… for this summer at least. I’m just back from a week in Honfleur where we had an excellent time (although the weather wasn’t really up to my expectations).
We experiences two splendid and intimate hotels, “La petite folie” and “Le clos Bourdet” and a few restaurants such as “l’Absinthe”, “Sa.Qua.Na” and “le Bistrot des Artistes”…
Top achievement of the week : we managed to buy 6 bottles of cider “François David”, probably the best ever and exclusively retailed at “Les Vapeur”’s restaurant in Trouville.

This is my networker of a wife’s dream, being able to tell in a public place who’s who by just firing your phone (and thus saving you the hassle of asking the waiter to investigate….
Pretty nice concept video (all fake) but illustrating brilliantly the idea.

It’s always such an excitement to see a start-up complete its life-cycle by a positive exit. As you know I joined the Steek adventure 3 months ago to create and develop the mobile division. When I first stepped in I discovered a company with talented people really sales-oriented and customer driven. This 7 years old start-up has achieved great goals and with over 2.5 million users it can really play in the carrier playground. Seeing a positive exit as announced today is a positive signal sent to all the other start-ups around : develop the business on your own, deliver stuff that work and you *will* make a success story out of your company.
Congrats to all the team, can’t wait to see how Steek will change F-Secure by bringing our end-user focus and their huuuge salesforce together!

JM and I put up this little video yesterday showing a few demos on Steek Mobile for Smartphones and how we bring the Save, Share and Play experience to those devices, hope you enjoy it !

Pretty funny service from AT&T called Video Share that lets you share during a phone call video either live from your mobile or stored in its memory, some kind of half-duplex 3G visio … only works on 4 handsets yet I love the thought!

Thinkbalm is probably the most interesting analyst group I’ve seen on the Immersive Internet field. They just released a Machinima where they present a lot of data on the status of Immersive Internet for Businesses in a very unique way. While the video might be a bit long for the web (9mins) it’s really inspiring!

JaJah quietly launched a few days ago a new service called “GoJaJah” currently only limited to bearers of an italian mobile.
The service basically uses the Funambol technology (SyncML solution provider) to synchronize your address book to the GoJajah backend, detects your current location and adds to each of your contacts calling cards the appropriate local Jajah VoIP phone number making it a real no-brainer to use Jajah service in the smartest possible way (and letting you save money on long-distance calls).
This is probably the most impressive use-case of address book synchronization and enrichment – watch out as the service goes mainstream !

Finally got the Palm Pre SDK (hurray) and got to play with the emulator and write the first hello world, this device really looks promising and it’s so exciting to see Palm back in the business. For the record, my first handheld device was a Palm III in 1998, and since then Palm devices have progressively lost their appeal… But now it seems i cant’ wait for the Pre to reach us in Europe with its GSM version !
On the left a screenshot of the emulator with browser pointed to this blog.