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Since yesterday, I'm working with young people, 18 to 22-yo. Each time they speak about money, they use "dollar" instead of "euro", which seems weird provided we are in France, founder and active member of the European Community. I've asked them why. Answer : because 1) it's more easy to pronounce, and 2), it's fun.
So, we've got an entire generation ready to switch...
Glad to see that some readers are using the Fleck function on the left hand side bar.
I hope you guys make the best out of it.
No Telecoms, Fiber Optics, or Web 2.0 today. I've just started the grape harvest campaign here in Champagne. For the next week or so,I'm going to stay the feet on the ground, the hands on the nature of things, and the head in the real life.
However, as I love selling Pierre Cardin' suits 10 week-ends a year because it helps me keep learning on sales tips & tricks, I take this experience as a great opportunity to keep learning on teamwork and people management...
Thanks to Master Guy Kawazaki (and the Magic of the Blogosphere), I discovered the recently published article in Smashing Magazine : Data Visualization: Modern Approaches. For all of you manipulating data to be presented to end-users, customers, or managers, this article (and the related comments, full of links too) is a must-read. It's a given that the web sites and tools mentionned are must-bookmark ;-)
Imagine your favorite car maker goes wild, trumpeting all around the planet with its brand new world-class top-range model, which is supposed to make your life even better, bringing you so many new features that it's going to be the ultimate driver experience.
Now, imagine that a few months after release, this guy offers you to downgrade to the previous generation, because the new one shows some unrecoverable weaknesses in real world conditions.
That's exactly what Lenovo is offering to its customers : downgrading from Windows Vista to Windows XP. See here.
Redmond, you have a problem.
I'm pleased to announce the release of my new weblog : " Fiber On Demand ".
Fiber On Demand displays all videos related to the FTTH Fiber To The Home technology available on the Net.
The first version, aka "beta" as usual, do aggregate content from YouTube and GoogleVideo. The actual query looks for all the files tagged "FTTH", without any further operation but filtering non-unique items, the results being combined into one single RSS feed.
To create Fiber On Demand "Beta", I've used only two tools, beside the TypePad platform of course : Yahoo!Pipes and Feed2JS. Total time spent to put together the actual version : less than 60 minutes, including 10 minutes to build and test the pipe, 20 minutes to test several options to display the RSS feed on a TypePad' weblog, and 20 minutes to create the current design of Fiber On Demand.
To get started, here is a comprehensive list of useful ressources :
- Yahoo!Pipes Blog
- Some Template Tips & Tricks blog
- 5 cool ways to use Yahoo!Pipes
- Yahoo! Pipes: Unlocking the Data Web by Jeremy Zawodny
My "FTTH_videos" pipe is available here. Developed from scratch - means it's not a clone of an existing pipe. Just to prove how easy it is to build your own app, even if you haven't put your hands on C++ since years (myself : was in the mid 90's, when I were a registered NeXT Developer ;-)
The next revision of Fiber On Demand will : a) exclude french-speaking videos, b) sort the videos by location.
Also, I'll do my best to get embedded YouTube clips instead of vignettes.
Last but not least, I'm preparing another video blog, this one aimed at education on fiber optics technology. Stay tuned ;-)
post-scriptum : to go to Fiber On Demand, click on the link under "Blogging On Fibergeneration" in the right hand' sidebar.
UPDATE Aug. 27, 2007 : I will publish the step-by-step process in a future post (read : soon).
A new business model is making its debuts in the Fiber-To-The-Home market. In " Europe Fiber futures: 40 Gbps to offices & 100 Mbps to homes ", VON' European Editor Bob Emmerson explains what a Nordic telco, Lyse Tele, is currently doing with its customers. The real innovation : subscribers can lay the last meters themselves, in order to reduce the costs.
IMHO, this is the very first step towards a " Network 2.0 " approach, where the end-users will build their access networks according to their own needs. The technology is there, the tools are there.
Imagine the fiber network in your neighborhood as a giant loop, open, always on, delivering enough bandwidth for the common applications and services - say 100Mbps -, onto which you can plug your terminal at will.
We just have to do it (I will come back on that one later).
The parent company of Lyse Tele is a utility that had and still has a core asset: an established billing relationship with millions of electricity users. In April 2002, they formed a subsidiary to enter the IPTV arena, so while the activity was brand new, the name was not. Moreover, this was a company that the market could trust, and that is something technology cannot create.
The company started with a clean sheet of paper. There were no legacy investments or services to protect. But to compete, they needed a visionary strategy and an offer that was not merely different but radically different. All service providers employ the same technologies, so the radically different visionary strategy and offer had to come by way of marketing.
Selling Before Building
Their go-to-market strategy is alarmingly simple: before you go anywhere, make sure there is a market. They make sure by creating it.
They could not realize differentiation over cable or copper. It had to be fiber. To justify the investment, the company set up meetings in the neighborhood. They provided a supervised play area for children, coffee, mineral water, and a presentation.The basic pitch is also simple. The company will lay fiber to your home, and you get 100 Mbps IP access (minimum), IPTV and triple play services, and because the bandwidth is symmetric, you can also participate in a community of interest groups. But all of this can happen only after enough households sign up. Participants can sign up at the meeting or later, and they are encouraged to spread the message if they want the service.
It works. To keep costs down, subscribers can lay the last part of the network themselves. There’s a do-it-yourself kit, and they save €500 (US$630). Around 80% do the physical, self-provisioning part themselves.
Apart from saving money, subscribers who lay the fiber themselves feel that they own that part of the infrastructure. VoIP calls made within the broadband network are free. This part of the strategy minimizes churn, as does the decision to deploy symmetric access to facilitate the development of community services. It works. Upstream traffic exceeds downstream.
Got this message in my inbox this morning.
Definitely not a Web 2.0 thing, not mentionning the IP address !
Here's an example of a perfect approach, by the new people search engine Spock. 
Everything is in there, including the gentle way to please the customer : " You are one of the first people ...", so she feels proud to be considered as a VIP.
Also, you may notice the full URL link in post-scriptum : most of the Web 2.0 startups add such a link for you to copy & paste in case the direct hyperlink don't work. Here's my advice : always check if the sign-up confirmation email includes the full URL link. If not, it means the company / startup doesn't care that much about you...
" For the hundreds of climate-change activists who have camped out near Heathrow Airport for the past week, there is only one way to reduce the carbon footprint of aircraft: Stop flying so much. "
Must we quit flying to save the planet? the article published yesterday on the Seattle Time, by Mark Rice-Oxley is a must-read for all of us, especially those whose wallet sports one or more Gold/Platinum/Whatever-metal frequent flyer card.
Here's the conclusion :
[He noted that] 45 percent of all flights in Europe are less than 310 miles. "The French and Germans are showing that if you invest in good railways, you can persuade people to travel by rail and not by air."
But it's not only about leisure travel. Business travel makes up, by some estimates, 40 to 50 percent of all air travel. One element of the British OMEGA project is a study that looks at how business can reduce its aviation carbon footprint.
Keith Mason, who is leading the study, said it involves persuading businesses to measure the carbon they consume, choose flights that are not just the cheapest but are least environmentally damaging, use rail when possible and make greater use of videoconferencing and Internet solutions.
"We are aiming to come up with a range of practical tools that will help companies start managing their carbon consumption," Mason said. He noted that one company, PricewaterhouseCoopers, has introduced an internal "carbon budget" whereby its 1,000 top travelers must reduce their CO2 footprint by 20 percent.
Some experts think similar personal carbon budgets — rationing — may be the solution.
"It's too late for voluntary mechanisms," Anderson said. "Carbon allowances are the only fair way to deal with this."
I wonder if I would still be able to collect 150 boarding passes in a year, as I did back in 2000.
On the other hand, flying every two days or so is exhausting - ask your captain the next time you get in an airplane. And opportunities to create new businesses out of this new situation (i.e. Global Warming) are tremendous...
Wow ! FiberGeneration got 350+ unique visitors yesterday. The all-time record, for the time being. I wish Skype to be down more often ;-)
Seriously speaking, now that this blog has been exposed to more potential readers than ever, I've got to deliver a better content to keep some of them on board and from there let the snow ball effect do his job...
