A Fresh Start (up)

I remember when Nicolas was telling me: “stop being so enthusiastic about Web2.0, when you’ll be working you’ll see that you won’t have time for your blog or spending hours on Facebook”… He was definitely right, and I apologize for the lack of updates, but I’m still working like crazy and it’s not likely to get better due to the economic circumstances…

Anyway, just a quick update of these last weeks:

- I finally attended the “Journée d’appel à la Défense” at the Lycée Francais, it was just a nightmare, I was lost in the middle of more than 300 teenagers, suddenly realizing that I wasn’t one of them anymore, listening to some propaganda about how great it is to serve your country and how the army is changing your life for the best. And I even have to wake at 7am on a Saturday to listen to that… anyway, now I have my paper!

- I went to Vegas for the Shop.org conference, it was great to talk to people from the industry, but I realized that last year I enjoyed Vegas only because I was with plenty of good friends, but when you’re not there to party and have time to take a step back to look at the people in the street, it’s actually a pretty sad city… Pictures are here.

- We spent a week in Hawaii for our honeymoon, in Oahu and Maui, and it was great! Oahu (Waikiki and Honolulu) looks like Miami (too many buildings to be really heavenly) but Maui met my expectations: the beaches are gorgeous, it was amazing! We went boogie boarding, horseback riding, we attended a luau (and discovered the delicious Kalua Pork)… and we should have avoided going to the rainforest, because we ended up spending the night in a cottage in the middle of a banana farm, chasing geckoes out of the house and hoping that there would be no serial killer in the farm because there was nobody who could have helped us!! All in all, it was a great break, but I was happy to be back home: as always, I don’t like being away from home for too long, and I guess that one week is my limit. No trip around the world for me! Pictures are here.

- It was my birthday last Sunday, and I spent it in the plane, but I had lunch with the team this week in a French café (very nice) and yesterday we celebrated that at the restaurant with Audrey, David and his roommate. And then we attended the Santana concert in Mountain View, it was awesome! The guy is just a phenomenon, the atmosphere was great, we had a great time.

- Manue is coming here on Tuesday, I can’t wait, I start really missing my French friends, I want to spend a night discussing about the meaning of life, the definition of happiness, the goals that we should pursue… even if you wake up the morning after with exactly the same doubts.

- Finally, the crappy news, I lost $2700 on craigslist: I sent money to a landlord to book an apartment in NYC for Christmas, and the guy was a fraud and closed the account right after the money arrived, so basically I lost my $2700… I filed a police report but I don’t have much hope at this point, so I’m canceling the trip to NYC and my parents will visit me in SF instead… You can’t start to imagine how angry I am…

This is it,  talk to you soon guys!

I am forcing myself to keep updating this blog, even if I start doing a much better job at calling all of you regularly to give “in-person” news, which is still much better.

I have worked like crazy these past few weeks but it seems that it will be slowing a bit down now. I am actually going to Vegas tomorrow for 3 days for the Shop.org conference, and I hope that I’ll manage to have some time in the evening for a bath in the Luxor’s swimming pool :-)… I feel that I really need some holidays now, fortunately Hawaii is not so far away (2 weeks!!!!) and I’m counting the days. These past few weeks I was really wondering: why didn’t I go into banking? I would do the same hours and be paid 3 times more… and then I read the news about the bankruptcy of Lehman, and I realized that I probably made a safer and more fun choice

Nothing much apart from that: Remy and I went to a fundraising event on Wednesday (the Director of my group is on the board of the association) for an association called Summer Search, which helps high school students in tough situations to go to college. It’s a very great project, and the event was amazing, at Villa Montalvo in Saratoga (a beautiful villa with an amazing park). Today we went to a BBQ at Annabelle’s place (which is gorgeous, in San Mateo) and that was again another “Melrose Place” moment, eating burgers around the pool (see pictures). Then we had dinner with Nicolas, his brother and his brother’s partners in SF: they’re both just absolutely handsome, it’s a real look for women

Remy is having his conference at Oracle World next Sunday, and he seems to be in a lot of stress: he is experiencing a weird pain below the ribs, and we even ended up at the hospital on Thursday night about that. After some blood tests, it seems that it has nothing to do with the liver, and it is just muscular or stress-related. I can understand the stress, it’s kind of a big deal to speak in front of so many experts, and I’m sure he’ll do great… Anyway, I can’t wait for this conference to be over and Remy and I to be in the plane for Hawaii

Talk to you when I’m back from Vegas guys!

