One more very IT post: I’m looking for a second-to-nine hand car, ready to come, see, and perhaps pick up in or nearby Paris, France.

Prerequisites: less than 6 years old, less than 100K kilometers, non smoker

Feel free to leave me a comment or send me an e-mail if you’ve got something for me.

PS: if you feel like redirecting me to an eBay or La Centrale ad, forget about it – I know them all. Thanks for your dedication anyways.

Related Adendum: I use Lokaliz an interesting French e-Bay mash-up that shows you the products you want according to your area of residency. Its founder, Pascal Levy-Garboua, actually worked for eBay France as the head of technology and media categories. Pascal blogs on e-Commerce & I highly recommend his analyses to my French-speaking readership. By the way, he’s getting married in September basically half a mile away from where I leave in Paris so don’t hesitate to greet him directly on the Lokaliz blog (you may also use the comments here on Tech IT Easy).

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In a few hours from now, I’ll be flying over the Pyrennées back to France. My internship is (almost) over. I’ve spent a wonderful time here in Cataluña (on the picture, one of the magic fountains next to Plaza de España), learning a lot at work and meeting great people all around.

I’d like to thank, and I mean it, those who particularly brought me something special:

- at “work”, if I may call this work because, although we were definitely extremely busy, it’s always been a pleasure to try to build up things with you guys: Eloy (also known as “boss”), for his guidance, drive, willingness to teach me insights from his – financial management, amongst others – experience, and..ability to enjoy all sorts of situations and just have fun whatever distressed the situation may be; Xavier, although we haven’t had time to interact together as much as I would’ve liked, for your hands-on approach of business, focusing on and only on adding value to the end-user experience.

I have to say I couldn’t find a more complementary pair in you two guys. Last but not least, many thanks to Susana for bringing some stability and patience at the office, not an easy task when surrounded by the crazy folks we all were. Both consulting (what I call “the Gxllos galaxy”) and entrepreneurial ventures are making your business group, all and only made of friends, everyday more efficient, effective, and skilled. Good luck and stamina for the future. Of course we’ll keep in touch, this is a no-brainer.

- outside “work”, many thanks to my all-times friend Pierre for introducing me to his group of international exchange students and his explanations about computer networks. Mathias and Lukasz, thanks for the great fun and the nice conversations we had on, respectively, computer science and telecommunications. I guess that now that we’re all four of us leaving the city, jazz clubs will see their turnover plummet…And of course, thank you Alberto for teaching me some bits of the Art of Bullfighting (la corrida) – I’ve spent very unique moments with you.

I’m not sure you all read this blog, but if you do, don’t forget to start (and keep, Xavier?) blogging! Send me an e-mail for blog-bootstrapping advice.

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The underground war between potential successors of DVD discs is raging. Two main competitors have been identified, Toshiba’s HD DVD and Sony’s Blu-ray. However, my bet is that those solutions are already obsolete. An Israeli start-up named Matteris, incubated at the incubator of Haïfa’s Institute of Technology (known in Israel as Technion), is going the extra mile…

Toshiba had closed in July 2006 a 150 m$ financing round with partners such as Microsoft, Universal Studios, Intel, Warner Home Video, Paramount Home Entertainment, just to promote the qualities of its HD DVD, a sort of 15 Gbytes DVD. The HD DVD is supposed to be easier to manufacture than its main competitor: Sony’s Blu-ray. However, the Blu-ray’s capacity goes up to 27 Gbytes. The HD DVD’s theoretical capacity should approach the 90 Gbytes, against 200 Gbytes for the Blu-ray. Which of these will be the standard storage media in five years from now? Only God knows…

Yet, God might well know about the issue of the race, the exists a third way we ought to consider.

Matteris, a start-up incubated at the Israeli Institute of Technology and funded by the public Proseed Venture Capital Fund (see portfolio webpage reporting the stake in Matteris), will start very soon to manufacture – through a yet-to-be-signed joint-venture agreement, likely to occur with a Japanese player – a 500 Gbytes DVD devised on a disruptive technology using holographics. Additional industrialization costs are marginal when compared to Sony’s ones, despite a capacity multipled by 20 (27 Gbytes vs. 500 Gbytes). Though 500 Gbytes are already not so bad, the maximum storage capacity (already successfully tested) should reach a Terabyte (Tbyte), that is to say 1000 Gbytes. No comment. Or maybe just one: what’s going on in the Israeli cluster of innovation at the moment is big, very big. Matteris is just one example amongst many others, but I still don’t see European multinational companies starting to think about trying to match US MNCs in terms of investments in the Israeli technology innovation potential. Well, too bad for Europe.

