LeWeb

PARIS -- LeWeb's focus this year on "the Internet of things" this year brought Net-enabled door locks, houseplant monitors, and footstep loggers to the conference stage. But the gadget that caught the most attention was a remote-controlled quadcopter.

Quadcopters are all the rage these days, popularized best by the Parrot AR.Drone. Here at LeWeb, startup Team BlackSheep showed its take on the tech with a model that's remotely piloted by an operator who sees what's going on from a camera mounted on the drone itself.

Raphael Pirker, founder of the company, piloted a TBS … Read more

PARIS -- Licensing constraints mean that Europeans who want to try the Pandora music service had best be patient, Chief Technology Officer Tom Conrad said today.

"The reason we're not here today is because of music licensing," Conrad said here at the LeWeb 2012 show. In the United States, Pandora can use a statutory licensing provision that "allows us to do what do without having directly negotiate licenses with record labels. It's very likely in other international settings we'll have to pursue direct licensing."

Direct licensing, a difficult series of negotiations between online … Read more

The turf battle between Instagram and Twitter shows the sites have the wrong priorities, said Matt Mullenweg, founder of Automattic and its WordPress.com blogging service.

There's a danger when a company focuses too much on its own properties and pleasing its own advertisers at the expense of giving its users what they need, Mullenweg said here at the LeWeb 2012 show. Those problems are what's afflicted microblogging site Twitter and photo-sharing service Instagram, which Facebook recently acquired.

Twitter has been restricting access to third-party tweeting software and limiting access that third-party companies such as Instagram get to … Read more

PARIS -- The Internet's global reach means it's a golden age for inventors trying to bring a new product to market -- at least until Kickstarter gives you the boot.

Kickstarter is a "crowdfunding" site that lets ordinary people back inventors, creators, and others with a new idea. On September 19, two of those inventors were Apigy co-founders Cameron Robertson and Paul Gerhardt, creators of the Lockitron Net-connected door lock.

That was the day the pair finished two years of work and began the process of promoting Lockitron on Kickstarter, Robertson recounted today at the LeWeb … Read more

PARIS -- Lending Club, a startup that connects people who want to borrow money with those who want to lend it, is profitable and plans to go public.

Chief Executive Renaud Laplanche discussed the initial public offering at the LeWeb conference here. "We're planning on going public in the next few years," he said in an on-stage interview, then confirmed he'd earlier said 18 months.

An IPO of course brings new funds, though Lending Club currently has $50 million in cash, but Laplanche said he wants to go public for the higher profile it brings. "… Read more

PARIS -- Wi-Fi's range is too short, 3G and 4G are too expensive, and both use too much power. A French start-up called Sigfox, says it's licked these network problems -- at least for the idea called the Internet of things.

The Internet of things involves networking countless devices such as cars, toys, heart rate monitors, and traffic lights. These devices may not necessarily need the network capacity of a smartphone used to watch videos, but they need to connect from all over and they need to run on a small battery.

Sigfox's network, using a technology … Read more

PARIS -- It began with a meeting this week between two Finns from Angry Birds maker Rovio Mobile and Neelie Kroes, the vice president of the European Commission's digital agenda. It ended with a jumble of politicians trying to learn what they could do to make Europe more economically vital in the digital age.

"Please skip the next appointment. I need more time with these guys," Kroes told her staff, then called vice ministers and other officials into the meeting. "In three hours we had a list to do for ourselves, and also for getting inspiration. … Read more

The social-networking giant today said there are now more than 350 apps on its Web site, with more than 1 million monthly active users each.

On the mobile side, nearly 200,000 iPhone and Android apps are integrated with Facebook, including 9 of the top 10 grossing iPhone apps. Additionally, more than 45 percent of the top 400 grossing iOS apps use the Facebook SDK, the company said.

Facebook, which is at the LeWeb conference this week in Paris, also revealed that Paris has become one of the top locations … Read more

PARIS -- Indiegogo, a site that lets people fund projects and companies in exchange for assorted products and perks, is expanding internationally.

Co-founder Danae Ringelmann announced today at the LeWeb conference here that the company today started accepting payments in euros, British pounds, and Canadian dollars, not just U.S. dollars, and has versions of the Web site in German and French.

"Thirty percent of our business is outside U.S., but it's all been in English in U.S. dollars," Ringelmann said. Internationalization of the business will make Indiegogo work more easily elsewhere. "If you'… Read more