The day started out rainy and grey, then turned snowy and grey and then ended with a cocktail reception in the Paris town hall. For the folks where were not jet lagged the party continued way into the night (but I was in bed early i.e. by 1.30am).

I caught up with some interesting people in the networking area throughout the day and will post those chats to YouTube when I get some decent bandwidth. As is traditional for LeWeb the wifi has been very flaky; but this is not a surprise given how many people are in attendance (approximately 2,000 attendees I’m told).

The formal plenary sessions of the first day were very oriented big brands explaining their value propositions (not very exciting for me) – Marissa Mayer from Google is probably the best at doing this without making it dull.

But a new idea for LeWeb was a series of Ignite talks and this was a real hit with some standout speakers. I really hope LeWeb continues this idea in future.

• Francis Dierick: “Cold Water Swimming”
• Beathe Due: “Clouds and Concerts. New music experiences.”
• Ricardo Sousa: “Teen Entrepreneurs Can Change the World”
• Romain Lacombe: “Tocqueville 2.0: Opening Government Data”
• Matthias Lufkens: “Twitter Diplomacy”
• Fabrice Marchisio: “The Boiling Frog Phenomenon and The Importance of “weak signals””
• Luca Sartoni: “9 Things We Should Copy from the Internet”
• Ali Naqi Shaheen: “Protecting Sarah from the “iCulture””
• Steven Willmott: “Speak Beautiful XML to me – 10 ways to change the world with APIs”
• Fumi Yamazaki: “Japanese geek culture”

I’m gradually uploading my photos to the LeWeb 2010 set on Flickr as bandwidth permits.