IT Addict, "High Tech made Simple" / This blog has moved to www.jeremyfain.net

Moving from Blogger to Wordpress: update your RSS feed!

2006-08-16T11:55:00.000+02:00

Since I started blogging, exactly two months ago, I have been advocating that the very best enterprises needed to focus on serving their customers everyday better - one of my favourite topics being that Information Systems & Technology could empower these companies´ processes towards the necessary "operational excellence" achievement. In other words, I´m a strong believer that tomorrow´s leading companies in all industries will be the ones which will have proven a certain mastery in creating and servicing a competitive advantage thanks to IT-driven projects.

There is a word for all this mess, "e-Business": use the best technologies, and make these used and understood by your ecosystem (suppliers, employees, etc.) to serve you customer best.

I felt that I had no right writing about something I actually wasn´t applying nor planning to implement. This blog is an enterprise in its own: it requires dedication, time, patience, and the drive to write, or at least try and do my best to write interesting "IT Addict" stuff. Furthermore, I have a fast-growing portfolio of very bright customers: you! Through gathering feedbacks, I realized you were overall pretty satisfied with the content & design, but that you wanted me to switch, for reasons I still don´t understand well, from Blogger - a tool you consider being "blogging for dummies", to a more "professional" platform like TypePad or WordPress. I´ve chosen the latter.

My goal being to serve better my community, of which you belong to as long as you read me and leave comments, I hope I found a good way to illustrate how a technology upgrade (from the Blogger platform to the WordPress software) may enhance customer satisfaction.

Now that the message has come accross, here are a few housekeeping remarks:

- Do not leave comments on http://itaddict.blogspot.com anymore, go to http://jeremyfain.wordpress.com instead (update your bookmarks); you will anyways be able to find my blog on http://www.jeremyfain.net.

- I made a slight blog title change, from "IT Addict, high-tech made easy" to "Tech IT Easy", under the name of a shop bearing such a name I saw in Rome;

- Update my RSS feed on your RSS reader from itaddict.blogspot.com/rss.xml to http://jeremyfain.wordpress.com/feed/ for posts and http://jeremyfain.wordpress.com/comments/feed/ for comments;

- I´m in middle of the migration process (making sure all the comments are there, pictures right-sized, no broken links, browsing features, etc.) and I should be done by the August 30th 2006. Consequently, I should be most grateful if you do excuse any inconvenience likely to happen until then.

- I´d like to thank: Blogger for providing me with a very simple tool that helped me start blogging; WordPress for making its superb software platform available to all for free (I added many interesting new features such as the last comments published); and you for your time and faithfullness in my writings & thoughts. I hope this is only the beginning of our collaborative sharings on the utmostly interesting topic of Information Technology.

See you right now on Tech IT Easy.

Entrepreneurial Brainstorming session N.3: BlogMapping.com

2006-08-15T13:55:00.000+02:00

Which blogger hasn´t dreamt of accessing a sort of blogospheric map?

Blogs, as pretty much anything social, are organized in networks. If a visit doesn´t make of you a community member (Steve? Leo? ;-) ), leaving a comment includes you in a conversation and leaves a link towards your own personal space.

My idea would be to build a tool tracking networks on the blogosphere. In other words, BlogMapping.com would be an "automatic visual LinkedIn", where you could see who is connected to whom, and how strong their ties are. For instance, X & Y both leave comments on Z´s blog, so Z connects them. But Z leaves comments on Y´s blog, not on X´s blog, so the Y-Z link is stronger than the X-Z one.

I believe categories of bloggers should appear very fast, becoming communities of common interests (IT, Art, Rock music, entrepreneurship, Ventures Capital, Politics, etc.).

As usual, I´m not displaying any business model hint until it´s been commented (by the way, you´ll find commented what I think the business model answer is on WikiustomerService.com).

Kari Silvennoinen on Project Management

2006-08-14T12:17:00.001+02:00

I spent a week-end in the world´s most beautiful city. You name it: Rome. Rome is just a big breathtaking open-air museum, and an open-air fashion show too by the way.

Here on the picture, you see my friend Kari, from Helsinki, Finland. We were brunching at ´Gusto yesterday, a very trendy place not far from the Spanish Stepsides (the exact address is Piazza Augusto Imperatore 9). Kari provided me with very useful professional insights, and agreed for me to share it on this blog.

Kari is an IT Project Manager at a major Nordic energy company. His projects involve mobile messaging platform implementation and IT risk and governance issues, among others. He is accountable for the project´s budget, quality and is obviously expected to make it match deadlines.

More interesting is the fact that Kari usually doesn´t have dedicated resources: he needs to "borrow people" from different types of IT resources (IT dept., contractors, etc.), people who don´t necessarily have time (or willingness) to commit to another project, and boss. You can imagine how enhanced Kari´s diplomatic & negotiation skills must have resulted! The role of the project owner (the Project Manager´s supervisor, directly reporting to the CIO) is also key: the project owner (who has the hierarchical clout) and manager (who has the execution drive) really need to seduce "client departments" when explaining why this project fits the company culture, goals, but also why the end-customer will benefit from such a service.

No doubt Scandinavian technological leadership and culture of consensus & dialogue help a lot in this challenging environment.

Oh, by the way & before I finish, here is Kari´s daily reading roll:
- Daring Fireball (Apple news, Kari is Mac-addicted)
- Reddit (news)
- Slashdot.org (News for nerds)
- and the late Drunken Blog (about Apple)

Apple vs. Dell: the victory of marketing leadership over operational excellence?

2006-08-11T16:08:00.000+02:00

Is the bell tolling for process-intensive (Dell, Home Depot, Amazon, Wal Mart, HP, Ikea, etc.), top of the class in operations, companies? Why have marketing-dept. driven companies (Apple, Nescafé, American Express, l´Oréal) so strongly gained momentum in the recent months?

Take the Dell-Apple bullfight. Check this MacDailyNews article. Ceteris paribus, Apple computers (laptops & desktops) now appear to be less expensive than Dells (see an example here, in Spanish but easy to pick up).

As a reminder, Apple´s market cap has been topping the one of Dell since the early days of May 2006.

Furthermore, Apple blows Dell away at the Google fight (see picture below).

Laptop furnitures: a niche market yet to be taken over by a sound leader

2006-08-11T15:46:00.000+02:00

The 41 years old German architect Konstantin Grcic´s last blockbuster is nothing else but a laptop-friendly geek´s chair. I find it pretty cool.

I believe there is still a market for a beautiful, metal-designed, fashionable laptop furniture manufacturer. When you browse the Ikea, Home Depot & Office Depot websites, you indeed find some nice stuff - but people spend so much time on their laptop that they might let go a little premium to afford a unique environment for the time they use it from home.

Furthermore, laptop sales having outperformed desktop computers for half a decade, there is no reason why laptop-focused furniture sales aren´t skyrocketing.

Creative launches an iPod killer

2006-08-11T15:35:00.000+02:00

I´m not an iPod fan (see post). And I´m happy to see Creative Technology launching, for the sake of all, its ZEN: elegant, light, powerful, & most of all working perfectly - unlike its Apple couterpart - in an opened, peer-to-peer, knowledge and information sharing environment.

Entrepreneurial Brainstorming session N.2: MyMessage.tv

2006-08-10T10:40:00.000+02:00

MyMessage.tv would basically be the Internet gateway of a real satellite television channel, the television channel of the People.

People vote (through the Internet, mobile phones, fax & telephone) for plannings, and the TV shows & programs to fill plannings in. Commercial broadcasting time will be broken down through an auction system: advertisers will be required to bid in order to obtain the targeted commercial timeframes.

People will also vote for the best commercials, which will be granted free prime-time spots to be allocated to charities. Basically, the winning advertiser will give out its commercial time to a charity it will have chosen.

Again, people will send donations (Internet, mobile phones, etc.). Biggest donators (individuals or organizations) will be granted free prime-time spots and be able to chose the advertising (politics, environment, themselves talking, their company, etc.) they´d like to watch.

This way, there would be no more program nobody would want to see. People will feel they entertain more wisely, spend their time & money better, & contribute to fighting poverty & diseases.

To make it short, MyMessage.tv is a TV channel inspired by eBay, LastMinute, Kiva & Wikipedia.

A few days in Barcelona with Vincent

2006-08-09T19:37:00.000+02:00

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?

