FiberGeneration

Web 2.0 At Its Best : Feedly

For those of you who a) use Firefox 3, and b) a RSS feed aggregator & reader, Feedly is the add-on you need.

Read the comprehensive presentation here on Mashable, so you'll get the whole picture.

I use Feedly since Day One (as well as Firefox 3, of course) : it's both simple and powerful, flexible and easy to set up and use. The page looks like an online magazine (which it is, at the end of the day), unlike Netvibes or GoogleReader. With its typical Web 2.0 attributes, such as The Wall where others can share with you recommendations and annotations.

Since Feedly is an add-on to your browser, you don't need to go to Netvibes or GoogleReader any longer : set Feedly as your homepage, that's all you need to do. Sure, you can do the same with your traditional RSS reader, but it's not "integrated" into your browser.

I'm convinced Feedly is another step forward to the true Enterprise 2.0, since it enables the user to aggregate multiple information and content onto a single page without the need to connect to an external website. A brief look at the Feedly's mash-up diagram tells me we've now everything in hands to create, implement, and truly use simple yet efficient & productive vertical *Web 2.0-based* applications...

The time of the twits

Step by step, month after month, the Web 2.0 is changing the way we can use data and information.
See here how you can mash your twits up. Thanks to Dipity.

For many businesses, it's time to think different.

Teaching Fiber Optics Basics The YouTube Way

Why spend time on training course slides and notes design and edition, when everything you need is available on the Net ? Provided that people better remind images rather than text, YouTube is one of the new companions of the teachers, trainers, and instructors of all kind, together with Wikipedia and a few other Web 2.0 tools.
Here's a collection of videos I've put together for fiber optics training - most are in english, some are in french. Enjoy, and feel free to use. The playlist is available here.

[Web Too] IM-Translate

French startup IM-Translate is born, offering the first online instant translation of instant messages:

Immediate translation of instant messages. You do nothing differently — IM-Translate™ integrates seamlessly into your existing IM application — just type as usual. Forget copy, pasting or jumping back and forth to a web-based translator. Your buddy receives your message plus a translation — instantly. You see the translation of the text you typed. You also receive your buddy’s messages in both languages. Free! — Downloads in seconds with broadband.

First IM app targeted : Windows Live Messenger, aka MSN.
As I told my friend Georges, CTO of IM-T, they should release a Mac version as quickly as possible, since Mac users are more suited for beta testing campaigns : we love giving feedback, for the developers to enhance their products.
Also in the pipe : the app for Google.

Interesting : IM-T is formed by... US citizens and registered in... France, for some legal and market issues.
IM-T is a typical Web 2.0 start-up : of the six co-founders and team members, nobody knows more than two others face-to-face. They never met altogether so far ! Their collaborative tools : Google, Skype, and email.
One of the founders is my old buddy Georges Pantanelli. A french High-Tech industry veteran, who relocated to the US in the 90's. Georges got his american passport two years ago, in San Francisco. The lesson : in California, everything is possible for those who have the entrepreneurial spirit.

IM-Translate site and download here.

Belgium Goes Web 3.0

This is true User-Interaction. Just amazing. And so funny ;-) Enjoy !

Wake Up Call By Google

Google did it again. A true breakthrough online app, which is set to be the next revolution in the Internet mattress - ooops, sorry, matters. See here for more details.

Windows Failure Hits My Dell Hard (And Zoho Saved My Day)

Earlier this week, I've tried to install Ubuntu on my laptop PC - just because I was getting tired of Windows (ever seen a slowing 2GHz CoreDuo ?). The IT guy gave me his so-called official off-the-shelf blahblahblah PartitionMagic CD, for me to partition the hard disk accordingly - I still need Windows for some software demos and apps.

Guess what : got the BSOD right after the reboot. Since then, impossible to repair the damages (don't ask, please), as I couldn't even access to the DOS.

So, yesterday evening I decided to do it the hard way, formatting the hard drive and installing Ubuntu 7.0. Pretty comfortable OS, by the way : I got WiFi up and running in less than 1 minute, and I don't have to re-enter the WEP key each time I wake the machine up.

Now, the really good thing of all this mess : I can get back all my mission-critical files, PDF docs, URLs, etc. Thanks to the lovely Zoho suite, Zoho Projects in particular.
I use Zoho everyday, as my mission planner and database. I put almost everything on it : draft presentations, spreadsheets, web links, PDF documents...

I can now restore my offline base, without fearing files losses.
Outcome : I'll use Zoho Show to create my next presentation.

post-scriptum : I'll install Opera for Ubuntu as soon as I can get rid of those typical Linux messages (missing this, missing that...). So I'll be able to sync my bookmarks and prefs, in the blink of an eye.

The No-Time For Blogging Edition [01-29-08]

Buddy Blogger Benoit Felten has published two must-read briefs on two must-read reports : "CES'08", by Olivier Ezratti, and "Free's FTTH services testing", by the french newsletter Journal du Freenaute. Great readings for learnings.

Even Asia

See here. Amazing.

Your Best Marketing Friend : Google

To those of you who still think you need to pay hundreds of bucks to a PR agency for ensuring your visibility on the Web, you may think again. See this : somebody somewhere was searching Google for "optical networks contracting"; outcome : Fibergeneration came number one in the list, with this post.

Lesson : Seth Godin is right. First thing to do this year : Google yourself.

Discovery Engine

Apparently, FiberGeneration has been spotted by a new web crawler.
Here's what SiteMeter saw as web browser : "Generic crawler 1.0
disco/Nutch-1.0-dev (experimental crawler; www.discoveryengine.com; disco-crawl@discoveryengine.com)"

The Discovery Engine home page is pretty sexy, although it doesn't say much about the real stuff behind the logo... Just wait & see, as usual with the startups working in stealth mode.

The Web is the Platform

Erick Schonfeld of Techcrunch reports the short speech of Jeff Huber, VP Engineering, Google, at the Web 2.0 Summit yesterday in San Francisco.

Quote Huber : " What we see is applications fundamentally changing. Just like the model for content changed from monolithic sites, now applications are going to be feeds and containers. A lot that you have heard here is about platforms and who is going to win. That is Paleolithic thinking. The Web has already won. The web is the Platform. So let’s go build the programmable Web."

And let's go build the user-programmable test gear : Testing 2.0 !

mymt2k.com : " My mTurk " ?...

This mymt2k.com thing was too much of interest from a business intelligence perspective for me not to spend an hour or so today to find out what it could be. Turns out it's a... Wait a second, you'll get the answer at the end of this post.

Before that, let's start with the begining : Google. A quick search on "mymt2k" gives a 6-pages results, with FiberGeneration on the first one and lots of... porn-related stuff on the 5th and 6th pages.
On the first page too, a handful of other blogs also displayed on mymt2k. See for instance Euan Semple' s The Obvious, or Blucat and A Reality Of My Own. According to the respective posts, the thing started back in March this year...

Then, let's go on WhoIs to find out who could be behind the mysterious website. Mr Jason Lucas is the happy owner. Congrats, Man ! Such a hype for a domain registered in January, that's quite a success. However, I'm not the only one to think Mr Lucas is a cover...

So, let's dig into the mymt2k website itself. Start with the simple URL 'mymt2k.com' : a nice, white, blank page. Cool, zen, but useless. A quick look at the different URLs mentionned by above bloggers and commenters show that the main content is a dynamic one. See for instance here, and here : same tmp9 directory, yet displaying different content.

Then, how about looking at the 'mymt2k.com/tmp*/' directories themselves ? From 1 to 10 and above, quite interesting outcomes. For instance, in tmp4 there is a link to the old contest at Snap.com.
See the structure of the tmp9 one in the screenshot at the left. Hum... what's that 'mturk' stuff ? Does ring a bell ? Fine, let's go deeper onto the investigation.

Go to the tmp6 directory, and read the bold flashy statement :
" Note: Be patient and check pages carefully! We will invite good mturkers for our next tasks with a much higher payment! "
Okay, finally we got them ! So simple : 'mymt2k' stands for " My mTurk ", easy, right ?

Now, what's an mTurk ? For those of you who are not familiar with the Web 2.0 world, mTurk, or Mechanical Turk, is a new service offered by Amazon since a few months.

