This week-end I came to know (thank you Mathias) about the existence of a really useful German website: Mitfahrerzentrale.

The idea is very simple: say you’re driving somewhere this week-end (anywhere in Europe) and have some seats available in the car. Just mention where you’re going, how much you’re asking people who want to join you (either on the full trip or just a part of it), and the platform will match you with travellers. Same business the other way round: you’re broke, cannot afford a plane, train or bus ticket. Just log on Mitfahrerzentrale and you’re on your way to the destination of your dreams!

I have to say I loved the idea: it’s simple, environment- and wallet-friendly. And it’s safe since travellers are allowed to provide a feedback on their drivers (and conversely): safe driving? friendly atmosphere? etc. Great site!

Despite common belief that all internet intermediation ideas (suppliers – manufacturers; buyers – sellers; women – men; companies – investors; etc.) have been exploited, there is still plenty of room for creative and dynamic people to reinvent the world. And say you’re not creative enough to come up with you own innovative business model, just reproduce in your country a successful story like the one of Mitfahrerzentrale in Germany!

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Here’s a great article on skyrocketing blogging habits in France, published in the International Herald Tribune’s Technology columns.

Just to tease you before you read it, let me just quote this really funny but so true sentence from the article: “We had 16 presidential candidates at the last election, and we will probably have the same number next year,” Benjamin Griveaux said. “Every French person wants to run the country – a blog is the next best option.”

Loic Le Meur, the Godfather of the French blogosphere, is also quoted in the article.

PS: I knew I had seen this name Benjamin Griveaux somewhere, and I quickly realized I had actually talked to Benjamin Griveaux, an HEC alumnus if my memory’s correct, an advisor at think-tank A Gauche en Europe , several times when trying to invite French center-left politicians to an AFIDORA symposium at the French Parliament in May 2005. The world’s so small…

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Many thanks to Xavier Fisselier, a Barcelona-based blogger as well, but also an entrepreneur and a marketing passionate (to French speakers, check his blog), for letting me know about this new service. I’ve been testing 10^3 bees for a few days now, and I like it. Though certainly not exhaustive, 10^3 bees is simple, reliable & easy to deploy. I recommend 103bees.com to all my fellow bloggers.

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Too often do I hear that France lacks a Silicon Valley.

Last occurence: I recently exchanged a few e-mails with blogger Hadrien Simon, also a member of AFIDORA.

In one of these e-mails, Hadrien harshly criticized France for fostering local innovation centers rather than backing the creation of a true Silicon Valley.

There are many actually many innovation parks in France (Rennes in telcos, Lyon in software and video games, Grenoble in semi-conductors, Toulouse in aeronautics and biotech, Bordeaux in structure mechanics modelling, Lille in retail information systems, Metz, Montpellier, etc.). But the technological innovation clusters landscape is by far dominated by French Riviera´s Sophia Antipolis, near Nice, which ranks #2, and, quite unsurprisingly, Paris and its South West outskirts as the leading technology innovation center in France.

South West Paris (between highways A6 and A14 on the map, broadly speaking) concentrates everything that´s needed to foster and encourage innovation.

There are plenty of research centers in leading engineering universities such as Ecole Polytechnique in Palaiseau, Ecole Centrale Paris in Châtenay-Malabry, SupOptique, Supélec, all-mighty University of Paris-XI in Orsay, University of Sceaux near Versailles, National Institute of Agronomy in Grignon, INRIA in Rocquencourt, National Telecommunications Institute in Evry, Pharmacy Academy in Châtenay-Malabry, and I´m probably missing a few. The business University I study in, HEC Paris, is also headquartered in the area, 5 minutes away by car from National Institute of Agronomy, Ecole Polytechnique, Supélec & SupOptique (the latter & Polytechnique share a campus).

