LeWeb is already a traditional annual conference, which not only discusses trends and prospects for the development of the Internet, but also resolves practical issues of creating new projects in the global network. In recent years, it has become the largest forum of this kind in Europe, which attracts several thousand participants each time.
The history of the annual LeWeb conference began in the early years of the new century, when it was organized as a meeting of web bloggers to discuss their problems, development prospects and exchange new ideas. Since 2004, one of the main organizers of the forum was Loic Le Meur, the most popular blogger in France at that time. To participate in the December 2006 meeting, he managed to attract such famous people in the world as Shimon Peres, Nicolas Sarkozy and French politician François Bayrou. Since then, the popularity of LeWeb has been growing every year, always gathering influential people in the field of creating and promoting Internet projects, media specialists and politicians. Today it is no longer so much a bloggers' conference as a place where teams of promising start-up projects find investors interested in them.
The main one is the annual meeting in Paris, which takes place every year at the beginning of December. The last two-day Parisian forum in 2011 brought together over 3,500 web technologists, entrepreneurs and politicians from 76 countries, including Russia. On behalf of our country, a new project was presented, in particular, by the founder of the dating site Mamba.ru Andrey Andreev. This time, he modestly announced that he was going to build a company worth one hundred million dollars based on the already existing dating social network Badoo.
However, interest in this forum is growing so actively that the organizers decided to hold an additional conference in the summer of 2012 in London. It took place in Westminster Central Hall, located at the famous abbey. For the first time, a multi-stage competition for Internet projects was held here; 16 most promising startups were selected to participate in the final stage in London.