* The photography of the day is the ranking of this blog on Technorati, after 10+ months of existence. Goal : reach a 5-digits rank within the next 12 months.
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 ;-)
FSJ has it right. When your customer faces a problem with a new product of yours, better apologize and get this product replaced free of charge rather then explaining he made a mistake. You'll make this guy happy, and in the meantime you'll learn a lot about potential misuse of this product. Hence its next revision will be even better, and you'll be able to thank your customer for his great contribution to the improvements.
" For the record, there have been zero problems with iPhone. Zero. Those "dead spots" aren't actually dead spots. Yes, people have brought some back and we've given them replacements. That's not because there was anything wrong with the phones. But it's easier to just give them a new phone and make them happy than to explain to them that they're screwing up when they use the phone, and that they probably need to have their big fat stupid fingers whittled down. FYI, all Apple employees who want or need finger-reduction surgery will get subsidies from the company. See your benefits representative. "
Full article here. Fun, as usual. Plus, read this amazing story about the guy who went to surgery in order to better use his new iPhone.
Yesterday, I had a diner with a fairly young entrepreneur, involved with some high-tech firm in the US. Among other things, we discussed a little bit about team-working. For me, after so many years in business, team working is the only solution to move ahead and progress.
I've had the chance to learn it at the very beginning of my career, at my first position with the French Railways, back in the early 80's. We were a team of *only* three people in a Division of hundred, but we were the most productive ones. The reason : the three of us were like the pieces of a puzzle, fitting perfectly well together whilst featuring some overlap in our personalities, making our team strong and indefeasible (almost like the Fantastic Four, although we didn't have a The Thing with us). There was the Rational Thinker (my friend Bernard M., now a masterpiece at french ISP NeufCegetel), the Hands-On Expert (my friend Christian B., still doing fiber optics for the sake of the French Railways), and the Creative Builder (myself). Discussing a new idea or working on a project was always the same story : controversial yet productive, friendly & fun, which might be a dream for many people those days... Think about it this way : the Rational Thinker is the Finances guy, the Hands-On is the Manufacturing buddy, and the Creative Builder is the Marketing & Sales fellow (what else ? ;-). The perfect set-up for success.
Later, I've experimented the same situation with the Musketeers at Agilent Technologies. We were a bigger team of course, yet working together as one. The outcomes were absolutely stunning.
On the reverse side, I also learned the hard way how the lack of team work (not mentioning the lack of a team per se ;-) can blow your dedication away. When you have nobody to confront your thoughts with all day long even when sitting in the office, better be a freelancer : at least, your clients will listen to you, just because they're paying you for it (well, depends). 
The best example of efficient teamwork is the famous medical drama television series Dr House. Says Wikipedia : "The team arrives at diagnoses using the Socratic method and differential diagnosis, with House guiding the deliberations. House often discounts the information and opinions from his underlings, pointing out that their contributions have missed various relevant factors."
In this setup, House is not the one who leads, he's the one who guides the discussion, acting as a facilitator aimed at taking the best out of the brainstorming.
Watching those sessions always reminds the days with Bernard & Christian : tough think tank exercises leading to outstanding results.
Ed. note : I really love the series, for it's really entertaining. My wife says it's because I do pretty much resemble to Gregory House, not because we both have a problem with one leg but because I like to tease people too ;-)
Most of you may already know the fantastic (hey, I'm speaking plain old English now ;-) weblog of the brilliant (see ?) Fake Steve Jobs, aka Daniel Lyons, supposedly technology writer for Forbes. Today, I discovered another *must-read* online journal, by Julia O'Brien. Julia is a CIA agent, based in Washington DC.
Hint : she writes her articles in a wonderful french language which most of the french bloggers should learn ;-)
Check this brand new internetTV startup, live since a couple of hours. No need for huge fundings anymore. Good luck, Folks !
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
The post "Top-Ten Quotes by Raymond Loewy" becoming more and more popular (thanks to Google and PresentationZen :-), here is a new tribute to Loewy's extraordinary vision. Just a brief overview of the Father of Industrial Design' taste for Beauty.
For more information, visit the Official Web Site of Raymond Loewy here, Loewy Design here, Loewy Group here, and the Raymond Loewy Foundation here.
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