FiberGeneration

Quote Of The Day 10-29-09

" Just finished a @platinumfitness workout/torture. Felt like merde."
Lance Armstrong, on his Twitter @lancearmstrong

Quote Of The Day [09.2]

"Will somebody pleeease whip up a photoshopped 'MacBook touch' or something?!"

MacDailyNews' team, on one of the too many articles on who you know.

Quote Of The Day [09.1]

"Own your Zip code. The next frontier is local, and this is a great way to start."
Seth Godin.

Three posts by Seth Godin I should have written myself

It's about marketing, business development, selling, customers, and us.
First, read "Self promotion", then continue with "The first rule of b2b selling", and finish with "What do you know?".
Now you've got the top-3 rules for a successful business.

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.

Thanks(for)Giving Us So Much Fun

Once again, His Highness FSJ goes straight to the point. Peace out. And enjoy the ride.

The Week Ends Edition 09-28-07

On Lunch Over IP : Picnic07: Stefana Broadbent and why everything is moving into the background.
I read Bruno Giussiani's running notes just before watching Jerry Maguire again. Kind of interesting answer to the question at the end of Bruno' s post : " how important something is to you to makes you make that specific choice of focusing on it? "...

On TechITeasy : Sustainable, Information Technology?
A detailed fact sheet by Jeremy Fain of Microsoft on Green IT. Among lots of other pretty serious stuff, this one : " Every second that passes sees 24 Kg of PCs produced, 1.8 tons of raw materials aimed at the Information Technology market, half a ton of CO2 generated by hardware heat, 108 Kg. of PC-related garbage."

On How To Change The World : Ten Questions with Chris Brogan.
The Social Media expert answers Guy Kawasaki' s famous ten questions (which are eleven, by the way) on Twitter. You've got to like the twittering app after that (don't miss the comments).

The Think Different Edition 08-04-07

Really, this could change the World. Your life will never be the same.

Post-scriptum : follow also the links here and here.

FiberGeneration featured on the Wall Street Journal (online ;-)

The BlogoSphere will never stop surprising me. FiberGeneration is listed in an online article published... March 28, 2006 (no typo ;-) by Leila Abboud. Read : " How France Became A Leader in Offering Faster Broadband " here, and go to end to find the link to this post.

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.

Sustainable Readings 07-23-07

Cities 'key' to solving world's environmental woes
With 80% of Europeans living in urban areas, cities hold the key to sustainable development, said Commissioner Margot Wallström, outlining her "vision" for sustainable cities at the opening session of Brussels’ Green Week event. A must-read (incl. EU official documents).
[tags : environment cities sustainable development]

EU commission chief calls for more eco-technology
European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso has recently called on Europe to boost its climate technology efforts if it wants to stay a world leader and benefit from the business likely to be made from low carbon technology in the future.
[tags : eco-technologies climatechange]

Abu Dhabi to become a global leader in clean energy
The UAE has one of the world's fastest growing economies and is experiencing the most significant real estate growth in its history. Masdar will capitalize on this unprecedented economic growth by becoming the premium developer and installer of photovoltaic systems in the region. Within two years Masdar will provide up to 40MW of capacity -- equivalent to 10,000 homes.
[tags : eco-technologies middle-east]

Business of Green: Burnt out on climate?
Has the flurry of green exuberance made people concerned about climate change and committed to stopping it? The answer in many parts of the rich, developed world appears to be a resounding "no," according to a survey released last week by HSBC, a British bank.
[tags : Green business europe environment]

It's about testing your broadband access

" Testing the limits of the customer premises " was published a year ago by Tim McElligott on TelephonyOnline.com

The battle for the soul of the broadband customer goes on behind closed doors. But it's not all behind the doors to the development labs where ingenious engineers hatch super-secret capabilities. Nor is it all behind the doors to the central office from which all bandwidth flows. One of the biggest battles is being waged by technicians behind the doors to the den and to the family room.

“The home is the new frontier,” said Dave Holly, head of the cable networking division for JDSU. “It has dramatically changed what is being introduced to the network [by end users] as well as the portfolio of [test] tools we must develop and deploy.”

In this new frontier, the key to winning the broadband battle — not that there ever will be a clear-cut winner, only interchangeable market leaders — may depend on the weapons, or tools, with which service providers outfit their technicians.

