Loïc Le Meur

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Loïc Le Meur
Loïc Le Meur at the LeWeb3 conference in 2006
Born	July 14, 1972 (1972-07-14) (age 35) France
Occupation	Serial entrepreneur, Blogger

Loïc Le Meur (born July 14, 1972) is a French serial entrepreneur and blogger. He served as Executive Vice President EMEA at software company Six Apart after merging French blogging company Ublog with Six Apart in July 2004.^[1] In late 2006 Le Meur became a public backer of French presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy and joined Sarkozy's campaign team as an advisor on Internet-related topics.^[2]^[3]

1 Career
2 Blogging
3 Controversies
4 Bibliography
5 References
6 External links

[edit] Career

In 1996, Loïc Le Meur founded his first company, interactive agency B2L, which was sold to advertising agency BBDO in 1999 for an undisclosed sum.

In parallel he also founded RapidSite France and made it the leading web hosting company for small businesses in France.^[4] In 1999, he sold RapidSite to France Télécom where it became part of Wanadoo.^[5]

In 2000, he founded application service provider Tekora and sold the company to French software company Access-Commerce in 2002.^{[citation needed]}

In 2003, he got involved with French weblog hosting company Ublog which he purchased from its founder, fellow Breton Stéphane Le Solliec in October 2003.^[6] He then grew Ublog and merged the company with Six Apart where he became Executive Vice President in 2004.^[7] He held his role as EVP EMEA until March 2007 when he handed his job over to long-time business partner Olivier Creiche. Le Meur remains Honorary Chair of Six Apart Europe. ^[8]

In 2006, Le Meur joined the RSS Advisory Board, the group responsible for the RSS 2.0 specification.

[edit] Blogging

Le Meur's personal weblog has been one of the most widely read blogs in France. He is also well-known as the organizer of the LesBlogs weblog conferences in Paris, France (later renamed to LeWeb).^[9] In 2004, he became part of the team behind the official World Economic Forum Weblog.^[10]

In December 2005, he conducted the first podcast interview with a major French politician, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy.^[11] While AgoraVox, a French citizen journalism site, panned the interview as "infotainment", claiming Le Meur had asked "softball questions" and criticized the podcast interview as free publicity for Sarkozy,^[12] Le Meur responded that he didn't want to be confrontational, and the event was seen as an effort to stem Sarkozy's decline in popularity among younger voters.^[13] Le Meur then went on interviewing several other politicians in subsequent podcasts, including Dominique Strauss-Kahn and François Bayrou. He announced his support for Sarkozy in the 2007 presidential election in September 2006.^[14] Both Bayrou and Sarkozy spoke at internet conference LeWeb3 in Paris organized by Le Meur in December 2006, as did Israeli politician Shimon Peres.^[15] He was invited by the french president Nicolas Sarkozy to come with him to the White House during his first official visit in United States in November 2007.

[edit] Controversies

Loïc Le Meur did not create the Ublog service (then sold to Six Apart) as often mentioned. The Ublog service and technology was acquired from its founder and lead developer Stéphane Le Solliec and then incorporated by Le Meur.

Le Meur was blamed by some in the global blogosphere for "hijacking" (term used by the BBC blog and other bloggers:http://www.britishblogs.co.uk/categories/leweb3/) the 1,000-person conference he organized in Paris, Le Web3 (2006), by inviting his Presidential choice, Nicolas Sarkozy, to give a 15 minute speech that included no exchange with the audience. Another presidential contender, the centrist François Bayrou, also spoke at the conference (taking questions).

[edit] Bibliography

Blogs pour les pros by Loïc Le Meur and Laurence Beauvais, Dunod ISBN 2100493957, November 2005
La révolution podcast by Loïc Le Meur and Laurence Beauvais, Dunod ISBN 2100500597, September 2006.