Souvenez-vous : au milieu des années 90, il y avait deux visions, concurrentes et radicalement opposées, quant au devenir des réseaux numériques. La première était représentée par Compuserve et défendait une architecture structurée du réseau : Compuserve formait un système fermé qui possédait sa propre nomenclature et ses propres applications inaccessibles aux non-abonnés. Face à Compuserve, on trouvait d’autres acteurs de premier plan comme America Online et màªme Apple qui offrait son défunt “eWorld“ aux premiers téméraires qui arpentaient le réseau balbutiant (moi par exemple).
Continue reading La revanche du Web structuré →

“Il était une fois…” Pendant des siècles, la façon de raconter des histoires n’a pas varié d’une virgule. Les règles de leur déroulement étaient immuables et intangibles : unités de temps, d’espace et d’action. Ces principes fondamentaux du récit sont aujourd’hui en train de voler en éclat sous la pression des médias numériques.
Continue reading Drama 2.0 : vers une nouvelle forme de narration interactive →

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.

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.

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.