Archive for December, 2006
Down from the “Aiguille rouge”
Very nice “black” slope from the highest point in Les Arcs … follow me during a small part of this very nice slope ! As you might hear, there are some rocks, we are still waiting for the snow here !
Off for holidays - Merry christmas and Happy new year
I’m off for 12 days of skiing in the French Alps at Les Arcs 1950. Very nice brand new village (created from scratch 4 years ago) where I really feel I’m in Disneyland with high quality resorts heavily decorated … I’m still waiting for Mickey or Dingo to pop by dressed in father christmas.
Anyway, merry christmas and all the best for 2007 !
CSG3
Very cool diner yesterday night after leweb3 organized by Jeff, Rodrigo and Marc. Great people, I had a long chat with Andrew from treonauts (this guy is amazing, his way of thinking and buinding a business is awesome), Brett who was in Japan exactly at the same time as me, Esmeralda from muniwireless, Scott from mybloglog… too bad it’s only once in a year !
Technorati Tags: csg3
Politics 3.0
Along with the politicians, we had Elkabach (famous French journalist specialized in politics) joining the audience and coming on stage.
Notice : I’ll try to keep this post really neutral, I’m not (yet) doing any kind of politics 
Franois Bayrou (UDF) started by stating “blogosphere is important to me”
He started by explaining how worried he is as powerful groups are putting their hands on the media, and the only reaction possible can come from the blogosphere. He is impressed by OpenSource & Wikis that he sees as a trial to create a cooperation society. He wanted to be there as we (the bloggers) represent this blogosphere and we should relay his interest on this new eras.
Although I must confess this was not an easy exercise for him, I found his speech pretty poor - and his English is terrible.
Nicolas Sarkozy (UMP) did a wonderful talk around the theme “France is behind regarding technologies and has lost its will to create new businesses, here a a few propositions to change that”. He said we should inspire ourselves with what’s happening in the US and how universities are a real asset to the economy enabling creation of successful companies. The talk was really well prepared, accurate and with many concrete propositions (good job Loïc )
Nevertheless, I’m not sure it was very fair to leave Bayrou without a professional translator when Sarkozy had one and english speaking people had special earplugs to hear the translation…
I left just afterwards, fed up with the poor wifi connection … last year we had less than half of the bandwidth and still everyone could surf in good conditions. Hope next year will be better !
WaveStorm is hiring !
I must confess I’m really confused … everybody says there is unemployment in France but I’m looking for a set of hardware and software engineers and cannot seem to find any ! So if you feel like working on embedded communications system from hardware design, schematics, PCB routing to drivers and even HMIs, send a mail with your resume at recrute @ wave-storm.com.
UWB in Europe
It was quite impossible to get UWB in Europe apart from development samples, indeed UBW uses frequencies from 3.1 to 10.6GHz in the US and part of those frequencies are still in military domain in Europe. Thigs are finally moving as you can see on this article in WNN. The full spectrum won’t be open at once, as for a start Europe will be limited at 3.4 to 5 GHz and 6.0 to 8.5 GHz. Anyway, it would have been a shame for Europe to be left aside the revolution of UWB !
World is pregnant
We had a wonderful talk from Shimon Peres this morning, here are a few ideas he scattered during this morning :
We are giving birth to a new world. One age is over and a new age is being born, an age were politics, government, borders are no more. Our mission is to imagine, not to remember, Internet is the best teacher for our children and helps us remember. State, borders, governments are no longer that important. Economy has become without borders, without lands, without armies. Wealth is no more a matter of accumulating goods, it’s become what ideas you imagine (patents…). An individual man can create an economic state around a good new idea, Bill Gates did. There’s no more “private” companies, because your company is global and influencing the whole world… thus every company is “public”. Companies are more influential to our future than governments which cannot manage their demography anymore. The armies as they are now are of no use anymore, they are disproportional… sending a huge multi-billion dollar plane to kill one single terrorist is too much. But new armies based on robots and nano-technologies are appearing.
The new force is modern science, technology and companies. Strategy and politics aren’t the solution anymore, economics is the first step to solving problems, but governments don’t have the money to finance new opportunities… as private equity can be reactive on new market opportunities and help the world change.The terrorists and fanatics have no future, they are of the old age, they won’t sustain modernity.
How can we change the world ? Create new businesses on emerging countries and help reshape the world. Governments can’t do that, companies can.
During Q&A, Mr Peres said that he foresees that in 20 years, 80% of energy will come from the sun.
“Don’t look at the past, it’s a waste of time” Democracy is the right to make mistakes and the obligation to correct them.
This talk was really a success with the longest (and only) standing ovation for a man who has a unique vision of the future and how to make a better world.
Technorati Tags: leweb3, shimon+peres
Entrepreneurs, come to France
Very interesting panel animated by Jeff (nice suit Jeff!) who just reminded us that in France we are in an exceptional position to innovate ! We are really in advance compared to our neighbors & US regarding broadband services. In France we have 50Mb/s for 30€ when you get 1,5Mbps in US for 45$. So we are at the best place to innovate and invent the new broadband services, and the DSL operators have been creating a great ecosystem to push new services (triple, n-uple play …).
Technorati Tags: business+oportunities, broadband
The service of the day
Hail to echovox and its service smsconnect.com. Just talked to Kurt about what echovox is and basically it’s a Swiss company that was mainly B2B (working the M6 SMS interactive system for instance) ans smsconnect is their first B2C service. They support 9 European country (US to come) and it’s 100% free ! Just connect to the site, use the API and start billing, easy as a Pie. revenue model is based on Revenue sharing, they take 3% of management fees.
Technorati Tags: echovox, smsconnect, sms
“Live” from leweb3
Leweb3 just started today with a set of very interesting conferences. I’m pretty sad I missed Niklas zennström this morning (had to work… tough !) but enjoyed the two conferences about OpenSource sorftware & Mozilla along with Technorati’s Dave Sifry - what a showman - who explained us kindly : “if you want to get more influence, you should post at least once a day, have a two-years-old blog, and use technorati
Nice organisation, apart from Orange’s WiFi which doesn’t work 
It’s 3pm and I don’t know when I’ll be able to upload pictures & post … and my neighbor who managed to connect cannot send mails ..n no smtp passthrough … man Orange guys just don’t know their job. They really should stick at providing DSL…
