A few days in Barcelona with Vincent

My friend Vincent van Wylick just left Barcelona. Vincent is from nowhere: he speaks Dutch with a German accent and German with a Dutch accent...Born in Germany with parents from Yougoslavia & the Netherlands, a Dutch citizen, Vincent has studied in Manchester before working for Sony during 3.5 years in various countries & assignments related to marketing & innovation. He then went for Graduate studies in Rotterdam and is planning to start a financial auditing career in Luxemburg.

Vincent came to visit me for 5 days. Although I was most of the time working, we managed to find some time to to exchange on matters such as innovation, entrepreneurial economics, high tech, Apple, software, the Internet, & girls..which didn´t prevent us from drinking too much, eating interesting food, meeting nice people and listening to some really good live jazz music. I had met Vincent during my time, as an international exchange student within the Master of Entrepreneurship & New Business Venturing at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus Universiteit.

We had teamed up to write a research paper about the best possible entrepreneurial teams. Vincent & I had come up with the conclusion that Asterix (mental agility) & Obelix (strength) was a good founding pair, and we defined the perfect profile: Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, is both a geek (Amazon rests on its customer-centric information systems) and a Wall-Street insider (helpful during fundraising times). Those who actually feel like reading the paper may write an e-mail to me and I´ll be glad to send it (.pdf).

The main reason why I´ve decided to write such a post is that Vincent underwent quite an interesting, although sad, adventure. As he was polishing his thesis, he landed a consulting job within one of the European Space Agency incubator´ start-ups. Founded by an Israeli / Belgian / American team, the start-up was devising virtual space tourism systems when its founder suddenly died in his early thirties. So did the project, obviously. It´s pretty difficult to comment on such a story, but I wanted to share it with you all.

This being said, Vincent is already thinking of executing one of his business ideas - a sort of Web 2.0 publishing company. Well, I´m afraid I can´t say much more, but you may expect Vincent, a very heavy reader, to come up with disruptive innovation (he was trained at Sony) in this ageing business.


Adendum 1: I have actually shot a video interview of Vincent. It´s pretty big (500 MB), and I´d like to start videocasting on this very blog. Would anyone be kind enough to suggest me a videocasting hosting service as well as a compression standard enabling me to plug the video (.avi)? I was thinking of YouTube and vpod.tv...Many thanks in advance.

Adendum 2: for your information, Vincent´s favourite websites both cast video. These are the great & utmostly famous Venture Voice & a Stanford University lectures broadcasting service I don´t know yet. Vince, could you please provide IT Addict´s readership with the exact address in the comments section?