A Fresh Start (up)

This week-end really made me realize how inspired I have been when I chose to live in California. Whereas my friends and family were complaining about the freezing weather in France, I spent my Saturday afternoon… swimming in a delightful pool, under palm trees and an amazing sun (pictures here)! Today, we had a great brunch at Seb’s place in Palo Alto, and then drove to Half Moon Bay, a beautiful beach (pictures here), where I realized that I will probably never take a bath in the Pacific Ocean: it is absolutely freezing! I feel that I’m really bad in terms of integration with American people: I stick with French people because it is so easier to interact with them, without the fear of making inappropriate jokes or confronting an obvious cultural difference (and I realize that there are many!)… But I’ll definitely need to meet American people, because that was the main point of living here!

This week I took the first steps to become a real person here: I applied for a Social Security Number (2hrs wait, a dumb guy misspelling my name, I love US administration) and I got some info about getting a driving license… I know that getting some info is not enough ( ) so I will -probably!- take my first lesson this week: inhabitants of San Jose, stay home!!!

I had some thoughts a few weeks ago about what this blog was going to become. If you see this post, you will think that these thoughts weren’t worth it! But anyway, my friends found this video of me (made in Vegas, of course) quite funny, so I share it with you in a “stupid interlude”!

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

It’s always difficult to speak about my expatriation, to communicate what surprises me, what I like and dislike about it on an ongoing basis on this blog, because it would generate really short articles about some silly things. Twitter would be the ideal way to do that but as most of my friends are not geeks, I know that I don’t reach the people I want with this medium. So I decided to make regular updates gathering all the news and practical details of my expatriation, my opinions and feelings about it. It is particularly important for me since I use expats’ blogs a lot, to discover great things to do, to understand some cultural aspects, or simply to know how to get my Internet access repaired in this country! So, in bulk:

• I love studying in the US, because I realized I really lacked some concrete experience about the fields I am studying. I get to listen to business angels, VCs, entrepreneurs, corporate entrepreneurs, innovation directors… and I simply love it, because I put a face on these functions and I mitigate my thoughts and stereotypes.
• L.A. has plenty of advantages (amazing weather, both great cultural and night life, great entertainment, lovely areas…) but a big drawback: it’s huge. As my budget didn’t allow me to rent a car for 3 months, I am obliged to plan days in advance what I want to do, because you can’t simply wake up one morning and go to downtown, because you have to remember that it is at least 1hr30min bus drive to go there. I have no impression of “knowing” L.A. as I can’t do multiple things in the same day, so I can’t manage to “connect” the different places I go to. Fortunately my neighborhood is one of the nicest (Westwood, between Santa Monica and Beverly Hills ;-))
• Today is Halloween, and it’s a big deal here, but it has been celebrated everywhere for a week now (you can see my costume of devil here)… Originally I thought that Halloween was supposed to be scary, but it is in fact the equivalent of Mardi Gras… And most women (at least in L.A.) preferred the sexy costume than the scary one!
• I kept the best part for the end: I just accepted an offer to work as a Business Analyst for the Marketplaces Strategy team of eBay in San Jose, California (headquarters), and I will start working there in January. Obviously I’m delighted, especially since I enjoyed my internship at eBay France, but also because it’s a great opportunity to discover the challenging environment of Silicon Valley, and to work with the best people of the sector, all sharing the same amazing corporate culture. I would have so many great things to say about eBay (the core values, the amazing portfolio, the great challenges to face, the vision, the campus…ok I stop now) but I have decided that it will be the only time I will speak about it. There are a lot of legal aspects involved when blogging about the company you’re working for, and the limit between what you can say or not is often really vague. I will of course share my knowledge of the Internet sector and what I will learn by interacting with bloggers and entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, but I won’t say a word anymore about eBay itself.
• My boyfriend also has to find some work in Silicon Valley, so if you know a company needing a top notch software engineer and having no problem in sponsoring visas, please let me know, that’d be great!
• I will move to Silicon Valley in January, and have to find a place to live: I’m hesitating between living in San Jose to be close to eBay or finding a nicer area… If you have any advice then do no not hesitate! I think I will try to rent a place for one month to give me time to find my “ideal apartment”.