Entrepreneurial brainstorming session N.1: WikustomerService.com

2006-08-09T09:57:00.000+02:00

The domain name Wikustomerservice.com is still available and I don´t understand why.
Well I guess you get from the very name of the website what it´s all about - good, that means the name´s well chosen. I've been thinking about such a service since I discovered Wikipedia, quite a while ago. It might already exist, but I haven´t seen such a thing so far. Still don´t get the picture?

Wikustomerservice.com is an Internet wiki platform empowering users of all products of all brands to build their own customer service. Basically, the venture would need to convince potential clients, namely key accounts, to 'outsource' their customer service to their..customers! Employees specializing in certain business areas would be moderators in their fields, and companies would save millions in documentation and customer support service fees (such key accounts should keep their traditional customer service on the phone though; but why not also through being allowed to Skype the relevant moderator?). The wiki platform should be devised to enable a congregation of as many companies as possible, as well as brands, products, versions into a single graphic chart customable at the client´ convenience. The classifications & categorization may be inspired from, for instance, Wikipedia.

There you go. I'm not elaborating more on this business idea to let our creativity work a little bit. Wikustomerservice.com would´ve been helpful when Dell laptops burst, when Apple laptops burnt, when Smart cars & Class A Mercedes flipped over. Customers are more often than we think more reactive than product manufacturers themselves - a rather logical stance since customers are the ones that actually use the products.

Entrepreneurs, forget about NDAs!

2006-08-08T20:09:00.000+02:00

Non Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) are useless.

At least that´s my opinion. I won´t be the first person advocating for their inefficiency and removal from entrepreneurial business practices (I´m not talking here about medical, law, industrial or any other "established" environment).

If you have an idea, say it! share it with your friends, family members, & the people you meet everyday. Why?

I can think of at least 3 reasons:
- Firstly, they´ll start challenging you and help you improve the initial idea.
- Second, because they´ll feel honored that your trust them and might well help you later on if they can.
- Third, imagine you talk to someone about your idea and realize that (s)he´s decided to start executing right away without telling you: if your idea has entry-barriers low enough to enable anybody to implement in a wink, I guess you should builp up your project, work harder to fit your market needs so that it becomes unmatchable by the competition in the short-run.

That´s why I´ll start posting a few ideas - all IT addicted- from time to time on this very blog, starting as of tomorrow. I believe we´ll be able to improve such ideas a good deal. And, who knows, some of you might well feel like starting-up something related to such brainstormings.

PS: it goes without saying that if someone comes to you with an idea, asking you for your opinion and input but for the strictest confidentiality as well, the most basic ethical discipline will make you even forget that you met with this would-be entrepreneur. However, before you shut your mouth forever to respect her/his will, take one or two minutes to try to convince her/he to display entrepreneurial ideas. There would be just nothing to regret since every word, comment, move, external input can only help.

56% of bloggers sometimes or often double-check their sources. What about journalists?

2006-08-07T19:52:00.000+02:00

Although a mere 34% of bloggers define themselves as journalists, the bulk of them, actually 56%, sometimes or often double-check their sources (source: Pew Internet & American Life Project, 20th July 2006 report).

I believe 100% of journalists call themselves journalists. But how many exactly double-check their sources? How many 'professional' journalists cross information drilled through different channels before publishing/displaying/broadcasting it?

Believe me or not, the answer is "very few". Through a non-profit venture I worked for during 4 years, I had the opportunity to meet many, many journalists, one different everyday at some point, from many countries

Some journalists are sincerely curious, smart, honest, accountable, reliable, trustworthy, professional & helpful when it comes to helping readers getting to know what happened where. Unfortunately, such good journalists are a minority. I'm writing 'good' the same way I would qualify someone as 'a good person', in a narrow sense: I'm not talking about their skills, I'm not saying they're good rather than excellent, because these good people are just doing their real job, as it should be done.

Indeed, too many journalists forget about their initial mission statement: provide THE MOST ACCURATE FACTS to readers, rather than viewpoints or political messages. Instead of that, journalists are urged by their editors or their paper's owners to convey specific political messages. Reading one single newspaper hardly helps getting a clear picture of what's really going on since every single one of them expresses a viewpoint. The solution for us, citizens, would be to read all sorts of papers (different doctrines, countries, etc.) to confront representative opinions - which is hardly feasible for someone who can´t spend more than an hour a day reading the news.

Furthermore, many of the journalists I talked to confessed that, being conscious of their clout, they sometimes tend to abuse it. And when they do so, what happens? Well, nothing...A reader sends a letter to the editor, and this letter's most of the time not published, if read at all. However, in most regulated environments, there are consequences to one's mistakes: Andersen was dismantled in the aftermath of Enron, medical doctors get sued in case they do something wrong, unskilled politicians don't get reelected (well..I agree there's room for discussion on this one), thiefs get trialed, murderers get sentenced to jail or Death Penalty, Zidane got a red card..humm, let's stop piling up examples - you got the idea.

It all boils down to the following conclusion: no check & balances & seldom double-checking of sources (due to lack of time, fast-moving Society, publishing deadline, etc. - journalists just rephrase what Press Agencies broadcast), traditional media are in a pickle. Collateral damage: less and less citizens trust the media.

This is where blogs come in. Blogs, as I see it, constitute a Hegelian overtaking of traditional media routine:
Be inaccurate, just once, and someone will inevitably post a correcting comment.
Don´t mention your source & people will ask for it.
Try to lie on a blog: the blogging community will immediatly retaliate.
Blogs are also a fabulous counter-power for the people. Churchill once said during a House of Commons speech, on November 11th 1947, that "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." Thanks to blogging, democracies widen the gap that separates them from autocracies, symbolized by traditional media who have become more powerful than necessary.

Beyond "techno-fetichism & -nationalism": God Bless America´s Venturesome Consumers

2006-08-07T13:55:00.000+02:00

I came across a refreshing article in the Economics Focus column of this Friday´s issue of the opinion-shaping, free-market, weekly, British magazine The Economist.

Amar Bidhé, a Professor of entrepreneurship at Columbia University´s business school, explained in a recent paper why mushrooming alarming reports stating that the US economy will suffer from a shortcoming of engineering graduates are mistaken.

Bidhé distinguishes upstream (R&D offsprings, inventions) and downstream (a service or product) innovations, and demonstrates that good managers, able for instance to bring a patent to the market, matter as much if not more than good engineers. Bidhé also advocates the Wal Mart case, striking a positive opinion about a company that has optimized its operational processes (downstream innovation) to lower prices and attract more consumers.

I recommend you to read Bidhé´s paper as well as The Economist´s column, which ends with Amar Bidhé´s main idea: there is no added value without a transaction, and since American consumers often lead the use of innovation products & services, the more innovation in China & India, the better for the United States. Consumers, not technologists, reap off the benefits of innovation. Hence the whole point of the demonstration: "America´s policymakers should worry more about how to keep consumers consuming than about the number of science and engineering graduates, at home or in the East" (source: The Economist).

Logistics: Information (Technology) matters every day more

2006-08-07T11:49:00.000+02:00

This week-end I found some time to hang around the Barcelona Logistics Zone, hidden by the hill of Montjuic, at the Southern exit of the city.

I love watching the actual happening of international business. I believe the contemplation of merchandise trade flows helps understanding how the world goes round: a French container departs to Japan, a Chinese one arrives in Spain, etc. By the way, I suggest you combine harbor watch with reading a good Albert Londres novel for a unique, genuine, amazing brainstorming experience. It´s pretty much like making love whilst sipping a Chivas on the rocks.

Globalization has made the Information and Services Society hit the headlines, but though the feeling of distance might be abolished by IT, geography will never be annihilated. Moreover, we more and more tend to talk about what moves all around (capital, humans, goods, services, etc.) but tend to forget about what remains stable: distances. Distances matter more and more in a growing Consumers Society. We consume a hell lot of products, every day more products.

Products trade go through containers, a standardized metal "box" invented in the end of the 60s in Hong Kong. Containers fit the loading infrastructures of boats, airplanes, trains and trucks and are bound to at least use 2 of these transportation means during each trip, often more. Paradoxically enough, containers spend most of their time in storage areas like warehouses. Since containers are devised to make goods move from one place to another in a minimum period of time, one of the big challenges of supply chain management is to reduce storage periods.

This is where IT comes in: reducing storage time will lower working capital, and better the transaction economics. In this respect, IT can help.

