Loic and Géraldine LeMeur (Loic, you are *always* interrupting your wife ;-) have given a press conference (in French) some days ago. Quite interesting, they have presented the whole event and the program. Some highlights below.

The conference

• fourth edition of the conference
• as usual, in English
• last year: 1’300 participants and 36 nationalities
• this year, about 1’500 participants expected, 2’000 as a maximum. for the three first editions, people were refused
• 907 participants already registered
• budget: about 1 million EUR
• 120’000 EUR just for the wifi setup, bandwidth of 250 to 300 MB/s expected
• also as usual, no ads or mailing campaigns, just word of mouth, specially through the bloggers
• about 32 (!) partners for the conference among others google, microsoft, ibm, nokia, orange, …
• one central “plenary” room for 1’500 people, a second room for networking with a direct retransmission of the central room presentations, a third room for the startup competition
• start-up competition: 120 startups registered, 30 have been pre-selected for the competition, and grouped in 4 domains:
  • b2b
  • video
  • mobile
  • consumers

The program

There are just some highlights and notices for myself for the conference ;-) You can find the official program there and the workshops program here.

• First day

• micro-blogging, Evan Williams, founder of Twitter and Blogger
• social information (controversial), with Kevin Rose, founder of Digg
• why books and school lectures still exist, Hans Rosling
• creation and innovation as a isolated process, Philippe Stark
• impact of technology on corporate culture, Nelson Mattos from Google
• technology and its impact on our society, June Cohen from TED conference
• Karl-Heinz Brandenburg, the creator of the MP3 format (!)
• 3 tracks about the future of the music industry
• digitized world, Joi Ito (!), about virtual worlds and games and specially World of Warcraft
• casual games, Jeff Clavier, Mathieu Nouzareth from Boonty
• disruption and innovation, Hugh MacLeod
• and a last track about branding in virtual worlds