While trying to get a sense of this year’s LeWeb conference, the annual technology culture get-together in Paris, one thing was most striking to me: humans are out of this loop. For the most part, speakers focused on topics like machine-to-machine communication, artificial intelligence, or the now ubiquitous big data.

But while that realization seemed jarring at first, it’s also becoming increasingly clear how these tech-heavy topics will help humans — especially as we approach a world where practically everything is connected. (The so-called “Internet of Things.”)

Let’s take a look at the five most interesting topics at LeWeb:

1) PixPlit’s social photo creation app

As expected, plenty of Instagram-wannabe apps were trying to cut through the noise. But I thought PixPlit, an Tel Aviv, Israel-based app that lets you co-create photos with others, was the standout. It’s like a social jigsaw puzzle that offers you a new way to tell a story.

Simply take a picture with the PixPlit app, decide on the jigsaw canvas design, called the “collage”, apply your filters, and publish. Then the story takes flight — whoever wants to be part of the creation process can add their own piece. In the end, one picture (or part of it) becomes an element in a much bigger artistic creation, with friends or complete strangers.

The PixPlit co-creation process is interesting, but the real value is the way it lets you communicate via tastes and aesthetic notions with others.

2) Jib.li, say hello to “crowdshipping”

Another startup that boosts a new approach to communication is France-based Jib.li, which is like the Craigslist of your shopping abroad. Let’s say you live in Kentucky and your favorite cookies come from Paris. Jib.li makes it easier to source them by connecting travelers to people who need things shipped over to them urgently. The founders call this “crowdshipping.”

Joining the network is free of charge if you’re a traveler — simply state your itinerary and travel dates, as well as available volume in your suitcase. The person who’s asking you to bring an item has to agree to your terms, for example, whether it’s going to be a free or paid transaction, or one in exchange for a return service (or just a drink).

The openness of the exchange is a particularly interesting aspect of Jib.li: transacting takes place directly between the two parties, and the reward is paid upon delivery of the goods. The company may face a few legal hurdles with the current regulations for flight safety — you’re not supposed to carry something given to you by a stranger, especially if you don’t know the actual contents.

3) The man behind the Mars Curiosity Rover speaks out

Muse, NASA Mars Curiosity Rover chief software engineer Benjamin Cichy has his own vision about how social media fits into in the Internet of Things when it comes to space discovery. [Check out our in-depth interview with Cichy.]

For him, Curiosity Rover is the is “the further outpost of a connected device, and on the surface of another planet,” transmitting data to help humans understand their galactic surroundings better. He pointed out how the Internet of Things also includes social media, which has allowed global, real-time distribution of information. The whole world now has immediate access to NASA photos that were only visible to a happy few handful of space scientists before.

The irony, Cichy said, is that nowadays, scientists often end up seeing the images after the general public does, due to the viral nature of the information being broadcasted everywhere simultaneously.

4) Interaxon’s thought-controlled computing

Another mindblowing technology and approach to artificial intelligence comes from Interaxon. On-stage at LeWeb, Interaxon CEO Ariel Garten presented the Muse, which looks like a hair band, but has the ability to register your brainwaves and translate them into concrete signals as you type an email, for example.

“You can listen more carefully to what’s going on inside the brain, understand the relationship between brain activity and emotions and gain more control over your emotional state,” Garten explained.

5) Mobiquithings powers the “Internet of things”

The most striking startup at LeWeb wasn’t on stage, and its technology far from sexy (despite being being oh-so-powerful). Mobiquithings stayed under the radar. — a real tour de force given the power of their simple yet far-reaching technology.

The company uses SIM cards as data transmitters that can connect devices across carrier networks. Since it’s relying on existing infrastructure, the SIM cards can easily give almost any device an always-on Internet connection. For example, it could be placed on your water heater to alert you, or a repairman, as soon as it has a problem.

Mobiquithings notes “by 2020, there will be 50 billion things connected in the world.” That surely represents a massive pool of opportunities for this French startup.

Top photo: Jean Baptiste-Bellet for LeWeb; Cichy photo: LeWeb; Garten photo: Ciara Byrne; SIM photo: Luciano Belviso/Flickr;

The first part of the system is a hub that forms the bridge between the Internet and home devices supporting low-power, wireless protocols like Zigbee and Z-wave. SmartThings adds a set of reference devices to that: a motion sensor, a contact sensor that can be attached to doors and windows, and a low-resolution cloud-controlled camera. You can also use standards-based devices from other manufacturers. Finally, there’s the SmartTag, a keyfob that indicates your presence and also acts as an environment sensor. All kinds of apps will run on top of the basic platform.

