How often do you switch off your mail and phone to think or create?
Posted by Brice Le Blevennec | Filed under Thoughts
Sim D’Hertefelt ask us on Linked in : “How often do you switch off your mail and phone to think or create?”. His thesis is that “For innovating ideas to emerge -in design, business, management, technology development…- you have to switch off your mail and phone for at least a day.”
He also ask “Do you agree? What helps you to create and innovate in your job?”.
My answer :
Innovative ideas rarely appear ex nihilo, unless you’re a real genius. They are often the result of the combination of several items. This is why at Emakina we enjoy brainstorming in a groups made of people from very different background. This is why I actually enjoy the flow of interruptions that provide me alien items that collide with my current flow of thinking. Like a lot of scientific discoveries, many of my ideas results from accidents, completely independent of my will. But don’t tell my customers 
My only talent is being able to notice interesting collisions and having the instinct to feel the value or novelty of a new combination in a fraction of second, before the thought is lost. I take notes in my bed, record ideas on my iPhone, write email to myself a lot, just to avoid forgetting valuable ideas.
What help me to create in my job is people very different from me, the flow of random items that populate my mails, rss feeds, tweets, and conversations on all media. Also I read a lot of magazines specialized in many different subjects (from Monocle to Wired, from CanardPC to Stuff, from Keyboards to Psychologies, …)
In summary I think that the great creative genius thinking in the silence of his Ivory tower is a cliche that only non creative people believe in.
All creatives knows that creativity is a talent “inné” that you cannot learn, but you can force yourself being open to the flow of items (subscribe to as many flows as you can), train yourself to observe new combinations, practice systematic checking of novelty and value. In the end only the good ideas counts.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
Missing Apple Announcements
Posted by Brice Le Blevennec | Filed under Thoughts
Why and how Joost will change the World!
Posted by Brice Le Blevennec | Filed under Ideas, Report, Thoughts
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 :
- http://www.peercast.org/
- http://www.freecast.org/
- http://p2p-radio.sourceforge.net/
- http://www.streamerp2p.com/
- http://www.sopcast.com/
- http://www.peerstream.net/
- http://tribler.org/
- http://www.rawflow.com/
- http://www.octoshape.com/
- http://www.abacast.com/
- http://www.flatcast.com/de/startseite.aspx
- http://mediablog.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/MediaBlog
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PPStream
- http://www.pplive.com/en/index.html
- http://actlab.tv/
- http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/IceShare
Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us
Posted by Brice Le Blevennec | Filed under Movies, Thoughts
2007 Trends #1 Enterprise 2.0
Posted by Brice Le Blevennec | Filed under Thoughts
You may know that on the internet people commonly blog, participating in communities, generate content on video, photo, power-point sharing applications. They browse and write blogs, they read and write wikis. They publish and subscribe to feeds using RSS, and share documents and information on groupwares. Those social web application that are used by the general public on the internet are known under the buzzname Web 2.0 coined by Tim O’Reilly..
Many companies were born of that. Yahoo recently bought del.icio.us, a bookmark sharing application. They bought flickr a photo-sharing application, Google bought writely.com, an online word processor that allows you to share files. Google bought jotspot.com, which is a wiki farm ASP provider – so that on the internet anyone can set up a wiki and start to read and write web pages.
The trend next year will be to use the same design philosophies, technologies, approaches, interfaces rules that became famous under the buzzname Web 2.0 inside enterprises, into enterprise web applications. I call this trend
To summarize, I think one of the big trends will be the use of the same philosophy and approach in the Web 2.0 world, inside enterprises. So people in companies will trash their C drives and email boxes and start working in another way that allows them better access to information, better discrimination into relevant information. Instead of getting thousands of emails, they’ll subscribe to rss feeds that will give them information about the topics they need.
Richard Dawkins on The Late Late Show
Posted by Brice Le Blevennec | Filed under Movies, Thoughts
De l’utilité d’un prix créatif
Posted by Brice Le Blevennec | Filed under Thoughts
Manquons-nous de bons Awards créatifs en Belgique ? Oui, hélas. A l’étranger, on trouve des compétitions qui font autorité et qui ont imposé de véritables standards dans le marché. Pourtant, ce n’est pas faute de talent : les agences interactives belges s’exportent bien hors de nos frontières et séduisent des clients internationaux qui apprécient notre Belgian touch créative. De même, les agences comptent un nombre grandissant d’expats qui nous découvrent par le truchement du web. Vous avez dit paradoxe ?
