Jeremiah Owyang, Industry Analist and Partner Altimeter Group, spoke about “Social media and big business: trends for 2011″.

The year of 2010 is according to Jeremiah the year of social business formation. Jeremiah thinks 2011 will be the year of social business integration. For internal goals in 2011 social strategists will focus on measurement of ROI. They are currently using engagement measurements – fans, friends, etc. Companies will be focused on integrating social media with their corporate website. 76% of the corporations are going to spend money in the brand monitoring area according to Jeremiah’s statistics.

The biggest area of growth in 2011 is social media staff hiring. Jeremiah thinks social media boutiques will soon be bought by bigger corporations who need a social media expert.

Jeremiah’s advice for corporations as far as social media is concerned:

1. Hire correctly and properly for social media – don’t hire social media gurus and ninjas but social media program managers who will integrate social media correctly;

2. Pragmatically integrate social media on the corporate website then aggregate and curate. You’ve spent so far to get people to corporate website and now you shouldn’t be linking them away with no integration strategy;

3. If you’re going to invest in advertising invest in advertising that leverages social graph;

4. Developed an unpaid army of brand advocates – get your customers to do the work for you. Invest in advocacy programs that scale. You can never hire enough community managers to respond to your customers;

5. Invest in scalable systems like SCRM and SMMS (social media management systems);

6. Learn to measure using the right ROI.

You can find Jeremiah on Twitter at @jowyang

Howard Lindzon, founder of Social Leverage and co-founder and CEO of StockTwits.com – the Facebook of finance – was the next on stage at Le Web. Howard shared with us the fact that his passion was finance and decided to base his start-up on this passion.

Dave McClure, who describes himself as Startup Investor and Troublemaker is the founder of 500startups.com – an internet startup and seed fund and incubator program in Mountain View, CA. Dave has been geeking out in Silicon Valley for over twenty years, and has worked with companies such as PayPal, Mint, Founders Fund, Facebook, LinkedIn, SlideShare, Twilio, Simply Hired, O’Reilly Media, Intel, & Microsoft.

Dave talks about global trends on the web. Accoring to him there are more and more old people and young people online nowadays. There is also more bandwidth and more video online and a growth of Global languages (there are more than 1 billion Mandarin and English speakers and more than 500 million speakers of Spanish, Hindi, Arabic and Portuguese). This means that you can build projects for your local market in one of these languages that appeal to all the world.

Another obvious trend accoring to Dave is the smart device proliferation – phone, tablet, TV, console, etc – as well as the acceleration of global payment and e-commerce. On the other hand product development and customer acquisition have more and more reduced costs.

Dave’s advice is to dominate your local/native market first or to move so that your local market is bigger (China, US).

Dave recommends a few books – “Spent: Sex, evolution and human behavior” by Geoffrey Miller, “Influence: the psychology of persuasion” by Robert Cialdini and “Understanding comics: the invisible art” by Scott McCloud.

Dave’s opinion is that you don’t need to be in Silicon Valley, but Silicon Valley needs to be in you wherever you are in the world.

The main conclusion of Dave’s presentation was: Start local, hustle global.

The prize for virality goes to paper.li – a startup that organizes links shared on Twitter and Facebook into an easy to read newspaper-style format.

The prize for technology goes to Waze – a social mobile application providing free turn-by-turn navigation based on the live conditions of the road.

The prize for originality goes to Super Marmite

The Startup Audience Choice Award goes to City M – a car-sharing application

Apparently caffeine together with enthusiasm fuels startups as the main sponsor of the competition was Nespresso. Congratulations to everyone!

One of the most inspiring talks this morning at Le Web was Loic’s chat with Phil Libin, Evernote CEO. Although the talk belonged to the “Money Talks” session, Phil’s main theme was that that you should not follow the money. What Phil advised entrepreneurs was to search for an idea that could save humanity or change the world and build upon it.

Phil’s presentation was entitled “From a Simple Idea to a Global Success” and this is exactly what he thinks was the reason behind Evernote’s success – a very simple idea. The company came from 2 teams that came together in 2007 and launched a service in the summer of 2008, 2 and a half years ago.