“We come at the Internet of Things from the perspective of a bunch of cloud software guys,” says Hagins. “Our tendency was to divorce the intelligence from the devices.” He argues that countering that tendency gives consumers more choice and makes life far easier for developers. “The Internet of things has been held hostage by firmware developers,” he continues. “That’s not a common skill set. A web developer should be able to jump into an IDE, write a smart app that integrates and works with these physical devices, and push a button to deploy.”

The idea of the “smart home” has been around since the 1950s but never became mainstream. The smartphone supplied one of the missing pieces. “We are now carrying the perfect console for the Internet of Things, the smartphone, and 50 percent of consumers in the US and in Europe have one.”

SmartThings polled Kickstarter supporters on what applications they wanted most. DIY home security came out at the top of the list. The definition of security here was broad. It was not just about protecting your home from external threats but also internal threats like a pipe bursting and ruining your wood floors.

Control of entryways was another requirement. “When I use this device as the console for so much of my life, it controls my finances, my communications, my social engagements, restaurant reservations, my music system, my TV. It’s controlling so much and yet I can’t control my front door? We haven’t reinvented the front door in 1,000 years,” Hagins explains.

The next most popular request was care of people and pets. Do you know when your kids get home? Can you tell if the dog’s gotten out of the yard? That your elderly mother has taken her medicine? 

SmartThings’ 6,000 Kickstarter backers will receive the hub and a set of devices in January. The business model hasn’t yet been decided. It may depend on the distribution channels the company chooses. Partners like retailers should be able to add their own value on top of the platform by creating custom application. The company also recently announced a $100,000 contest for software developers and device makers.

SmartThings was founded in 2012, is based in Washington DC, and has a staff of 25.

“You can listen more carefully to what’s going on inside the brain, understand the relationship between brain activity and emotions and gain more control over your emotional state,” Garten explains.

An EEG measures electrical activity in the brain by detecting it via contacts on the scalp. As a medical instrument it has long been used to diagnose conditions like epilepsy and dementia as well as determining whether a patient in a coma is brain dead. Brain electrical activity is cyclic in nature, hence the name brainwave. Waves within particular ranges of frequencies, like “alpha” or “beta” waves, have various types of biological significance.

“Beta waves are associated with focus and alpha waves when you are relaxed and calm or quiet the mind,” says Garten. Beta waves are emitted when people are alert, agitated, tense or afraid and have frequencies ranging from 13 to 60 pulses per second in the Hertz scale. When relaxed, the frequency slows down to 7-13 pulses per second, so called “alpha waves”. We spend most of our time in beta mode, but the alpha rhythm is ideal for learning and performing complex tasks. Decreasing the brain rhythm using techniques like meditation and mindfulness also produces significant increases in the levels of beta-endorphins and dopamine.

“This is still first stage technology so what we can detect is still quite limited but the very fact that we can detect it is pretty damn exciting, ” enthuses Garten. “The predominant thing we can detect is alpha waves and beta waves.” The Muse headband measures full brainwave spectrum data from four points on the scalp: the temples and behind the ears. The integrated Brain Health system suggests and runs you through a series of mindfulness-based exercises such as deep breathing suitable for your current brainwave state. “

“Meditators can have a higher resting alpha state. When you are meditating there are a number of brain changes which go on and over time those become persistent so people are able to maintain this calm state of mind. “

At the LeWeb conference in Paris, Garten demonstrated the headband by adding contextual information based on brain activity to an email. “When someone is focussed the characters are small and tight and as they dream or relax or start to laugh the letters have florishes. When you are adding emphasis to something, you are smiling or using a lot of facial movement (which Muse can detect), we make the text bigger.”

Interaxon is certainly not the only player in this space. Neurosky makes an EEG chipset for integration into other devices as well as producing EEG devices which cost around $200. Emotiv has produced a more sophisticated 16-sensor headset which can detect some emotions and thought patterns but it’s a rather more steep $750. Both applications seem to emphasise applications where you directly control things with your brain such as a computer interface.

“We can do really basic controls – one dimension – based on alpha waves and beta waves. When you focus on something it will happen. If there’s a glowing ball in your game and you focus on it (to go into a beta state), it can get bigger, ” says Garten. However, Muse’s objective seems more inner exploration than external control.  As the Buddha said “It is better to conquer yourself than to win a thousand battles. Then the victory is yours. It cannot be taken from you.”

Muse can be pre-ordered on crowd-sourcing site IndieGogo where the project has already raised $253,293.

Facebook announced today at Parisian tech conference LeWeb that Facebook.com was home to more than 350 applications with more than 1 million active monthly users each.

