There’s only one week to go until Paris becomes the beating heart of Europe’s tech community. Organisers Loic and Geraldine LeMeur will be hosting the 9th LeWeb Paris at Les Docks, bringing together entrepreneurs, leaders and influencers from all around the world to connect, both in person, and online from wherever they are.

The theme for this year’s LeWeb is “The Internet of Things." For many years this idea has been pure Science Fiction. But we are slowly and steadily starting to connect the dots. The idea of intelligent connected objects is just around the corner, and they are going to become a very large and exciting part of our daily lives. Imagine a day when your fridge will tweet you to pick up some milk, or your lights will change colour to reflect your Smartphone playlist. Or your thermostat will learn your ideal temperature without even asking. Oh wait… This is already happening! These technologies exist, and we can’t wait to learn more about the future of the Internet of Things at this year’s LeWeb, and share our plans and ideas for it.

At Salesforce, the Internet of Things feels like a natural extension to our mandate. As the leading enterprise cloud pioneer we deal with connecting customers, partners and employees in new and exciting ways. For several years companies such as Toyota, Virgin America, Burberry, General Electric and Coca-Cola have entrusted us to help them become socially connected enterprises, and to establish a new paradigm with new ways to interact with their customers. So our vision of the "Internet of Things" goes way beyond simple connected and mobile objects. In addition to multiple interactions involving connected objects, one must also take into account, connected information, places, systems and people. This ecosystem is what will power this new Internet of Things.

So if you want to hear about how we’re helping shape businesses and make the Internet of Things a reality, come visit our booths at LeWeb or watch our Chief Marketing Officer Mike Lazerow discuss the future of Marketing with Robert Scoble on 5th of December.

Similar to our set up at LeWeb last year or in London earlier this year, we will monitor the social conversations around LeWeb12 Paris with our Marketing Cloud listening tool. Visitors will be able to follow the key topics, trends and talking points from the various sessions and speakers via our Command Center in the Pullman building. We also teamed up with a crack team of 3 young developers to create an extensive and powerful mobile App to allow for real-time investigation of the social conversations mixing Marketing Cloud data, Heroku platform and mobility. During the past few weeks three students together with our Platform team built this LeWeb Analytics iPad App for Loic LeMeur. That way he will have access the real-time data around the event at all times, and will be able to share with the audience the hottest topics, speakers and startups.

And that’s not all. At our booth in the Eiffel building you will have the chance to peer behind the curtain and see how our Marketing Cloud is helping big brands turn connections into customers for life. We will also be holding Salesforce workshops in the afternoon of December 5^th if you want to take it for a test drive! There we will welcome customers from Pernod Ricard and the city of Saint-Quentin to talk about the impact of professional social networks within their organization.

All in all it will be three packed days! And if you can’t be in Paris this year, we will do our very best to connect you to LeWeb and ‘The Internet of Things’ with curated content; including daily blog posts, video interviews with speakers, startups and visitors as well as live updates via our various Salesforce social media channels. So stay tuned. We are counting the days.

 *Image courtesy of LeWeb