78% of the logistics industry players make less than half a million dollars a year (source: International Data Corporation). Hence an overall limited of resources available for IT investments, which explains why, apart from MNCs who for a decade have been investing heavily to foster a competitive advantage. Trucking corporations have been particularly late in adopting Information Technology.

So far, it´s been proven (source: Ibid.) that the use of Internet & collaboration tools lowers transportation costs by 20% to 30%. Such achievements were reached thanks to:
- a better accountability of supply chain flows;
- inventory data sharing between manufacturers, transporters and retailers.

See for yourself, the best logistics companies are no more in the logistics business but in the information business. This is due to the very shift of the industry, enhanced by the generalization of EDI systems (Electronic Data Interchange) and soon-to-come (?) generalization of RFID.

I was always amazed by the FedEx tracking feature, allowing end-users to know exactly where a shipment is. I think information about one´s flows help accepting natural shipping delays due to geographical distances, never to be abolished. Let´s however make sure financial analysts don´t start analyzing logistics player stocks like media company ones...

On Microsoft´s diversified competitive environment

2006-08-04T11:12:00.000+02:00

Which company doesn´t compete in a way or another with Microsoft? I can only think of two: Coca-Cola and Ikea...

Seriously speaking, Microsoft´s huge free cash-flows finally find some battlegrounds to be invested. It looks today as if Microsoft could start competing against any software or Internet industry player whose market proves sufficiently juicy.

Take a look at Microsoft´s competitive landscape, & you´ll find how tough the software/Internet environment is since only top-notch companies operate in this industry:

- Operating Systems: Microsoft Windows vs. the open-source community´s Linux
- Consumer Electronics / Digital Industry: Microsoft Zune (an iPod-like, an AppleStore-like, an iTunes-like, MS Media Player vs. Quicktime - Microsoft is, like Apple did, keeping its environment closed, too bad for them) vs. Apple
- Video Game Stations: Microsoft´s XBox 360 vs. the Sony Playstation
- Internet Browsers: MSIE vs. Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Safari, Crazy Browser, etc.
- Search Engines, Instant Messengers, eMail services: MSN vs. Google
- Same as above, + Media Content: MSN vs. Yahoo!
- Encyclopedies: Encarta vs. Wikipedia, Britannica, Universaelis, etc.
- Enterprise Resources Planning (mostly business intelligence & customer relationship management): Microsoft Dynamics (ex-Business Solutions)´s Axapta, Navision & MapPoint vs. SAP, Oracle-Siebel, Business Objects, Salesforce.com, Amdocs, Cognos, Sage, etc.
- Contacts Management: Outlook vs. Mozilla Thunderbird, Eudora, Novell Groupwise, and even IBM´s Lotus Notes & Domino
- Office Solutions: MS Office vs. Open Office, Star Office, Corel WordPerfect Office, Google, etc.
- Personal Finance: MS Money vs. QuickBooks, etc.
- Internet Development Standards: the .Net galaxy (AJAX, XML, etc.) vs. LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-Php)

And I´m forgetting so many (MS Meeting, MS Visio, MS Project, Windows Mobile, MS Exchange Server, Virtual PC, etc.)...I believe Microsoft´s ability to deal with so many impressive competitors deserves an in-depth reengineering of "commonly-agreed corporate strategy rules" like, for instance, "diversification is evil" & "the BCG matrix is wrong" which prove to be jeopardized by Microsoft´s software industry leadership. But that´s another story.

As I see it, Microsoft´s main strengths are:
- top-of-the-class Software Development Project Management Methods, undoubtedly;
- R&D horsepower (MS doesn´t find it too hard to attract talents from all over the world; R&D headcount: over 25K!)
- a certain know-how when it comes to reaching the mass-market; I would say this was Bill Gates´ genius, cf. the democratization of Windows 3.0 against MacOS, IBM OS/2 and Jean-Louis Gassée´s BeOS, although Microsoft undoubtedly had the worst product at the time i.e. less stable and user-friendly.

Before I finish, I bet Microsoft will soon make (say before 31 December 2007) a VoIP acquisition (Wengo?) to allow Outlook users to basically "Skype" their contacts who are online just by clicking on a button. Who bets?

CIOs ought to be business people, not geeks

2006-08-03T02:53:00.000+02:00

Let's see how you react to this stance: I more and more tend to believe that, although it would definitely be best if engineering trained, CIOs (Chief Information Officers) need first to be business & management people, not geeks.

Further to that, CIOs should be promoted from the very inside of a company, and be familiar with its key processes and operations. Then, CIOs should obviously be keen on working in IT-intensive environments, though they don't necessarily need to be IT people.

Facing the dilemma "who should I chose between an excellent functional manager of one of my business key processes, and an excellent technologist?", I would definitely go for the process-knowledgeable candidate since this person will empirically know what it takes to optimize current operational routines, and foster a breakthrough from good to great value chain execution.

What about you? Please feel free to discuss my stance.

CRM software vendors: leaders should pay attention..

2006-08-02T03:21:00.000+02:00

..to rising stars SalesForce.com (ASP only) & AmDocs (combining billing and CRM solutions). Both are pushing hard. See the following Customer Relationship Management software vendors ranking by Gartner:

Wondering about which blog service fits ITAddict´s needs best

2006-08-01T12:07:00.000+02:00

Due to recurrent uploading problems with Blogger at the moment, I´ve been wondering whether I had made a good decision or not opening "ITAddict: IT made simple" on Google´s Blogger / Blogspot. Don´t worry, this blog´s very existence in by no way in danger: I enjoy blogging a lot.

To tell you the truth, when it comes to chosing a service to power my blog, I´m not sure I actually made a choice: I just happened to open it on Blogger without thinking too much (I had had a former, pretty interesting, blogging experience one year ago - which lasted 3 weeks and as many posts, using Overblog - which wasn´t bad at all).

Since I didn´t want to pay anything to be able to blog (Six Apart´s Typepad and Movable Type), my pain should more or less have resulted in chosing between Overblog, Wordpress, and Blogger.

Blogger is very easy to use, powered by Google (ungrounded rumors: there are good chances that search rankings will be higher!), and easy to remember since so many people use it. But it lacks functionalities such as editing comments (rather useful when you realize you made a spelling mistake), and has been unstable recently. Another shortcoming: the layout is the one you should expect if you user Mozilla Firefox to browse the Net; otherwise, and especially on MS Internet Explorer, the design is crappy and definitely not what you should expect.

Anyways:
1) too late...
2) I´m not convinced another blog service provider would´ve done much better (e.g. WordPress´s rather slow at loading; Overblog is too French; TypePad is not free; etc.).

Adendum 1: I just happenend to discover that Olivier Ezratty, a former Microsoft France executive and now a coach for start-uppers, explained on his blog (in French) why he chose WordPress. To French-speaking readers (I apologize to the majority): Olivier Ezratty´s blog is one of my favourite daily visits. I don´t know the man, but his analyses are unique. We share a common drawback, which is having a hard time writing short posts :-). But though some of mines are concise, you won´t find any single one of them on his.
Forgetting about length, you have access on www.oezratty.net to the most accurate analyses on the software industry (innovation, R&D) in general and Microsoft on particular (as an insider, his writing usually involves a sarcastic tone when it comes to regulation or lobbying; e.g. "MS fined by Bruxelles for lower-tier software engineering methods"). You may also find in a recent post an enlightening interview of Bernard Liautaud, the co-founder & the Chairman of Business Intelligence software player Business Objects. Interestingly enough, the interview was published in the magazine "Centraliens", an in-house alumni review of Ecole Centrale Paris, a leading French engineering school where I´ll be starting in September majoring in computer science, telcos & project management thanks to an agreement between Centrale & my home-university, HEC Paris.

Adendum 2: ...the same Olivier Ezratty provides his readers with an a link: Emily Robbins describes on her blog her experience with both WordPress & Typepad.

Adendum 3: 5 blog services reviewed by CNet. Blogger ranks last between Typepad, MSN Spaces, Yahoo! 360 & AOL Journals but taking a look at user comments, Blogger´s far ahead. Although I´m aware of the sample bias we´re facing here.

Mitfahrerzentrale: a German collective car trips matching platform

2006-07-31T03:25:00.000+02:00

This week-end I came to know (thank you Mathias) about the existence of a really useful German website: Mitfahrerzentrale.

The idea is very simple: say you're driving somewhere this week-end (anywhere in Europe) and have some seats available in the car. Just mention where you're going, how much you're asking people who want to join you (either on the full trip or just a part of it), and the platform will match you with travellers. Same business the other way round: you're broke, cannot afford a plane, train or bus ticket. Just log on Mitfahrerzentrale and you're on your way to the destination of your dreams!

I have to say I loved the idea: it's simple, environment- and wallet-friendly. And it's safe since travellers are allowed to provide a feedback on their drivers (and conversely): safe driving? friendly atmosphere? etc. Great site!

Despite common belief that all internet intermediation ideas (suppliers - manufacturers; buyers - sellers; women - men; companies - investors; etc.) have been exploited, there is still plenty of room for creative and dynamic people to reinvent the world. And say you're not creative enough to come up with you own innovative business model, just reproduce in your country a successful story like the one of Mitfahrerzentrale in Germany!

IHT: "France's mysterious embrace of blogs"

2006-07-29T01:31:00.000+02:00

Here's a great article on skyrocketing blogging habits in France, published in the International Herald Tribune's Technology columns.

Just to tease you before you read it, let me just quote this really funny but so true sentence from the article: "We had 16 presidential candidates at the last election, and we will probably have the same number next year," Benjamin Griveaux said. "Every French person wants to run the country - a blog is the next best option."

Loic Le Meur, the Godfather of the French blogosphere, is also quoted in the article.

PS: I knew I had seen this name Benjamin Griveaux somewhere, and I quickly realized I had actually talked to Benjamin Griveaux, an HEC alumni if my memory's correct, an advisor at think-tank A Gauche en Europe , several times when trying to invite French center-left politicians to an AFIDORA symposium at the French Parliament in May 2005. The world's so small...

103bees.com, a useful traffic analysis service for bloggers

2006-07-28T00:22:00.000+02:00

Many thanks to Xavier Fisselier, a Barcelona-based blogger as well, but also an entrepreneur and a marketing passionate (to French speakers, check his blog), for letting me know about this new service. I've been testing 10^3 bees for a few days now, and I like it. Though certainly not exhaustive, 10^3 bees is simple, reliable & easy to deploy. I recommend 103bees.com to all my fellow bloggers.

Innovation Clusters: South-West Paris, a Technology Valley

2006-07-27T11:58:00.000+02:00

Too often do I hear that France lacks a Silicon Valley.

Last occurence: I recently exchanged a few e-mails with blogger Hadrien Simon, also a member of AFIDORA.
In one of these e-mails, Hadrien harshly criticized France for fostering local innovation centers rather than backing the creation of a true Silicon Valley.

There are many actually many innovation parks in France (Rennes in telcos, Lyon in software and video games, Grenoble in semi-conductors, Toulouse in aeronautics and biotech, Bordeaux in structure mechanics modelling, Lille in retail information systems, Metz, Montpellier, etc.). But the technological innovation clusters landscape is by far dominated by French Riviera´s Sophia Antipolis, near Nice, which ranks #2, and, quite unsurprisingly, Paris and its South West outskirts as the leading technology innovation center in France.

South West Paris (between highways A6 and A14 on the map, broadly speaking) concentrates everything that´s needed to foster and encourage innovation.
There are plenty of research centers in leading engineering universities such as Ecole Polytechnique in Palaiseau, Ecole Centrale Paris in Châtenay-Malabry, SupOptique, Supélec, all-mighty University of Paris-XI in Orsay, University of Sceaux near Versailles, National Institute of Agronomy in Grignon, National Telecommunications Institute in Evry, Pharmacy Academy in Châtenay-Malabry, and I´m probably missing a few. The business University I study in, HEC Paris, is also headquartered in the area, 5 minutes away by car from National Institute of Agronomy, Ecole Polytechnique, Supélec & SupOptique (the latter & Polytechnique share a campus).
Many, many, many global corporations are based in the area (in Versailles, Issy-les-Moulineaux, Boulogne-Billancourt, Vélizy Villacoublay, Buc, Saint-Cloud, etc.). To name a few: CISCO, Alcatel-Lucent, Bouygues, GE Healthcare, Thalès, Nissan-Renault´s Technology Center, EADS Astrium, etc. etc. etc. Microsoft and Apple are not so far away (head North 20 minutes to department 91 taking A86).
Financial Center La Défense is pretty close, and providing that most Venture Capital firms are located in the 8th district of Paris, according to the corporate blog of fundraising boutique Chausson Finance, the "1-hour driving rule" is well-respected, even under the worst traffic conditions.
South West Paris has it all. We´re talking here about the highest brain concentration in Europe.

But true, Paris´s no Silicon Valley, and conversely. How could the Silicon Valley ever be replicated in any other place than..the actual Silicon Valley? It´s just impossible.

Say you´re a CEO: do you really want to become Jack Welch or would you rather learn his methods from some legacy he left (be N.1 or 2; leadership training; Six Sigma; was going over best executive profils himself saying "It´s my job"; etc.)? Anyways, had you wanted to become Jack Welch, this would´ve been impossible! The logics applies to innovation clusters too: no place anywhere in the world will ever be able to become another Silicon Valley. There is just one Silicon Valley and it´s in US California, 1 hour driving North from San Francisco, around Stanford University´s home city Palo Alto.

I believe Paul Graham, an essayist and programmer, is mistaking when writing an irrational though brillant article entitled "How to be Silicon Valley". However, I think Paul Graham´s "Why startups condense in America" is far more relevant. The Silicon Valley model should be studied, understood, digested, and reinvented according to the specificities of a targeted location where human & financial capital are available as much as the political brave willingness to ease Schumpeterian creative destruction.

I should wind up stating that territories should focus on attracting and retaining capital, both humain and financial. In today´s globalizing, everyday flatter world, everything moves, flies and flows apart from geography. Ensuring and promoting the global competitivity of regional territories is, according to Bill Clinton´s economic advisor and Harvard Professor Robert B. Reich (see a book that changed my life, The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for the 21st Century Capitalism), the single mission-statement political leaders of all sorts should be obsessed by. Hummm..such a long way to go.

Towards a European Small Business Act?

2006-07-26T13:01:00.000+02:00

At least, I hope so.

Between 23 and 40% of the United States of America´s public procurement have been granted to small and medium businesses (SMEs) since 1953. The American Small Business Act has helped many innovative start-ups become high-growth SMEs, in other words Gazelles, before eventually going public, abroad and joining the multi-national enterprises (MNEs) club.

In the last 30 years, Europe hasn´t created so many world leaders when compared to the United States or, say, India. Take the Internet industry for instance: the Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, eBay (which acquired Luxembourg-founded by Swedish & Danish entrepreneurs Skype), Amazon are all US-born and raised. And the same goes for many industries. Europe has a hard time making SMEs become world leaders, despite obvious entrepreneurial capabilities: the bulk of the industrial fabric in many European countries is made of SMEs (Spain, Italy, Germany, to name a few).

On the one hand, most public procurement tenders are disputed between already leading. On the other hand, the European Union wants to promote, like it or not, equal chances to succeed for all. Quite paradoxically, global European leaders are thriving whilst unemployment rises.

So let´s give a European Small Business Act a chance. I advocate the creation of mechanisms that would allow the best SMEs to supply European Governments with their products and services. European public procurement currently amounting to 1500bn€, a European Small Business Act appears at least as a short term solution to rising employment and SMEs development uncertainties.

If you agree with my stance, if you believe like me that Europe needs a Small Business Act, that the best companies - independently from their size - deserve a share of the 1500bn€ per annum public procurement market, sign the EuroSBA petition.

IT as a business process optimizer: back in B-school tracks

2006-07-25T12:55:00.000+02:00

Yesterday, I read an extremely interesting article in the British daily newspaper Financial Times. Basically, two NYU professors, namely Vasant Dhar & Arun Sundararajan, conducted a research about the importance of IT teachings in MBA programs.

After the bubble burst, IT suddenly become a separate area despite having been a superstar two-letters word during the net economy period.

I found really telling the parallel drawn in the article between finance and IT: market finance is a stand-alone set of skills that are very specific to people willing to work on capital markets; corporate finance is on the other hand a subject every single executive should know about, since investment decision-making science is based on such measurings as ROI, IRR, EVA, NPV, EPS, WACC, etc.
The same actually goes for IT: IT is both about studying technologies (like market finance: everybody doesn´t need to know about networks architecture, etc.) and the way technology apply to companies by driving business processes improvements. Henceforth, the impact of Information Technology in organizations should be an underlying topic in all business management courses. According to the article, the universities of Stanford & Harvard seem to have integrated IT as a performance driver in all its MBA course topics.

As far as I´m concerned, I enjoyed a very good exposure to the challenges and opportunities raised by the integration of technologies at HEC Paris: you get compulsory general MS Office training seminars, optimization and simulations on Excel, statistical marketing analysis on SPSS, Information Systems (ERP, networks, security, databases), and if you chose to, there are Visual Basic for Excel classes too. Furthermore, IT systems were often to referred to as potential competitive advantages in marketing (SRM, CRM, BI, etc.), supply chain (SCM, RFID), management accounting and control (tableaux de bord, balance score-card, etc.), financial economics (arbitrage, etc.), etc. Not bad, uh?

If I may add something, it looks as if the best IT-driven companies are most of the time the best performing and most respected corporations in their field. For instance, an e-Business investment plan made CISCO save 1.4bn$ last year (e-education, distance collaborative projects, billing, etc.); take a look on HP (IT-driven operations & logistics), Dell (a company that sell IT products through IT systems that had been providing its value chain a great advantage over the competition for several years), Home Depot, IBM, GE, Procter & Gamble, Decathlon, Toyota, Nissan, etc.

Basically every leading company is actually a leader thanks to a perfect fit between information systems & organizational structure. A good understanding of the integration of information technologies within corporations has become a key skill, one of these skills that will differentiate good people with excellent change agents.

But still, too many business management students believe IT is the designated area of all geeks and techies. Too bad!

Petite Anglaise, a British secretary in Paris, fired..BECAUSE OF BLOGGING!

2006-07-24T17:36:00.000+02:00

I discovered on Loic´s blog that Catherine, a British secretary who´s been living in Paris for more than a decade, was fired because she was blogging.
Petite Anglaise´s former boss, a so-called Old-School boss in Catherine´s own words, evoked 2 main reasons why he dismissed her:
1) he was concerned by the fact that she might blog from work;
2) Catherine was broadcasting too much information about her workplace.

Here are my two answers to these two points:
2) On the latter, I can tell that, on petiteanglaise.com, one could never guess which organization Catherine was working for...There are thousands of companies in Paris, most of them unknown to the mass. Wouldn´t her boss be a little paranoïc too?
1) On the former reason, well, if Catherine is a good secretary, why would she deserve such a treatment? Isn´t the most important bit the fact that her work is done and well done?
I have blogged from work too , that´s what I´m doing right now.

But I respect a few rules and an ethical, employer-employee interests convergence approach regarding blogging from the workplace:

- there should be economies of scale between blogging and working; I work for a capital and business development company involved at the moment in several entrepreneurial Internet projects. Consequently, blogging helps me bring ideas to the business, know in advance about new consumer trends, learn about ways to create a marketing buzz, etc.
In other words, blogging helps understanding better how the Internet shapes the world, and how a changing world will change the Internet. I´m pretty sure my boss is happy to have someone to ask questions to when uncertain about the raison d´être of a new web technology or website. And if it wouldn´t have been the case, he would have told me so and I would´ve stopped spending twice 30/35 minutes a day blogging.

- Oups, that was my second point. Getting disciplined is necessary: I never, ever spend more than an hour per day blogging. Too many things to do in 24 hours!

- Third, I prepare my posts the night before, from home (I´m sharing a flat where there´s unfortunately no Internet connexion yet), it´s a nice thing to do before going to bed, and behaving this way I don´t waste my time at work writing stuff that aren´t connected to my daily missions. A USB stick helps me carry support articles back and forth.

- Last, but not least, I make sure I do not disclose neither confidential nor negative information about my workplace, my company and its stakeholders. This is an implicit moral contract, that doesn´t apply to blogging only, I´ve always and will always abide by: when saying bad things about a place where you´re spending half of your time, if not more, you´re also sending a negative signal about you.

When all´s said and done, let´s wish Petite Anglaise good luck during her not-so-soon-to-come trial. By the way, Catherine´s blog is so cool, well-organized and her posts so clear and clever that I do not doubt 1 sec. that she´ll be job hunted in the next week thanks to her blog.

PS: this reminds me of another story. A Delta Airlines flight attendant was already fired for posting on her blog a picture of her in a plane...This is one more reason why you should never fly Delta Airlines. Delta Airlines is an awful company and here´s why.

Entrepreneurial finance for fast-growing start-ups: bootstrap & secure bridge financing. Venture Capitalists may help.

2006-07-21T13:22:00.000+02:00

Thanks to this very blog, a Chicago-based young engineer & entrepreneur Skyped me yesterday. John thought I was a VC. Well, I´m a trainee in a capital and business development company - that´s slightly different in terms of decision-making power)); though I´m learning a lot.

John is a pure geek, in his own saying. We had a great conversation: I was happy to give him advice, and I hope John found some of it useful.

A fantastic programmer, John gives a damn about operations, finance and marketing. He´s been developing a software that suits the needs of many US & Chinese Universities (John´s family lives in China and is connected to the academic world over there). Anticipating his future need for manufacturing the software (every client University might purchase several hundred licenses), John attended a lecture about bridge financing last week.
- I asked: "How interesting was it?"
- "Probably great, but I still don´t understand what bridge financing is, so I didn´t get the most of it", John replied. "Anyways, considering the high-growth potential of my software company, I don´t need external financing. I don´t want VCs to come onboard and bother me with tons of questions I can´t answer. I prefer to focus on coding perfectly and taking care of clients."

Focus on quality and clients: fantastic attitude!
I praised his words, but told him firstly that growing and making sure cash inflow streams were increasing were two totally different businesses. Especially with clients such as Universities - not considered as fast payers.
Secondly, VCs can be extremely helpful to him. Venture Capitalists are not only boring financiers aiming at cashing out on your back. Some of them are real entrepreneurs, and true, VCs are finance guys, but good VCs get hands-on involved in the business strategy. Furthermore, considering John´s lack of business management experience, VCs could also provide free top-notch consulting on how John´s software company should be scaled.

I tried to make my point about growth and lack of funding resources using two examples, one of them I faced myself taking part of an entrepreneurial adventure in Israel one year ago. I thought what I told John, plus the two examples I used, might be of some help to the numerous geeks that frequently visit IT Addict (I wish...).

1) What bridge financing is

NeedForBridgeFinancing Inc. is a start-up company. Its founder was able to bootstrap in order to get the product R&D, suppliers sourcing and primary business development achieved. Therefore, these bootstrapping financial efforts are considered to be sunk costs.

The entrepreneur came up with a very successful business model. Transformations from primary goods aren´t costly (though the gross margin amounts to 30%), but the value added to the end-user is sound & real. The business plan reveals sales should increase by 5% every month, which is tremendous.

All in all, it´s pretty clear that we´re talking here about a very profitable venture. However, it seems obvious that prior to actually going into business for good, the entrepreneurial team needs to secure an 8-months bridge financing in order to survive its profitable fast-growth (which is often the case in high-tech start-ups) until breaking even. Bridging is a treasury management vehicle, usually a mezzanine loan, devised to help companies finance their net working capital. In the beginning of its operations, a company is just not scaled enough on the competitive landscape to decide how long supplier debts and customer credits should be cleared.

2) Venture Capital as a necessary financing step for entrepreneurial Gazelles

The term Gazelles usually refers to start-up companies, often in the high-tech sector, growing extremely fast. The first time I heard that word was during a lecture on entrepreneurial innovation clusters in the Netherlands: Erik Stam, an at the time bright Ph.D. student and now a Professor at Cambridge University, was letting his students at Rotterdam School of Management know more about his findings on the geography of gazelles in the Netherlands (see .pdf article). In France for instance, "Gazelle" is a label granted to the 2000 fastest-growing companies during two consecutive years. As an example, Photoways, the company ran by the French blogger and entrepreneur Michel de Guilhermier, was accredited "Gazelle" by the French SMEs Minister Renaud Dutreil recently (see post on Michel´s blog - in French, one of the blogs I visit most frequently for the top quality of its writer thoughts).

Well, let´s go back to our second example. The company we´re talking about in this case study definitely deserves the "gazelle" title: its sales grow 100% every month! Unfortunately, its competitive position is rather weak; although its management secured identical payment delays for both suppliers and clients, clients get pretty loose and the executive management of the start-up has no other choice, commercially speaking, than letting them do so - until its competitive bargaining power increases.

Fortunately, the entrepreneurial team had anticipated this situation, thanks to their talks with VCs (one of the VCs was an entrepreneur in the same business, prior to his exit after which he became a VC). So the VCs invested in this business, for the sake of all. Without the capital provided by the professional investors, the entrepreneurs´own financial resources could never have shadowed the development pace of the company in a sustainable way. After one year of operations and though the business model clearly shows profitability, breakeven is yet to come.

John might well have suffered a similar situation hadn´t he realized he needed to surround himself with skilled stakeholders: a team devised to support the software start-up´s scalability (John plans 3-digits growth in the American and Chinese educational market), and proper advisors with established networks and access to capital for the very best projects, such as John´s software start-up. I wish John good luck, success, and..fun!

Top 10 Online Advertisers according to Nielsen/NetRatings

2006-07-20T13:00:00.000+02:00

Nielsen/NetRatings compiled a webads spendings ranking thanks to data provided by AdRelevance. Though Nielsen/NetRatings´ last podcasting/blogging/advertising .pdf report legitimately provoked a little uprise amongst bloggers (see for instance: Loic Le Meur, Robert Scoble, Frank Barnako) for its lack of podcasting spirit acumen, I believe several things were rather interesting in this release.

What I´d like to point out to show not only crap is issued in Nielsen/NetRatings´ last podcasting/blogging/advertising .pdf report is its interesting Top 10 Advertisers by Estimated Spending table. Not that I feel like analyzing which kind of company would be most likely to waste its marketing budget online, but I believe Nielsen NetRatings´table lacked a Cost per Impression column. So I added it:

What may be drawn down from this table is that online advertising campaigns are largely optimizable: for instance, NextTag spends 10% more than Skype in online promotion, but generates about 3 times the impressions Skype advertising campaigns do. These are undoubtedly figures e-advertising professionals should study thoroughly to make sure they understand the way online spendings ROI could be optimized.

Towards a "project managementization" of organizations

2006-07-19T16:02:00.003+02:00

Project Management is, in my opinion, the single most important skill people willing to work in for-profit or not companies should acquire.

The corporate world is not complicated, it is complex i.e. difficult to represent graphically. Therefore, people should learn how to deal with all the departments of a company. The widely spread word to explain such a trend is "transversality".

Project Management doesn´t necessarily mean "to manage a project" but to integrate best within a specific teamworking environment supposed to deliver a defined service or product before a deadline, provided resources constraints.

Project Management is still a young discipline (although the Project Management Institute I´ve just subscribed to is everyday more and more recognized), primarily born in the construction industry, and structured in the IT spheres during the last decade.

Look at these frightening figures: "According to Maxfield, 74% [of all projects] come in over budget, 82% miss deadlines, 79% fail to meet quality or functional specifications, and 67% result in damaged team morale." (source: ComputerWorld) As I see it, projects mainly fail for political reasons or lack of resources.

You must probably be thinking "Jeremy´s fool. Why would companies switch to project structures if project management gives such crappy results?". Well, projects fail because organizations are not project management-focused.

See the chart on the right (sorry, it´s in Spanish. I live in Spain, think in Spanish,..). This is how most companies operate, through departmental and divisional structures. Marketing and Finance spend their time fighting instead of working towards improving business processes; Sales and Production departments can´t be blamed for not getting along well: when sales go up, production people work harder; when sales go down, production people need to justify increased inventories and hence a higher working capital, etc. Examples are countless!

I believe the traditional way to organize a company should die. And the quicker the better. Today, young and less young professionals want to get the big picture of the organization they work hard for. People want to interact with people that are different: different cultures (look at Microsoft, the United Nations, or INSEAD, three successful organizations. it´s the zoo there; different people, colors, backgrounds, etc.), & most of all different domains of expertise. Bring purchase, supply chain, IT, finance, marketing & sales people all together in one team; give them responsibilities, a well-defined deliverable, flexible deadline & budget, make sure someone takes leadership of the group. Monitor the advancement of the project and check regularly that a corporate mentor (a senior executive) visit them and provides relevant advice. See the results for yourself: your team will feel empowered, since all its team members will be learning from each other.

In the short-run, everything won´t be perfect, but you´ll notice the difference after a few years: less turnover, better people that their organization is a learning one (provided that executive management set up the right Knowledge Management tools eg Intranet, Virtual Experiences Exchange platform, Feedbacks, etc.).

The best way to learn about the best project management practices is certainly to benefit from IT people´s numerous insights - IT people suffer from most organization´s lack of Project Management acumen. Most of today´s best organizations in Project Management are technology-driven (Cegelec, Microsoft, HP, IBM, Business Objects, GE - to name a few. But I´d be glad if my readership could provide us with more insights about the best PM organizations). I wish companies from other industries start taking to Project Management-oriented organizational structures; one gateway to such a change could be e-Business implementation, that implies having different corporate departments working together. I wish...

How to fry an egg on your MacBook

2006-07-18T10:47:00.000+02:00

Thanks to The Register for these breaking news.

A blogger eventually understood why Apple laptops were so "thermically undisciplined": Apple wants you to be able to fry an egg on your laptop.

Cool, isn´t it?

Entry barriers strategies in social networking

2006-07-17T17:00:00.000+02:00

First, Friendster patented last week its database-centric social networking technology at the US Patent Office. What is the strategy behind this move? I don´t know, but I guess such a step may temper potential social networking new entrants´ enthusiasm.

Second, a European project, Fleck, has also been in the process of patenting its technology recetly. Fleck.com´s motto is "Web Democracy".

Third, a dating website, Engage, just raised 5m$ in a first financing round. It´s business model is a mix of social networking and dating. Are investors buying diversified Web 2.0 projects, or will Engage bring in disruptive synergies in the dating business?

I suggest that all IT Addicts start thinking right here, through commenting, about the nuts and bolds of patenting "soft" technologies. Are social networking technologies really innovative? What´s the underlying strategy of companies willing to legally protect their activities?

I can´t resist taking to the ZidanoNinjaMania

2006-07-14T16:36:00.000+02:00

Have a look at this, it´s really funny:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/07/13/zidane_headbutt_outrage/
Anyways, apologizing to my Italian friends, I think Zidane was right to do what he did. Racism should be fought without compassion for anybody.

Keep an eye on India´s reaction to what happened in Bombay, and on the Israeli strikeback against terror that unfortunately involves Lebanese civilians that believe terrorism is pure negation of life too.

And for those who´ll ask be by e-mail what the connection between this post and high-tech is:
- "buzz" marketing (viral video clips)
- video special effects (see Zidane´s videos)
- blogging as a personal window on the world: I can express my opinions freely without having to write an reader letter to The Economist (that has around .00003% to be selected).
- and anyways, I can write whatever I like. It´s my blog. Open yours and put you on the map!

Addendum:
* Materazzi is not bad too...Here are his Top 5 most violent plays according to Italian journalists.
* Try it too, it works!

VoIP: Skype introduces customer experience feedbacks

2006-07-14T11:35:00.000+02:00

For the sake of all...A good initiative though, something engineers-ran high-tech companies should do more to get closer to their customers.

Taking advantage of this post´s topic, you can obviously feel free to criticize this blog anytime, should you think that it doesn´t match its objectives/most posts are crappy/I should talk about specific technologies/etc.

YOU are making this blog existing through your comments and visits. Keep that in mind.

Loic Le Meur on blogging at the Google Zeitgeist Europe conference

2006-07-13T12:58:00.000+02:00

You should listen to Loic Le Meur´s intervention at Google Zeitgeist Europe, which occurred in June 2006. Loic Le Meur is one of the most prominent spokespersons of European blogging and podcasting (he´s written a book on each of the topics; I haven´t had the opportunity to read these yet but I´ll keep you posted, it´ll come soon), and leading French blogger.

Loic Le Meur´s presentation of what it takes to be a blogger is extremely telling. Indeed, why don´t journalists bother to discuss with their readers? There are situations in life where we just feel like expressing ourselves. Let me conclude by quoting Loic: "Bloggers just want to be part of a conversation".

Enjoy the podcast.

On e-Commerce & e-Business

2006-07-12T15:51:00.000+02:00

E-Commerce is not e-Business, and e-Business is not (only) e-Commerce. Everyday I realize as I discuss with people that the the trend goes towards mixing the two concepts every day more.

* E-Commerce is synonym to allowing e-Shopping: an e-Commerce platform (be it C-to-C or B-to-C) is basically a virtual, interactive shop window that make products and services available to all cyber-citizens.