In a panel onstage, Facebooker Justin Osofsky also said Platform has been integrated with more than 200,000 iOS and Android mobile apps. When it comes to the big money-makers, Osofsky wrote this morning on the company blog, nine of the 10 top money-making iPhone apps are Facebook-integrated, and almost half of the top 400 iPhone and iPad apps use Facebook Platform.

Of course, there was a bit of light pandering to LeWeb’s heavily European crowd of entrepreneurs, developers, and technology enthusiasts. Osofsky mentioned to the audience that Paris is the number-two city in the world when it comes to Open Graph submissions for Timeline apps (don’t worry, San Francisco; you’re still number one). Also, he said that 40 percent of all submissions for Timeline apps come from developers in Europe.

A lot of Platform activity is the direct result of announcements Facebook made ages ago at its developer conference in 2011. At that time, Mark Zuckerberg told the audience about Facebook’s biggest-ever changes: all new Timeline-based profiles, functionality for listening to music with friends, wildly better graphic interfaces across the site, and something called Actions.

Actions represented an all new way for developers, brands, and publishers to interact with Facebook users, and by using Actions and integrating with Timeline, many app developers began to see huge bumps in user activity, from new signups to app engagement.

Given all that and the fact that the social network is now, at one billion users and still growing, the largst of its kind, it’s not too surprising that developers are putting Facebook first when building their apps — no more surprising than the fact that many developers are putting mobile first. They’re fishing where the fish are.

Top image courtesy of Jolie O’Dell

---

Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

---

Mars may once have looked like Earth. It has seasons, polar ice-caps and once supported shallow seas and flowing streams. So did it also once support life? The Mars Curiosity Rover’s chief software engineer Benjamin Cichy just gave a rollercoaster of a talk at LeWeb in Paris on the huge software effort and nail-biting suspense involved in getting the rover to Mars.

NASA has been sending spacecraft to Mars since the 1960s. The first 12 missions failed disastrously. Overall, one-third of all missions to Mars have failed. The Curiosity Rover is the biggest and most complex that NASA has even built, the size of a small car, and it was landed using a completely novel set of technologies.

It took five million lines of code to teach the Rover how to land. A heatshield made from an entirely new material protected the spacecraft during entry. The biggest parachute ever built was used to slow its descent towards the surface down to a mere 300 km per hour. At this breakneck speed the cord was cut and a jetpack attached to the top of the Rover fired up to slow it down to 2.5 km per hour and lower it down towards the surface. Finally the attachment to the jet pack had to be cut before it ran out of fuel and crashed down on top of the rover.

Even worse, there was no way to test if all of this would work together until the landing itself. NASA called it “The 7 minutes of terror.”

The Curiosity Rover’s two-year prime mission is to investigate whether conditions in Mars may have been favorable for microbial life. It is equipped with a 2 meter robot arm, cameras, spectrometer, telescope, chemistry and minerology equipment. It even has a laser which can be pointed as a rock to determine its composition. 

When the Rover has nothing new to report it sends back a packet to Earth. As software engineers do, Cichy inserted his own name and those of the other NASA developers into the 1000 characters available. He also added a quote from Carl Sagan: “We began as wanderers and we are wanderers still.”

We met with Benjamin Cichy for a chat after his presentation for some forward thinking perspective.

VentureBeat: What’s the next step, the closest in time, and the big picture?

Benjamin Cichy: We’re just getting the Rover to be able to explore Mars. It’s been on the surface of mars for four months now. We have a two-year mission, we’re just getting started. What we’re trying to do is to drive across the surface of this crater and get to the base of this mountain that we landed on. We’re going to go read the history book of that mountain —  each layer on that mountain is a chapter in the book of Mars.  We’re going to learn about Mars by reading it from the oldest layer at the bottom, to the most recent layers at the top. That’s what’s next for this mission.

VB: What do you hope to find out?

BC: Whether or not Mars ever could have been a place to have life. Was there a life once on Mars before? Everywhere that we look for life, we know we need to look for three things. An energy source, water an the organic molecules that can bring life — are there building blocks of life on Mars?

VB: Which would be the next planet that you would want to explore, that to you as a scientist think could hold the key to other potential forms of life? 

BC: There’s a lot of other exciting bodies in the solar system and they’re not all planets, they’re moons. Moons of Saturn and moons of Jupiter. One in particular, Europa, is very interesting — in terms of  maybe it’s an environment that could harbor life now; maybe there is a liquid ocean there on Europa. Maybe there’s something interesting to find out on these moons of other planets. What I’d really like to see is some missions to go off explore those other bodies in the solar system and really just look for how pervasive these environments are that could have once supported life.