The company has definitely become a global success as Evernote has just passed 5 million registered users a few weeks ago and gains around 18000 users every day. One of their highest growth rates is in Spain and Libin stated that they have no idea why are that he is planning a visit there. This growth was organic they didn’t do any SEO or advertising. As far as revenues are concerned, Evernote gets around 160,000 premium users. I really liked Phil Libin’s open attitude towards sharing company information. The reason behind this openness is probably exactly what he shared: “If you think of all the things that can kill your startup at every point in time, competition is actually not on top of the list. We don’t think about what other people are doing, we just try to do what we do best”.

Evernote is a proof of the freemium model at work – Phil Libin’s philosophy is that “people pay for what they love. So the easiest way to get 1 million people to pay is to get 1 million people to fall in love with you. If people know that they can leave when they want they will probably stay with you for the rest of their lives”.

Agreeing with the previous speaker, Alexander Tamas from DST International, Phil stated that from his point of view, “the worst reason to start a company is to make money. You’d better get a job. You have to love your idea and wanting to save humanity or to want to change the world is a much better reason”. “Starting a company is a bad way to make money,” he added. “On average, it’s a terrible way to make money. But if you want to save humanity from boredom or mediocrity or from the city of Paris shutting down from an inch of snow, then start a business.”

The “Money Talks” session continued with Loic Le Meur’s conversation with Alexander Tamas, Partner at DST International. DST is originated from Russia and grew out of the social networking company Mail.ru. At some point DST started making international investments and Facebook was their first international investment. They invested more than 500 million $ in Facebook overall.

Before investing in Facebook, DST owned and ran a social network in Russia. Russia was leading as far as social networking was concerned – from the first day the people in Russia are coming online they have social networks and social networks were number 1 or number 2 websites in Russia. In all the other parts of the world people started using internet with email and social networking was more like an add-on. So overall the dynamics in Russia were different and social networking was for them a very profitable business. They soon realized that it was only a matter of time for Facebook to become really large worldwide.

Mailru is the biggest tech IPO in Europe – 8 billion $ valuation at the present moment. Tamas’s advice is that ”You should go public when it makes sense for the company not because you want to earn more cash”.

DST invested about 150 million dollars in Zynga but they didn’t agree to disclose at what valuation.

As far as Groupon is concerned, according to Tamas the Groupon management team realises that they have quite a business going on so they are not very keen on selling it. Tamas compared Groupon and businesses to books – some books last for generations and Alexander Tamas thinks Facebook, Zynga and Groupon are the kind of companies people will talk about in some years as well. Tamas says Groupon know they have something very special going on and they have the potential for a generation-defining business. Facebook, Groupon and Zynga are all long-term companies like classic novels and stars in the astronomical sense

Tamas’s mantra seems to be “don’t sell early, keep growing”. According to him DST are seeking companies with tremendous growth minimum 1 billion $ valuation and a strong growth outlook. In Europe there are companies who have an exit plan in the business plan presentation even if they haven’t started yet which to Tamas seems funny and a mistake.

According to Tamas, the chance to build something meaningful is a once in a lifetime opportunity “No exit money can pay for the fact that one can build something special, something significant!”.DST is not an early-stage investment company, they are a very small company and cannot afford early-stage. According to the DST International partner Foursquare has a tremendous amount of potential ahead of it but it’s still a bit early.

We very much enjoyed the love/hate fireside chat between Marissa Mayer – Google VP – and Michael Arrington – TechCrunch Editor. Marrissa Mayer was commited to not giving any information away regarding Google’s plans, while Arrington seemed commited to asking her trick questions and getting her to share some strategic inside information.

For those of you who don’t know, Marris Mayer recently took a new job within Google and is now in charge of consumer products for the company – primarily local geographic products. A key part of Google’s future plans seems to be contextual discovery whish Marrisa mainly talked about.

Michael Arrington didn’t resist asking uncomfortable questions and he brought up the fast that Marissa is a heavy FourSquare user as well as the fact that Google failed to acquire Yelp, Twitter and Groupon so far.

The conversation got even cooler when Google presented a Nexus S demo together with the new version of Android (Gingerbread). The vector based mapping is rather cool, check it out!