* E-Business has a broader range: as I see it, e-Business incures major transformations in traditional ways of doing business.
E-Business is about getting rid of resources-costly processes through integrated information systems.
These information systems (ERP software + electronic terminals) usually involve sourcing (SRM: Supplier Relationship Management), tracking inventory and goods (e-Supply Chain), managing talents (e-HR), finance, customer needs (CRM) to make their shopping experience better and better - and..e-Commerce, which, because it allows direct interactions with customers, is the most important part as long as operations are perfectly executed.

To wind up, when e-Commerce helps the company selling (better) through electronic channels, e-Business is about enhancing a competitive advantage by bringing in information technologies into the firm´s operational processes.

Here is an excellent recapitulating chart devised by Pr. Petra Schubert from the University of Applied Sciences of Basel, Switzerland:

You may find the whole presentation (.pdf) by clicking here. The lecture was given in December 2005 at an e-Commerce conference in Lisboa, Portugal.

"Positioning, the battle for your mind", a must-read by Al Ries & Jack Trout

2006-07-11T18:29:00.000+02:00

Too often do high-tech people focus on the technology only, rather on the customer experience.

Al Ries and Jack Trout, and Philip Kotler who writes a foreword, explain in "Positioning, the battle for your mind" how marketing in general, and branding in particular, helps you build a position in your prospect´s mind.

I enjoyed a lot reading the book. The lessons I will remember are the following:
- position well, wisely. Make sure you target a corner of the prospect´s mind that´s still virgin;
- think outward (ie from the customer´s viewpoint), always look for a niche to occupy before the competition, and give the customer what (s)he wants to listen about my company;
- the message you convey should be your actual strategy; keep your message as long as possible to achieve your strategic goals: don´t change your mind or the customer will change his/hers as well.

Some examples are a bit outdated (the book was written more than 20 years ago!), but still, Al Ries and Jack Trout provide great insights through them: why Xerox always failed to invest business different to the copy machines one (because Xerox MEANS copy in the customer´s mind), why IBM failed to even think about competing with Xerox in the copy-machines business, etc.

In a nutshell, I recommend this thin book to all techies that are willing to brush up their marketing skills in less than a week.

PS: many thanks to my former Marketing Professor at HEC Paris, Frédéric Dalsace, for granting his students with a great strategic marketing reading list. "Positioning, the battle for your mind" was on the list.

"To google" officially becomes an English verb

2006-07-11T17:23:00.000+02:00

The Merriam-Webster English dictionary has officially added "to google" as a verb, and "googling" as an action. Unsurprisingly, "google" means "to use the Google search engine to obtain information about (as a person) on the World Wide Web".

Impressive for an 8-years old company (at that time PhD students at Stanford, Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded the search engine in 1998), isn´t it?

Google is the third company I know having become a verb too. If "xerox" obviously means to copy, "cofacer" in French means to hedge one´s company again one´s international client failure-risk during an export transaction (COFACE is France´s main credit risk insurance company).

Picture credit: thanks to Jeff Clavier for the printscreen on the day of the Soccer World Cup Final (http://blog.softtechvc.com/2006/07/google_celebrat.html).

Why Israel didn´t make it to the Soccer World Cup...

2006-07-10T22:25:00.000+02:00

Do you want to know why Israel didn´t make it to the World Cup in Germany? Check this video out. By the way, many thanks to Neila for the link.

Apart from that and on such videos in general, I read in this week´s issue of the British free-market newspaper The Economist that some advertising companies specialize in creating funny and shocking videos. One example they provide is Kontraband, a London-based firm specialized in "viral" marketing. Such advertising videos are aimed at creating an online buzz, mainly through e-mails and links sent amongst friends - exactly like Neila sent the video to me.

JeuxVideoPC.com buy out - What will be Emmanuel´s next step?

2006-07-10T15:10:00.000+02:00

Emmanuel le Sellier de Chézelles founded JeuxVideoPC.com, the leading French-speaking website on PC Video Games matters (tests, new releases, tricks, trends, etc.), in 2000. At that time (he was still a high-school student), he already knew he was, and was all the more becoming, a true entrepreneur.

But instead of dropping out (like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, etc. - nice comparison, don´t you think?), Emmanuel went on to French preparatory classes to business schools competitive exams. In other words, hell! I can tell you from undergoing preparatory classes myself, it takes more than a three-figures IQ to study like a Japanese in these extremely intensive environments, and develop your own Internet-company AT THE SAME TIME!!

Emmanuel not only managed to make of JeuxVideoPC.com the leading PC games website in the French-speaking world, he also succeeded in passing the competitive exam of the most selective business university in France. Do you think he then started to look down on his friends?

Not at all. Emmanuel and I are classmates at HEC Paris. Could you believe that it took me several months to get to hear (not from him) about his venture? Emmanuel is extremely humble, and at the same time terribly effective, driven, and learnt. Having employees and managing a very profitable website never changed his tremendous people skills. On the contrary, Emmanuel still believes he has a great deal of things to learn about entrepreneurship, Internet technology and management. And he keeps spotting new trends: his team recently launched a website dedicated to booming Flash games: JeuxVideo-Flash .

Last week, Emmanuel finalized his exit from JeuxVideoPC.com, sold out to Groupe Best of Micro, a top-50 Internet media company in France (bestofmicro, presence-pc.com, infosdunet.com). Well done Emmanuel!

Though Emmanuel´s now on the map, bets aren´t opened regarding his future projects: Emmanuel shows his long-term commitment by staying more involved than ever in JeuxVideoPC.com. Emmanuel believes synergies between Groupe Best of Micro´s hardware sites and JeuxVideoPC.com are tremendous and potentially provide room for two-digits growth.

One thing that´s certain is that Emmanuel belongs to the forthcoming generation of French entrepreneurs, knowledgeable of the extraordinary buzzing opportunities of the Internet, and ethically-minded.

If you´re a VC or a business angel, I advise you to watch ITaddict carefully to be able to jump on Emmanuel´s next venture financing bandwagon. I´ll make sure I keep you posted.

Wengo, a better VoIP service than Skype?

2006-07-07T10:09:00.000+02:00

Skype is good. But there exists a better software, at least for now. Its name´s Wengo.

Lots of people connect through Skype, the rates are pretty low, and everybody knows about it. True. However, I´m sure you´ve already noticed that:
* The quality is good, but not so good;
* Skype uses a lot of memory resources;
* if you´re connected to a network (in your company, at home, etc.), one of the networked computers will be assigned "Server Tasks" and become EXTREMELY slow and vulnerable (security breaches). It´s on the contract you tick to agree when registering to Skype, and a major pitfall against corporate accounts business development.

So I suggest that you try Wengo. It´s as cheap as Skype, the hearing quality´s definitely better, few people have is so there´s no "Server" risk, and it´s extremely easy and simple to download and install. I now use Skype for PC-to-PC calls and Wengo for PC-to-landlines/cellphones/SMS use.

So try Wengo.

Cisco Systems France and its weekly high-tech podcast

2006-07-06T17:45:00.000+02:00

Cisco Systems France had started in January 2006 a weekly radio-podcast program: diaLog. The two journalists, Jérôme Colombain and François Sorel, are really, really good, both have a great sense of humour and they invite the most prominent decision makers of the French high-tech lanscape.

Judge by ourself! You should be able to find on the Archives page:
Pierre Ardichvili (IT Communications business development director), Pierre Kosciusko-Morizet (HEC Alumni, founder and CEO of PriceMinister.com), Olivier Sezner (VP technological strategy @ Cisco France), Jérôme Archambault (country manager @ Skype), Rafi Haladjian (founder of Ozone), Stéphane Cotte (Samsung France), Patrick Chanudet (ootay.fr), and many more!

The two interviews I found most interesting were the ones of Alexandre Mars (HEC Alumni too, founder and CEO of PhoneValley) - because I happen to know him a little bit (he had just stopped investing in start-ups when I was fundraising for a project); and the double-interview of Pierre Chappaz (founder of Wikio.fr, founder of Kelkoo, former Yahoo! France director) and Tariq Krim (founder of Netvibes) who are particularly visionary when it comes to their vision regarding what Internet 2.0 really is.

I apologize to all non-French speaking ITAddicted, the program´s in French. But I suggest you start taking French lessons because Cisco diaLog´s worth it.

Click here to access the podcast´s main page.

Steve Job´s commencement speech at Stanford: "follow your intuitions and become yourself".

2006-07-06T12:28:00.000+02:00

Apple´s founder and CEO Steve Jobs gave a fantastic speech at Stanford, talking about his family background, the reason why he dropped out of college, why we should thank him for the many typos available on our PCs, his entrepreneurial quests at Apple (and how he primarily got fired!), Next and Pixar - which eventually became managerial adventures. In a very moving conclusion, Steve Jobs talks about death and urges Stanford students to live their own life instead of someone else´s.

An amazing speech available by clicking on this link.

Amazon.co.jp makes of RFID and Internet-Telco synergy a reality

2006-07-05T16:28:00.000+02:00

Amazon, as far as I know, is the first blue-chip Internet company to launch a sound e-commerce mobile service.

Briefly speaking, Amazon´s "Scan Search" service boils down to:
* having users downloading onto their cellphone a free application;
* Whenever a user goes to a brick-and-mortar shop, she/he has the possibility to scan its barcode and send it instantaneously to Amazon´s system;
* if the product´s also in Amazon catalog, then the user accesses its page and: i) may consult user reviews and opinions about the product; ii) most importantly, check out price which price is best: the actual shop or Amazon.

Amazing, isn´t it? This is the sort of eBusiness service that will give Amazon Japan an advantage over the competition (we have talked in the past on this very blog about Rakuten), for four main reasons:

1) Amazon will be able to track market trends better and see which products Amazon doesn´t have consumers ask for (hence allowing them to better react);

2) Amazon will all the more competing with Japan´s offline retail stores. The fact that it happens in Japan is extremely interesting provided that the distribution system is extremely opaque there;

3) Thanks to the information gathered, Amazon will be able to devise a better pricing strategy (they´ll get to know better about the competitors´ prices);

4) Consumers will be curious to understand what their neighbour´s doing taking a picture of everything she/he plans to buy and, terribly jalous of their ability to make better purchasing decisions, will also take to Amazon´s new RFID solution.

What Amazon started in Japan really adds value to the consumer experience. Not only does it require little capital to get going, it also generates business!

Towards a more generalized Storage & Security industries convergence? Proof is the EMC acquisition of RSA Security

2006-07-04T20:51:00.000+02:00

It had been a while since a major storage and security convergence M&A transaction hadn´t occurred (in December 2004, Symantec and Veritas had merged).

What happened last week is, when it comes to industry trends forecasting, very telling: EMC, the world-leader in storage solutions, has acquired RSA Security, the successful access and identity management software company. RSA hit the headlines recently when it partnered with antivirus software company Panda to dismantle the Clickbot.A application e-mafia (a virus monitored by a network of e-crooks that tracked "Pay-per-Click" pages and clicked on it automatically).

Although I believe the $2.1bn valuation grants RSA shareholders with a pretty nice premium, the move clearly makes sense, strategically speaking: companies are fed up having to deal with tons of vendors when implementing a new information security solution (hardware vendors, security auditors, storage architects, software engineers, deployment consultants, training consultants, etc.). Thanks to the EMC - RSA integration, clients will be dealing with this one-stop integrator that will provide the storage solution and the software that goes with it. Simple, isn´t it? It´s exactly as if you purchased a new PC (or a door) and had to go and buy the operating system (the key...) on the side: why bother?

I actually came to know about this deal thanks to Philippe Becher, the founder and managing director of Vadis Partners. Vadis Partners is an international capital and business development consultancy: Philippe´s teams help their clients (Israeli high-tech start-ups in security, storage and telcos) expand their business base through frequent international expansion missions in Europe and the United States (fundraising, new clients hunt abroad, strategy consulting, etc.). When I met Philippe in Tel Aviv, I was impressed by his drive and talent to convince. Prior to founding Vadis Partners, Philippe had worked for the World Bank in Russia, for a major French banking institution, and finally for the Fantine group - at the time the major Israeli Private Equity group. When Fantine went bust, Philippe founded Vadis Partners, which is now a major player in the security - storage - telcos consulting business.

From what I understood from my last talk with Philippe, Vadis Partners´ client portfolio has doubled in size and volume in the past year(Israel is a nest of start-ups with outstanding technological capabilities and they´re all willing to expand internationally). Philippe has eventually achieved what he had set out to do: allow companies with fantastic customer and technological assets like RSA Security, a long-term client of Vadis Partners, to be purchased by a giant like EMC. And this is only a beginning...
Congrats Philippe: you make Israeli technological breakthroughs available to the world!

No doubt you´ll get to read more about Vadis Partners and its clients technologies in the future on this very blog.

Think different, don´t think iPod

2006-07-04T14:16:00.000+02:00

Let me start with a little story, and a basic question:
Say you purchased gas for your car, and realized that this specific oil company sells a specific gas that works only with one specific car. Would you be pissed off?

Sure you would. Well, that´s exactly the pattern Apple iPod´s business model is implementing. When you download music on Apple Music Store onto your iTunes software, the only electronic music player that enables you to listen to the music you´ve purchased is your iPod. Does it sound familiar?

iPod´s lack of interoperability confirms the underlying strategic move Apple´s CEO Steve Jobs has made. Apple is exiting step-by-step the software industry in which Microsoft Windows KO-ed Mac OS a long time ago - to do what it does best (design and marketing), & become a consumer hardware devices pure-player, reproducing Microsoft´s monopolistic economics.

The French government, for once, understood what was going on in the entertainment industry. A motion potentially forcing Apple to either open its rather unfair FairPlay technology or exit the historical French market (France is an all-times first-mover into Apple´s new releases and hosts the biggest Apple conference outside the US - named Apple Expo) was recently accepted by both the Parliament and the Senate. Unfortunately, French lawmakers ruled out the possibility to constrain Apple´s upcoming dominant competitive position. There is however still room for fining Apple, and the story made such a media hype that other governments might follow France´s clever move. Let´s hope the world realizes where culture is heading to before it´s too late.

To recapitulate, all what consumers want is to be able to purchase the music they like from the downloading website they want, and play it on the device they had previously bought.

A new online community is kicking-off: FrenchNetwork.org

2006-07-03T15:59:00.000+02:00

Welcome to FrenchNetwork.org, a portal for all French people living abroad!

The concept is new and pretty simple: several million frogs currently and constantly live all around the world. We call them "Les Expats". They are most of the time wealthier than the average Frenchman, rather open-minded, and..terribly alone - at least in the beginning of their stay.

Ilan Abehassera, Nathanael Cohen and Jerôme Gorges, three very dynamic French (Internet , but not exclusively) entrepreneurs living in Miami, Florida, spotted the opportunity and opened for the "Expat" crowd a community portal. FrenchNetwork.org´s a meeting and networking place as well as an ads marketplace. And though only a Beta version, FrenchNetwork.org is already a big and growing success! A newer, final release of the website is to be launched soon, and more communities are being targeted for future developments (ItalianNetwork, GayNetwork, JewishNetwork, etc.). I´ll keep IT Addict readership posted of the new developments of the FrenchNetwork.org adventure!

One very last thing: the last time Ilan, Nathanael and I met, we went to a crazy place in South Beach, Miami. If you want to have some fun, I highly recommend you to take a look at Taverna Opa - a greek restaurant where people dance on tables when dessert/coffee time comes (their cheap Ouzo helps a lot too - but watch out the check, they often charge for twice what you´ve ordered). We came out so drunk that we thought there could be a market for an AlwaysDrunkGuysNetwork.org));

Grid is the future of computing

2006-06-30T21:03:00.000+02:00

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!

2006-06-29T18:39:00.002+02:00

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

2006-06-28T11:40:00.000+02:00

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

2006-06-28T10:14:00.000+02:00

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

2006-06-27T19:33:00.000+02:00

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

2006-06-27T19:01:00.000+02:00

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

2006-06-27T13:01:00.000+02:00

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!

2006-06-27T11:05:00.000+02:00

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!

2006-06-26T19:11:00.000+02:00

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!

2006-06-26T15:53:00.000+02:00

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

2006-06-25T20:50:00.000+02:00

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?

2006-06-23T10:51:00.000+02:00

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

2006-06-22T21:53:00.000+02:00

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

2006-06-22T11:00:00.000+02:00

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

2006-06-22T10:36:00.000+02:00

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...

2006-06-22T10:21:00.000+02:00

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"

2006-06-21T23:49:00.000+02:00

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

2006-06-21T21:01:00.000+02:00

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

2006-06-21T18:54:00.000+02:00

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

2006-06-21T17:38:00.000+02:00

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.