Many, many, many global corporations as well as state-owned research centers are based in the area (in Versailles, Issy-les-Moulineaux, Boulogne-Billancourt, Vélizy Villacoublay, Buc, Saint-Cloud, etc.). To name a few: CEA, CISCO, HP (the 2 latter in Issy-les-Moulineaux), Microsoft and Apple very near Orsay, Alcatel, Nortel Networks, Bouygues, GE Healthcare, Thalès, Nissan-Renault´s Technology Center, EADS Astrium, etc. etc. etc. Financial Center La Défense is pretty close, and providing that most Venture Capital firms are located in the 8th district of Paris, according to the corporate blog of fundraising boutique Chausson Finance, the “1-hour driving rule” is well-respected, even under the worst traffic conditions.

South West Paris has it all. We´re talking here about the highest brain concentration in Europe.

But true, Paris´s no Silicon Valley, and conversely. How could the Silicon Valley ever be replicated in any other place than..the actual Silicon Valley? It´s just impossible.

Say you´re a CEO: do you really want to become Jack Welch or would you rather learn his methods from some legacy he left (be N.1 or 2; leadership training; Six Sigma; was going over best executive profils himself saying “It´s my job”; etc.)? Anyways, had you wanted to become Jack Welch, this would´ve been impossible! The logics applies to innovation clusters too: no place anywhere in the world will ever be able to become another Silicon Valley. There is just one Silicon Valley and it´s in US California, 1 hour driving North from San Francisco, around Stanford University´s home city Palo Alto.

I believe Paul Graham, an essayist and programmer, is mistaking when writing an irrational though brillant article entitled “How to be Silicon Valley”. However, I think Paul Graham´s “Why startups condense in America” is far more relevant. The Silicon Valley model should be studied, understood, digested, and reinvented according to the specificities of a targeted location where human & financial capital are available as much as the political brave willingness to ease Schumpeterian creative destruction.

I should wind up stating that territories should focus on attracting and retaining capital, both humain and financial. In today´s globalizing, everyday flatter world, everything moves, flies and flows apart from geography. Ensuring and promoting the global competitivity of regional territories is, according to Bill Clinton´s economic advisor and Harvard Professor Robert B. Reich (see a book that changed my life, The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for the 21st Century Capitalism), the single mission-statement political leaders of all sorts should be obsessed by. Hummm..such a long way to go.

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At least, I hope so.

Between 23 and 40% of the United States of America´s public procurement have been granted to small and medium businesses (SMEs) since 1953. The American Small Business Act has helped many innovative start-ups become high-growth SMEs, in other words Gazelles, before eventually going public, abroad and joining the multi-national enterprises (MNEs) club.

In the last 30 years, Europe hasn´t created so many world leaders when compared to the United States or, say, India. Take the Internet industry for instance: the Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, eBay (which acquired Luxembourg-founded by Swedish & Danish entrepreneurs Skype), Amazon are all US-born and raised. And the same goes for many industries. Europe has a hard time making SMEs become world leaders, despite obvious entrepreneurial capabilities: the bulk of the industrial fabric in many European countries is made of SMEs (Spain, Italy, Germany, to name a few).

On the one hand, most public procurement tenders are disputed between already leading. On the other hand, the European Union wants to promote, like it or not, equal chances to succeed for all. Quite paradoxically, global European leaders are thriving whilst unemployment rises.

So let´s give a European Small Business Act a chance. I advocate the creation of mechanisms that would allow the best SMEs to supply European Governments with their products and services. European public procurement currently amounting to 1500bn€, a European Small Business Act appears at least as a short term solution to rising employment and SMEs development uncertainties.

If you agree with my stance, if you believe like me that Europe needs a Small Business Act, that the best companies – independently from their size – deserve a share of the 1500bn€ per annum public procurement market, sign the EuroSBA petition.

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Yesterday, I read an extremely interesting article in the British daily newspaper Financial Times. Basically, two NYU professors, namely Vasant Dhar & Arun Sundararajan, conducted a research about the importance of IT teachings in MBA programs.

After the bubble burst, IT suddenly become a separate area despite having been a superstar two-letters word during the net economy period.

I found really telling the parallel drawn in the article between finance and IT: market finance is a stand-alone set of skills that are very specific to people willing to work on capital markets; corporate finance is on the other hand a subject every single executive should know about, since investment decision-making science is based on such measurings as ROI, IRR, EVA, NPV, EPS, WACC, etc.

