A thousand times bigger ?

Posted by Brice Le Blevennec | Filed under Thoughts

In the seventies I had my first experience with a digital computer. Actually the word computer is a bit exagerated, it was a TI58c, a programmable calculator from Texas Instrument that could remember a little program in its resident memory even when turned off, which was a revolution at the time. I used it mainly to cheat at the exams. It’s memory capacity was expressed in bytes. That’s all I remember from computing in the seventies.

Then it was the eighties. And in 1981 precisely, I bought my very first own computer, a ZX81 from Sinclair computer. It had a whopping kilobyte of memory. Unfortunately some of those 1024 Kilobytes were used for the display memory. I quickly bought the 16K extension. But it was overheating and disconnected frequently. A few years later, around 1984, I bought a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, with 16 K of memory, that I quickly upgrade to the 48K model. I still own a untouched sample in my office, thanks to my partner John who found one in an attic. One of my best friend was lucky enough to get a 128K Macintosh. But all I could afford was a Sinclair QL… enought to overleap the Commodore 64 K that all the others kids from my school where bragging about. In the eighties we expressed memory in kilobytes.

Then it was the nineties. And in 1991 I founded Ex Machina, a prepress and multimedia studio. My first hard drive was a 20 megabytes hard drive. It was huge, thousand times bigger than my previous storage unit : the 3 1/2 floppy drive. But I had trouble opening a photoshop file the size of an A4 page, and to be able to cut and paste between two scans, I had to backup and empty my whole hard drive. Luckily hard drives where growing fast, and suddenly I was sending 40 Megabytes Syquest disks to my offset film supplier. Then Syquest drive became obsoletes and replaced by optical disks, up to 512 Megabytes, … I started creating CD-ROM of 640 Megabytes. In the nineties we expressed memory in Megabytes.

Then we passed 2000. In 2001 Ex Machina, my first company merged with Emalaya and became Emakina. I can remember my first 1 gigabyte removable magneto optic disk drive. And I had 20 gigabytes in my Macintosh laptop. Then 40, then a hundred gigabytes. Now my iMac has a 500 Gigabytes Hard Drive inside and I burn 4.7 Gigabyte DVD disks. I read 40 Gigabytes Blue Ray disks in my PS3. In the first 10 years of the third millennium the memory unit where the Gigabytes, … but my first Terabyte drive entered my house as an Apple Time Capsule. I have several servers with terabytes drive at my Emakina offices, I have a 30 Terabytes storage cluster at ContactOffice, one of my company that provide webmail and online file storage. I can clearly see that the memory unit of the twenties will be the Terabytes (1000^4).

Every 10 years the memory unit grow by a thousand factor. With little imagination you can forecast petabytes (1000^5) drives in the thirties, exabytes (1000^6) in the forties and zettabytes (1000^7) in the fifties, yottabytes (1000^8) in the sixties… enough to record digitally every sound your ear, every image each of your eyes captures in a resolution higher than your retina, every smell, every taste, every touch feeling, … every bit of the chaotic signals your brain thinks is reality. To remember everything forever. Hope I’ll live long enough to see if I was right.

Good night.

Read more | Comments (1) | July 29th, 2008

Why I don’t blog anymore ?

Posted by Brice Le Blevennec | Filed under Thoughts

The reason I give usually is that I found something more interesting to do (like developing a Social network, reading a book, dating a cutie or run a company). In reality, I have never been a real blogger. I just like to test the possibilities of blog platforms and their plugins, or embedding rich content. Also when I encounter something cool, I am ready to spend 5 seconds to share it with the world by a cut and paste. A more a micro-blogger and the real reason is that I’m too lazy to write. Now I can wait another month before the next post ;-)

Read more | Comments (1) | April 11th, 2008

Quelques conseils pour reussir votre entreprise internet

Posted by Brice Le Blevennec | Filed under Thoughts

Networking

  • Donnez d’abord (temps, conseil, visibilité, …) pour recevoir ensuite.
  • Choisissez bien vos associés afin d’éviter les conflits, surtout ceux d’ego.
  • Partagez-vous les rôles et les pouvoirs en fonction des compétences de chacun et pas de l’historique.
  • Surtout créez votre réseau de contacts avant d’en avoir besoin.

Innovation

  • Soyez curieux, remetez-vous souvent en question, étudiez éternellement.
  • N’hésitez pas, même si vous êtes le seul, à lutter contre une opinion populaire.
  • Copiez, assemblez des idées existantes, ou détournez-les sans complexes.
  • Lisez beaucoup (offline et online), et ne perdez pas de temps en foire et salons.
  • Partagez vos idées avec un maximum de monde, et écoutez beaucoup, n’ayez pas peur d’être copié. Ce ne sont pas les idées qui valent mais l’énergie et le talent qu’on met a les réaliser.

Business Model

  • Les grandes idées sans business model sont les idées les plus dangereuses.
  • Eviter comme la peste les business models ne reposant que sur la publicité.
  • Privilegiez les business models scalables techniquement sans devoir recruter du personnel proportionellement à votre croissance.
  • Commencez par travailler le volet revenu de votre business plan avant les dépenses et le plan marketing et communication.

