A Fresh Start (up)

I mentionned at the beginning of my blogging experience that this blog was going to be launched in September 2007, when I will leave France for the US. In fact, my first purpose was to write a blog about both the great moments and the difficulties of expatriation. But my passion for the Internet, entrepreneurship and innovation was too strong and I decided to launch this blog before leaving our wonderful country.

Anyways, lots of visitors of this blog have sent me messages telling me that they would be interested in reading more on this expatriation on this blog. It is quite understandable: as this blog was until now (and will probably continue to be) really Internet centric, my readers are in many cases passionate about this sector. And it is really hard to be passionate about the Internet without having a great interest in what is happening in the US, and how a Frenchie can manage to be integrated there.

So I just want to tell you that I’m leaving to the US on Sep. 18th to study entrepreneurship for one term at UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles), as an exchange student from the PIM program. This term at UCLA will replace my last year at HEC Paris, and I will graduate in June 2008. But I reassure you, I won’t convert this blog into a story of my life, first of all because it is really not that interesting, and secondly because if you want more basic news about what’s happening to me you can follow me on Twitter here.

I can speak more serenely about this departure now, because almost everything is arranged, but I can tell you that expatriation really IS a big deal.

During these past months, I’ve had to:

• go through awful administrative processes to get my student visa
• find an apartment online (I love rent.com!) and book it without even being sure that the woman I sent my money to really is the property manager of a great condo (of course I checked everything I could, but how can you be sure when you are miles away?). I must add that I had tough requirements: short term stay, fully furnished, close to UCLA, not too expensive, with the possibility of having an Internet access, and if possible a fitness center (me, demanding? )
• try (not done already!) to install an Internet access in my future apartment to have it when I arrive
• figure out that there is a sexual offender in the street of my US address thanks to vison20/20, amazing site generating violent reactions (I definitely can’t stop writing about net topics)
• find an insurance to cover me in the US
• start selling all the furniture of my French apartment
• resiliate all the utilities contracts
• get used to the fact that UCLA is a HUGE university and try to identify the halls I must go to when I arrive
• leave my beloved Mac for another computer, buy Windows Vista and Office 2007 because they are the only ones compatible with UCLA systems
• select the courses I want to follow while knowing that exchange students NEVER get the courses they selected
• start being stressed (I’m really in advance on this one!)

So if you have any questions about the preparations fro an expatriation, do not hesitate to ask; otherwise, more to come after Sep. 18th ! Wish me good luck!

Sorry, I will not convert this blog into a travel blog, but I just spent the week-end in Barcelona and I want to share with you my passion for this city:

• Gaudi is a genius and my parents really had trouble in stopping me from taking pictures of every mosaic;
• Spanish people party all the time, and bars of Puerto Olymico are just amazing;
• La Rambla is still a place where you can find the weirdest and funniest people, I love it!

I take this occasion to introduce a new blog I will author, created by Béa, a  “passionate about everything” friend who gives me the pleasure of commenting a lot on this blog. This new blog, www.vaou.net, is a French collaborative travel blog which will gather all the great places (hotels, restaurants, and much more) where the team of authors went around the world. I will very soon make a review of a great hotel and a delicious restaurant I went to during this week-end in Barcelona, so I suggest that you take a look to give us your feedback about the idea and, if you want (and if you speak French), join the team to share all your good addresses!

I have always had a problem with using different tools for the same application. Web2.0 has made me changed my mind as this social revolution obliges you to be connected to a lot of different networks to make the most of it.

Same thing in the case of slide shows: I like different things in differents players.

I love Flektor to create fun slide shows, as it offers many effects. Of course it looks totally unprofessional, but that’s the purpose, and that’s what users seem to like. Myspace has been probably right when acquiring it as they target exactly the same people. You can see below what can be done in a few minutes.  

Even if Rock you! also proposes fun effects, I like it most for the professional designs it proposes. And I must acknowledge that there is something which has made me fall completely for it: you can add sports teams’ logo on the corner of the slide show and… they offer the UCLA one! So as soon as I will get there and collect enough pictures, you will definitely see slideshows with the UCLA logo on the corner!

I also like Goodwidgets because there is not so much choice but the templates have a really cool design.

But the quicker and most useful tool is FlickrSLIDR: when I don’t want to spend time in adding some effects to my slideshows, it is the most useful tool as it automatically select a specific set on Flickr and displays it in a very professional way. These slideshows are a huge improvement for Flickr; now they must really develop new widgets to put on sidebars, because the layouts do not offer lots of possibilities.

Which one do you use? Any advice?

I’m leaving to Barcelona for the week end so don’t be surprised if I don’t answer the comments

If, like me, you better understand a great image or chart than some text, you should have a look at the article I just published on Tech IT Easy about visualization tools for shopping, search and social networking.