The same actually goes for IT: IT is both about studying technologies (like market finance: everybody doesn´t need to know about networks architecture, etc.) and the way technology apply to companies by driving business processes improvements. Henceforth, the impact of Information Technology in organizations should be an underlying topic in all business management courses. According to the article, the universities of Stanford & Harvard seem to have integrated IT as a performance driver in all its MBA course topics.

As far as I´m concerned, I enjoyed a very good exposure to the challenges and opportunities raised by the integration of technologies at HEC Paris: you get compulsory general MS Office training seminars, optimization and simulations on Excel, statistical marketing analysis on SPSS, Information Systems (ERP, networks, security, databases), and if you chose to, there are Visual Basic for Excel classes too. Furthermore, IT systems were often to referred to as potential competitive advantages in marketing (SRM, CRM, BI, etc.), supply chain (SCM, RFID), management accounting and control (tableaux de bord, balance score-card, etc.), financial economics (arbitrage, etc.), etc. Not bad, uh?

If I may add something, it looks as if the best IT-driven companies are most of the time the best performing and most respected corporations in their field. For instance, an e-Business investment plan made CISCO save 1.4bn$ last year (e-education, distance collaborative projects, billing, etc.); take a look on HP (IT-driven operations & logistics), Dell (a company that sell IT products through IT systems that had been providing its value chain a great advantage over the competition for several years), Home Depot, IBM, GE, Procter & Gamble, Decathlon, Toyota, Nissan, etc.

Basically every leading company is actually a leader thanks to a perfect fit between information systems & organizational structure. A good understanding of the integration of information technologies within corporations has become a key skill, one of these skills that will differentiate good people with excellent change agents.

But still, too many business management students believe IT is the designated area of all geeks and techies. Too bad!

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I discovered on Loic´s blog that Catherine, a British secretary who´s been living in Paris for more than a decade, was fired because she was blogging.

Petite Anglaise´s former boss, a so-called Old-School boss in Catherine´s own words, evoked 2 main reasons why he dismissed her:

1) he was concerned by the fact that she might blog from work;

2) Catherine was broadcasting too much information about her workplace.

Here are my two answers to these two points:

2) On the latter, I can tell that, on petiteanglaise.com, one could never guess which organization Catherine was working for…There are thousands of companies in Paris, most of them unknown to the mass. Wouldn´t her boss be a little paranoïc too?

1) On the former reason, well, if Catherine is a good secretary, why would she deserve such a treatment? Isn´t the most important bit the fact that her work is done and well done?

I have blogged from work too , that´s what I´m doing right now.

But I respect a few rules and an ethical, employer-employee interests convergence approach regarding blogging from the workplace:

- there should be economies of scale between blogging and working; I work for a capital and business development company involved at the moment in several entrepreneurial Internet projects. Consequently, blogging helps me bring ideas to the business, know in advance about new consumer trends, learn about ways to create a marketing buzz, etc.

In other words, blogging helps understanding better how the Internet shapes the world, and how a changing world will change the Internet. I´m pretty sure my boss is happy to have someone to ask questions to when uncertain about the raison d´être of a new web technology or website. And if it wouldn´t have been the case, he would have told me so and I would´ve stopped spending twice 30/35 minutes a day blogging.

- Oups, that was my second point. Getting disciplined is necessary: I never, ever spend more than an hour per day blogging. Too many things to do in 24 hours!

- Third, I prepare my posts the night before, from home (I´m sharing a flat where there´s unfortunately no Internet connexion yet), it´s a nice thing to do before going to bed, and behaving this way I don´t waste my time at work writing stuff that aren´t connected to my daily missions. A USB stick helps me carry support articles back and forth.

- Last, but not least, I make sure I do not disclose neither confidential nor negative information about my workplace, my company and its stakeholders. This is an implicit moral contract, that doesn´t apply to blogging only, I´ve always and will always abide by: when saying bad things about a place where you´re spending half of your time, if not more, you´re also sending a negative signal about you.