VB: This is LeWeb and the theme is the “Internet of Things”. How does Mars Curiosity Rover relate to that? 

BC: This really is the first mission that we’ve had since the internet has literally exploded into a hyper connected web: social media, connected devices…. the Curiosity Rover in a way now is the further outpost of a connected device, and on the surface of another planet. What it does is that as Curiosity sends out these images, they are sent all over the world, broadcasted through social media and they get traction elsewhere in the world in a way that they never did before. Images are retweeted thousands of times and often times even before the scientists are able to take a look at them, the general public sees the images. That’s immediate access to the exploration process, participation in the exploration. This is really the first time.

VB: When do you think we’ll be able to have shuttle trips going back and forth between Mars or other planets and the blue planet — Earth? 

BJ: When I talk to people about space, it’s universal: the people want to take that journey of exploration. We won’t be able to do it now, we are taking the baby steps towards understanding what it takes to land on these other bodies, what it takes to get humans up there.

VB: What is the role of private-public partnership in your field? 

BC: When you look at what we need to do to gain low-cost access to space, if we want to go somewhere like Mars, colonize Mars, extend our human presence throughout the solar system, we’re going to need to get much lower cost access to space. One of the great things that we’ve seen through our collaboration with the private industry and the commercial space program is that lower cost access to the space station is achieved through such public-private partnerships. We really need to extend that model, in order to really  gain access to space — low cost access to space is what we will enable us to carry out the rest of our exploration.”

VB: What about communication with and identification of other forms of life? 

BC: Ultimately, we want to find a common language, about exploration, find a common ground. We want to tell them we’re intelligent beings as well.

Benjamin Cichy is on Twitter but says he tweets less than Curiosity Rover (@MarsCuriosity), but you may still want to follow him:  @BenCichy

Interview by contributor Liva Judic; Photo: NASA

---

HealthBeat 2013 is a new conference showcasing how technology is transforming health care. We'll explore how IT is driving out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. Check out full event details here, and register here.

---

The audio-sharing network SoundCloud, which allows users to share not just music but any audio recording — from company earnings calls to cat impersonations — has just launched a new version, “Next SoundCloud,” at LeWeb in Paris.

“Sound will be bigger than video online,” said CEO Alexander Ljung.

VentureBeat once described SoundCloud as “the biggest music startup you have never heard of.” Since then the company landed a reported $50 million in funding and expanded to touch 180 million users (via web, mobile, and partner widgets) a month, an impressive eight percent of the entire online population. One of SoundCloud’s latest users is the White House, which releases Barack Obama’s key speeches and other content via the site.

The Berlin-based company has long wanted to make sound the sixth sense of the social graph. Flipboard, for example, is using SoundCloud to add audio to its content. SoundCloud’s founders are convinced that sound has the potential to be bigger than video, since we listen to it while doing other things, and it’s much easier to create than video. Ljung talked about how he receives sound recordings (rather than the more traditional photos) of his cousin’s new baby.

Human beings derive richer layers of meaning from a voice than from a written sentence. The background sounds when you call someone give you an instant impression of their situation. “If you want to stop being scared when watching a horror movie, you mute the sound. Sound is the emotional carrier,” Ljung said.

Next SoundCloud adds new discovery features like algorithmic recommendations (“Related Sounds”), curation, and reposts. Reposts are similar to Twitter’s RT feature and are a way to amplify the voice of creators. When you join Soundcloud via Facebook, the service will automatically detect what music and sound creators you like so that you can follow them on SoundCloud as well.

At the core of the service is the Soundcloud waveform; a visual representation that allows listeners to add comments at any point in the recording. It was initially developed by Ljung and co-founder Eric Wahlforss as a way to share a piece of music with someone privately and get feedback.

Wahlforss was an artist creating music, while Ljung was a sound designer for TV and films. “We had both been tech geeks all our lives and were really into the whole social web movement around the time of Flickr. But there was no Flickr for music. There was nothing built for artists,” Llung told me. SoundCloud started off as a set of tools for professional and semi-professional music creators. It’s now the standard way for many DJs and music makers to send and receive music. The Berklee College of Music, one of the premier music schools in the world, runs its online courses entirely from SoundCloud.

The startup world may be obsessed with pivots, but SoundCloud has grown from a tiny Berlin startup to a large company without fundamentally changing its mission. “We want to unmute the web,” Ljung told me in an early interview. “We think the web is very silent at the moment.”

SoundCloud was founded in late 2008 and has raised roughly $66 million in funding. It has 160 employees.

Carlos Espinal is partner at Seedcamp, a European micro seed fund for internet technology companies.

