Le Web3 Live

Who said Africa was not present at Le Web 3 ?

Le Web 3 ended up wednesday afternoon with two sparks of ecology and humanitarian relief. Almost an hour of noble feelings to make the web leaders think of something else than business. Not easy, but you have to get money where it is.

Wind energy in Ireland

It was 4.30PM when Tom Raftery, a blogger and social media consultant jumped on the scene to talk of … wind
energy in Ireland.

Did Le Web 3 suddenly move to Bali, to join the climate change conference? The question seemed to be in the mind of some viewers, who were not so many at this late hour of the day.

Yet the brilliant presentation of Tom Raftery succeeded to capture the audience attention. He explained what were the challenges of the wind power in Ireland : it represents 6,5% of the energy demand of the country, and the governement decided to move up to 33% in 2025.
This choice causes some problems : wind power is very variable, when the demand is stable. Energy demand and wind energy supply are almost entirely out-of-sick. For instance, the wind farms energy production falls off at 9AM when the demand picks up.
“If you cannot control the supply, you have got to try control the demand”, said Raftery. His idea to fulfill this goal is to network data centers to collect precise informations about the demand, and then to balance wind sudden drops or picks by speeding up or slowing down data centers generators. Another big challenge is to educate citizens in order to make them use their washing machine or another electric device when the demand and the prices are lower.

All this can be referred as “energy management” for Raftery, a word to recall that energy issues open new business fields. Thereas not a single question at the end of his talk. The speech, as relevant as it was, still seemed quite misplaced in Le Web 3 conference.

Why did Tom Raftery talk of wind energy here? He has two simple answers to the question : his friend Loïc Le Meur asked him (nothing can be refused to the Web 3 guru it seems), and “the people who are here are influencer”. So there is no better place to pass on his message, he thought.

(interview of Tom Raftery will come soon)

Images of poor African people

After the ecological moment, came the humanitarian minute.

To introduce the presentation of UNHCR plan Nine Milion, which aims to provide education to nine million children in 2010, a movie was broadcasted. We could see refugees children from Darfur or Irak, saying they wanted to go to school to become a boss or a teacher, followed by beautiful images of the children carrying wood in desertic areas, with a Hollywood high-moving music : the show went one, even on this sensitive topic.
Then a UNHCR relief worker dedicated his speech to his colleagues who died in an Al Qaeda bomb attack in Algiers the day before. His voice was shivering. He continued : “With all the creativity in the room, maybe we could reflect how we could bring technology to the “dark places” of the world, and try to make them a use for education.” Some people leaft the conference room, others were watching mangas cartoons on their laptops. But a few were still listening.

The last speaker was Hans Peter Bromdo, a Norwegian businessman leading Plum. This company provides tools to websites to share their content and become more “social”.
With seven other “Digital champions”, he takes part to the webmastering of Nine million plan, and said just a few words to the remaining audience : “All you have to do is helping create nine million references on the web to the site ninemillion.org. Post something on your blog, twitt it, make a video, something that points back to Nine million.org.”

A sincere plea to launch a big communication campaign, in which Nike Inc., Microsoft, Merck & Co. Inc., or Procter & Gamble are also involved.
After the end of his speach, Hans Peter Bromdo explained why he is committed in this action and why Le Web 3 conference was the right place to alert on the subject.

(interview of Hans Peter Bromdo will come soon)

These last moments of Le Web 3 created an incomfortable feeling. After two days of frenetic business unrest, it sounded like “Oh Gosh! we almost forget to tell you something about climate change and poor african people.” A unpleasant smell of “politically correct”. But it may have triggered something in the mind of people who have great influence on the web and money to give out. And this is far from useless.