It’s about 9:45 am Paris time here at the sixth annual Le Web conference. Kicking things off is Twitter creator Jack Dorsey, who just launched his new startup, a mobile payment platform and service called Square, talking with Le Web’s Loic Le Meur. There are 2,300 registered attendees at the event, the most ever, and it looks like most of them have jammed themselves into the main floor to see Dorsey talk.

The audience is eating this up. A large screen next to the stage is showing real time tweets related to the talk, and a new one is popping up every second or faster.

Dorsey is kicking things off talking about his initial vision for Twitter (our first post). “I knew the concept was huge,” he said on stage. “The hardest part of any idea is getting started.”

Dorsey says he’s been surprised by the velocity of growth, and the ways that users have changed it – retweets, @mentions, hashtags, etc., were all invented by users.

Jack’s now giving the audience one of the first live demo’s of his new startup, Square (see here for a video of our demo). Square lets users make payments over a mobile phone, starting with the iPhone. The hardware will be given away for free, he says.

Funny enough, the demo isn’t working properly, although Loic says it worked perfectly back stage. Dorsey switched from wifi to Orange’s mobile network and the payment went right through.

Dorsey is highlighting the social aspects of the service. A picture of the payer pops up if they’re a registered user, adding security to the transaction.

The service is in limited beta, says Dorsey. And a number of retailers around the U.S. are accepting payments via Square.

Dorsey says the service will go live for all next year, hopefully by March. He also responded to a question I asked about Apple’s explorations into this space – they will become a direct competitor. Dorsey says they’re focused on the user experience, getting people in without contracts, merchant accounts, etc. Apple is doing things differently.

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The Social Collective, LaunchBox Digital-incubated startup, recently launched to provide event planners and marketers with a cost-effective browser-based service targeted at enhancing the event experience for both attendees and sponsors. The Social Collective even caught the eye of high-profile event organizers and was used during SXSW and Oracle Open World this year. Today, the startup is launching a second product, called Crowd Campaign, to let users easily launch a contest and then leverage the power of their social graph to promote the campaign. We have free one-year premium accounts (worth $5000 for each account) for the first 100 TechCrunch readers who sign up for a campaign and enter the “techcrunch” promo code here.

When setting up a contest via the web-based product, Crowd Campaign offers the ability to customize the contest’s subdomain, upload a logo and background image,write a Terms & Conditions page, set colors and styles, insert Google Analytics tracking code and more. Contest winners can be decided by popular vote or by an “expert panel” or some combination of both. And contests can include text entries, photo or video submissions and links to other content such as blog posts or web site. Crowd Campaign also offers management tools for removing offensive content, merging duplicate entries and tallying entries, votes and page views.

Using oAuth, any user who votes or submits and entry can Tweet it out from the contest’s Crowd Campaign-powered site. Any Tweets published from Crowd Campaign will include a hash tag that the contest author creates for the campaign. And when a brand creates a contest, the platform allows the administrator to Tweet the link and information about the contest directly from the platform.

Crowd Campaign offers a free version for contests containing no more
than 10 entries and/or 100 votes. To increase these limits, contest
managers can pay as little as $95 up to $4,995 for a one-year
unlimited-use license. Considering the current cost of running a contest on Facebook, Crowd Campaign’s offering is appealing and cost-effective. The product is being used for several contests already, including a Web 2.0 Exp0-sponsored contest to ask U.S. Deputy CTO Beth Novak a insightful question.

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We’ve written a lot about Yahoo Meme, Yahoo’s new microblogging platform that resembles Twitter. A few weeks Yahoo launched an API for Meme and also shed some light on where the social media site is being used; which seems to be mainly outside the U.S. According to Yahoo, Meme is gaining a following in Brazil, China, the Philippines, India and Turkey. Yahoo initially rolled out Meme in Portuguese, then Spanish and then English. Today, Yahoo is rolling out a native version of Meme in Bahasa Indonesia, the national language of Indonesia. The Republic of Indonesia, which comprises over 17,500 islands, is the fourth most populous country in the world.

With the translation, Meme is actually spelled as “Mim” on the site, but it appears to have much of the same functionality as the other versions of the site. Yahoo meme lets users post their own content (including text, photos, videos, links and more) and repost the content of others with one-click publishing, allows users to follow other Meme users (via one-way connections, no friend authorization is required) and comment on their posts. Meme’s content limits are higher than Twitter’s—the limit is 2,000 characters.

Coincidentally, Twitter also recently made an announcement concerning Indonesia, launching a partnership with Indonesian mobile carrier AXIS to provide Tweets via SMS. While Yahoo Meme may be growing internationally, Twitter is aggressively going after international markets as well. The site most recently launched a version in Spanish and plans to roll out versions in French, German and Italian soon. Hopefully Meme doesn’t suffer the same fate as Yahoo’s social network in India, SpotM, which didn’t even make it to its first birthday.

Thanks for the tip Rama.

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Remember when Pizza Hut put out a job posting for a “Twintern,” a.k.a. someone who would Tweet for the company and assist with all things social media? Well, a lucky UNC-Chapel Hill student, Alexa Robinson, was brought on board to manage the @pizzahut Twitter account for the summer and did such a fantastic job that she’s been offered a full-time position as master of all things Twitter at Pizza Hut.

It seems that the folks over at Pizza Hut don’t know exactly what her job title should be. Potential ideas are “Chief Creative Tweeter” and “Social Twitterfly.” Yikes. So the restaurant chain is inviting the greater public to submit creative title’s for the all things Twitter position. Alexa will select her favorite consumer-generated submission and put it on her business card. And as an added bonus, the person who submits the winning entry will be awarded free pizza for a year. To submit your idea, you need to Tweet directly to @pizzahut with your suggestion and tag it with the hashtag #PizzaHutTitle.

The role of the chief Twitterer at Pizza Hut was to be “a social media journalist” who chronicled ‘”in 140 characters or less what’s going on at Pizza Hut,” said Bob Kraut, Pizza Hut’s vice president for marketing communications, in an interview with the New York Times earlier this year. The individual also has to monitor Twitter for complaints about the brand and engage with consumer on the microblogging site.

With the power that Twitter (and other social media sites like YouTube and Facebook) wields over mass communication about brands, celebs and products, it’s not surprising that Pizza Hut would choose to keep the “Twitern” on as full-time staff. There are no doubt countless other minions working for brands and companies to manage their Twitter streams and social media presence.

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