Despite any clouds looming over the macro-economic climate, Europe’s startups and investors (and increasingly those from further afield) gather together once a year to attend the LeWeb conference in Paris.

Part of what makes LeWeb so great is the multitude of events that occur on the periphery of the actual conference. With our very own Seedcamp event taking place a few days earlier, Le Camping’s social event at the Paris Stock Exchange, Startup Bus having a get together, and the many private dinners held by companies, tech industry celebs, and investors alike, there is no shortage of opportunities to meet new and influential people as well as up and coming tech startups.

If anything, it is this peripheral networking during LeWeb ‘week’ that makes it increasingly one of the most influential conferences globally. And it is oftentimes the casual conversations that occur on the tails of a great talk between the attendees that the new ideas will take hold for the next year.

I had the chance to catch up with a few friends who attended — Chipper Boulas (Boulas Ventures), Mike Sigal (Guidewire Group), Francois Tison (360 Capital), Scott Sage (DFJ Esprit), Maximilian Claussen (Earlybird), and Marek Kapturkiewicz (Innovation Nest) — to discuss what the future may bring in terms of ideas born out of discussions and talks at LeWeb. These are the four clearest social/mobile trends we expect to see over the next year:

1. Innovation linked to smartphone proliferation – With the ongoing penetration of mobile devices into emerging economies, particularly smartphones, more innovative mobile services will spawn, particularly regarding payments and hyper local targeting.

2. Increased use of groups for social filtering — People are increasingly pressed for time and saturated with social media (George Colony, CEO of Forrester, mentioned that people’s use of social media is only second, in terms of time spent, to childcare, implying we are in a social bubble and people are reaching a saturation point in the use of their time). As a result, companies, content creators and advertisers will struggle to make relevant connections with individuals. However, the rise of social filtering based on the awareness of an individual’s affinity groups while traversing the web (for example, something like Google+ circles) may solve the relevancy and targeting issues associated with trying to connect with an individual without knowledge of the social contexts in which the individual operates.

3. Continued evolution of micro location and hyperlocal applications – While in the past micro location (being able to track a person’s location to a high degree of accuracy whether indoors or out) has been difficult to do, Google’s location head, Marisa Meyer, spoke about how the indoor mapping features of Google Maps for Mobile 6.0 will help spawn greater use of hyperlocal apps and services to provide advertising opportunities for brands and agencies but also more relevant search results for users.

The greater use of APIs such as those from Google and Foursquare will also continue to generate more locally aware applications.

4. Financial technology innovation will speed up — Financial technologies will see wider adoption and democratization. With service providers such as the Currency Cloud, present at LeWeb, and other disruptive players such as Transferwise (Seedcamp Company) and Kantox making inroads into how companies deal with foreign-exchange risk and costs. Additionally, how consumers interface with their financial institutions via their mobile will continue to evolve.

It will be interesting to look back on this list at next year’s LeWeb to see how far and how fast these technologies have moved and to speculate on a new batch of emerging trends over the conference’s great (and free) Nespresso.

The LeWeb conference is just winding down for another year in Paris. From the major brands to the new startups looking for the big break, everyone’s been here.

The conference began amid a lot of speculation about a possible move to London. That commenced a whole debate around innovation in Europe and the regular debate on Europe vs. Silicon Valley. This was heightened by Google executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, saying that Silicon Valley needs to have more competitors on the world stage. Schmidt said he believes a number of European cities had the potential, with Paris being the forerunner. Of course, all of us Europeans loved this and strongly believe that Europe is finally living up to its promise.

I’m still completely buzzing from my first panel at LeWeb. I was joined by Victoria Ransom, CEO of Wildfire, and Matthieu Chéreau, founder and CEO of Tigerlily to debate “Going beyond creating a Facebook page”. The key takeaway from the panel was data, data and more data. It’s all about having the information to understand how to engage audiences and build lasting relationships. The three of us all believe that the right data provides a clear understanding of what works and what doesn’t, and without data it’s impossible to strategically build campaigns that will deliver the best return on investment.

This became even more relevant when Sean Parker stepped onstage and talked about the future of the social web. He claimed that the outcome of the next US election will be determined by social media, and that got me thinking about what has changed in social media since the last election.

Every candidate will be using social media this time around. Having a social and digital policy will not be the differentiator but getting it right and building real engagement will be key. This time around, candidates will have to understand their audiences and develop relationships that are real. What worked for the Obama administration last time will not suffice, but picking the right tools and strategies will give significant results to those that get it right. Once again it all comes back to data and using the data to understanding what’s going to work.

LeWeb continues to be one of the best digital conferences in the world, and this year was no different.