As a serial entrepreneur, I’ve already had quite a few experiences in creating, funding, scaling and selling (or failing or stopping) businesses. A few very interesting trends have been emerging over the past few months and which got quite popular within my fellow entrepreneur’s minds:

• the “Lean” start-up. Basically the idea is that in 2010 you should be able to start up any Internet-based business with a super-low seed financing (typically a few kUSD). Use subcontractors in low-cost countries (rent-a-coder, odesk…) get a talented freelance web-designer and get started ! Release early (if you’re happy with your release then you took too long) and start making the buzz.
• Focus on less features but do them better than the competition. Steve Jobs demonstrated that it’s not the number of features that matter on the mass market, it’s the ease of use and understandability of the solution.
• Make a real business. Make a business where you have customers ready to pay for the service. Freemium is usually the way. Forget about the advertisement (limit it to the free part of your website) and focus on the transformation rate between free and paying customers. Make your business recurring, it really helps !
• Find a large enough market for your service, if Europe is too hard to address (# languages, payments methods, laws…) just move !
• Organize the buzz in your industry, blog be present and become a referent in your business. Find where the journalists look for their info in your area and make sure your messages are there visible to them. Forgen about making PRs, it’s old-fashioned, instead enroll the influential writers as advocates of your business.
• Get venture money only when you have created enough value and have enough figures proving that you will be able to translate marketing investments into new users and recurring money. If you can get profitable and that your business lets your live super-well, do not get venture money at all, and focus on getting that “4-hour workweek” dream. The moment you get venture, you’ll have to find an exit strategy in the next 3 to 5 years with a 10x return – it really limits your options for the future.

I’m getting ready to leave for MWC2010. Apparently this year Barcelona is going to be rainy and cold, just like 2009 was – but definetly 2010 is going to be a revival for the whole industry.

• Smartphone are the new standard – with school girls addicted to blackberry’s PIM and 1€ android smartphones, mobile services are getting to a next level
• The network too is evolving to support those, after AT&T network killed by numerous iPhones overloading it with huge data transfers, LTE is getting real and all the manufacturers are selling upgrades to the existing networks (AT&T just purchased it from Alcatel and Ericsson). IMS also is getting there bringin in “presence” and Softphone-based cross-media communications to the network core
• Value added services are getting bigger and bigger with the operators willing to act as a distributor to those new services and keep as much value as he can

Exciting times ahead, cant’ wait to see what’s new to be seen this year!
If you’re around, come meet me on F-Secure boot AV38A and get a sneak peek at how F-Secure protects the irreplaceable – even on your mobile!

Address Book is undoubtedly the core usage on the mobile phone and central for many startups (zyb, plaxi…), but I’ve always been a strong believer that it has and will be replaced by social networks. Let’s face it, my 2k contacts on my phones are just a pile of crap, lots are outdated, and quite a few would require a little search for me to remember who those people are. My friends are on Facebook, my business contacts on LinkedIn, this is my Address Book.
This morning at #leweb, both LinkedIn and Facebook confirmed they are eyeing on the phone address book space.
Facebook on Blackberry paved the way, with phone numbers and pictures updated from facebook, the experience has been live for more than a year now and as a user I feel it quite clear that that’s what we should all be experiencing in our phones.
Value is not the data, it’s the relationship between the users.

speed test with Ethernet

Mise en ligne par jmgobet

30Mbps down, 23up…. amazing scores ! Can someone get me fiber in Neuilly please ?
I’m so curious about the new use cases this kind of speed is bringing in – for instance time-machine-on-the-cloud just starts to make a lot of sense, and I wouldn’t have to worry anymore about crappy usb drives dying…
Also Second Life might get smooth, would love to see that happening – same for streamed or downloaded-on-the-fly games such as OnLive, QuakeLive or Unity’s…

If only those were true I’d get them straight away! If you have the sould of a Wii modder WiiMoteMods is the site to find a whole load of good stuff.
Source Gizmodo

I started playing at Final Fantasy VII – Crisis Core a week ago and it’s probably the best PSP game I’ve been playing so far. Excellent scenario, awesome graphics, rhythm and gameplay. The 40mins per day in the Metro have never seemed so fast. It’s really a pure RPG where you get immersed into a splendid story with alternate high-energy battles and breathtaking movie phases.

SOLDIER is a group of skilled combat operatives within the Shinra Electric Power Company. The elite within the group-those strong enough to be deemed SOLDIER 1st Class-are respected and idolized by the citizenry. Zack is a young SOLDIER 2nd Class who aspires to become a 1st. He spends his days carrying out assignments under the guidance of his 1st Class mentor, Angeal Hewley.

During an operation in Wutai, a large number of SOLDIER members, led by 1st Class operative Genesis, go missing. The severity of the situation prompts the Shinra Electric Power Company executives to deploy even more SOLDIER operatives in hopes of bringing an end to the war with Wutai-and conducting an investigation into the mass desertion. The ones assigned to the mission are Zack, Angeal, and the 1st Class hero Sephiroth. However, when Angeal goes missing on the Wutai mission, Sephiroth believes it is betrayal.

After returning from the mission, Zack is deployed, along with the Turk leader Tseng, to investigate Banora Village, the past home of Angeal and Genesis.

Google has released today Lively, their own 3d virtual world. I’ve been test driving it and those are my early thoughts:

• It’s a browser plugin which is good – installing a stand-alone software seems more complex to end users and look too much like a game when web3d is clearly *not* a game – this has been one of the major cause of disappointment about SL
• It takes forever to load a room… about 10 mins to have the room completely loaded on a pretty fast DSL2+ line
• No user generated content : Major drawback, you’ve got to think to the content catalog. Google says they hope to bring UGC some time but imho without a decent UGC creator studio (which is on of SL’s greatest achievements) this is going to be just yet another fisher-price web3d experiment
• HMI is really simple, probably too simple, motions seem weird (left goes right ? ) and use of the mouse unnatural. Although I have a MacbokPro with a GeForce, FPS seemed pretty slow.
• Integration with gtalk is clearly a good way to go – that’s exactly what i wanted to show with the SL-Messenger project, virtual world and online communities should be bound together using the usual communication channels.

Overall it’s interesting to see Google go in that area – there is still a lot to do though to turn this test into something useful …

I’m finally getting to use SL in my own company for remote meetings, that’s über-cool ! As we have a proof of concept being worked on based on the SL RC client, the full tech team is now SL compliant. And meetings in SL really are nice . Below in Messenger meeting room with my interns.

It’s kind of an announcement that Linden Labs and IBM made today, they have been working for one year on the OpenGrid Protocol that is supposed to enable an avatar to move from one world to another while keeping its original inventory and look. It seems like it’s the way it should have been since the very start, but every virtual world has until now been an isolated island on the metaverse with no way of communicating with people from other worlds, this is going to change !
Here’s the video made of the first teleport from Second Life to OpenSim.