You may read the FAQ page on mturk.com here. Pretty exciting yet a bit complex for non-geeks people. In summary, the mTurk service puts Human Intelligence behind the computer (that's a nice one ;-).

Says Amazon :

What is Amazon Mechanical Turk? 

In 1769, Hungarian nobleman Wolfgang von Kempelen astonished Europe by building a mechanical chess-playing automaton that defeated nearly every opponent it faced. A life-sized wooden mannequin, adorned with a fur-trimmed robe and a turban, Kempelen's "Turk" was seated behind a cabinet and toured Europe confounding such brilliant challengers as Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon Bonaparte. To persuade skeptical audiences, Kempelen would slide open the cabinet's doors to reveal the intricate set of gears, cogs and springs that powered his invention. He convinced them that he had built a machine that made decisions using artificial intelligence. What they did not know was the secret behind the Mechanical Turk: a human chess master cleverly concealed inside.

Today, we build complex software applications based on the things computers do well, such as storing and retrieving large amounts of information or rapidly performing calculations. However, humans still significantly outperform the most powerful computers at completing such simple tasks as identifying objects in photographs—something children can do even before they learn to speak.

When we think of interfaces between human beings and computers, we usually assume that the human being is the one requesting that a task be completed, and the computer is completing the task and providing the results. What if this process were reversed and a computer program could ask a human being to perform a task and return the results? What if it could coordinate many human beings to perform a task?

Amazon Mechanical Turk provides a web services API for computers to integrate "artificial artificial intelligence" directly into their processing by making requests of humans. Developers use the Amazon Mechanical Turk web service to submit tasks to the Amazon Mechanical Turk web site, approve completed tasks, and incorporate the answers into their software applications. To the application, the transaction looks very much like any remote procedure call: the application sends the request, and the service returns the results. Behind the scenes, a network of humans fuels this artificial artificial intelligence by coming to the web site, searching for and completing tasks, and receiving payment for their work.

What problem does Amazon Mechanical Turk solve? 

For software developers, the Amazon Mechanical Turk web service solves the problem of building applications that until now have not worked well because they lack human intelligence. Humans are much more effective than computers at solving some types of problems, like finding specific objects in pictures, evaluating beauty, or translating text. The Amazon Mechanical Turk web service gives developers a programmable interface to a network of humans to solve these kinds of problems and incorporate this human intelligence into their applications.

For businesses and entrepreneurs who want tasks completed, the Amazon Mechanical Turk web service solves the problem of getting work done in a cost-effective manner by people who have the skill to do the work. The service provides access to a vast network of human intelligence with the efficiencies and cost-effectiveness of computers. Oftentimes, the cost of establishing a network of skilled people to do the work outweighs the value of completing it. By turning the fixed costs into variable costs that scale with business needs, the Amazon Mechanical Turk web service eliminates this barrier and allows work to be completed that before was not economical.

For people who want to earn money in their spare time, the Amazon Mechanical Turk web site solves the problem of finding work that they can do wherever and whenever they want.

Interesting concept, huh ?

Now, let's go back to the HITs Human Intelligence Tasks main page. There is a "Web Page Classification" HIT here. Looks familiar, right ?
    

The remaining question is : does mymt2k.com belong to Amazon, or is it a kind of mashup by some research firm - or guy (this Jason Lucas is unknown on mTurk, and Steven Research is unknown on Google) ?...

Jottit, The Wiki Made EZ

" Jottit makes getting a website as easy as filling out a textbox.", claims the About page on this new app' website. Well, if Less Is More, Jottit' creators Simon Carstensen and Aaron Swartz got it at the perfection.
It took me approximatively 30 seconds to get a new wiki (in french), with its own address, up and runing. Amazingly easy.

More on Jottit by Rafe Needleman of C|Net' Webware here.

Baby 2.0

Robert Scobble uses the recent birth of his new kid to demonstrate some Web 2.0 apps. Here in France, newborns come to life with a huge debt do pay. In the US, their first cry goes on Twitter. I wonder if I don't prefer the first option...

Fibernews goes live !

[updated 09.14.07 @ 8:22PM CET]

Please welcome the new member of the Fibergeneration family : FiberNews !
FiberNews is a GoogleMap mashup, displaying FTTH Fiber-To-The-Home related news per their respective location.
See the previous post here.

Created with Yahoo!Pipes and GoogleMaps, of course.
The process is very simple :
1. get news feeds from different online news websites,
2. filter them on specific items, extract the location out of the press release or information,
3. get the corresponding output file as a KML file,
4. open it with GoogleMaps,
5. get the HTML code,
6. embed it in a blog post.

Next steps : a) add more news feeds - for the time being, that's only Fiber Optics Online and The New York Times, b) add a Yahoo!Maps display, to compare with Google's, c) test new ways to show information, as on Babelcast for instance.

You can see, use, and copy the fibernews pipe here. 
FiberNews webpage is here.

The Jump Into The CyberSpace Made Real

Star Wars fans, you (and me) have dreamed of it since 30 years now. Today, thanks to Australia-based startup Scouta, your dreams come true. Watch here.

The Danger Of Going All-Facebook (or Google)

Facebook becomes a one-stop-shopping center. Like Google.The Internet and especially the Web 2.0 were supposed to be an open place, offering open spaces for open applications.
Now, look at it from a different perspective : managing your online life thru only one or two places is dangerous. You'll end-up totally tight-up to one guy.  Ask yourself : what if ? What if Facebook realizes they can make more money charging you for each time you go use something from them ? What if Facebook shuts down for whatever reason, competition, lack of cash, management's s retirement ? Same with Google : Search, Maps, Apps, Google holds our entire online life...

Now, this true story. Back in the late 90's, Fiber Optics Networking was an easy one : pick this fiber from this vendor, say Corning, put those transmission equipments from this one, say Alcatel, and insert some optical amplifiers from that other one, say Lucent Technologies (remember : at that time, they were rivals ;-), you got a perfectly running optical network, no hassles at all.
Until 1998, when Corning and Lucent Technologies came up with some new fiber technology, aimed at the forthcoming (at this time) high-speed WDM wavelength-division-multiplexing networks. From that very moment on, the whole optical networking landscape changed : from an open-interoperable model, it became a closed vendor-specific model. Corning fiber cables worked only with Corning/Siemens systems. Lucent fibers worked only with Lucent equipments. Same with Alcatel, with Pirelli Telecom, etc. Very convenient for the customers (read : the Telcos, ISPs, Carrier's Carriers, etc.), and for the vendor himself of course (easier to beat the competition). The perfect one-stop-shopping-center model, in summary...
Enters the downturn. Everybody gets hit, dramatically. The whole set-up crashes. Among all those Bubble Stars, only one company did well and survived quite easily : Ciena. Why ? Simply because Ciena was the only optical networking equipment manufacturer to offer  OPEN solutions. Their gear was truly interoperable, vendor-independant. And that was the key factor with the customers at that time : everyone else was collapsing but Ciena.

Think about the next time you move one of your key application onto Facebook : what if ?...

What If Google Shuts Down ?

Today, Skype is  holding its breath, for the first time ever according to my early adopter's s memory.
For those of us who use Skype for overseas business communications, the issue might cause only some minor troubles - hey, we still have landlines and cellphones, right ?

However, it's interesting to see how the Internet is prominent in our daily life today those days. Hence the very basic question : what would happen if Google goes down someday ? Here's a funny exercise : count all the Google services you actually use every day, if not every hour, and be prepared for a scarring moment ;-)

UPDATE August 17, 2007 @ 10:51AM CET : Skype login still down.
I can't discuss via IM with my friends of Belarus, for our usual early-morning coaching session (I do help those folks to jump on the 21st Century' bandwagon). We don't want to use MS or Yahoo! Messenger(s), as those are not efficient tools for business purpose; we could set-up a Wiki rapidly, but this would become useless when Skype goes live again; we don't want to do a confcall via telephone : both landline and cellular communications are damned far too expensive from/to France to/from Belarus. Twitter would be good, if there was no text size limits. Therefore we do communicate the old-fashion way : email. Just hope we won't be forced to go back to Morse and telegraph someday ;-)

Virtual Tree

Thanks to the endless sources of distraction offered by the Blogosphere, here is the map structure of this weblog.

 

What do the colors mean ?

blue: for links (the A tag)
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags

Go here to create your own. Enjoy.

iPhone apps : imagination beyond boundaries

The SW Developers community was kind of disappointed when Apple decided not to set up a SDK software development kit for the iPhone, preferring to enable third-parties Web applications using Safari, Apple's Web browser (which, by one of the smartest à-la-Sun Tzu moves ever, also runs on MS Windows now). An offense to all the guys used to think VisualBasic...

Just a couple of weeks after the release of the iPhone, the first apps were popping up everywhere on the Net, and new concepts emerged, to overcome the limits fixed by Apple.

Among several other interesting stuff, there is one idea which seems to be a real killer : Storing iPhone apps locally with data URLs. It opens the door for amazing vertical applications for professionals - I can't wait putting my hands on an iPhone and create a fiber testing solution on it ;-)

To better understand the tremendous possibilities offered by Apple's latest gadget, read this article on MacDailyNews, official press release from Heart Imaging Technologies here.

Still sticking to VisualBasic, anyone ?

Mapping The World

Searching for information on the Global Information Grid, I found this awesome/mind-opening/think-out-of-the-box article : "Network Maps, Energy Diagrams : Structure and Agency in the Global System", by Brian Holmes.
Holmes describes current researches aimed at mapping networks of all kinds, from the obvious Internet to illegal sea-going immigration routes to pedestrians' s everyday itineraries in Amsterdam.

To document its very detailed yet comprehensive explanations of the background and applications, Holmes links to lots of websites which are worth the visit. Among all those sites, you may check this one : Each frame of this movie-map is a snapshot of Internet usage across the world during a few hours time; five different images were compiled every two days, over a period of some eighteen months. The result is an extraordinary visual experience. The ISPs turn green and advance toward the center as their connectivity increases; the link lines shift as the routing structure reconfigures to meet the moment’s demands. We watch the diurnal flux of the Internet, and feel the complex, disjunctive rhythm of the global information machine. It’s like the pulsing of a hive, a planetary brain: the cognitive and imaginary activity of untold millions of individuals, establishing far-flung connections.

To give you the flavor, here's the introduction :

The Internet is the vector of a new geography – not only because it conjures up virtual realities, but because it shapes our lives in society, and shifts our perceptions along with the ground beneath our feet. Networks have become the dominant structures of cultural, economic and military power. Yet that power remains largely invisible. How can the networked society be represented? And how can it be navigated, appropriated, reshaped in its turn?

Reflecting in the early 1980s on the spatial chaos that technological and financial developments had impressed upon contemporary cities, Fredric Jameson pointed to the need for “an aesthetics of cognitive mapping” to resolve “the incapacity of our minds, at least at present, to map the great global multinational and decentered communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects.” He conceived this cartographic aesthetics as a collective pedagogy, whose challenge would be to correlate the abstract knowledge of global realities with the imaginary figures that orient our daily experience. Epistemological shifts, pushed forward by the use of sophisticated technical instruments, would need to be paralleled by the deployment of radically new visual vocabularies, in order to produce a clearer understanding of contemporary symbolic relations (social roles, class divides, hierarchies) and a fresh capacity for political intervention in the postmodern world. Only by inventing “some as yet unimaginable new mode of representing” could we “again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion.”1

Twenty years later, what has become of the mapping impulse? What new forms of cartography have arisen to chart the virtual/real spaces of the present? What kinds of agency do they permit? What modes of social organization do they foster? Can critical and dissenting maps be distinguished among the established and dominant ones?

Full article and much more, here.

Well, that was true...

"A power outage hit downtown San Francisco Tuesday afternoon, leaving thousands of residents without power and knocking popular Web sites such as Craigslist, GameSpot, Yelp, Technorati, TypePad and Netflix offline for a few hours", says Erica Ogg for C|Net

Luckily enough, I was to post a thank-you note to Tour de France star Alexander Vinokourov for his tremendous victory on Monday when TypePad went down. Imagine how I would feel now :-(

Anyway. " Never Give Up " was the title of this never-to-be-published post. So, never give up, Folks !

Breaking News : All Online Data Lost After Internet Crash

Officials confirm that all online data has been lost after the Internet crashed and was forced to restart.

Breaking News: All Online Data Lost After Internet Crash

Ed. note : I stopped downloading the latest iTunes playlist while watching '24' online with some BitTorrent stuff in the background and Twitter open ;-)

Bringing Social Networking To The Next Level

Earlier this week, Web browser pioneer Netscape has released a public beta of Navigator version 9. Among several nice features (which still can't beat the powerful yet unknown Opera 9) Netscape Navigator 9 jumps on the Social Networking bandwagon with the possibility for the users to share interesting stories [they] find with millions of people and vote on stories submitted by others as [they] browse.
An interesting feature indeed, which is similar to other social sites such as Digg and Delicious, it relies on Netscape's  start page Netscape.com. That means you need to go to Netscape.com to read other people' s opinion on the story or topic you want to submit (as with Digg and al.).

Now, wouldn't it be cool to be able to share your opinion on that story directly on the web page you read it ?
Fleck does that, somehow. Launched last year, Fleck is a  Web annotation tool for marking up blogs, Web sites, and social networking profiles with little sticky notes. See the snapshot for a quick view (Credit: CNET Networks). With Fleck, no need to jump from one site to another : you get the message right onto the relevant page.
However, you still need to go to Fleck.com before sticking your note in order to give the URL of the page you want to add this note to.

Those necessary steps are quite annoying. The ultimate user-experience would be for anyone browsing the Web to be able to leave a note or a vote or a feedback onto any web page without being forced to go back and forth between different sites.

As stated on Fleck/About : " Fleck.com wants to add a new layer of interactivity to the web. Fleck is inspired on a story written in 1945 by Vannevar Bush and an article titled 'We Are The Web' by Kevin Kelly.
Vannevar Bush predicted a machine called the Memex that would allow people to surf from one information page to another. Some people say that Hypertext and the World Wide Web are based on or at least inspired by the Memex.
One thing that the Memex had and the web doesn't is the ability to add new content to every page it contained."

Anyone willing to make this last sentence really true ?

Newsmap : how to make world news sexy

   

I recently discovered Newsmap, a Google News aggregator of a new kind.
Similar in its concept to the " What's Hot " feature on C|Net, Newsmap " provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe ".

As stated as well in the " About " page on Newsmap' website :
Newsmap does not pretend to replace the googlenews aggregator. Its objective is to simply demonstrate visually the relationships between data and the unseen patterns in news media. It is not thought to display an unbiased view of the news; on the contrary, it is thought to ironically accentuate the bias of it.

I am convinced such of concept can be applied to many other areas than pure online news. For instance, a telecommunications operator could use it in its supervision and/or monitoring systems, e.g. to display users' s traffic. 

About Beta Testing

 

Last week, I met with the founder of a WebTV startup here in France.  During our discussion,  the beta test issue came out : she was planning a 2-weeks beta phase, during which a dozen of selected target customers would have access to the WebTV website. And that was pretty it.
Of course, I did my best to convince her to change her mind, and go for a longer test period, to be offered to a larger audience. Here are my arguments :

• beta testing is aimed at... testing a beta version of a product. In other words : the objective is to get as much as possible end-users feedback in order to fix bugs which can be detected only in the real life (vs. the R&D lab or the garage) by real users (vs. software engineers and developers), spot user interface' s incoherences, and... get the people used to the product.
• The Web is... global. Remember "www" ? Stands for : " World Wide Web ". The Web allow anyone to reach anyone in the World (well, there are some limits, but still, you know what I mean). Why would you want to limit your scope to a dozen of people, when thousands can help you build a better product, almost in the blink of an eye ?
• in today's Web 2.0 environment, every single new website or online tool come up as a "beta". Everybody is used to it now. Especially the people who this startup is targeting. So, one more Web 2.0 firm launching its first product in beta mode won't hurt anyone.
• speaking of the target audience : the goal of the startup is to create a community of end-users/visitors. What a better tool than a beta phase to create this community spirit ? People will be proud to be part of the development team, they will feel like pioneers, helping at building something new, something great.

For all those reasons, I suggested to launch as soon as possible, in beta mode, for 6 months, and worldwide. Keep your eyes open : there might be  an eye-catching WebTV near you soon ;-)

Check Point FiberGeneration v1.5

I have registered FiberGeneration on SiteMeter on January 27th this year, means roughly a month ago.
Here is the traffic report as of today :

Visits :
Total  312
Average per Day  16
Average Visit Length  2:21
This Week  110

Page Views :
Total  436
Average per Day  23
Average per Visit  15
This Week  160

I don't know yet where this goes, however I can tell that the traffic jumps when I publish a post with a trackback to a prominent blog or when I post something with the magic keywords : " Steve Jobs " ;-)

As I a pretend to be a smart/creative/efficient (please add your own adjective ;-) Product Marketing guy, I am gathering data for the SWOT analysis of FiberGeneration and its next major revision - the version 2.0 (hey, everything is " 2.0 " those days ;-) is on the roadmap, scheduled Q2 '07 !

France, I beg your pardon (soon on a WebTV near you ;-)

Dear French Web 2.0 fellows, my apologies ! In my recent post ' What We Do (Not) ', I forgot one freaking cool startup : vPod.tv ! I thought the WebTV actor was a new infant from the Kingdom of Spain. I should have known better : the son of a very close friend of mine is working at vPod. Mathieu, aka " Mat ", joined the startup last year, as software developer. I spoke with Mat on Friday. An top-developer, Mat is also a very good salesman : he convinced me that vPod.tv is a french startup with a brillant future worldwide.
To start with, I think they've got it all : a smart business model, a whole-solution offer for both end-users and clients (vPod.tv provides a full-range of B2B services for companies looking for a webTV portal - see below), and a Apple-like  user-experience, thanks to the combination of superb user interfaces, ease of use, and flexibility. Hey, they even provide an API for set-top-box, allowing users to watch the WebTV on their own TVs !
Of course, I am going to use vPod.tv as my preferred tool for sharing and embedding my own videos.
Shall every France-based Web 2.0 startup provide such a high-level of both quality and capabilities, I would change my mind regarding the Silicon Valley. Nevertheless, I am afraid vPod is kind of unique here.

vPod.tv on the show here :
- my.vpod.tv
- portal.vpod.tv

Tour Of California

Being both a Cycling fan (I am cyclist myself) and a Bay Area lover (I was living in San Francisco during the 1906 earthquake - I'm serious : I firmly believe I died during the resulting fire... and that's the reason why I want to go back there for the rest of my - actual - life), I watch the Tour of California live on... the Net.

The race's website < www.amgentourofcalifornia.com > offers outstanding features packed in the Tour Tracker 2.0 tool, developped jointly by Adobe and CSC. As the press release claims :

Launching Feb. 18, the site's Tour Tracker 2.0, designed specifically for the Amgen Tour of California, will employ the latest technology from founding partners CSC and Adobe to provide the ultimate viewing experience for cycling fanatics and casual observers alike. Tour Tracker 2.0 is a lightweight Flash-based application built using Adobe Flex technology that is pioneering a new generation of rich Internet applications. Tour Tracker 2.0 requires Adobe Flash Player, which is installed on more than 700 million personal computers worldwide. Some of the features will include:

- Full-screen capable live video stream of each stage from start to finish (provided by Adobe)
- Enhanced user interface featuring elevation, route, rider and peloton positions, and text race commentary (provided by Adobe)
- Archived stage video clips
- GPS photography for each stage that pinpoints highlights along the route (provided by Adobe and CSC)
- GPS tracking for top riders and official vehicles (provided by CSC)
- GPS data will provide first-hand knowledge of the top rider positions along the route and overall peloton location, as well as elevation information, general speed and overall miles from the finish
- Minute-by-minute textual race commentary exclusively reported by VeloNews
- Two audio channels, including live audio commentary from sports journalist JoE Silva and former cyclists Robbie Ventura and Chris Gutowsky, and an official radio tour stream that lets listeners hear what race officials hear
- Mobile (WAP) site for information and text updates for each stage so fans on the go can access race information from mobile phones and devices

The question is : what does a post on Cycling do on FiberGeneration ? Actually, this : the point is, the Amgen Tour of California website is a perfect example of what a Testing 2.0 website for end-users (read : Telcos) should be. Sites maps with GPS tracking and data, live video feeds of the network' s installation, video and photos archives, audio commentaries, dedicated site for access by mobile users, etc...

