Exploring the real-time web at LeWeb 2009

Last week the Sprouter team traveled across the pond to London and Paris to meet entrepreneurs from around the world, and attend/host some great events. We were in London hosting our Sprout Up London event with Gary Vaynerchuk (photos here, video to come), which was the UK launch of his new book Crush It! On the 9th we flew to Paris to attend the LeWeb conference, organized by Loic and Geraldine LeMeur (Loic is the founder of Seesmic, a software company that makes a popular Twitter and Facebook client). The conference started in 2005 with only 250 attendees, and this year had almost 2000 entrepreneurs in attendance from all over the world. The theme for this year’s event was “real-time web” and the lineup of speakers was impressive – from social media superstars like Chris Brogan (see an excerpt of his presentation below) to innovative CEO Tony Hsieh of Zappos, to serial entrepreneurs including Yossi Vardi.

The conference also included a startup competition in association with TechCrunch Europe – it provides a platform for European startups to present in front of key players in the technology and entrepreneurship market. 16 companies demoed their product/technology to the judges (who included investor Dave McClure), and the top three presented on the main stage. See below for the top three startups who presented, and a bit more about their business:

1st place Stribe – Stribe allows any blog or website to create a branded and customized social network. Currently in beta, Stribe was also the winner of the Scientipôle Initiative Award.

2nd place Tigerlily - Tigerlily is a set of apps for people who want to get more from their Facebook fan pages. It allows people (both with their free and pro accounts) to customize and brand their Facebook pages by adding widgets and pulling in feeds, engaging with fans, and measuring interactions. We’ve implemented Tigerlily on our Sprouter fan page – check it out here.

3rd place Cloudsplit - CloudSplit is a company that provides real-time spending insight and cost control for cloud spending. You install their open source cost counter, view costs by application in real-time, and can control costs and eliminate unnecessary spending using their alerts and cut-offs.

The entire conference was livestreamed on UStream – you can check out all 94 archived videos here.

Here’s an excerpt of Chris Brogan’s session at the conference: