Grid is the future of computing

Remember Gordon Moore´s law? "The power of computer chips components doubles every 2 years." Moore came up with this statement when a co-founder and top technologist at Fairchield. Three years later, he founded the Intel some of us have Inside.

Many thought died this assertion. It probably is...But IBM went beyond the obvious and just successfully tested a 500Ghz transistor circuit. Not bad, uh?

Unfortunately, for every Hertz of power produced, another Hertz is used to lower the temperature of the semi-conductor!!! Hence, and as I see it, energy management in electrical and hence computer devices as THE big issue of the upcoming decades; but I might be mistaking. This fact makes Moore´s law all the more unsustainable in the mid run.

However...Do you realize that everytime you leave your computer unattended when in a meeting or so, you´re basically wasting calculation power? Imagine a world in which you would access your applications faster thanks to your colleague being on vacations, or your neighbour having a shower? This technology already exists. Its name is Grid Computing.

Grid Computing is the future of computer science.

PS: more on Grid with Oracle, which survey underlines the trend for wider grid adoption in a near future.

Happy birthday IT Addict!

IT Addict is one week and 18 posts old. Many thanks for your support in the beginning of this great common adventure into the World of Information Technology! Let´s keep on the great work together. This blogs need our everyday commitment - to make sure we understand better how technology shapes the world we live in, and conversely, how Society fosters technological breakthroughs.

Business Week ranking: Top 100 IT companies

Soccer World Cup:
France 3 - 1 Spain

Top 100 IT Companies by Business Week:
France 1 - 2 Spain
(Cap Gemini ranks 72; Telefonica Moviles & Telefónica rank respectively 6 & 7)

This high-end comparison being written down, some interesting facts derived from this ranking should be highlighted:
- criteria are financial; company executives and hence employees behaviors, need to align with shareholder´s interests in order to be successful;
- Top 3 companies are all from emerging countries (Mexico & Taiwan);
- Where the hell are IBM? Adobe? Symantec? Business Objects? Comverse? Salesforce? AMD? etc.
- Accenture is the only huge Western IT services consulting company to appear in the ranking (where are CSC? Bearing Point? IBM - again?), and it interestingly outperforms Indian rivals (Infosys, Wipro, Tata Consultancy Services);

I´m going to stop here with remarks since I could spend the night analyzing the results. The whole point of these highlights is that I highly recommend you to take a deep look into the chart.


Oups, I was almost forgetting...I have a business idea: what about opening a bartering e-commerce platform where France could trade its soccer skills against Spanish IT capabilities? What do you think is the most valuable?

After Google Spreadsheets, Microsoft Office 2007 goes online

2 weeks after Google announced the release of its ASP spreadsheets software, Microsoft launches Office 2007 online: you don´t need to download anything, so it won´t take too much space on your hard drive. And you can access it anywhere.

This is just the beginning of the Google-Microsoft war. More on this topic very soon.




ADDITIVE: Office Online is not compatible with Mozilla Firefox: Boooooooooh! Anyone got tomatoes?...

From Web 1.0 to Web 2.0

I just tried to conceptualize the whole thing in a very simplistic chart. Tell me what you think about it!

Now, just one, very tellling example:

I co-founded 4 years ago, alongside with Jeremy Ghez - and joined at a later development stage by HEC-classmate Steve Danino, a think-tank on the Middle-East geopolitics: AFIDORA (see what Wikipedia says about this organization - in French).

a) AFIDORA.com, the Web 1.0 era
I had devised the first website myself: it was a homepage-like catalog of articles sorted by type (editorials, analyses, opinion, reports and synthesis). On the one hand, we were often praised for the quality of our research and event-organization capabilities; but on the other hand, though we were really willing to foster this aspect of our business, interesting interactions with our readership (including financial contributors, active members, guest speakers, etc.) hardly happened online. We were dealing with this issue (and this is very Web 1.0) by consolidating all our readers comments and our own reactions on a "Your Comments" space on the website.
It wasn´t so bad for the times, but we came to a point where new tools enabled better user interfaces and hence interactions...

2) AFIDORA.com, the Web 2.0 era
I was late (or lazy?) in realizing what we were about to miss if we didn´t upgrade our antique, old-fashioned website. Steve, already mentioned, felt the Web 2.0 tsunami ways before I did. He didn´t want AFIDORA to miss the comments democratization movement the Web 2.0 was impulsing. This movement was also so much AFIDORA!
The non-profit elitist think-tank (think-tank: a top-down approach that says "look, we are smarter than you, look at our great articles") was renamed "community on the Middle East geopolitics" (in a community, every member has the same rights) during the process of allowing readers to comment directly an article below it. Steve used the content management system Mambo and developed the new website alone for 2 months, every night.
Thanks to Steve Danino´s drive, AFIDORA.com now ranks number 4 in terms of single visitors in the whole French-speaking geopolitics and foreign affairs industry. You can visit AFIDORA´s Web 2.0 website by clicking here.

INSEAD just opened a Research Center on Entrepreneurship in Israel

Though a student at another leading European business school based near Paris (namely, HEC Paris), I have to say that INSEAD knows where to find the best research prospects. Fontainebleau & Singapore-based INSEAD has just opened a research center dedicated to Entrepreneurship in Israel (click here for official press release).

Some would like to say: why the hell in Israel, and not in Tallín (Estonia), Paris (France - where the word "entrepreneur" comes from), Bangalore (India), Boston (MA, USA), Shanghaï (China) or Palo Alto (CA, USA)?

The best answer you can get is obviously not from me, but from specialists. I was lucky enough in my life to get to meet fantastic people such as Pr. Wim Hulsink, Professeur of Entrepreneurship at the Rotterdam School of Management (Erasmus Universiteit) - a University where I did a semester-long Erasmus International exchange. Pr. Willem Hulsink recently invited, during a workshop at the Royal Netherlands Association for Agricultural Sciences, a prominent specialist of Entrepreneurship: Pr. Uzi de Haan - a former CEO of Philips Israel & Professior at Technion Institute of Technology (Haïfa, Israel).

Here is a link to Pr. Uzi de Haan´s tremendously clear and telling presentation about clusters of innovation in Israel, and the country´s entrepreneurial capabilities.

I myself too part of an entrepreneurial adventure in Tel Aviv: an eBay-like devised specifically for Israel named iMarket. It´s been one of the greatest cultural and human experience in my life: building a project from scratch, dealing with all aspects of management in an entrepreneurial and technological intensive environment. Here´s a picture of about half the team:


The iMarket team out of work to bowling and a whisky at 11:00pm in Tel Aviv...Though pretty tired, we were all smiling because the person who took the picture was a very hot girl.

From left to right: Raphael Benzekri, a great hard-working, visionary CTO; Eran Dangot, whose superb people skills made of him the best sales manager of the company; Radi Isakharov, a very clever and talented Software Engineer; and I´m on the right-hand side of the picture.

On Bill Gates departure media hype and criticism

Many bloggers, journalists, financial analysts wrote pretty nasty things ("monopoly Emperor", "responsible for all the bugs in the world", blablabla) about Bill Gates when he announced his, yet predictable, retiral in a year or so. To me, this is unfair.

(Picture: Bill Gates went to Israel in October 2005. I was in Tel Aviv at the time, and all I can say is that he was better received than the President of the United States would have)

I believe Bill Gates deserves a big applause for all his achievements in the software and technology industry (and soon to come, in charity) he has largely contributed to shape and reshape. Not only does he masters better than anyone else what it takes to develop a computer program (see Joel´s first Bill Gates´s "fucking review"). Bill Gates also had, and still has, a clear vision of where we are going, from where we´re standing. Most importantly, as a true successful entrepreneur and businessman, Bill Gates knows how to share his vision.

Thank you Bill.

Parallels allows direct switching between Mac OS & Windows!

While Apple´s Bootcamp doesn´t allow switching between MacOS and Windows without rebooting (Boot-Camp: Boot and chose your Camp), Parallels, a Washington DC-based software company, released Parallels Desktop for Mac - devised for Intel-powered Apple computers only.

Parallels Desktop for Mac makes best use of a virtual machine to run Windows, and Windows software, on MacOS as a fast as a fast PC would do. Congrats guys, you outperformed Apple. Are Apple programmers losing edge and momentum? Has Apple for ever lost its software mind to become a 100% hardware manufacturer in a near future?

Google on your mobile!

This is another revolution. From now on, we´ll all be able to google on our mobile phone everything we do, everybody we meet, every place we go.

Google Mobile Search will for sure change many things in our everyday life.

You meet a celebrity in the street but can´t remember his/her name? Google it!

You´re in a taxi, and you can´t remember the address of this night club you´re supposed to meet your friends? Google it!

You´re at lunch with clients of yours. You really want to impress them but, damn it!, you want to make sure that you´re not going to tell nonsense about their competitors. A mock-stay at the bathroom to Google it - and there you go!

I just hope it works...Well, not Google Mobile, but the Internet (I had tried GPRS access on my mobile, but it was too slow for everyday navigation)...

FON launches "the wireless networking era": 5$ for a router!

FON has been building a telecom infrastructure network without actualling investing in the actual infrastructure! History provides us with countless examples of Capex (capital expenditures) being the cornerstone of telco infrastructure companies (e.g. Google and its secret fiber optics network project).

However, the business model of FON makes such a move possible: people subscribing to FON (FONeros) share their own wireless connection with the FONeros surfing next to their home. And conversely, when travelling in or out of town you are able to connect to other FONeros´ wireless networks.

And to make sure it is just the beginning wireless democratization, FON just launched a special offer: you´ll get a router for 5$ alonside your first one-year subscription within the FON community.

What about the future then? Will we all become FONeros aswell as we´d be bound to feed our personal blog one day? Have we entered a new era, "the wireless networking era"? CISCO, already a networking company, has been the fastest growing company ever; will it be overtaken by FON?

Why I´ll never fly Delta Airlines again

Pierre de Beaumarchais granted us with a wonderful saying: "Sans la liberté de blâmer, il n’est point d’éloge flatteur" (to the happy few French speakers of the Web2.0). I was happy to recommend my readers to purchase their storage solutions on Flash Memory Store, I am now delighted to tell you about the worst airline, no sorry, the worst company ever. Namely, Delta Airlines.

The following facts about Delta Airlines raise the two major issues of today´s IT world: Information Systems reliability and..Human nature.

Indeed, Deborah (my girlfriend) and I underwent the worse airline experience in our lifetime three weeks ago, as we were flying back to Europe from New York City - where we had spent half a year.

Delta Airlines did it all to us, check it out by yourself:

* their staff (amongst them the JFK check-in officer Jason Q.) were rude, extremely rude (pretending they didn´t hear us speaking, and hence not answering);
* they lied (they lost our ticket and said it was our move, to make us pay 100$ - which we had to do eventually) several times;
* they treated us like shit, asking me to run from a Terminal to another in less than 10 minutes to get a ticket from another service: what if I were a senior citizen? Couldn´t they repair their mistakes by themselves? In the end, the guy hadn´t even waited for me: he had taken another customer in line.
* their information system is crappy: they could find Deborah but not me on their system, and they had the guts to doubt the fact that I had purchased my ticket! Fortunately, Deborah had a printout of the electronic ticket purchase.
* they made us pay 50$ for a .9lbs overweight (we had four pieces of luggage: 3 less than 50lbs, the limit, and 1 of 50.9lbs)! - I almost forgot to mention that it had already been two hours since we had arrived at the airport.
* their information system had "forgotten" that we had asked to be seated together;
* and their information system told them our luggage were in the airport whilst our luggage were in the plane they didn´t want us to board in!
* consequently, not only did we wait 10 hours in JFK, they also lost our luggage;
* and neither their customer service nor their HQs ever replied to our letters, obviously.

I´ll never fly Delta Airlines again. I had flown Delta Airlines (well actually, their low-cost Song) many times in the US, up to the point that I had a Frequent Flyer membership card. Not only did they lose a customer, they converted me into a fanatic anti-Delta buzzer.

Their information system being defectuous (which is a direct threat to personal security), the least their personnel could do is care all the more about their customers. But Delta´s personnel was mean, arrogant, and both Deborah and I had never felt so angry and humiliated anytime in our lives before. Of course many things in life are much worse, but I wouldn´t want my beloved IT Addict blog readers to undergo the same uncomfortable experience as Deborah and I did. So don´t fly Delta Airlines, never, ever, whatsoever. And spread the word.



After Googlinvestigating for a few seconds, I noticed I´m not alone complaining about Delta Airline´s service. Here´s a sample of 6 websites amongst many:
http://www.deltareallysucks.com/
http://www.thedonovan.com/beth/archives/001244.html
http://cdbaby.org/stories/06/05/09/3249045.html
http://www.complaints.com/directory/2004/may/29/7.htm
http://www.consumeraffairs.com/travel/delta_skymiles.html
http://blog.megacity.org/archives/000329.php

I also found a post on Loic le Meur´s blog, reporting the story of a Delta Airlines flight attendant who was basically fired because she was blogging...
http://www.loiclemeur.com/english/2004/10/the_bbc_talks_a.html

What Will Web 3.0 look like?

In (very) short:

Web 1.0 was about: personal web pages, corporate catalogs, content-only journalism, chat rooms, online purchases in online shops, static HTML + dynamic Javascript

Web 2.0 is about: sharing in general (thoughts on blogs, pictures, contacts, etc.) , collective content creation, professionals-amateurs interactions, user reviews, collaborative tools, php + MySQL + AJAX (Javascript + XML), live personalized interfaces (RSS, podcast), VoIP

Web 3.0 will be about: bringing together mobility and Web 2.0; making use of wider broadbands to ensure the integration of Voice, Video, Music, Text, Images, GPS in mobile devices such as cell phones in general, iPods, Blackberries, Blueberries, Strawberries, etc. Tomorrow´s mobile devices will look pretty much alike in terms of functionalities. What about design? Will Apple become the world´s n.1 mobile phones manufacturer?

Book review, Lou Gerstner´s "Who said Elephants can´t dance?" on IBM turnaround

I´ve justed sent Lou Gerstner´s book "Who said Elephants can´t dance?" back to my bookshelves.

I have to admit that, having been for a while very keen on CEO´s books, Lou Gerstner´s feedback on his IBM experience is one of the category´s masterpieces.

Well, writing on IBM, a fascinating company, also helps. But I really enjoyed the way Gerstner described the assets as well as the shortcomings of Big Blue.

There are definitely a few lessons I should remember from reading this book (nicely written, fluid style - at least that´s my opinion):

- Gerstner had a strategy consulting, consumer goods and financial services marketing background prior to joining IBM as a "Change Agent". He was the first non-IBMer to take such a responsibility in a company known for its overwhelming culture. He managed, through a real, sound, true alignment of strategic issues with operational behaviours and communications, to make of IBM (an at the time heavy administrative technology-breakthroughs focused geographically-divided multinational) a customer satisfaction, market-driven services transnational company (IBM is still today´s leading services corporation worldwide).

- Throughout the book, Gerstner insists a lot on:
* communication, "Say what you do, do what you say" could be one of his mottos, at all levels: cross-border, cross-departements, bottom-up, top-down, internal-external;
* a constant competitive analysis, or benchmarking, with speeches I find hilarious, but true, referring to competitors stealing IBMers the money they saved for their children´s College studies. As an example, the way IBM could generate enough free cash-flows (the only real performance indicator in the corporate world according to Gerstner) was basically to optimize its cost structure against the competition´s cost structure;
* transferring R&D patents into disruptive market innovations that serve customer´s needs;
* avoiding corporate inertia, fancy titles, and "sit-and-watch" jobs; a good strategy can´t work without a perfect execution.

Gerstner was also rather concerned about his lack of IT skills prior to joining the company. He had an terrific advantage though: he knew IBM from a customer viewpoint. Going back to his lack of technology acumen, Gerstner was humble enough to find the best people to translate the high-tech jargon into common English sentences, and transform IBMers, great tech persons, into great tech persons + great business-minded people.

Today, IBM´s competitive edge is challenged but still unmatched in many areas (Middleware software like Rational and Lotus for instance; storage solutions; servers; IT services consulting; etc.) thanks to its one-stop shop size. I believe great CEOs are brave leaders. In other words, leaders courageous enough to do what it takes to convince their stakeholders (clients, suppliers, employees, shareholders, etc.) to pull the rope in the same direction. Gerstner´s legacy is all made of brave moves, amongst which:
* keeping IBM in one piece, to benefit from the economies of scale implied by its size;
* lowering the size of blockbuster servers to increase short term market share & cash flows to invest better in the future;
* realizing that OS2, though a better operating system than MS Windows 3.1, had lost the operating systems battle against Microsoft´s marketing power. I used to be a fanatic of OS2, Mac OS and Jean-Louis Gassée´s BeOS a long time ago - and indeed, these were better products than Windows. But in the end, what matters is not technology, it´s customer adoption...I learnt the lesson too and switched to Windows when its 1995 millesium was released;
* etc. etc. Reading this book is a no-brainer!

All in all, I learnt a lot reading Gerstner´s "Who said Elephants can´t dance?", and I strongly recommend this book to all would-be managers, as well as all the geeks who believe what matters most is technology, not customers. The latters will find in Lou Gerstner´s testimony the perfect demonstration that what lies behind every success as well as all failures is nothing else but competitive and market forces - which then drive technological innovation.

On eBay´s international expansion strategy

I´ve gathered some data about countries where eBay operates. Here it is presented in a table (Sources: populationdata.net & global-reach.biz; figures are from December 2005).

Could someone explain to me what eBay´s international expansion strategy exactly is? It seems rather inconsistent...

For instance, eBay´s in Singapore, New Zealand & Ireland and not in, say, Estonia, Jordan, or Israel (for the latter: pop. 6,780,000; 3,700,000 Internet users; 55% IT literacy).

When it comes to Japan, where eBay, again, doesn´t operate, I understand that Rakuten´s leadership is probably unmatchable, but isn´t fighting competition the very essence of top companies?

eBay eventually integrates with Skype for good

So there we are. eBay eventually issued a press release stating clearly how it was intending to make Skype fit in its universe (eBay + Paypal, and soon Fon?): buyers will be able to contact sellers through Skype when considering buying an expensive item (like jewels, a piece of Art, a car, a sockets company, etc.). This, according to eBay, should help close deals faster, enhancing trust and confidence in both parties´ abilities to pursue the transaction.

Though I cannot come up right now with a smarter idea to integrate eBay & Skype, I believe the move (to be probably extended to all items soon) is too easy to be value creative - especially for sellers. The whole point of eBay relies on its asynchronous properties: I can sell my books while sleeping! And I definitely don´t want to waste my time chatting with every single eBay user, or I´d rather go to the flea market and liquidate everything.

I´m all the more convinced that eBay purchased Skype - for a mere $bn 2.6, just to prevent someone else (Google? Yahoo? Microsoft?) from buying the Skype technology and voIP market share out. And such a way of playing with one´s shareholders money, to my mind, jeopardizes the executive team´s credibility.

Picture request...

No really connection with IT, but it shows at least one way to take advantage of the new horizons the maturation of the Internet has opened.

I got an e-mail this morning asking for my picture. There you go.

Please not that, though single, I´m currently unavailable. I hope this little story will urge people to start their own blog...

"Loin des yeux, loin du coeur"

This is a French saying literally meaning "out of sight, out of heart".

This huge outsourcing trend has been regularly hitting the headlines for a decade now. One of the main challenges outsourcing poses is nothing else but remote control, remote collaborative work. The Internet is an extraordinary communications tool. However, I can´t come up with a single communication tool that enables to capture one´s emotions. The Internet abides by this rule. A number of software companies have launched collaborative tools that more or less satisfy the appetites of some users. But stomaches grow faster than new versions developments. And nothing will ever, whatsoever, replace eye-to-eye, face-to-face, hand-in-hand human contact.

I´m currently working on an Internet project, and all three of the engineering team (a graphic designer, two programmers) work from home. Fine. But for one reason or another, the development pace is rather slow. This might be because our project management methods are not yet well defined between the different players, however I found natural to suggest the COO of the company (I work for the VC fund investing in this Internet start-up) whether I could help find additional programming resources.
- "Why not?", he said - "What you got?"
- "Well, I know several free-lance programmers and graphic designers. They´re all based either in Israel, in the USA and in India. And when it comes to companies, I know two guys in Paris who´ve successfully launched their own website designing business". Namely David Poryngier (www.metaconsult.fr) and Vincent Jacques (www.antemia.com). The latter manages a team of programmers based in Romania.
- "No, I ain´t work with such people. I want them to stand right here, in Barcelona."
- "You know, I guess Romanian engineers are a lot cheaper than here"
- "It doesn´t matter really. I want to be able to kick their ass if they don´t do their job. Can you picture me flying to Bucarest every week-end to monitor their work?"
- "Loin des yeux, loin du coeur", I whispered.

Though I still disagree with the COO, I found this perspective interesting since many decision-makers may think the same way. We´ve entered an era in which distance matters less, it seems, thanks to new communications tools - an era of "Globalization" as they say. But isn´t geographical distance the ultimate bottleneck of globalization until someone invents the "ubiquity machine"?

Internet advertising revenues

Number of single visits monthly	Monthly revenues (€)
30.000	90
12.000	100
18.000	150
48.900	5
4.500	53
75.000	1.300
150.000	60
84.000	750
660.000	65
747.000	137
240.000	60
150.000	100
600	90
999.990	200
330.000	2.200
199.950	220

The table above reflects a little research I´ve done, asking people I know who have websites how many visitors their counting tools (Xiti, Urchin, etc.) say they have, and how much money they make monthly (1€ = 1.23$ today). All websites are France-based and in French (English language websites tend to derive more traffic and hence make more money), in very diverse areas such as: gastronomy, sex, sports, personal blog, art, aero modelling, video games, media, etc.

The question of Internet advertising revenues is largely unsolved. When trying to write your business plan, it´s pretty likely that you´ll end up assuming completely bullish Internet revenue derived from advertising. Actually, for most amateur websites, Internet advertising revenues allow to cover running charges like ISP, domain name, and yearly space rental.

Why one should buy a storage solution @ Flash Memory Store

My background:
I´m not a technologist, yet - though I´ve experienced IT a lot as a simple customer. I´m in the process of graduating with a Master in Management from HEC Paris (http://www.hec.fr), the leading French business university. However, I´ll be specializing in high tech next year, namely doing an additional Master-level course at Ecole Centrale Paris (http://www.ecp.fr) in computer science, telecommunications and project management. This track should provide me with the necessary tech knowledge, and know-how, to make IT Addict more and more technical with time going by.

Why you get to know about my background:
Because I´m hardly a technologist (so far), my posts for some time will probably relate experiences I´ve had as a customer (this very story for instance), or IT analyst (I read basically everything´s that related to IT in every major international paper every day, or every week when times are frantic; and I´ve worked as an IT stock analyst in Delhi, as a project manager in an Internet start-up in Tel Aviv, and a business development assistant in a Barcelona-based Venture Capital company). But your tech inputs are more than welcome, especially if you´re a sound, real geek: debates need depth to be relevant in today´s complex world.

The story:
We all need external storage solutions: think about all the private, precious data in your laptop that relies on your ability to avoid catching a virus! A 150€ move may secure a nice hedging strategy against information loss risks.
I decided to purchase an external hard-drive online, and found after researching the Internet an apparently pretty messy website, Flash Memory Store, which prices were rather low (not to say "dirt cheap"). 5 days after, I had received a nice QMemory 100BG mini-external drive. One week after, I was very happy about it when, coming back from a client in cold New Hampshire (USA) and having left my laptop in the trunk of the car, I found the hard drive frozen, like dead.
Though panicking since I had important stuff in it and only in it, I quickly found on Flash Memory Store the way I could sort things out: send it to their warehouse with all the details of my purchase, and they would return it fixed.
And you know what?
It worked. About a week later, I received a brand new external hard drive, with all the information previously stored in the frozen external memory drive in it! That´s what I call a nice online customer experience - who said online shopping is risky?

I´ve tried a lot of online stores in my life, and all I can say is that reviewing your vendors (on Amazon, eBay, etc.) and buzzing about great online stores (like http://www.Flash-Memory-Store.com) is the only way to drive crooks (numerous on the net) out of business - for the sake of all.

A new IT blog on the blogosphere

Welcome to IT Addict! A new blog which aims at providing high-tech insights and viewpoints. Of course, the value of a blog is created by its visitors - so feel free to challenge me anytime, that´s why we´re here for.