That’s it, I will keep you posted about the many practical things I will have to overcome to settle down

For my course of entrepreneurship, I had to interview an entrepreneur to understand the major obstacles to overcome when creating a venture. Raphael Labbé, one of the co-founder of U.[Lik], has took the time to share with me the story of U.[Lik] from an entrepreneurial point of view. As many of you know, U.[Lik] allows users to share their tastes by creating their own online library where they can aggregate their ratings of cultural products (music, cinema, arts, people…).

You can find the story here on Tech IT Easy. Be careful, the article is really long, but how can you shorten an entrepreneurial story? Since entrepreneurship is all about mentoring, it has been really great for me to discover Raphael’s entrepreneurial adventure, or “rollercoaster”.

If you want to discover my tastes, visit my lounge on U.[Lik] here. Christmas is approaching, so please also check my wishlist ;-). And good luck to Raphael and Mathieu to build this “cultural Babel” (sorry but this expression rocks!).

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.

Yesterday, I attended the football game UCLA vs Washington at Rose Bowl. And the basic evidence that in the US belonging to a university is a much bigger deal than in France struck me even more. Can you imagine a stadium of 95 000 people dedicated to a university team? I think about my friends playing football at HEC: nobody cares, we barely even know the scores against other business schools. At UCLA, 95 000 people cheer these players every month; 5-year-old girls wearing one of the multiple UCLA sweatshirts, pompons and caps cry with joy when a player comes next to them; L.A. inhabitants with absolutely no relation with UCLA come to attend the event and choose their side and entire families come to support the team of the nephew’s university. I could barely imagine the face my parents would do if I asked them to attend an HEC football game knowing that I don’t even have any relationships with the players!

Ok, it is obviously a different culture, and a lot of reasons can explain that this can’t be applied in France, but what harm can it make to brand our schools a little bit better? What I mean is that I don’t expect people coming from all around France to attend an HEC football game, but I would find absolutely normal to be able to wear a fashionable HEC cap and jacket (and having the choice to choose the color, size and shape) when I go for a run, or an HEC towel when I take a bath… We must not forget that this pride of being part (or having been part) of a university generates millions of dollars to universities that directly benefit current students and alumni. Some might say that the problem is that we don’t have this pride in France; I would say that we do have it but we have nothing to prove it or express it.

And to finish, a little extract from the game, after the entrance of UCLA players (video n°1) and after a touchdown (video n°2):

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!

For a very long time I have been trying to prove to my friends that I’m not a geek. But my reaction when I saw my Moo stickers in the mail today definitely ruins my attempts to convince them!

Moo, a UK start-up which had launched a printing on mini-cards service, has recently added to its offer some stickerbooks: you can basically convert your Flickr (and other photo sharing services) photos into stickers. As you can see I can now stick my head and my boyfriend’s everywhere, on postcards, on gifts… (I have plenty of ideas, but I have to select the least kitsch ones!). Of course it can be used in different ways: you can use any picture you want, so for example you can have stickers with famous paintings. I will also probably order my mother’s shop logo and she will stick her stickers on all the wraps she will make. Both mini-cards and stickers have generated creative ideas among users who have created a Flickr group here.

After reading “The Unofficial Tourists’ Guide to Second Life”, I was amazed by the number of “touristic” places to visit in Second Life, and by the fact that the authors of this book have written this book as a traditionnal touristic guide.

I have just published a review of this book and of the most surprising places in Second Life here on Tech It Easy. 

What do you think about this rapid creation of such an elaborated virtual world, which now offers touristic places, sports, cultural activities, etc… ?