LeWeb has published its schedule for the upcoming global conference for tech in Paris, and it’s looking pretty good. TechCrunch Europe is a media partner and is helping to organise the startup competition, so that’s our interest declared. That said Loic and Geraldine Le Meur have clearly finessed the event back towards tech companies and brought a new focus on Europe I think. Here are some highlights they’ve just published:
-Her Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan will speak at noon on Dec 10th
-The Real Time Web theme will be present in the form of Jack Dorsey (inventor of Twitter) opening the event, followed by announcements from Microsoft, Facebook, MySpace, Ning, LinkedIn and Ustream.
-Mobile applications will be quite high on the agenda with a panel including Shazam, Tapulous, SGN and others.
– Google’s Marissa Mayer returns to keynote again as is Skype founder and partner at Atomico Niklas Zennstrom and YouTube’s founder and visionary Chad Hurley
– European startup notables will be present, such as Brent Hoberman, Marten Mickos, Marc Simoncini, Martin Varskavsky, all of whom have founded leading European startups.
– The Middle East Panel has been curated by Joi Ito and the Russia Panel has been prepared by Jennifer Schenker
– Chris Brogan and Chris Pirillo will talk on community best practice and the brands panel features Dell and the World Economic Forum
– The Twitter ecosystem gets airtime with with the Twitter Apps and RealTime Search panels
– Other speakers include Timothy Ferriss, Violet Blue, Gary Vaynerchuk and Tony Hsieh… who just sold his company, Zappos, to Amazon for… about a billion dollars.
– Europe versus Silicon Valley was a heated conversation last year. In addition to the traditional Gillmor Gang closing the conference, this year they will hold a European Gang just before Gillmor.
– Google, Nokia, Facebook, PaypalX, Twitter, Six Apart will feature in Workshops & Garage sessions scheduled during the 2 days.
– 1,400 participants are already signed up