I just tried to conceptualize the whole thing in a very simplistic chart. Tell me what you think about it!

Now, just one, very tellling example:

I co-founded 4 years ago, alongside with Jeremy Ghez – and joined at a later development stage by HEC-classmate Steve Danino, a think-tank on the Middle-East geopolitics: AFIDORA (see what Wikipedia says about this organization – in French).

a) AFIDORA.com, the Web 1.0 era

I had devised the first website myself: it was a homepage-like catalog of articles sorted by type (editorials, analyses, opinion, reports and synthesis). On the one hand, we were often praised for the quality of our research and event-organization capabilities; but on the other hand, though we were really willing to foster this aspect of our business, interesting interactions with our readership (including financial contributors, active members, guest speakers, etc.) hardly happened online. We were dealing with this issue (and this is very Web 1.0) by consolidating all our readers comments and our own reactions on a “Your Comments” space on the website.

It wasn´t so bad for the times, but we came to a point where new tools enabled better user interfaces and hence interactions…

2) AFIDORA.com, the Web 2.0 era

I was late (or lazy?) in realizing what we were about to miss if we didn´t upgrade our antique, old-fashioned website. Steve, already mentioned, felt the Web 2.0 tsunami ways before I did. He didn´t want AFIDORA to miss the comments democratization movement the Web 2.0 was impulsing. This movement was also so much AFIDORA!

The non-profit elitist think-tank (think-tank: a top-down approach that says “look, we are smarter than you, look at our great articles”) was renamed “community on the Middle East geopolitics” (in a community, every member has the same rights) during the process of allowing readers to comment directly an article below it. Steve used the content management system Mambo and developed the new website alone for 2 months, every night.

Thanks to Steve Danino´s drive, AFIDORA.com now ranks number 4 in terms of single visitors in the whole French-speaking geopolitics and foreign affairs industry. You can visit AFIDORA´s Web 2.0 website by clicking here.

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Though a student at another leading European business school based near Paris (namely, HEC Paris), I have to say that INSEAD knows where to find the best research prospects. Fontainebleau & Singapore-based INSEAD has just opened a research center dedicated to Entrepreneurship in Israel (click here for official press release).

Some would like to say: why the hell in Israel, and not in Tallín (Estonia), Paris (France – where the word “entrepreneur” comes from), Bangalore (India), Boston (MA, USA), Shanghaï (China) or Palo Alto (CA, USA)?

The best answer you can get is obviously not from me, but from specialists. I was lucky enough in my life to get to meet fantastic people such as Pr. Wim Hulsink, Professeur of Entrepreneurship at the Rotterdam School of Management (Erasmus Universiteit) - a University where I did a semester-long Erasmus International exchange. Pr. Willem Hulsink recently invited, during a workshop at the Royal Netherlands Association for Agricultural Sciences, a prominent specialist of Entrepreneurship: Pr. Uzi de Haan – a former CEO of Philips Israel & Professor at Technion Institute of Technology (Haïfa, Israel).

Here is a link to Pr. Uzi de Haan´s tremendously clear and telling presentation about clusters of innovation in Israel, and the country´s entrepreneurial capabilities.

I myself too part of an entrepreneurial adventure in Tel Aviv: an eBay-like devised specifically for Israel named iMarket. It´s been one of the greatest cultural and human experience in my life: building a project from scratch, dealing with all aspects of management in an entrepreneurial and technological intensive environment. Here´s a picture of about half the team:

The iMarket team out of work to bowling and a whisky at 11:00pm in Tel Aviv…Though pretty tired, we were all smiling because the person who took the picture was a very hot girl.

From left to right: Raphael Benzekri, a great hard-working, visionary CTO; Eran Dangot, whose superb people skills made of him the best sales manager of the company; Radi Isakharov, a very clever and talented Software Engineer; and I´m on the right-hand side of the picture.

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Many bloggers, journalists, financial analysts wrote pretty nasty things (“monopoly Emperor”, “responsible for all the bugs in the world”, blablabla) about Bill Gates when he announced his, yet predictable, retiral in a year or so. To me, this is unfair.

(Picture: Bill Gates went to Israel in October 2005. I was in Tel Aviv at the time, and all I can say is that he was better received than the President of the United States would have)

I believe Bill Gates deserves a big applause for all his achievements in the software and technology industry (and soon to come, in charity) he has largely contributed to shape and reshape. Not only does he masters better than anyone else what it takes to develop a computer program (see Joel´s first Bill Gates´s “fucking review”). Bill Gates also had, and still has, a clear vision of where we are going, from where we´re standing. Most importantly, as a true successful entrepreneur and businessman, Bill Gates knows how to share his vision.

Thank you Bill.

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While Apple´s Bootcamp doesn´t allow switching between MacOS and Windows without rebooting (Boot-Camp: Boot and chose your Camp), Parallels, a Washington DC-based software company, released Parallels Desktop for Mac – devised for Intel-powered Apple computers only.

Parallels Desktop for Mac makes best use of a virtual machine to run Windows, and Windows software, on MacOS as a fast as a fast PC would do. Congrats guys, you outperformed Apple. Are Apple programmers losing edge and momentum? Has Apple for ever lost its software mind to become a 100% hardware manufacturer in a near future?

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