A Fresh Start (up)

I am exhausted… but delighted! On Thursday and Friday, I was in Chicago to attend my first eBay Live!, the annual gathering of eBay buyers and sellers. I can’t really say a lot about it since it is work-related, but I can tell you that speaking with all those sheer entrepreneurs and passionate people, really inspired me and made me realize even more that I work for a company like no other (and these are my views and not the ones of my company… legal stuff ). In strategic jobs, when you spend most of your time in front of a computer, it is essential to have moment like these to meet with your customers, especially when they are so atypical, to understand clearly the impact of what you are doing on the people that depend on your company to pay their son’s college tuition or to pay their employees. Whether they are happy or not, our customers really care about what we are doing, and this is already a huge motivation factor. Anyway, I’m glad to have had the opportunity to see so much energy, passion and originality gathered in a convention center. All the official eBay pictures are here. And I’m still in love with Chicago!

Yesterday we spent the day in SF with Audrey, doing a lot of shopping . Pictures here. She cooked a delicious “poulet basquaise”, so now I’m obliged to try to reproduce her recipe  for Rémy… He’ll probably be very disappointed

And finally tomorrow I’m heading to San Diego for a 2-day offsite with my team, this is going to be fun, if we don’t get eaten alive by the nice sharks of the San Diego bay!

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.

Just a quick post to get your opinion on something that always interests me: innovation. So I would like to know which technology or business model in the tech sector you’ve found the most surprising / interesting / innovative this year, and how it is likely to impact the sector.

My choice is 23andMe, which is, as most of you know, an Internet based service allowing you to read and understand your DNA thanks to your saliva. I heard about them of course because of Google’s investment in this startup, and I find it really interesting because it broadens widely the perimeter of “search” and then the mission of Google of making all the information of the world accessible. The idea of “Googling your genes” was already mentioned in The Google Story from David Vise, and even if a lot of people read it already, I will probably review it on Tech It Easy soon.

Anyway, please let me know your choice for the most interesting technology / business model for 2007, as an “end of the year” gift

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 currently work a lot for my finals about entrepreneurship ideas, and I am imagining some of them in the two sectors I like: the Internet and the food industry. I recently had an idea in the latter one, and I just wanted to get some feedback on it. 

I think that we have all experienced (ok, I amend myself: all the women have experienced) a sudden longing for a specific dish, sometimes in the middle of the night. When I work late at night, at around 2:00am, I am sometimes starving for a “fondue au chocolat”; pregnant women are also well known to feel like eating strawberries in the middle of the night, and I am sure that you can come up with a moment when you think “I would love to have that in my fridge right now”.

Hence the idea of creating a 24hrs delivery service allowing you to make a call and order anything you want, from basic strawberries to the most complex dishes. The company doing that would of course charge a large premium, that I believe some customers (at least women!) would be willing to pay to get what they want when they want it, and have longer delivery time than traditional delivery services. In terms of operations, the “kitchen” would have to be located really closed to a 24hrs food wholesaler so that the company wouldn’t carry any unmanageable inventory.

Of course it is a raw idea with plenty of hurdles, so:

- First, do you think there is a market for this service or am I just the only one ready to wait 2 hours at 2:00am to have some “fondue au chocolat”?

- Do you know if this service already exist? I couldn’t manage to find anything like that on the web. But if it hasn’t been done in any part of the world, it should definitely mean that either there is no market or it is not profitable.

- Do you think that it is manageable in terms of operations?

- Do you think that it is possible to make a profit, knowing that there is absolutely no economies of scale?

It is definitely not an idea I will develop, I’m just surprised it doesn’t exist already, so do not hesitate to bash it, it is just a trial to see if I can get some feedback on my ideas thanks to this blog.

My boyfriend, who is a software and web developer, has launched his first Facebook application (like every developer at the moment ;-)) a week ago. It is called “If I were” and allow you to create your Chinese portrait to display on your profile and to guess your friends’ portrait to see if you know them well. He has reached today 700 users, which is a pretty good number. You can learn everything about the conception, the development and the launch of this application here on Tech IT Easy. It is particularly amazing to have first-hand data about the famous “network effect”.

Of course, this article is everything but neutral, so I acknowledge that I would be glad if you could try this app and give me (or him on Tech IT Easy) feedback about it.

My boyfriend is also looking for a job in Silicon Valley, starting in January, so if you know some companies that might be interested, do not hesitate to tell me

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!

 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.

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