When all´s said and done, let´s wish Petite Anglaise good luck during her not-so-soon-to-come trial. By the way, Catherine´s blog is so cool, well-organized and her posts so clear and clever that I do not doubt 1 sec. that she´ll be job hunted in the next week thanks to her blog.

PS: this reminds me of another story. A Delta Airlines flight attendant was already fired for posting on her blog a picture of her in a plane…This is one more reason why you should never fly Delta Airlines. Delta Airlines is an awful company and here´s why.

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Thanks to this very blog, a Chicago-based young engineer & entrepreneur Skyped me yesterday. John thought I was a VC. Well, I´m a trainee in a capital and business development company – that´s slightly different in terms of decision-making power)); though I´m learning a lot.

John is a pure geek, in his own saying. We had a great conversation: I was happy to give him advice, and I hope John found some of it useful.

A fantastic programmer, John gives a damn about operations, finance and marketing. He´s been developing a software that suits the needs of many US & Chinese Universities (John´s family lives in China and is connected to the academic world over there). Anticipating his future need for manufacturing the software (every client University might purchase several hundred licenses), John attended a lecture about bridge financing last week.

- I asked: “How interesting was it?”

- “Probably great, but I still don´t understand what bridge financing is, so I didn´t get the most of it”, John replied. “Anyways, considering the high-growth potential of my software company, I don´t need external financing. I don´t want VCs to come onboard and bother me with tons of questions I can´t answer. I prefer to focus on coding perfectly and taking care of clients.”

Focus on quality and clients: fantastic attitude!

I praised his words, but told him firstly that growing and making sure cash inflow streams were increasing were two totally different businesses. Especially with clients such as Universities – not considered as fast payers.

Secondly, VCs can be extremely helpful to him. Venture Capitalists are not only boring financiers aiming at cashing out on your back. Some of them are real entrepreneurs, and true, VCs are finance guys, but good VCs get hands-on involved in the business strategy. Furthermore, considering John´s lack of business management experience, VCs could also provide free top-notch consulting on how John´s software company should be scaled.

I tried to make my point about growth and lack of funding resources using two examples, one of them I faced myself taking part of an entrepreneurial adventure in Israel one year ago. I thought what I told John, plus the two examples I used, might be of some help to the numerous geeks that frequently visit IT Addict (I wish…).

1) What bridge financing is

NeedForBridgeFinancing Inc. is a start-up company. Its founder was able to bootstrap in order to get the product R&D, suppliers sourcing and primary business development achieved. Therefore, these bootstrapping financial efforts are considered to be sunk costs.

The entrepreneur came up with a very successful business model. Transformations from primary goods aren´t costly (though the gross margin amounts to 30%), but the value added to the end-user is sound & real. The business plan reveals sales should increase by 5% every month, which is tremendous.

All in all, it´s pretty clear that we´re talking here about a very profitable venture. However, it seems obvious that prior to actually going into business for good, the entrepreneurial team needs to secure an 8-months bridge financing in order to survive its profitable fast-growth (which is often the case in high-tech start-ups) until breaking even. Bridging is a treasury management vehicle, usually a mezzanine loan, devised to help companies finance their net working capital. In the beginning of its operations, a company is just not scaled enough on the competitive landscape to decide how long supplier debts and customer credits should be cleared.

2) Venture Capital as a necessary financing step for entrepreneurial Gazelles

The term Gazelles usually refers to start-up companies, often in the high-tech sector, growing extremely fast. The first time I heard that word was during a lecture on entrepreneurial innovation clusters in the Netherlands: Erik Stam, an at the time bright Ph.D. student and now a Professor at Cambridge University, was letting his students at Rotterdam School of Management know more about his findings on the geography of gazelles in the Netherlands (see .pdf article). In France for instance, “Gazelle” is a label granted to the 2000 fastest-growing companies during two consecutive years. As an example, Photoways, the company ran by the French blogger and entrepreneur Michel de Guilhermier, was accredited “Gazelle” by the French SMEs Minister Renaud Dutreil recently (see post on Michel´s blog – in French, one of the blogs I visit most frequently for the top quality of its writer thoughts).