With FTTH and FTTN implementations in full swing, significant changes are taking place in all aspects of network testing that will affect not just an upswing in the sale of test gear, but how, from where and by whom live networks and services are tested.

There are still those vendors looking for ways to “outfit the Super Tech,” said Peter Schweiger, business development manager for optical network test systems at Agilent. But he and others believe that may never happen. In some respects, the technologies are too numerous and complex for technicians to have command of them all. For the same reasons, it is untenable to have a single tool a tech can carry.

Test equipment manufacturers are trying to strike a balance between building what Schweiger calls the “minimum viable product” — a hand-held device with a couple of red and green lights that tests continuity and perhaps a little jitter and response time — and a full-blown analyzer that looks at Sonet, Ethernet and dense wave division multiplexing and acts as an optical time domain reflectometer and perhaps even POTS tester in the same box. He calls it, poetically, the difference between “tools for techs” and “instruments for engineers.”

Much more in the full article here.

The whole Testing 2.0 concept is right at the core of this article : for several different reasons, today's technicians need simple red & green lights tools to test the broadband access (and TriplePlay services) at the subscriber premise. Testing 2.0 goes even further : it's all about making tools for non-technicians.

Viewed Pre-G8 On New Views Edition 06-06-07

Press Briefing by Tony Snow and Jim Connaughton, Chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality
Jim Connaughton, Chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality, and US President's top environmental advisor answers questions about international development and the international development agenda leading up to the G8. 
[tags : climate environment globalwarming]

Truth about Kyoto: huge profits, little carbon saved
On the eve of a G8 summit focused on climate change, Nick Davies of The Guardian reveals major flaws in the global system designed to reduce emissions.
[tags : climate  environment  globalwarming]

China unveils climate change plan
China has unveiled its first national plan for climate change, saying it is intent on tackling the problem but not at the expense of economic development.
[tags : climate  environment  globalwarming]

Viewed Interviews On New Views Edition 05-30-07

Member of European Parliament Gyula Hegy on 'Making EU cities sustainable' by EurActiv.com
[tags : climate environment green transportation]

European Commission Vice-President Margot Wallström on the role of the European Union in the fight against global warming,  the European public sphere for the new generations, and much more, by New Europe.
[tags : Europe future generations]

Thanks God It's Monday Edition 05-28-07

Searching Google for " user-generated-content ", found this awesome website : trendwatching.com. A must-bookmark for every creator, entrepreneur, marketeer, whatsoeveer (no typo here ;-)
You can subscribe to TrendWatching monthly newsletter here.
Read the report " Customer Made " for the UGC stuff.
[tags :  consumers customer-made entrepreneurship marketing trends]

 

Readings For 05-24-07

The Last Temptation of Al Gore
A 4-pages article By Eric Pooley for Time, or how the ex-future-President of the United States of America could become the future President of The United States of America.
[tags : AlGore President America GlobalWarming Change]

Chambers 2.0
LightReading reports the recent speech of Cisco' s CEO at the Interop show in Las Vegas earlier this week. Not so surprisingly, when one knows what Cisco is all about, Chambers said : "For the first time in my 17 years in the industry, I said there's a killer app, and it is video."
[tags : Web2.0 Networking Video Productivity JohnChambers]

Fifteen Things We Wish Someone Would Invent
Over the last two years, Elisabeth Eaves and Michael Noer, journalists at Forbes, interviewed a hundred of CEOs and other executives, about their dreamed invention. As Elisabeth writes in the introduction : " The results range from the highly imaginative to the mundanely useful. " Read the special report here.
[tags :  inventions changetheworld changes innovations]

TGIF Edition 05-18-07

Images: American mass consumption, by the numbers
Seattle photographer Chris Jordan has created "Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait", a series of prints which show modern American culture "through the austere lens of statistics". (from C|NET)
[tags : consumers, massconsumption, ecology, environment]


Rodriguez: Bike to Work Day: Start gearing up
Yesterday Thursday was the "Bike to Work Day" around San Francisco and the Silicon Valley.  There might be "a growing awareness that commuting by bicycle is the right thing to do".
[tags : environment, globalwarming, climate, siliconvalley]


Planning for a Climate-Changed World
This article is the first one of a series published by MIT' Technology Review on "how states and cities are searching for the fine-scale predictions they need to prepare for emergencies".
[tags :  environment,  globalwarming ,  climatechange]