a little less demanding as they realize it is not that easy to build and maintain those services.

I really like how Seth described the two responsibilities of the consumers in a new world of empowered consumers:

"It's simple, I think. In a world where consumers have so much power, we now have two responsibilities:

* If you don't like what an organization stands for, work actively to spread the word and force them to change
and
* If you will miss a product, a service, a book, a site or a professional when they close up shop, stand up, speak up and bring them masses of new business."

I received the below email from "**** Agency" which is "eager to fill me in their new strategy to conquer social publishing" because "she is a huge fan of Wired Magazine".

Om Malik received the same email and call:

You may want to check how your PR agency is helping you, unless the whole purpose is to get buzz around how to handle PR...

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Loic,

I have had an interesting conversation with a few friends recently who tell me that I should reduce the size of LeWeb this year from being able to fit about 1500 people to only 600 to 800 and make it invite only, more exclusive, more expensive to deliver higher end services to the participants. It is not the first time I hear this. I am already getting lots of criticism from entrepreneurs and students who think it is already very exclusive with a price range of 750 to 1700 euros depending when you buy the ticket (early or late).

My pride is that there is not a single week throughout the year that follows LeWeb without a participant email thanking me because he raised funding, made a deal or even sold his company at LeWeb, or even just got inspired. And that makes my day. That makes me run LeWeb at cost not really as a good business. It helps.

I hear every single year these criticism about a ticket around one thousand euros being too expensive. Unfortunately there is no way we can do cheaper with what we provide. The "naked" room in the hear of Paris for 1500 people is about 200 000 euros, the wifi is about 100 000 to make it work for such a demanding group, add video and audio means, the stage, the human resource to build and unbuild all that, add food for all these participants, etc etc and you are just at cost. LeWeb barely breakevens and to be honest with you, we are already quite proud to be able to run it at breakeven with the help of sponsors and participants.

So is it expensive? Yes and no. Yes for unemployed, starting entrepreneurs, students, many bloggers, etc. This year we accepted a lot of them as student price and have had a few "official" bloggers. We will also entirely stream live the main stage, which has a high bandwidth and setup cost, not to talk about ustream costs who we thank to be a partner and will stream it for you. So all the content will be free and if you stay home you can get it all (the startup room will be uploaded online after, could not make it live as well, but the main stage is already not bad, did not have the means to do both).

No it is not expensive given the level of service we have. World class speakers, participants from 30+ countries, a wifi that works, food which is generally not crap and high quality audio and video in a venue in the heart of Paris. While we all like Paris, it is one of the worst place to host such an event given the number of events there: rooms are booked one year ahead with no negociation possible with them and the hotels do not care much about giving deals.

A similar conference in the US in terms of setup is more like 3000 to 6000 dollars a seat (TechCrunch50, The Lobby, Web2 Summit, DEMO, D Conference, TED...), so I do not think we are that expensive given what you get, at all. It is a professional event, not an "expo" meant at the public in the street.

So should I divide the size of LeWeb by half and double the price to make it more exclusive? I could still give away free tickets to the best startups and bloggers and make it very exclusive, like my three reference conferences are, D TED and Davos. I am aiming at their quality while being far from it given their budget and how much they are backed by enterprise, brands and participants who can pay a 3000 to 6000 dollars ticket. How did they do that? Well it took them years. 20 years or more for Davos and TED, unsure how long for D Conference. Or they decided day one it was very exclusive, like the excellent The Lobby which hosts barely more than a hundred people.

I want LeWeb to be around in 20 years and be the Davos of the Web industry, not in Europe, just in general. It will take some time. I want it to have an impact long term because I know it is slowly contributing to changing Europe and that matters to me. LeWeb is inspiring generations of entrepreneurs, that is much more important for me than making is a super exclusive conference especially when many think it is already too exclusive. Now to be honest when I see how much my wife Geraldine and the team of freelancers are killing themselves to make LeWeb a fantastic event, I think it should also deserve to make a significant profit every year, we are not quite there yet, but we give all the participants tons of fun and opportunities.

Thank you Philippe for having remixed me on the theme of Love, lots of work to do this I guess.

Many people ask me why we chose Love as a theme this year at LeWeb so here is an attempt.

-we always have content outside of technology, one of the goals of LeWeb is to take the tech industry leaders outside of their traditional subjects to make them think and react differently, as well as get inspired. Two years ago we had President Shimon Peres and President Sarkozy (with a huge controversy therefore a huge reaction!) and last year Philippe Starck. We were not clearly expressing themes in the program before but they were there: politics as a suprise, controversial them and then creativity through design. Love is clearly expressed this year to make participants think and learn on a topic that is important for all of us. If I remember well Helen gives one definition of love as a mix of intense friendship and very strong sexual attraction so expect Helen's presentation to be controversial too!

-I listened and met with Helen Fisher at TED (see her speech) and Davos (see my interview) and "loved" her speech so much I have read a few of her books and that is how I got the idea of Love as a theme, I wanted to share how brilliant Helen is with all of you and share the inspiration.

-LeWeb is all about love of entrepreneurship, it is a very similar obsession as romantic love. Entrepreneurs are breathing their project and will live and unfortunately often sink when they fail with it.

-The Web itself is all about loving each other as individuals: see how much social software and blogs got us together sharing and mixing in a totally new way. Love always starts by sharing (a moment, a dinner, a party) and then finding that you like each other so much a unique relationship is created. We are doing the same all day long on the web: sharing first, loving after, even if it often ends as serious friendship, no sex :)

-Corporations are forced to love each other as well in this new world: mashups are happening constantly to make better services, nobody can succeed alone. Our public APIs are the conduit for corporate love!

-LeWeb is all about love, participants from previous years will confirm that. I do not know any other conference where there is so much sharing (thousands of blog posts, pictures, videos published live each year) and so much willingness to meet each other during two days. It is also the only web conference where so many countries love each other as we have around 35 countries each year!

Love you all. See you in Paris, the world capital of love.
Why LOVE is @leweb theme this yearnrelated blog post http://www.loiclemeur.com/english/2008/11/why-love-is-thi.html