Well, let´s go back to our second example. The company we´re talking about in this case study definitely deserves the “gazelle” title: its sales grow 100% every month! Unfortunately, its competitive position is rather weak; although its management secured identical payment delays for both suppliers and clients, clients get pretty loose and the executive management of the start-up has no other choice, commercially speaking, than letting them do so – until its competitive bargaining power increases.

Fortunately, the entrepreneurial team had anticipated this situation, thanks to their talks with VCs (one of the VCs was an entrepreneur in the same business, prior to his exit after which he became a VC). So the VCs invested in this business, for the sake of all. Without the capital provided by the professional investors, the entrepreneurs´own financial resources could never have shadowed the development pace of the company in a sustainable way. After one year of operations and though the business model clearly shows profitability, breakeven is yet to come.

John might well have suffered a similar situation hadn´t he realized he needed to surround himself with skilled stakeholders: a team devised to support the software start-up´s scalability (John plans 3-digits growth in the American and Chinese educational market), and proper advisors with established networks and access to capital for the very best projects, such as John´s software start-up. I wish John good luck, success, and..fun!

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Nielsen/NetRatings compiled a webads spendings ranking thanks to data provided by AdRelevance. Though Nielsen/NetRatings´ last podcasting/blogging/advertising .pdf report legitimately provoked a little uprise amongst bloggers (see for instance: Loic Le Meur, Robert Scoble, Frank Barnako) for its lack of podcasting spirit acumen, I believe several things were rather interesting in this release.

What I´d like to point out to show not only crap is issued in Nielsen/NetRatings´ last podcasting/blogging/advertising .pdf report is its interesting Top 10 Advertisers by Estimated Spending table. Not that I feel like analyzing which kind of company would be most likely to waste its marketing budget online, but I believe Nielsen NetRatings´table lacked a Cost per Impression column. So I added it:

What may be drawn down from this table is that online advertising campaigns are largely optimizable: for instance, NextTag spends 10% more than Skype in online promotion, but generates about 3 times the impressions Skype advertising campaigns do. These are undoubtedly figures e-advertising professionals should study thoroughly to make sure they understand the way online spendings ROI could be optimized.

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Project Management is, in my opinion, the single most important skill people willing to work in for-profit or not companies should acquire.

The corporate world is not complicated, it is complex i.e. difficult to represent graphically. Therefore, people should learn how to deal with all the departments of a company. The widely spread word to explain such a trend is “transversality”.

Project Management doesn´t necessarily mean “to manage a project” but to integrate best within a specific teamworking environment supposed to deliver a defined service or product before a deadline, provided resources constraints.

Project Management is still a young discipline (although the Project Management Institute I´ve just subscribed to is everyday more and more recognized), primarily born in the construction industry, and structured in the IT spheres during the last decade.

Look at these frightening figures: “According to Maxfield, 74% [of all projects] come in over budget, 82% miss deadlines, 79% fail to meet quality or functional specifications, and 67% result in damaged team morale.” (source: ComputerWorld) As I see it, projects mainly fail for political reasons or lack of resources.

You must probably be thinking “Jeremy´s fool. Why would companies switch to project structures if project management gives such crappy results?”. Well, projects fail because organizations are not project management-focused.

See the chart on the right (sorry, it´s in Spanish. I live in Spain, think in Spanish,..). This is how most companies operate, through departmental and divisional structures. Marketing and Finance spend their time fighting instead of working towards improving business processes; Sales and Production departments can´t be blamed for not getting along well: when sales go up, production people work harder; when sales go down, production people need to justify increased inventories and hence a higher working capital, etc. Examples are countless!