Sorry guys, my blog was down for an entire day, but thanks to Rémy’s genius hands, everything is back to normal now.

Since the past week has been everything but interesting, I thought I would pass on the traditional weekly update, but Seb started complaining that without any article, he couldn’t know what I had done this week. Since the answer is nothing, here I am, writing about nothing. I’m wondering how long I can continue that; after all, I went to a business school, that shouldn’t be a problem

So, to sum up nothing, I had a pretty uninteresting week, waiting for Rémy to come back from Chicago, and then spending the week-end working. Work is getting tougher, but also more motivating. I also called a few friends; I think I will never get over the fact that I miss you guys! But I might end up not missing you for long: whereas Remy got a receipt saying that he got accepted at the H1B visa lottery, I still haven’t received anything, which is not a good sign. So I might end up going back to France, whether I (and you ) want it or not!

Apart from this (still) not interesting topic, I registered for the continuing studies program in Stanford, and I will be taking a class of… acting this summer! I can see all of you think “oh my god, she really wants to end up in Hollywood!”

What else? Still a lot of nothing to talk about… Oh yes, I am getting more and more obsessed with the idea of going into the hospitality industry sooner or later, and started devouring some books on the topic. It’s weird, I feel like once you have started in a sector, it is really difficult to go into something radically different later on… Now I start understanding people going into consulting! Those who know me well know that I’ve been talking about managing a hotel for a long time, and now I feel that I really need to do it, at least some day … So who wants to buy an Inn with me? I already have a partner (Manue, if you read me ) but except if she has been hiding her fortune for many years, I doubt that we will have enough money to do that now and alone … Hopefully, my grand father always told me that passion is more important than money to achieve your dreams, and, stupid as I am, I still believe him!

Ok, enough “nothing” for today! Just in case you stumble upon this blog looking for interesting content, insights about tech and entrepreneurship, I remind you that this blog is now for friends and family, or people interested in expatriation (or interested in “nothing”!) but that I still continue to publish more interesting things (it’s not hard!) on Tech it Easy. My latest pieces include an interview of Alain Romang on how museums can benefit from the Internet, and a book review of The One Minute Entrepreneur from Ken Blanchard. Enjoy (or not) !

Hopefully, I will have cooler things to say after Memorial day week end in Yosemite!

I am finally not a desperate case! It started really badly though: I arrived 45 min late because my instructor refuses to buy a GPS, and the examinator I got started by saying “oh, you’re from France? I hate France, people are so mean and rude there!”… It turned out that the guy was delighted to see me smile, since he thought that it might be the sign that “new generations are probably France’s last hope”… The guy was actually really nice, and I couldn’t really disagree with what he was saying: I did leave France for a reason! He ended up the conversation by asking me if Carla Bruni was smart, and I was… speechless! So now I’m going to buy a car… without knowing a single thing about cars! Any advice? I want to keep it under $10,000 (used) and ideally be able to resell it.

Well, this week is completely crazy at work, so I’m going to bed now, but just for info I posted an article about the New Media Arts conference on Tech IT Easy here, and an article about a great conference I attended today by Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, about customer satisfaction, here.

I had an interesting week, the kind of week when you feel that your brain has been working more than usual.

I attended a great conference by Dan Roam about visual thinking as part of the eBay Speaker Series. I wrote an article about it on Tech IT Easy, and it felt good to blog about interesting topics, and not just about what’s happening in my life. I realized that I made the right choice to put my personal articles here and the articles with a little bit more meat on TIE. It allows me to experiment two of the advantages of blogging (staying in touch with friends without writing a common email to everyone and generating great conversations on interesting topics) on different and appropriate platforms without mixing readerships. Whereas before I had a large overlap between my TIE readers and this blog’s readers, now it is not the case anymore even if I encourage my dear friends who read this blog to also read tech topics on TIE, so that they won’t make this strange and annoyed face anymore when I’ll speak about my job with them

Apart from that, I went to a conference on Friday night about New Media Artists and the Law, which will probably help me a lot to definitely finish my thesis. I might write something on TIE about it too (yes, I try to be back in the game!)