I'm cogheaded

I'm a happy Web 2.0 man : since yesterday, I'm an official Coghead Beta Tester ! That means prototyping of Testing 2.0 apps will be easier, as well as... beta testing. What a wonderful world : using beta stuff to produce other beta stuff ;-)
Post-Scriptum : for more information on Coghead, please read this detailled article by TechCrunch.

Snap !

I've just installed  Snap Preview Anywhere on the FiberGeneration blog. For those of you who don't know this wonderful widget, Snap Preview Anywhere provides high quality link previews. As Master Steve Jobs would say : " it's really, really cool " ;-)

ps : I'm back on Opera since Monday - I was tired of restarting Firefox every two days because of its huge consumption of  Mac OS X resources with all those Flash, Java, and Ajax things that are common stuffin every corner of the Web today. I really enjoy masquerading IE ;-)

A new revolution

Yahoo! unleashed its new product : Yahoo! Pipes. As John Murrell wrote for 'Good Morning Silicon Valley' :

"Pipes is a tool that lets the average user build easily what programmers have been hacking together for a while: Custom combinations of the RSS feeds now nearly ubiquitous across news sites, blogs and other information services."

Used together with widgets, Pipes is going to be  the fundamental brick for the forthcoming revolution in professional custom apps, built by the end-users for the end-users. Thanks to Pipes, you will be able to aggregate multiple data from multiple sources into one single window. Within the next couple of years, everything will be ' Web 2.0-based ' : every single information on the Web will be available as a RSS feed. So will be the enterprise' s data : all RSS. Therefore, it's pretty easy to figure out how people will manage the information flow : by themselves - or with the help of small consulting firms (by the way : Web 2.0 could sign off the end of the Big IT firms).

To learn a bit more on Pipes, you may read the very interesting article by Tim O'Reilly " Pipes and Filters for the Internet " here, and Robin Good' s post here.

ps : I bet Apple has brought Yahoo! on board of the iPhone with some leapfrogging ideas based on Pipes in mind.
 

My Top-Ten Web 2.0 Stuff

Last year has been the year of the Web 2.0. Myriad of startups in Silicon Valley and in the rest of the World - even in France !  that is an evidence of how it's easy to create a Web 2.0 thing those days ;-), tons of dollars from VCs and Business Angels... Google buying YouTube was * THE * news of the year, IMHO.

That is why I am proud to disclose my own Top-Ten List of Web 2.0 Stuff (i.e. companies, applications, websites, whatsoever branded '2.0'). Warning : it is a serious one, for I am convinced that all the companies - or the apps, more precisely -  listed here can find their way into real business - for instance... in the Telecoms industry. I am beta-tester for some of them, intensive user for others. It's all fun.

ps : since we are talking Web 2.0, please simply click on each logo to see what's behind ;-)

ps #2 : to create the list, I simply dragged & dropped the buttons from web2logo.com into the Edit page of TypePad. No programming at all, just a pure simple quick drag&drop. That's the Web 2.0 Magic at its best !

I am Googled ;-)

I will never stop being amazed by the magic of the Internet. Do a Google search on "Fiber Optic Splice Technician training in u.a.e" *, and read the results : FiberGeneration is listed, and better, is listed on page 1 !

* don't ask me why - that is what the TypePad stats tell me today ;-)

The Empire Strikes Back

Ever wondered where the US Telecoms industry is going ? Stephen Colbert has the answer ! Watch him explaining the recent disappearance of Cingular for the sake of... AT&T, and you will really see the true meaning of the word 'consolidation'...

Original post where I found this video, by Garr Reynolds of PresentationZen : here.

ps : I'm pretty sure that we will see the same movements in Europe soon. For instance, how about only two telcos in France within the next 18 to 24 months (think of the potential failure of FTTH deployment for one of the actual players ?...). Enjoy the ride !

Virtual Earth Widget

When revamping the sidebar today, I found this very nice widget on Xfacts.com
I am thinking of using it for some new development in the test & measurement area...

Churn Baby, churn (act 2)

I have changed the layout of the sidebar, adding/delet