I believe the traditional way to organize a company should die. And the quicker the better. Today, young and less young professionals want to get the big picture of the organization they work hard for. People want to interact with people that are different: different cultures (look at Microsoft, the United Nations, or INSEAD, three successful organizations. it´s the zoo there; different people, colors, backgrounds, etc.), & most of all different domains of expertise. Bring purchase, supply chain, IT, finance, marketing & sales people all together in one team; give them responsibilities, a well-defined deliverable, flexible deadline & budget, make sure someone takes leadership of the group. Monitor the advancement of the project and check regularly that a corporate mentor (a senior executive) visit them and provides relevant advice. See the results for yourself: your team will feel empowered, since all its team members will be learning from each other.

In the short-run, everything won´t be perfect, but you´ll notice the difference after a few years: less turnover, better people that their organization is a learning one (provided that executive management set up the right Knowledge Management tools eg Intranet, Virtual Experiences Exchange platform, Feedbacks, etc.).

The best way to learn about the best project management practices is certainly to benefit from IT people´s numerous insights – IT people suffer from most organization´s lack of Project Management acumen. Most of today´s best organizations in Project Management are technology-driven (Cegelec, Microsoft, HP, IBM, Business Objects, GE – to name a few. But I´d be glad if my readership could provide us with more insights about the best PM organizations). I wish companies from other industries start taking to Project Management-oriented organizational structures; one gateway to such a change could be e-Business implementation, that implies having different corporate departments working together. I wish…

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Thanks to The Register for these breaking news.

A blogger eventually understood why Apple laptops were so “thermically undisciplined”: Apple wants you to be able to fry an egg on your laptop.

Cool, isn´t it?

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First, Friendster patented last week its database-centric social networking technology at the US Patent Office. What is the strategy behind this move? I don´t know, but I guess such a step may temper potential social networking new entrants´ enthusiasm.

Second, a European project, Fleck, has also been in the process of patenting its technology recently. Fleck.com´s motto is “Web Democracy”.

Third, a dating website, Engage, just raised 5m$ in a first financing round. It´s business model is a mix of social networking and dating. Are investors buying diversified Web 2.0 projects, or will Engage bring in disruptive synergies in the dating business?

I suggest that you start thinking right here, through commenting, about the nuts and bolds of patenting “soft” technologies. Are social networking technologies really innovative? What´s the underlying strategy of companies willing to legally protect their activities?

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Have a look at this, it´s really funny:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/07/13/zidane_headbutt_outrage/

Anyways, apologizing to my Italian friends, I think Zidane was right to do what he did. Racism should be fought without compassion for anybody.

Keep an eye on India´s reaction to what happened in Bombay, and on the Israeli strikeback against terror that unfortunately involves Lebanese civilians that believe terrorism is pure negation of life too.

And for those who´ll ask be by e-mail what the connection between this post and high-tech is:

- “buzz” marketing (viral video clips)

- video special effects (see Zidane´s videos)

- blogging as a personal window on the world: I can express my opinions freely without having to write an reader letter to The Economist (that has around .00003% to be selected).

- and anyways, I can write whatever I like. It´s my blog. Open yours and put you on the map!

Addendum:

* Materazzi is not bad too…Here are his Top 5 most violent plays according to Italian journalists.

* Try it too, it works!

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For the sake of all…A good initiative though, something engineers-ran high-tech companies should do more to get closer to their customers.

Taking advantage of this post´s topic, you can obviously feel free to criticize this blog anytime, should you think that it doesn´t match its objectives/most posts are crappy/I should talk about specific technologies/etc.

YOU are making this blog existing through your comments and visits. Keep that in mind.

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You should listen to Loic Le Meur´s intervention at Google Zeitgeist Europe, which occurred in June 2006. Loic Le Meur is one of the most prominent spokespersons of European blogging and podcasting (he´s written a book on each of the topics; I haven´t had the opportunity to read these yet but I´ll keep you posted, it´ll come soon), and leading French blogger.

Loic Le Meur´s presentation of what it takes to be a blogger is extremely telling. Indeed, why don´t journalists bother to discuss with their readers? There are situations in life where we just feel like expressing ourselves.

Let me conclude by quoting Loic: “Bloggers just want to be part of a conversation”.

Enjoy the podcast.

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