This is a French saying literally meaning “out of sight, out of heart”.

This huge outsourcing trend has been regularly hitting the headlines for a decade now. One of the main challenges outsourcing poses is nothing else but remote control, remote collaborative work. The Internet is an extraordinary communications tool. However, I can´t come up with a single communication tool that enables to capture one´s emotions. The Internet abides by this rule. A number of software companies have launched collaborative tools that more or less satisfy the appetites of some users. But stomaches grow faster than new versions developments. And nothing will ever, whatsoever, replace eye-to-eye, face-to-face, hand-in-hand human contact.

I´m currently working on an Internet project, and all three of the engineering team (a graphic designer, two programmers) work from home. Fine. But for one reason or another, the development pace is rather slow. This might be because our project management methods are not yet well defined between the different players, however I found natural to suggest the COO of the company (I work for the VC fund investing in this Internet start-up) whether I could help find additional programming resources.

- “Why not?”, he said – “What you got?”

- “Well, I know several free-lance programmers and graphic designers. They´re all based either in Israel, in the USA and in India. And when it comes to companies, I know two guys in Paris who´ve successfully launched their own website designing business”. Namely David Poryngier (www.metaconsult.fr) and Vincent Jacques (www.antemia.com). The latter manages a team of programmers based in Romania.

- “No, I ain´t work with such people. I want them to stand right here, in Barcelona.”

- “You know, I guess Romanian engineers are a lot cheaper than here”

- “It doesn´t matter really. I want to be able to kick their ass if they don´t do their job. Can you picture me flying to Bucarest every week-end to monitor their work?”

- “Loin des yeux, loin du coeur”, I whispered.

Though I still disagree with the COO, I found this perspective interesting since many decision-makers may think the same way. We´ve entered an era in which distance matters less, it seems, thanks to new communications tools – an era of “Globalization” as they say. But isn´t geographical distance the ultimate bottleneck of globalization until someone invents the “ubiquity machine”?

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The table above reflects a little research I´ve done, asking people I know who have websites how many visitors their counting tools (Xiti, Urchin, etc.) say they have, and how much money they make monthly (1€ = 1.23$ today). All websites are France-based and in French (English language websites tend to derive more traffic and hence make more money), in very diverse areas such as: gastronomy, sex, sports, personal blog, art, aero modelling, video games, media, etc.

The question of Internet advertising revenues is largely unsolved. When trying to write your business plan, it´s pretty likely that you´ll end up assuming completely bullish Internet revenue derived from advertising. Actually, for most amateur websites, Internet advertising revenues allow to cover running charges like ISP, domain name, and yearly space rental.

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Warning (Update 11th January 2007): read comments first, maybe making a purchase @ Flash Memory Store isn’t such a good idea after all. Jeremy

The initial post:

My background:

I´m not a technologist, yet – though I´ve experienced IT a lot as a simple customer. I´m in the process of graduating with a Master in Management from HEC Paris (http://www.hec.fr), the leading French business university. However, I´ll be specializing in high tech next year, namely doing an additional Master-level course at Ecole Centrale Paris (http://www.ecp.fr) in computer science, telecommunications and project management. This track should provide me with the necessary tech knowledge, and know-how, to make”Tech IT Easy” more and more technical with time going by.

Why you get to know about my background:

Because I´m hardly a technologist (so far), my posts for some time will probably relate experiences I´ve had as a customer (this very story for instance), or IT analyst (I read basically everything´s that related to IT in every major international paper every day, or every week when times are frantic; and I´ve worked as an IT stock analyst in Delhi, as a project manager in an Internet start-up in Tel Aviv, and a business development assistant in a Barcelona-based Venture Capital company). But your tech inputs are more than welcome, especially if you´re a sound, real geek: debates need depth to be relevant in today´s complex world.

The story:

We all need external storage solutions: think about all the private, precious data in your laptop that relies on your ability to avoid catching a virus! A 150€ move may secure a nice hedging strategy against information loss risks.

I decided to purchase an external hard-drive online, and found after researching the Internet an apparently pretty messy website, Flash Memory Store, which prices were rather low (not to say “dirt cheap”). 5 days after, I had received a nice QMemory 100BG mini-external drive. One week after, I was very happy about it when, coming back from a client in cold New Hampshire (USA) and having left my laptop in the trunk of the car, I found the hard drive frozen, like dead.

Though panicking since I had important stuff in it and only in it, I quickly found on Flash Memory Store the way I could sort things out: send it to their warehouse with all the details of my purchase, and they would return it fixed.

And you know what?

It worked. About a week later, I received a brand new external hard drive, with all the information previously stored in the frozen external memory drive in it! That´s what I call a nice online customer experience – who said online shopping is risky?

I´ve tried a lot of online stores in my life, and all I can say is that reviewing your vendors (on Amazon, eBay, etc.) and buzzing about NOT (see comments) great online stores (like http://www.Flash-Memory-Store.com) is the only way to drive crooks (numerous on the net) out of business – for the sake of all.

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Welcome to IT Addict renamed “Tech IT Easy” on August 16th 2006! A new blog which aims at providing high-tech insights and viewpoints. Of course, the value of a blog is created by its visitors – so feel free to challenge me anytime, that´s why we´re here for.

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