FiberGeneration

FiberGeneration Facelift

FiberGeneration The Blog will soon celebrate its third anniversary. The right time to give it a little refresh, touch by touch.

After those beautiful (yes) buttons on the left sidebar which I installed a couple of weeks ago, today I replaced the 18 months old banner by a more accurate one : I'm doing more "green" stuff than being in Pau at the moment, so goodbye Boulevard des Pyrenees, and welcome to the Green Wave.

Also, I replaced the standard Category Cloud by this amazing widget, on the right sidebar. It's powered by Microsoft Silverlight, so it may not display on your browser, sorry for that. I couldn't find a dynamic tag cloud coded in Flash.

By the way, I wanted to implement a new Comment and Interaction system:  Echo by JS-Kit: although I'm quite an advanced Typepad user, I didn't find a way to easily enable this feature without switching to Advanced Design. As I don't have the time to do it today, please wait for the next revision to enjoy this wonderful tool, which you can see in action here.

Speaking of interaction, I put my Twitter back. Let's talk : @mduchesn.

Of course, the facelift will continue over the next few weeks - I want to clean up a little bit the page, and... add pages. Stay tuned!

Oh, by the way: FiberGeneration has 95 subscribers according to Feedburner as of today. Thank you All. I'm honored, and will do my best to publish more interesting stuff for you during this coming 4th year of existence.

Fiber Mania

I just came across a brand new (4 months old) website dedicated to Fiber Optics: Fiber Optic Mania. Plenty of informations for both novices and experts. A bit too much of Google AdSense stuff, but as soon as you forget those banners and ads links, the site is worth reading (note to Fiber Optic Mania' s editor: where's the "subscribe" button ?).

Welcome and good luck, Buddy !

Fiber Optic Mania is here.

Fibering Twitterland

For those of you who seek informations and/or jobs in the Optical Communications sector, here are your new companions : FiberNews and FiberJobs, which you can follow on Twitter respectively here and here.

Of course, those are RSS feeds which I've put together thanks to Yahoo!Pipes and other cool Web 2.0 tools (BTW, have you noticed how the expression "Web 2.0" is old fashion those days ?). 

FiberNews delivers news on FTTH worldwide, and FiberJobs delivers job postings related to FTTH (US only for the time being). Simple, isn't ?

FiberGeneration Blog Optimized For iPhone

Click here. Enjoy.

Thanks to TheSMESpace folks to allow us non-developers to test proof-of-concept so easily. More about TheSMESpace here.

ps: the iPhone screenshot is made with Apple's iPhone Simulator, which is part of the iPhone Dev Kit. You can find online simulators here and here.

FiberGeneration The Company : D-19

Just to let you know that the next version of this blog will be part of the larger FiberGeneration website that I'm currently drafting somewhere at the back of my poor overloaded brain. Au menu, the integration of my Twitter, FriendFeed, and Facebook.
That's still the Web 2.0 era, Folks ;-)

It's Time To Re-invent Fiber Optics Training

With the economy crisis' s waves going to hit the Telecoms Land hard, most of the Installation & Maintenance contractors are already tightening up their investments and expenditures budgets, the Dotcom crash being still present in their memories.

The key difference between today and 2000 : there are people at the other end of the fiber. FTTx Fiber-To-The-Whatever is a reality now. And despite the forthcoming yet unpredictable downturn, Telcos, Utilities and Munis are keeping their fiber networks' rollouts plans on. Shifting some deadlines here, downsizing the network's scale there, but the goal is still : "we must deploy fiber" - see the recent announcement (link in french) by the french government.

That means that there is still huge business to come for the I&M contractors. The question is : how to train their technicians to build and maintain State of The Art fiber networks, whilst their budgets will be close to nothing ? Answer is : Re-invent the way we do training. Since quite a while, Installation companies don't send their techs for a 5-days hands-on session anymore, so it's going to be even worth now. Except for a few very specific technology or product training, they won't go off-site. They will ask for on-site (if not in-house...) training, as short as possible to not keep the techs away of the field for too long time. Today, a 3-days session is the standard for novices to become OSP Outside Plant technicians. Tomorrow, it's going to be 1-day (you get the idea).

We Fiber Vets all know that you don't become a true capable Fiber Install guy in a day. You have to practice at least a week. Hence the business case : how to provide a 5-days hands-on in just one single day. The solution : let's come to the Technician. Provide him with the training he needs when and where he needs it. Welcome to Fiber Training 2.0.

Today, we can get the relevant info we want when we want it, no matter where we are : it's called The Web. Let's use it. Do the shift from the old-fashioned way : the powerpoints, the lectures, the 20-people class-room, to the Web 2.0 one : audio and video podcasts on iTunes, training video clips on YouTube, photos collections on Flickr, discussion groups on Facebook, etc.

That's what a couple of Old-Timers, including myself, are working on. See here what Jim Hayes and his FOA Fiber Optics Association is currently offering. I'm also working on such tools. See here for instance, and here. Soon to an iPhone/iPod Touch near you : fiber news, photos, videos, and one more thing (and more ;-).

Of course, nothing virtual will ever replace the real world. You won't learn how to splice two fiber strands together with a video only : you must put your hands on the fibers, the cleaver, the splicer. It's like becoming #1 in Tennis : you won't beat Federer just watching his matches on YouTube ;-)

Why I Finally Start My Startup Now (or so)

If everything goes well, FiberGeneration (hence Testing 2.0, by the way) will start its new life as a startup on December 1st - this year.
Here's why (by Paul Graham of seed investment firm Y Combinators).
With traders still living in their own crazy world, no doubt the overall situation is set to be even tougher for entrepreneurs. That's what makes entrepreneurship fun.

FiberGeneration The Company : D-52

 There's no better time to launch a startup than a big crisis such as the one we're heading to. Actually, I recently remembered that I've launched XWinG right after the downturn in 1993. Within the next 2 years, we were number one on the market. The key is : Bootstrapping. Less is more. Customer-centric.

Okay, fast forward to tomorrow : I'm happy to announce that FiberGeneration will be become a company on December 1 (this year ;-). Headquarter : Helioparc technoparc, Pau, France. Business : help people to better understand and use Web 2.0 apps & tools.

Of course, Fiber-To-The-Home and Sustainable Development will be part of the game...

Stay tuned for more soon !