After having attended several entrepreneur events in Belgium, like the Open Coffee and BetaGroup gatherings in Brussels, the 8th edition of the Le Web Conference is comparatively huge. I was amazed by the scale of the event and the clout of its attendees.

Except from several big wigs from Microsoft, Google, FaceBook and MySpace, the larger part of the audience consisted of mainly high profile bloggers, VC scouts and French entrepreneurs. I met people from quite a lot of interesting initiatives, like the SilverLight guys from Eeple with their digital picture board, the Three Melons advertising game development company, Yoowalk's nice looking 3D web village, SPARKEO, Weblin, Realmee, BloggersBase, dismoiou, NetVibes, and last but not lease our Belgian friends from Radionomy.

On a less positive note: I wasn't really convinced of the startup contestants. The people's choice Silentale not being among the three winners is an indicator of the lack of a clear winner. No wonder because a lot were uninspirational, lacked a good business model or couldn't really be classified as a startup anymore (5 years old, funded with $25 million, ...).

Many thanks to Robin Wauters, Clopin, Clo, Jonathan and Roland for grabbing a le Big Mac on Tuesday, you guys are hilarious. Also thanks to Kris Hoet and company from Microsoft for the cool GapingVoid drawing and for showing me the LiveServices, SilverLight and the BizSpark program. As mainly an Apple and open source geek I have to confess: Microsoft was probably showing some of the most impressive stuff at Le Web.

Well, I've had enough of Frenglish for quite some time, but as my namecard book shows: it was definitely worth it!

 Ok, I know, this is already more than a year old. But a little recycling doesn't hurt right?

This is a TV commercial from Toyota that starts with what looks like some normal World of Warcraft in-game action. Suddenly one of the characters summons up a Toyota SUV and starts trashing monsters. Great video, especially because it looks so real.

Since several years, the collaboration tools from 37Signals have been enjoying quite a lot of attention. It probably has a lot to do with the popularity of the Ruby on Rails framework, which is a by-product of the development.

The nice people from Datanews have featured us in their startup section this week.

You can read the article in Dutch here and there is also a French version here. Sorry, no English.

Mesh-Box is a nice blog on marketing co-operations. It features news, books, and papers on current marketing research in brand alliances, co-branding, cross-marketing and the likes.

Sam's paper on Brand Alliances 2.0 is featured there since Monday. Go check it out!

Some of today's artists are so succesful in marketing themselves, that as a marketeer you cannot but respect them (or the folks they employ).

The first TechCrunch meetup for me personally, and quite an experience it was. IntroNiche presented it's new business model and enjoyed the beauty contest with 15 other Belgian startup companies.

After Mike Butcher treated us to his usual tough love, we continued the party on free drinks in One Agency's cool warehouse office. And we had french fries!

"Why does a $1.7 million car need a deluxe edition?" asks the WSJ journalist quite pointedly. Apparently the customers of luxury carmaker Bugatti expressed a need for more customization of their already pricey toys. Therefore the compancy decided to partner with French luxury brand Hermès to create customized versions of the car, with hand-made leather interior. This increases the price tag to an astonishing $2.4 million.

This brand alliance promotion really rocks.

This afternoon actually.  I guess I should get going to attend the conference. I've got three minutes to explain cross-promotion marketing and the IntroNiche platform. For those who want to read my slides at ease: