Loic & Geraldine announce LeWeb London theme: "Faster than Realtime"

Innovation
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Checking in from Coachella today, Loic & Geraldine announced their theme for LeWeb London – Faster than Real Time. Drawing inspiration from Jeremiah Owyang (most likely from this blog post). Citing Highlight and Voxer as examples, the theme discusses being ‘fast’ in two senses – not only connecting people quicker than ever, but the entrepreneurial swiftness required to steer a startup. Additionally, it will touched on how large enterprises must also be fast, adapting to the rapidly changing markets.
London LeWeb marked a big step for the LeWeb brand, marking the first even in its almost ten-year run that will be held in Summer, and outside of France. Occurring just before the summer Olympic games in London, Loic & Geraldine have had no trouble attracting the world’s finest startupers to London in June. Some of the confirmed speakers include:

  • TechCrunch’s former and current Editors in Chief, Michael Arrington and Eric Eldon
  • The Founders of: Voxer, Klout, Highlight, Soundcloud, Evernote, and Fab
  • Our very own Roxanne Varza will be making an appearance at the event, along with writers from The Kernel, The Next Web, PandoDaily, and TechCrunch.

Having been to last December’s event, I’m a little disappointed to see so many familiar names on the speaker list – Shervin Pishevar, Alexis Tsosis, Sound Cloud’s Alexander Ljung, Techmeme’s Gabe Riviera – but they are all quality speakers and leaders of their respective fields.

The elusive startup competition

As always, LeWeb has opened up the application for its startup competition – startups who feel they are “faster than realtime” should definitely apply. Since December’s events, I’ve watched some of the winners and even the runners up in the past five months as they attain more & more traction and recognition. Second place winnes HeyCrowd have been refining their crowd-polling iPhone app – it is current one of my favorite games under the folder “Toilet Games” in my iPhone. One startup finalist, Geokiwi, has since gone on to join the Dojoboost accelerator program, and has reportedly had a lot of seed funding interest. Another finalist, GetGauss, has been to the London Web Summit as well as SXSW, where they finally launched their product, getting feedback from the likes of Steve Blank. At the end of the day, having the backing of LeWeb is a great way to get people to start looking at you more seriously, so I would suggest allocating significant time to applying to LeWeb.
The June event tickets are on sale, but if you’re planning to go I suggest you get your sleeping accommodations in order quickly – with the upcoming Summer Olympics, hotel prices will only be going up!