A Fresh Start (up)

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!).

I’ve already written about the failure of my company creation but that’s not the kind of thing you get over easily especially when a good friend sends you an email proving that your idea wasn’t crap because… somebody else is developing it, but is doing it much better than you were.

When I created BlogEntreprise, my idea was to tackle a growing niche of the blog market: small businesses and clubs, by allowing them to communicate simply and interactively with their customers, members or prospects without requiring a webmaster. Creating a corporate blog platform was also a way of creating a directory of these blogs, unlike other blog platforms mixing personal and professional blog.  As I said in my previous article on the subject, the main problem was the awful design, and the fact that we had absolutely no money to invest in it. Finding investors would have been impossible as neither my partner nor me were committed full time.

Blog4Trade is doing EXACTLY the same: a directory of corporate blogs, classified in different categories of the corporate world,  with exactly the same positioning (”the first blog platform 100% business”, targeting small businesses), with exactly the same marketing speech about the advantages of a blog for a company and exactly the same features (”blog of the month” on the home page).

But clearly, when you look at the two screenshots in this article, would you rather create a blog on BlogEntreprise on the left or on Blog4Trade on the right? The decision takes less than a second. But what is really hard to swallow is just that all the key success factors were there, except one (design) which would have cost no more than €3000, but it is an amount we didn’t have at the time.

No great idea cost nothing. They always cost something, even if “something” is really low. So you really have to evaluate this “something” before because, how great your idea can be, it won’t be revealed unless you finally get this “something”. Now I will leave my bitterness to wish good luck to Blog4Trade which seems to be a really good platform!

This is kind of the paradise for a girl like me. All the logos of the big Internet companies are appearing on all sides of the road… Silicon Valley is definitely my Disneyland

By the way, being there is a great gift for my birthday (and thanks to all of my readers who wished me a happy birthday ;-))… But unfortunately you are now punished by being obliged to watch another one of my awful podcasts… This time, it’s about the HP garage in Palo Alto, the birthplace of Silicon Valley: I think that you can see on the video that I am delighted to be there, even if it’s just the entry of a garage which can’t even be visited

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.

I’m really interested in visualization tools especially when they become art projects. But what about building a visual representation of the Internet itself? Everybody is aware of the success on The Million Dollar Page mainly because of the simplicity of the business model to gain easily lots of money, but it’s also a major Net art project that is a visual metaphor for what the Internet was in 2005. The creator Alex Tew even said: “One of my original aims was to create a piece of Internet art that reflects what’s current on the Internet and what’s possible, because I’ve made a million from that image. I want to create an Internet capsule to keep for years.”

But what we know less (probably because it did not generate any money!) is that they were previous attempts to visualize the Internet, notably ones from a major Net artist called Lisa Jevbratt. 1:1 is one of her project intended to make 5 different representations of the Internet. On her site, she describes the project like that: “1:1 was a project created in 1999 which consisted of a database that would eventually contain the addresses of every Web site in the world and interfaces through which to view and use the database. 1:1(2) is a continuation of the project including a second database of addresses generated in 2001 and 2002 and interfaces that show and compare the data from both databases.”  In Migration, she represented the Internet by allocating dots to the sites of a database, with different colors depending on the year of creation of these sites, and it is the only representation that allows to see changes over the year, to see the web “moving”,  whereas the other ones are static. But my favorite from the 5 is “Every“, which is really beautiful and gives access to all the websites from the database.

I love the way she describes the purpose of this piece of Net art: “When navigating the Web through the databases, via the five interfaces, one experiences a very different Web than when navigating it with the “road maps” provided by search engines and portals. Instead of advertisements, pornography, and pictures of people’s pets, this Web is an abundance of inaccessible information, undeveloped sites and cryptic messages intended for someone else. Search-engines and portals deliver only a thin slice of the Web to us, not the high-resolution image we sometimes think they do. The interfaces/visualizations are not maps of the Web but are, in some sense, the Web. They are super-realistic and yet function in ways images could not function in any other environment or time. They are a new kind of image of the Web, and they are a new kind of image. “

OK, no scoop here, but for me it was an amazing moment: touching the iPhone and taking a picture of me with it in the Apple Store of Santa Monica… Here are two proofs of that:

A few words to sum up this day: Santa Monica rocks, but I was disappointed by Venice Beach which is a striking example of the inequalities of the American society. If you’re interested, you can see all the pictures here.