Communication

  • Pour le lancement ne faites aucune publicité, mais communiquez beaucoup avec vos utilisateurs, la presse, vos partenaires.
  • Pensez à exploiter les canaux gratuits de l’internet (buzz, viral, web2.0, relais, …)
  • Une fois votre part de marché acquise, pour occuper le terrain et empêcher de nouveaux entrants, faites beaucoup de publicité.
  • Si vous avez les moyens, plutôt qu’avec un bon généraliste, travaillez avec les meilleurs spécialistes, Emakina

Technologie

  • Ne surestimez pas les compétences internet des utilisateurs ou le temps qu’ils peuvent consacrer à votre service.
  • Faites tous vos choix en fonction des besoins de vos utilisateurs, et non pas en fonction de la paresse de vos developpeurs.
  • Sauf pour les prototypes, ne misez pas sur des languages ou technologies exotiques, car en cas de succès il vous sera difficile de recruter.
  • Débutez avec des solution légères, des produits open source ou gratuits, prototypez avec des technologies souples avant d’investir dans l’architecture state-of-the-art.
  • Découper votre projet en unités, testables individuellement et assignez-les a des équipes différentes. Developpez unité par unité.

Read more | Comments (2) | February 1st, 2008

I’m 40 years old today

Posted by Brice Le Blevennec | Filed under Thoughts

Yep, that’s right. I turned 40 years old today. That’s the sad news. The good news is that for my forties I bought myself an US imported iPhone and unlocked it (iNdependance + AnySIM) to be able to use it with my belgian provider of choice, Proximus. Everything works perfectly but YouTube that Apple recently blocked for hacked iPhone.

I moved from my Nokia E61 to the iPhone overnight. What a great experience : I felt like upgrading from MS-DOS to MacOS X in one big step. The world will change now that the mobile Internet is a great thing and not a sub-par experience. You really enjoy browsing the web, reading online newspaper, checking email with HTML display, pictures and attachement and being able to answer on the go.

The iPhone is a big lesson given at a whole billion dollars industry that designing experiences is a very powerfull art.

Read more | Comments (4) | September 23rd, 2007

Cool new Internet Meme : Crowdsourcing your creation

Posted by Brice Le Blevennec | Filed under Thoughts

Here is a very good idea : ask the crowd to create your logo, your member recruitment campaign or even your new ad big idea… and if you don’t get good creation, at least you’ll have done some buzz around your brand.

Read more | Comments (0) | August 13th, 2007

Very interesting interview of Faris Yakob and Iain Tait

Posted by Brice Le Blevennec | Filed under Movies, Thoughts

This very interesting interview of Faris Yakob, Digital Ninja at Naked Communication, and Iain Tait, Creative Strategic Planner at Poke, was shot during an event in Romania. Among other things they discuss the merge of the role of Strategic Planner and Creative in Interactive Agencies. If fully agree with most of their toughts. So if you’re in the business, stay tuned until the end.

Some of you knows that I’m the founder and President of Emakina, belgium largest Full Service Interactive Agency (they may have read the sidebar ;-). So please notes that Emakina’ baseline is “Building a Better Web.”. Seems that Iain like it ;-)

Read the rest of this entry »

Read more | Comments (0) | July 31st, 2007

Pourquoi Tunz.com peut changer le monde

Posted by Brice Le Blevennec | Filed under Ideas, Thoughts

Tunz.com permet des paiements entre personne à distance. Il suffit que chacun possède un GSM et que le payeur ait un compte Tunz.com approvisionné. On pense immédiatement à la possibilité de partager une addition au restaurant, d’acheter des biens sur Internet ou de faire des micro-paiements pour du contenu sur un site, pas mal mais cela n’est pas ce qui va changer le monde…

Pourtant Tunz.com est une monnaie électronique différente : Tunz.com permet des transactions directes entre individus, instantanées, à distance, sans terminaux dédiés. Et des transactions dématérialisées permettent pleins de nouvelles applications, … révolutionnaires.

Par exemple Tunz.com permettrait d’acheter un objet virtuel a un joueur dans Word of Warcraft, dans Second life, ou de payer pour voir une vidéo dans PS3 Home. Sur n’importe quel système de chat/Webcam comme MSN Messenger, Skype, AIM/iChat, deux personnes peuvent s’échanger un paiement via leur GSM en échange d’un fichier, d’un service ou d’une information… même par email entre un acheteur et un vendeur sur un site d’enchère en ligne!

Dans la réalité (hors Internet) si un marchand affiche un code pour un produit dans un magazine, sur une affiche ou un écran, un membre de Tunz.com pourrait acheter ce produit n’importe ou. Dans son lit mais aussi dans la rue, a un concert, a un spectacle, a une convention, dans un métro… Imaginez d’acheter le MP3 d’un concert pendant que vous y assistez. Imaginez d’acheter la vidéo de la conférence que vous êtes en train de voir, ou un livre que l’auteur vous présente a un salon. Imaginez aussi simplement acheter un produit simplement en envoyant un payement avec le code nécessaire que vous voyez dans un publicité a la télévision, sur une affiche dans la rue ou entendez à la radio (si vous n’êtes pas au volant).

Au premier regard Tunz.com parait sympathique : c’est un porte-monnaie électronique mobile… Mais en y réfléchissant bien, son utilisation sans terminaux spécifiques, avec de simple GSM permet d’innombrables applications qui vont créer de nouvelles opportunités de commerce, permettre des transaction n’importe où, et a distance entre acheteur et vendeur. Telles les cartes de crédit ont rendu possible le commerce électronique sur le web, peut-être que Tunz.com changera radicalement notre économie. Et le monde ?

Read more | Comments (2) | May 17th, 2007

Missing Apple Announcements

Posted by Brice Le Blevennec | Filed under Thoughts

Read more | Comments (0) | April 16th, 2007

Why and how Joost will change the World!

Posted by Brice Le Blevennec | Filed under Ideas, Report, Thoughts

Joost™

I will not explain what is Joost, just google the web, visit the Joost website and blog.

But I’ll explain why, after only two weeks of Joost experience, I’m convinced that Joost will change the world.

Why ?

Because Joost will revolution television first, then slowly the audience habbits (personalized individual tv consumption), then the whole mass media segmentation system, then shift the power from the media moghuls that rules using their monopoly on frequencies, on satellite, cable, DSL channels to content creators.

Because Joost will change the business model of television, then destroy the advertising media agencies monopoly and their exclusive relation with advertisers, then turn whole advertising business sector (from ATL to Interactive) upside down - literally.

Because Joost will destroy the ambitions of most web video sharing websites (YouTube, Google Video, Daily Motion, and the numerous others) by cutting the bandwidth from the whole equation (thanks to peercasting) and adding advertising revenues (from day one) maybe subscriptions revenues and maybe pay-per-view revenues while respecting the whole rights system since day 1 (including territories distinction).

How is it possible ?

Joost can be viewed from any screen as long as you have broadband internet access and a Windows PC or a Mac. Watch it on a laptop over Wifi. Watch it on your desktop PC monitor or on a television (CRT, LCD, Plasma). No need for setop boxes, smart cards, satelite dishes. Watch it in your hotel room. Start watching a movie in the office, finish it in the living room. This is freedom of space! And freedom is a good reason to change your habbits.

Joost replicate the old plain TV experience (full screen) with a program (a playlist of shows). Don’t search snippets of video on the web, just trust a brand (channel), sit down, relax and watch. You just have access to a potentially infinite number of channels. You’ll never need to record a program again. Don’t invest in storage, recorders, tapes and EPG subscriptions. With Joost, you can navigate the channel playlist forward and skip a boring show or backward, to view an old show. This is freedom of time! And freedom is a good reason to change your habbits.

Joost has advertisement since day one. Both as sponsor of a channel (you watch an ad at the beginning of you program) or in the middle of your program (and to the contrary of television, you can’t zap). And you’ll watch those ads, as Joost will personalized them just for you. Joost know your name, your email, your email domain name, your location, your computer model and OS, your IP adress, your channel selection, your RSS feeds selection, so Joost know your profile. Joost will provide advertisers the GRAAAAL they have been searching forever : the emotional impact of television with the one-to-one personalisation possible with interactive media… And I bet Joost will provide advertiser a platform to buy ad space like you buy ad words in Google Ad sense program. Good bye media agencies…

Just like with Skype-out, soon Joost will ask your credit card number to allow you to subscribe to channels (great for porn), and buy pay-per-view movies. Even better a mobile payment system for teenagers like Tunz.com ;-) Then thanks to Joost integration of mozilla’ html rendering engine wich allow each channel to display an overlay with a mini website, you’ll be able to buy products from Joost in one click! Watch an TV ad, click. Done. Ho boy. That will be BIG.

In the near future bandwidth cost will drop and volume limits disappear. Even today in some market (eg: voo.be in belgium) broadband subscriptions have no volume limits, there Joost could also move from SD to HD in a codec snap and kill blue ray and HD DVD before birth.

Joost has the potential to change the media business, the advertising business, the e-commerce business, the interactive business. Soon the whole world.

Next episode : what are Joost’ threats.

Note : Like many others I thought I invented the peercasting in 1999 (see annex below). I remember an Apple Expo in Paris during which I had diner with my friend Martin and draw a QuickTime distributed streaming system on the napkin. By chance Frank Casanova, from Apple QuickTime team was in the restaurant, so I took my chance and gave him my little napkin drawing with an explanation. He gave me his email adress and asked me to send him my idea in writing. I never did. Ten years later Apple has AppleTV, FrontRow, iTunes, iPod, iPhone with Wifi, QuickTime Streaming Server and still no peercasting. So next time an idiot give you a napkin drawing, take him seriously.

Annex I : Other PeerCasting technologies :