LeWeb, now Europe’s largest tech conference, is scheduled to take place on June 5 ad 6 in London. The organisers have announced that the theme for the conference program in London (there is also one in Paris later in the year) is slated to be the “New Sharing Economy”.
Covering a lot of ground, the program will feature such key people in the emerging sharing economy as CEO Chad Dickerson from Etsy, Co-founder Joe Gebbia from Airbnb, Leah Busque from TaskRabbit, CEO Tony Espinoza from of Couchsurfing, Frerk-Malte Feller from Zipcar, Lisa Gansky from Mesh Labs, Shakil Khan from Spotify, Founder Larry Harvey from Burning Man, Co-founder and CEO Jeremy Stopppelman from Yelp, and of course LeWeb Founder Loic Le Meur, as well as many others.
The organisers have chosen to focus on the sharing economy because, as they explain, “This movement represents a major economic, social and cultural shift and is redefining the ways goods and services are exchanged, valued and created.”. The conference is planning to investigate the economics of the sharing economy phenomenon, and how it’s beginning to change the world.
Loic has pointed out in a recent presentation that the sharing economy has already become so pervasive that “You cannot avoid it, even if you try”. Airbnb alone now involves 40,000 people per day, in 30,000 cities, in 192 countries; Kickstarter has already grown to account for $320 million pledged by 2.2 million people on 18,000 projects; and car sharing company Zipcar now has over 767,000 members.
It should be a pretty interesting event, as it does seem like the right moment for an influential tech conference like this to address the sharing economy as a whole, if that’s possible. This year has already seen a number of articles published about the sharing economy in mainstream business media, such as in Forbes and The Economist. The whole idea of a new sharing economy appears to be taking hold, which is a great thing for the world.
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