A Fresh Start (up)

Sorry guys, my blog was down for an entire day, but thanks to Rémy’s genius hands, everything is back to normal now.

Since the past week has been everything but interesting, I thought I would pass on the traditional weekly update, but Seb started complaining that without any article, he couldn’t know what I had done this week. Since the answer is nothing, here I am, writing about nothing. I’m wondering how long I can continue that; after all, I went to a business school, that shouldn’t be a problem

So, to sum up nothing, I had a pretty uninteresting week, waiting for Rémy to come back from Chicago, and then spending the week-end working. Work is getting tougher, but also more motivating. I also called a few friends; I think I will never get over the fact that I miss you guys! But I might end up not missing you for long: whereas Remy got a receipt saying that he got accepted at the H1B visa lottery, I still haven’t received anything, which is not a good sign. So I might end up going back to France, whether I (and you ) want it or not!

Apart from this (still) not interesting topic, I registered for the continuing studies program in Stanford, and I will be taking a class of… acting this summer! I can see all of you think “oh my god, she really wants to end up in Hollywood!”

What else? Still a lot of nothing to talk about… Oh yes, I am getting more and more obsessed with the idea of going into the hospitality industry sooner or later, and started devouring some books on the topic. It’s weird, I feel like once you have started in a sector, it is really difficult to go into something radically different later on… Now I start understanding people going into consulting! Those who know me well know that I’ve been talking about managing a hotel for a long time, and now I feel that I really need to do it, at least some day … So who wants to buy an Inn with me? I already have a partner (Manue, if you read me ) but except if she has been hiding her fortune for many years, I doubt that we will have enough money to do that now and alone … Hopefully, my grand father always told me that passion is more important than money to achieve your dreams, and, stupid as I am, I still believe him!

Ok, enough “nothing” for today! Just in case you stumble upon this blog looking for interesting content, insights about tech and entrepreneurship, I remind you that this blog is now for friends and family, or people interested in expatriation (or interested in “nothing”!) but that I still continue to publish more interesting things (it’s not hard!) on Tech it Easy. My latest pieces include an interview of Alain Romang on how museums can benefit from the Internet, and a book review of The One Minute Entrepreneur from Ken Blanchard. Enjoy (or not) !

Hopefully, I will have cooler things to say after Memorial day week end in Yosemite!

I am finally not a desperate case! It started really badly though: I arrived 45 min late because my instructor refuses to buy a GPS, and the examinator I got started by saying “oh, you’re from France? I hate France, people are so mean and rude there!”… It turned out that the guy was delighted to see me smile, since he thought that it might be the sign that “new generations are probably France’s last hope”… The guy was actually really nice, and I couldn’t really disagree with what he was saying: I did leave France for a reason! He ended up the conversation by asking me if Carla Bruni was smart, and I was… speechless! So now I’m going to buy a car… without knowing a single thing about cars! Any advice? I want to keep it under $10,000 (used) and ideally be able to resell it.

Well, this week is completely crazy at work, so I’m going to bed now, but just for info I posted an article about the New Media Arts conference on Tech IT Easy here, and an article about a great conference I attended today by Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, about customer satisfaction, here.

I had an interesting week, the kind of week when you feel that your brain has been working more than usual.

I attended a great conference by Dan Roam about visual thinking as part of the eBay Speaker Series. I wrote an article about it on Tech IT Easy, and it felt good to blog about interesting topics, and not just about what’s happening in my life. I realized that I made the right choice to put my personal articles here and the articles with a little bit more meat on TIE. It allows me to experiment two of the advantages of blogging (staying in touch with friends without writing a common email to everyone and generating great conversations on interesting topics) on different and appropriate platforms without mixing readerships. Whereas before I had a large overlap between my TIE readers and this blog’s readers, now it is not the case anymore even if I encourage my dear friends who read this blog to also read tech topics on TIE, so that they won’t make this strange and annoyed face anymore when I’ll speak about my job with them

Apart from that, I went to a conference on Friday night about New Media Artists and the Law, which will probably help me a lot to definitely finish my thesis. I might write something on TIE about it too (yes, I try to be back in the game!)

This week-end was a little bit less intellectual: OK, I acknowledge that I went to see “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” at the cinema, and even if I’m sure that this movie can go directly to the “crappy” category for most people, I actually laughed a lot And it motivated me to go to Hawaii, so I might take so holidays and go there for Thanksgiving (yes, I am making plans well in advance!)

And finally today, I attended the Cherry Blossom Festival in Japantown with Seb, Audrey and Cecile (pictures here): too many people of course, but really nice parade, plenty of colors, and plenty of French people (don’t ask me why!). Then we looked for cold places since it was freezing in SF and landed in a really nice café, managed by French people of course, guess you can’t avoid them ;-)  Nice people and hot chocolate: I definitely start liking it here!

I am still a bit obsessed on how companies manage their innovation processes and how they make it fit with their culture. In this context, I recently read an HBS case about Intel research. The “Intel lablets” particularly attracted my attention and raised general questions about the management of innovation. If you want to read my thoughts about these questions on innovation, it’s here on Tech It Easy.

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

 A lot of my courses are oriented towards entrepreneurship and technology management, so I will use some of them as a raw material for some articles here or on Tech It Easy.

I just published an article on Tech It Easy concerning a process to generate breakthrough innovations, especially in technological companies, by identifying “lead users” on a specific market. If you want to take a look it’s here.

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.

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!