After months of preparation, stress, excitement and anxiety, I’m finally in L.A.! How to describe the first day of a new life? I must be born under a good star as everything went fine: in only one day, I checked into a beautiful studio, I visited UCLA and completed all the administrative tasks, I got my UCLA student card, I bought the traditional UCLA sweatshirt, I bought a US mobile phone, I opened a bank account, I found a Whole Food to buy some… food of course, and I even had time to make my first podcast at UCLA…

As I don’t want to convert this blog into a personal one (and it’s hard at the moment as I really want to share the experience of my expatriation), I will try to connect my experiences with some more interesting topics. For example, in this podcast, I explain the connection between UCLA and the Internet. The result is awful (horrible French accent, horrible face, awful quality, and I don’t understand why I move my head in all directions like that, that’s unbearable…) but I really want to make this blog more alive by adding podcasts, so hopefully it’ll get better with time ;-)

If you want to follow this expatriation step by step, you can see my Flickr pictures here and my Twitter feed here.

A few weeks ago, I wrote an article about the fact that, with customization trends, everybody will soon need to develop design skills to make the most of user generated products. In my vision, designers were really powerful because they have the required skills to benefit completely from this new trend. But recently I read another article of Etienne Mineur (in French, but I will explain it here), which basically says that designers are becoming less and less powerful, especially since new templates and applications allows amateurs to control design without having design skills.

I think that what I said remains true: users have more options to customize things but the power stays between the hands of designers who have the skills to offer this choice. Without design skills, users just have more options to choose when they buy a product: when Freddy&Ma proposes to “design your own bag”, it just offers you some different options on the same bag (the one I customized on the picture is nice, right? ;-)) but not the real possibility of designing the bag of your dreams. But what I misunderstood is the fact that even if designers are more than required to create those templates, they can feel that they are loosing some power because they don’t have any control on the final product anymore. I recently read some management theories telling that the most important motivational factor was the feeling of being responsible for a whole project (which is why motivation was so low during Taylorism). So I can now understand designers’ feeling, at a time when they are becoming more “facilitators” than “makers”.

I don’t really know anything about design, but the most obvious solution would be that designers migrate towards services, by proposing their advice to project managers who want to have a total control on the final cut. But when it comes to mass market, they should follow the wave by proposing the best solutions for users to customize their products. In that scenario, users wouldn’t even feel the need of developing design skills on their own because they would have all the choice they need, and designers would keep the benefit of their technical skills.

A few weeks ago I wrote an article about visualization tools where I said that these tools must either have a clear artistic purpose or must be really useful by improving understanding. Twitter blocks is none of them. I tried to understand the basic principles of this visualization, and it appears that it only allows you to see the timeline of the friends who have updated their Twitter feed recently. I didn’t even understand why some blocks are higher than others.

So why? With all the improvements that need to be done on Twitter, and the limited resources they have, why choose to develop a useless visualization tool, which brings nothing more to the core use of Twitter and which could have been developed by some artists via Twitter API?

The list of things to do is long enough: create groups to send direct messages (done by Twitter group but should be integrated to Twitter), create some tabs for different groups of people you are following, improve their people search engine…

Any idea what this visual app brings to Twitter? Did I miss something?

You really thought I wasn’t going to participate? For those who haven’t caught the vawe, Blogday is the day when bloggers can share with their readers 5 blogs they like, which helps making discover new blogs. I was also proud to be in the BlogDay selection of Tête au carré (thanks!). So here is my selection, among all my center of interests:

• eBay strategies: Ok, it’s not at all a new blog, but Scott Wingo is just amazing when it comes to analyse eBay current strategy, and as I’m still passionate about the company I interned in these past 6 months, I couldn’t miss this one.
• Inside the USA: the blog of a French expatriate who came bak from the US but who keep on commenting US news. Obviously, I couldn’t miss this one either.
• Qu’est ce que l’art aujourd’hui: again it is for French readers (really sorry for others) and it is about everything happening in contemporary art. It also proposes some great analysis about the market.
• Tourism Internet Marketing blog:  great blog about the tourism industry and its use of the Internet.
• Future of real estate marketing: a blog exploring Real Estate marketing and the impact of the Internet, Web 2.0 and blogging on the Real Estate industry.

Enjoy!