This week-end was a little bit less intellectual: OK, I acknowledge that I went to see “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” at the cinema, and even if I’m sure that this movie can go directly to the “crappy” category for most people, I actually laughed a lot And it motivated me to go to Hawaii, so I might take so holidays and go there for Thanksgiving (yes, I am making plans well in advance!)

And finally today, I attended the Cherry Blossom Festival in Japantown with Seb, Audrey and Cecile (pictures here): too many people of course, but really nice parade, plenty of colors, and plenty of French people (don’t ask me why!). Then we looked for cold places since it was freezing in SF and landed in a really nice café, managed by French people of course, guess you can’t avoid them ;-)  Nice people and hot chocolate: I definitely start liking it here!

I am still a bit obsessed on how companies manage their innovation processes and how they make it fit with their culture. In this context, I recently read an HBS case about Intel research. The “Intel lablets” particularly attracted my attention and raised general questions about the management of innovation. If you want to read my thoughts about these questions on innovation, it’s here on Tech It Easy.

I feel really ashamed that I haven’t updated this blog for weeks, and I apologize sincerely to my (few) readers who doesn’t find here any updates. I have the impression that the more exciting my life is, the less lively this blog is. The thing is that I would have plenty of things to say, but I don’t find the time, or don’t try hard enough.

The courses at UCLA are very demanding but still really interesting, and I am starting to work on my final projects.  In Technology management I am analyzing the VoIP market, in Global Operations Strategy I will study the digitization of entertainment industries and in Corporate Entrepreneurship my project is to compare Google and eBay in terms of innovation strategy. So you can guess that I have a lot of material to cover, especially since I also have to make progress on my thesis about “Internet and the democratization of contemporary art”. But OK, I acknowledge that I am obviously looking for excuses, because I manage to find some time to travel (San Diego was great!) so I should find some time to blog!

I am also really busy preparing my relocation, and I still hesitate in going back to Silicon Valley for one week end to find a place to live before coming back to France for Christmas. Otherwise I would have to find a temporary housing in January, and this is a nightmare

This is it, I promise I’ll try to share the great lessons of my final projects with you soon

Update: I forgot the most important: I bought an iPod Touch! After long hesitations between the iPhone and the iPod Touch, I realized that it is before all having a cool wifi device that interested me the most, and the iPod Touch provided it without being obliged to accept the deal with AT&T and without paying $500 deposit! And of course now I can’t stop playing with it

 A lot of my courses are oriented towards entrepreneurship and technology management, so I will use some of them as a raw material for some articles here or on Tech It Easy.

I just published an article on Tech It Easy concerning a process to generate breakthrough innovations, especially in technological companies, by identifying “lead users” on a specific market. If you want to take a look it’s here.

As you may have noticed, this blog has been going in every directions these past weeks. I created it a few months ago and was willing to wait until my expatriation to launch it, but I couldn’t resist and I started this blog by talking a lot about Internet stuff, as it is the sector I love, and because I was really focused on that those past few months.

But the Internet is not the only thing I would like to talk about; in fact I realize that I would like to be able to write about everything I like, everything that surprises me, everything that scares me. In a word, I would like to talk about my life, because it’s often what blogs written by a unique author are, and life is diverse, fortunately.

I have spent one week and a half in the US now and I can’t manage to catch up with Internet news, so at this moment I can’t say anything great about Internet stuff but I would love to talk about American educational system, about the difficulties of expatriation, about the fact of being immersed in a group of international people… And I will probably go back to tech subjects in a while because I’ve taken courses in Technology Management at UCLA which are really promising. And I’m still working on my thesis about the impact of the Internet on the art market so I will also bring cool stuff about it.  And I know that it is hard to find a consistency between Internet, entrepreneurship, digital art, expatriation and education topics, but the common thing they share is that they are all part of my life…

But I also know that I can’t ask my readers to be interested in everything I like, so I really don’t know what to do

In a word it would be great if you can give some feedback on the subject. Do you think that blogs have to be specialized so that readers know what to expect? Or that if you like a blog it’s because you like the author (:-)) and would be interested in knowing more about him/her on multiple topics?

PLEASE, I really need your comments to figure that out, and it can also bring an interesting discussion about what blogging really is.