Certes, il y a la Night Of. Certes, il y a aussi les successful cases studies de l’IAB (Emakina a gagné le prix Best Case) et le Cuckoo Awards. Malheureusement, le rayonnement de ces distinctions ne dépasse guère le seuil de la communauté interactive belge, bien que la méthodologie des jurys se soit professionnalisée et que la présence de ces récompenses soit toujours la bienvenue au palmarès d’une agence. Nous serions mauvais prince en disant que la remise d’un de ces Awards ne nous fait pas plaisir.
Le CCB et son gala annuel (photo) auraient sans doute un rôle à jouer pour combler ce décalage entre le mérite réel de nos créatifs et leur reconnaissance sur la place publique. Malheureusement, le jury est souvent composé de gens issus de la publicité traditionnelle et qui ne baignent pas vraiment dans la culture numérique. Résultat : les cases soumis sont souvent évalué à l’aune de critères dépassés, voire inappropriés. Pour s’en convaincre, il suffit de jeter un coup d’œil au palmarès interactif de la dernière édition qui a couronné quelques projets peu assez représentatifs des nouvelles possibilités créatives qu’offrent les nouveaux médias. Sans vouloir souffler sur les braises communautaires, remarquons aussi que les agences francophones ont parfois l’impression d’être mises au ban du CCB. Une ségrégation qui nous chagrine un peu…
La guerre des guides de resto
Posted by Brice Le Blevennec | Filed under Thoughts
Restopages.be m’a spammé ce matin. Goodresto.be m’a spammé en juin. La Carte m’a spammé en mai. Je dois être repéré dans un fichier comme adepte de la restauration ‘out-of-home’. Ca m’apprendra à laisser mon adresse email sur les cartons de restaurants qui me proposent de m’inviter pour mon anniversaire puis qui s’empressent de revendre mon adresse email à des spammeurs.
Bref, il semble que le bon vieux Resto.be soit l’objet d’assaults de plus en plus fréquents. Et cela n’est pas plus mal. En plus d’être franchement moche, affligé d’une interface d’un autre temps (du web), Resto.be n’apporte aucun conseils. C’est juste un annuaire, pratique pour retrouver une adresse ou un numéro de téléphone. Quel dommage alors qu’aujourd’hui des mécaniques comme celle de Digg permettent aux utilisateurs de faire ressortir ce qui a un intérêt d’une masse d’informations. Ce genre de mécanisme, faisant ressortir les bonnes tables, contrarie probablement leur business modèle qui consiste a vendre des mini-sites à des restaurants médiocres en mal de clientèle. Ils n’apprécieraient pas d’être client et relégué aux oubliettes.
Personellement pour trouver de bon plans, je me tourne plutôt vers La Tribune de Bruxelles qui fait au moins acte de courage en ne proposant que des restos corrects.
Do you need a life coach ?
Posted by Brice Le Blevennec | Filed under Thoughts
On Holidays
Posted by Brice Le Blevennec | Filed under Thoughts
“The more interesting your life becomes, the less you post… and vice versa.”
– Jorn Barger (inventor of the term ‘weblog)
que faire avec un livre apres l’avoir lu ?
Posted by Brice Le Blevennec | Filed under Thoughts
… le delivrer : BookCrossing. En belgique : Vous prendrez bien un vers et Book Crossers en neerlandais. Enfin en france Book Crossing France
Emakina Video e-cards
Posted by Brice Le Blevennec | Filed under Links, Thoughts
If you have a webcam have some fun sending your wishes :
(another good idea from Emakina)
Brice wish you an happy new year 2005.
GPRS Roaming is cool
Posted by Brice Le Blevennec | Filed under Thoughts
Amazingly thanks to the Proximus partnership with Vodafone, mobile internet access from abroad is as easy as connecting in Belgium. Nothing to change in the settings, just pick the right GSM network provider and go!
Leaving for holidays
Posted by Brice Le Blevennec | Filed under Thoughts
No more videos will get posted here for the next ten days. I will be away from GSM (and GPRS networks), Internet (no web, no email) and even electrical power sources in Tarifa, Spain. Of course I’ll send all the cool swimsuit shots when back in civilisation.
I’ll be writing my much anticipated novel, whose title is still secret, but which is a metaphysical thriller related to SMS, email, IM and love in today’s urban society.
Until then have fun on Fulgurax, my new wiki toy.
Brice
In the french speaking part of Belgium everyone knows that Brice Le Blévennec is a complete nerd. For about 9 years he hosted CyberCafe, a cult radio and TV show about technologies ranging from the Internet to video games, from electronic gadgets to music, from geek art to hollywood blockbusters...