Xavier Comtesse's talk is about how the new economy is following a new trend: it's based on ordinary people who are now what can be called 'consumactors'. It's basically a neologism based on consumer and actors or consommacteur in french; it expresses the fact that consumer are now ‘actor’ of the system, e.g. for Amazon.com in which people’s review give more and more power to the platform. This is definitely a new business model. So, for Xavier, 2 concepts are important:

transfactors: people who by using new algorithm are able to transform what has been previously done by machines or organizations. Example. Marc Bürki who started a bank after his engineering degree at EPFL but had never worked in a bank. The same goes for Amazon: Jeff Bezos had never worked in a book shop.
consumactors: as said earlier, it's when the users are empowered by the company/platforms and clients have to do part of the job, as with low-cost airline companies such as easyjet:

I would say that , simply, the economy is following the Web 2.0 trend: the most important part of the process is the people: be it consumers or web users. Alain de Vulpian said something like: "from a rigidly regulated mass society to a living networking society"

Technorati Tags: lift, lift06, consumactor, transformactor