I honestly enjoyed a lot the cultural, national and theme diversity of the Ignite speakers at LeWeb and overall the 10 presentations had exactly the energy we needed after the lunch break. For those of you who don’t know the Ignite event consists of 10 fast paced 5 minute talks. The Le Web Ignite event was hosted by Jared Goralnick, Founder and CEO of AwayFind. Here is a short summary of the 10 presentations:

Luca Sartoni, 123 People – Luca opened the Ignite session with a presentation regarding “9 things we should copy from the Internet”.

Matthias Lufkens, World Economic Forum – Matthias has a very fun presentation about Twitter diplomacy. He presented the diplomatic Twitter relationships of some of the world’s greatest political powers.

Romain Lacombe, Etats Numeriques – Romain spoke about the collaborative effort of opening government data.

Beathe Due, Telenor Group - Beathe presented the results of a research developed in Norway during a music festival. The data from the research showed the way people listen to music and was meant to draw a conclusion about whether there is there an interplay between clouds and music. The conclusion that they came to was that people love to search, discover and rediscover music. Listeners are artist oriented and the average user played 92 different artists in 9 weeks. Mobile phones account for 35% of all streams and users use mobile phones to listen to music on their way to work mostly in the morning.

Ricardo Sousa, AiediLabs (Portugal) – One of the youngest speakers on stage talking about teen entrepreneurship. College is a great space for innovations, but Ricardo thinks highschool is the next college. Ricardo thinks teens have big ideas, they are not afraid of mistakes, they live by challenging the rules everyday which can bring disruptive ideas on the market. Ricardo takes things further explaining that he thinks that teens will be responsible for economic growth.

Ali Naqi Shaheen, Coeus Solutions GmbH - A different point of view from that of Ricardo Sousa’s, Ali Naqi Shaheen’s presentation entitled “Protecting Sarah from iCulture” is about the importance of protecting children from the digital age offensive content. The presentation was more like a heads-up for parents about the risks of unfiltered online content for children.

Fumi Yamazaki, Japanese blogger - Fumi spoke about the Japanese geek culture which is based on openness and collaboration.

Francis Dierick, Co-Founder (Hacker) Quantter.com - Francis has a very fun presentation about taking risks, swimming in cold waters and about the fact that a 20$ charity raise could save the people in need for clean water all over the world.

Fabrice Marchisio, Cotty Vivant Marchision & Lauzeral – Fabrice has a very interesting presentation about the boiling frog phenomenon and explained the importance of taking risks and getting out of our comfort zone. Fabrice also emphasized the importance of weak signals and highlighted that paying attention to weak signals can anticipate huge risks like the financial crisis and other disasters.

Steven Willmott, 3scale Networks - Steven had an interesting presentation about APIs entitled “Speak beautiful XML to me – 10 ways to change the world with APIs”.

The Internet connection is finally back as we are having Osama Bedier – Vice President of Platform, Mobile and New Ventures, PayPal – on stage. Milo Yiannopoulos, Technology columnist Telegraph.co.uk is asking Osama questions.

Milo started with a straight-forward question asking Osama Bedier why PayPay is blocking WikiLeaks payments. Osama’s answer was that the State Department told PayPal that these were illegal activities. The conversation continued with a question regarding hackers and I thought it was really funny what Osama said. As far as hackers are concerned, Osama says that hackers trying to target your business is a sign of success.

Osama Bedier highlighted that you have to be an open platform in order to have longevity onto the next Internet era and you have to use localised content services in order to offer the best online services to the offline world. According to Osama, around half of the world purchases now are somehow influenced by the web (price comparison, ecommerce, shopping reviews etc). The PayPal VP also emphasized the importance of knowing your customer and knowing how to design for him.

The How To Web team together with the Startup Challenge finalists – Squeeqly and FlairBuilder – are attending Le Web 2010 – Europe’s largest tech conference, organised by Loic Le Meur. We are very excited to be here and would like to try to keep you as updated as possible from the conference site. We will therefore be liveblogging from the conference. However if you want to watch what is going on here you can also check out http://www.ustream.tv/leweb

Le Web is expecting 2500 participants this year from 60 countries at Les Docks in Paris. Some of the main speakers of  the event’s first day are Ethan Beard – Facebook Developer Network director, Jason Goldman – VP of product Twitter, Mike Jones – CEO MySpace and Mikael Hed – Rovio behind the best selling mobile app Angry Birds.

Stay with for live updates from the event.