Archive for April, 2008

Interactive blog, start leaving video comments

Friday, April 25th, 2008

A quick note to let everyone know that we just added the new seesmic wordpress plugin for leaving video comments. Record away! The introduction video from Loic at the Video 2.0 panel a few minutes ago.

Have government programs work for you early on [startuping]

Thursday, April 24th, 2008

Lets start by a few facts. At the very beginning of a startup, when it's still called a project, there is only a few ways to finance it: your pocket, your friends & family's pocket or business angels. That should hopefully get you the minimum to get going. Now that you ...

Microsoft signs LoI to acquire Xobni [follow-up]

Monday, April 21st, 2008

As a follow-up to my post on friday, there is now independent confirmation that Microsoft has signed at least its side of a Letter of Intent to acquire Xobni. The price on that letter is unknown for the moment and would likely be above an initial offer of less than ...

Around the web this week

Monday, April 21st, 2008

Although it has been a long week, very few subjects were discussed intensely. As a result, you may have missed one of these interesting stories: New blackberry takes aim at the iPhone. I'm puzzled at what Research In Motion is trying to do. The new blackberry 9000 seems to be such ...

Microsoft acquires Xobni, good or bad?

Friday, April 18th, 2008

Speculations (here , here) [may have been] were true. Yesterday, Xobni finally came [is rumored to have come] to an agreement with Microsoft to be acquired. An official announcement with the details has yet to be made. Is this really the best way to go for this promising startup? From ...

Sleep well, someone is monitoring your servers

Friday, April 18th, 2008

To most of us this will sound obvious, but I've been running into quite a few startups that were neglecting this essential aspect of their infrastructure. If your worst nightmare is getting an email or a call from one of your friendly user saying "I haven't been able to login for ...

Power on the plane

Thursday, April 17th, 2008

Great surprise when embarking on today's flight from Paris to Toronto. The plane was upgraded to the new cabin on one of Air Canada's B767-300. Usually, AC interiors are known, as on most companies, to be very sober and lacking space. I won't go into all the details of the rearrangement ...

Now I really want an iPhone

Tuesday, April 15th, 2008

So you have been hearing the rumors yesterday and reading the news today. Fring has launched the first iphone application that allows to make Skype and VoIP calls right from your iphone. It also integrates chat messengers and your twitter stream. The real truth is, I'm a blackberry addict and have ...

Amazon EC2 with persistent storage in Private Beta

Monday, April 14th, 2008

Last week Google, in an attempt to enter the Clound computing market, launched Google App Engine and, just this morning, a major integration with Salesforce in order to penetrate the enterprise market. In the shadow of these big news, Amazon's CTO Werner Vogels has quietly announced this morning that EC2 ...

Around the web this week

Monday, April 14th, 2008

The past week has been intense. Quite a few subjects kept being discussed all week long. So, again, in no particular order... After Amazon EC2 outage last monday (aws forum, explaination from amazon, techcrunch), Facebook was plagued by an API bug that broke some of the 3rd party applications (bug report, ...