Having added the Mybloglog widget on Tech IT Easy has shown me that Tech IT Easy and A Fresh Start (up) have almost the same loyal readership (even if I have less readers on the latest than on the first one of course!). But in case you don’t know Tech IT Easy yet, it is an amazing blog with amazing authors (of course I am one of them ;-)) founded by Jérémy Fain: if you are a Tech addict you must take a look at it, and if you think that you have interesting things to say about Tech do not hesitate to drop me or Jérémy an email to become part of our dream team of bloggers!

You already know that I am a Twitter fan, but I always regretted that Twitter still had some shortcomings which could be easily corrected. Which is why I have been really happy to see that 3 of these shortcomings have been “solved”:

- You may have noticed that the frequency of bugs has been decreasing dramatically in the last few weeks, and it is definitely a great improvement for such an addictive service.

- You are not obliged anymore to go to Tinyurl to shorten your urls and then paste them on Twitter: it is now done automatically, which is a great time gain.

- Finally, it is not an improvement made by the Twitter team but by an external developer and it is GREAT: you can now send direct messages to groups of Twitter users with Twitter groups. It is one of the features that made a lot of people say that Pownce was better than Twitter, but I was sure that it was just a matter of time for Twitter to provide the same useful service. It is now a done thing!

I hope I still manage to convince some of you to start Twittering, and you can follow me here on Twitter!

I promised myself not to make duplicated content on this blog, but in this case, even if the whole blogosphere has already created a Simpson avatar, I couldn’t resist it. Especially since Béa challenged me to do it in the comments of the previous article…

So here she is, isn’t she cute? In case you haven’t noticed yet, I love avatars and I love purple!

And finally, just a quick poll to see if my readers are fans of The Simpsons or not:

After my cute Voki, I wanted to test Gizmoz, which is another avatar app with better personnalization tools (3D + upload of your own picture). Sincerely the result is amazing (and I kind of like this hair cut, not that I will try it for real!), except that… I scare myself !!!! So I won’t change from Voki to Gizmoz, unless I want my readers to be so afraid that they will be forced to read…

Express Yourself with Gizmoz Video Clips

I sincerely hate to criticize some services especially since I wouldn’t probably do better,  but in the case of Spock.com, I just can’t help myself. In any case thank you very much to GuiM.fr for having invited me. 

Spock is the new trendy people search engine, supposed to crawl the Internet looking for information on you. It is also exactly as I would describe Ziki.com, which is a service I really like which aggregates your public information on one page and even allows you to top Google results by buying keywords for you. It is exactly what I love in the Internet: being able to MANAGE all the information you make public without sometimes even realizing all the impacts on what you display online. But even if the basic definition of those two websites is the same, Spock presents MAJOR disadvantages compared to Ziki.

Indeed it allows other people to interact with your profile, which means that your Spock profile, likely to have a good Google ranking, may contain wrong or defamatory information. Of course it is a very “2.0″ service, as the community contributes to give an image of you, but I really don’t think that it is desirable to let other people play with such an important thing as your virtual identity. All the virtual identity services such as Ziki are trying to improve your “Net rep”, whereas Spock just don’t understand the main point here and proposes a service which doesn’t meet current expectations from my point of view.

Even worse, but less importantly, their crawler is apparently not as good as the Ziki one, and their design is just a nightmare (really bad for a personnal page): personnaly I really wouldn’t want an employer to see my Spock profile. On the contrary, it is a pleasure to show you my Ziki profile. And just for info, Ziki offers 100 business cards with the cool Ziki logo here; a great way to combine online and offline representation.

And if you (despite all) want to try Spock, do not hesitate to ask me for invites in the comments.

I have been on Pownce for 2 weeks now, and I have already made a review here. As I said, the product is great but as my friends are not on it, I will definitely keep on using Twitter.

But there is one thing that I really don’t understand: why do people that I know nothing about add me as a friend on Pownce? I can understand that you follow somebody you don’t know but if  he says interesting things (I follow some people I don’t even know on Twitter, and reciprocally) but why the hell adding somebody as your friend who says nothing at all (I have posted 2 updates on Pownce in 2 weeks!) ? I receive less invites on Twitter than I do on Pownce, whereas I often update my Twitter: am I more interesting when I am silent? I hope not

So I can’t help thinking that some first movers on Pownce try to get as many people as possible in their network so that they can have a captive audience (especially since Pownce send you emails for each of your network’s updates!). In a word, I find that Pownce is becoming really intrusive, and I am impatient to see people’s reaction to that. 

If you really want to try, I still have some invites left, one comment and they are yours

Just a quick article to tell you that I will be off to Megève for a few days to milk cows and to enjoy fresh air. I am a bit worried to know that I will have no Internet access, but I hope I will survive

I have no “babysitter” for this blog so I won’t probably answer my comments (unless I spend the entire trip looking for a cybercafé, which sounds totally lame but totally like me). So apologies for the lack of update for a few days, I will come back with great articles after that!