Le Web Main Stage, Ustream.TV: The #1 European Internet event, where 2500 entrepreneurs, leaders, investors, bloggers, journalists will gather together for

LeWeb Startups: Phonedeck puts your mobile on your desktop The holy grail of real social graph is the phone, they say. Phonedeck is a call management application which attempts to connect the mobile phone with the computer. When you get a call the app shows who is calling and offers various options to react, like send to voicemail. You can also make calls form the computer. If you want to call someone you can browse the phone book conveniently on your computer and start the call with one click. FatWire’s sex site demo backfires at Boston Web 2.0 conference Dec 3 2008 3:05PM GMT Posted by: Linda Tucci Tags: Thanks!

livestream Startup & Deep discussion Ustream © Search Log in / Sign up PayPal Releases Funds to WikiLeaks PayPal has just released the remaining funds in the account associated with WikiLeaks today, after restricting access to the account last week, according to a PayPal blog post. The release of funds follows a number of denial-of-service attacks earlier this week that were aimed at the document-leaking site’s providers. Most of the providers are now refusing to work with WikiLeaks after the U.S. government accused it of being in possession of documents that were provided in violation of U.S. law. Yesterday, WikiLeak’s founder Julian Assange was arrested and denied bail in London. He’s accused of sexual misconduct in Sweden. While PayPal is releasing the residual funds to WikiLeaks, it is not reinstating the ability for it to receive donations.

Le Web Startups: Badgeville is a modern loyalty rewards platform to drive engagement Badgeville is a badge system for web publishers allowing them to reward their users for checking-in and participating on their site. The idea is to get users to game their activity on the site. They have a had a $2.5 million series A funding round so far. The startup has come out of the Netherlands but has also put down a base in Palo Alto, CA.

Network Effects in Data - O'Reilly Radar Nick Carr’s difficulty in understanding my argument that cloud computing is likely to end up a low-margin business unless companies find some way to harness the network effects that are the heart of Web 2.0 made me realize that I use the term “network effects” somewhat differently, and not in the simplistic way many people understand it. Here’s Nick: Let’s stop here, and take a look at the big kahuna on the Net, Google, which O’Reilly lists as the first example of a business that has grown to dominance thanks to the network effect. Is the network effect really the main engine fueling Google’s dominance of the search market? I would argue that it certainly is not…. The intelligence embedded in a link is equally valuable to Google whether the person who wrote the link is a Google user or not.

Announcing The Next Web Conference 2010 (fifth edition) We are very happy to announce The Next Web Conference 2010 today. This fifth edition will be held on 27, 28 and 29 April, 2010 in the heart of the European technology scene (well at least for that week) and the city we love so much: Amsterdam. The Next Web Conference has become a must for everyone for whom the web plays a significant role for their businesses. Last year we welcomed 900+ guests from over 25 countries and 25 Startups launched their company on main stage.

Why Wikileaks Will Never Be Closed Or Blocked Last weekend, rather than read stories about the US diplomatic cables that Wikileaks has released, I decided to read them directly myself. In doing so, I better understood why no one — certainly not the US State Department — is going to shove those cables back into the darkness. Finding Wikileaks My first step was to go to the Wikileaks site — which meant, as it does for many people, doing a Google search to find it. Nissan Wants to Make the Car Modern Again Carlos Ghosn, the CEO of automobile giants Renault and Nissan, says that the automobile industry has failed for decades to innovate, but that the electric car is the breakthrough that will bring the motor vehicle into the modern age. During his keynote at the LeWeb conference in Paris, Ghosn explained that "cars have stopped being perceived as symbols of modernity." He stated that automobiles rank 17th in interest in Japan, easily beaten by cellphones, computers and video games. The reason for this, he says, is due to the auto industry's choice to focus on optimization over innovation.

Onaswarm: Lifestreaming For Groups Onaswarm is a new lifestreaming application from Toronto's David Janes and BlogMatrix. Lifestreaming is something people do with a growing class of services that let you display all your activities across different websites, through aggregating the RSS feeds from your accounts on one page. Onaswarm a smart, interesting service that combines groups, microformats and flashes of really good usability. The service is in private beta, but readers here who request accounts and include the letters RWW in their entries to the request form will be given accounts promptly. It's very text-centric and clearly better for geeks than it is for the artists who like Tumblr, for example. The Onaswarm site architecture and navigation need a substantial overhaul to improve usability, despite some nice touches.

TechHub aims to be the heart of Europe’s start-up scene While London is regarded as the centre of Europe’s tech start-up scene, it hasn’t yet produced the number of internationally respected, big-name companies it could have. If start-ups had somewhere central to work, hold meetings, collaborate and just hang out maybe things could be different. That’s the idea behind TechHub, a project that plans to create a co-working environment for Europe’s start-ups in the heart of London. The brainchild of entrepreneur Elizabeth Varley, with TechCrunch Europe’s Mike Butcher as its chief cheerleader, TechHub aims to create a focus point for the continent’s next generation of tech start-ups.

Twitter Explains Why #WikiLeaks Isn’t Trending Twitter has finally responded to numerous accusations that it has been purposely keeping #WikiLeaks and related hashtags out of its Trending Topics list. Twitter spokesperson Carolyn Penner just published a post on the microblogging service's blog that more fully outlines how Trending Topics are determined on Twitter. In essence: Twitter favors novelty over popularity. Trending Topics are "designed to help people discover the 'most breaking' breaking news across the world… Captur[ing] the hottest emerging topics, not just what's most popular," Penner writes. "Topics break into the Trends list when the volume of Tweets about that topic at a given moment dramatically increases," she adds. From this explanation, we can infer that the reason the WikiLeaks hasn't trended this week, despite being the most-discussed topic on Twitter at times, is because there hasn't been a dramatic increase in the level of discussion about WikiLeaks compared to previously.