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After blog services, spam blockers, search engines, media buyers and people blogging for a specific professional purpose (painters sell their paintings, headhunters recruit, free-lance programmers look for contracts, politicians grab potential votes, etc.), one more business enters the blogging industry: job boards.

Unlike many job boards which are just non-updated CV databases, Problogger Job Board, is built upon an interesting concept. Here’s the letter I received from its founder in the generic newsletter sent a few days ago:

“Dear ProBlogger Subscribers,I just wanted to shoot you a short note to let you know about a new feature added to ProBlogger in the last few mintues – ProBlogger’s Job Boards. Eric Allam and I have been working hard on them and would now like to invite you to stop by and be among the first to see the finished results.

Every week I am asked by companies, networks and individual bloggers where they can find good bloggers. I’ve often tried to set people up but these boards are about providing a space for bloggers for hire and those looking for them to meet – sort of like a blogging dating agency.

If you’re a blogger lookign for work there are already 10 jobs advertised and more on the way. If none of the first round of jobs are up your alley you might like to subscribe to the RSS feed so you can be notified of new jobs as they are posted.

If you’re looking for a blogger - take advantage of our opening special price of just $50 US for 30 days of listing your job. It’ll be seen both on the boards, the RSS feed and also the top right menu box at ProBlogger.net where it’ll be seen by thousands of readers (most of them bloggers looking to make money from blogging) each day.

I’m really excited about this new roll out at ProBlogger and hope you find it useful too. Let me know if you have any feedback on the boards – this is just version 1 and we’re looking forward to adding some interesting new features in the coming weeks and months. ”

Could you picture yourself as a professional blogger? I personally couldn’t, never. I blog for fun, and for you. But maybe our children will consider in some time blogging as a natural career option.

I’d really like to have your opinion regarding professional blogging.

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Just a few meters away outside my office in Barcelona are the Roca Headquarters (the factory is in Gava, in the South of Barcelona).

About Roca. If all European citizens probably know the brand, our American friends and readers probably won’t. Roca is one of the leading toilet supplier in Europe. Yes, you got it right, toilets.

So what the hell is this post doing here, on an IT blog?

The basic reason why I felt like writing a post about Roca is that its brand is so deeply-rooted in the consumers’ minds, that when you go to the bathroom in Spain, you don’t quite say it explicitly (like people from Scandinavia, boys and girls, do shamelessly for instance). Instead of that, in Spanish we use a very poetic sentence: “Voy a ver el señor Roca“, meaning “I have an appointment with with M. Roca”.

Although human beings have been going to the restrooms for quite a while, IT was roughly born in the mid-XXth century (WWI: operational research and radar technologies; 1958: the LISP language was created). However, I’m pretty sure we’re not far from having Information Technologies stop being just technologies to become fully and seamlessly integrated in our everyday life, like taking a trip to the bathroom already is.

In your opinion, what kind of sentences will we be saying to mention the fact that for a moment we’ll stop belonging to the real world to become virtual (e.g. going to browse the Internet)?

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I had already read, and briefly commented in this note, a few “essays” (that’s how the guy calls his – pretty long, that’s why – posts) written by Paul Graham. In “How to Start a Start-Up“, Paul Graham reflects on his experience as an entrepreneur in the software industry, an industry I believe is the most competitive worldwide, and provides some really excellent advice. I totally agree on many of his calls: don’t spend you cash in fancy offices and..chairs (a sign that you think you made it when the first dollar of revenues is still yet to come), get the necessary people on board, try to leave your ego on the side for once, get the product out of the pipeline fast, make it evolve quickly, listen to your customers and let them help you reshape and brush-up your product, go for cheap and simple, don’t target public administration tenders, etc. See for yourself by just reading this great paper, I mean it.

Excellent advice but also insightful comments on what geeks think about business people. Have a look at that extract from Paul Graham’s article:

“In a technology startup, which most startups are, the founders should include technical people. During the Internet Bubble there were a number of startups founded by business people who then went looking for hackers to create their product for them. This doesn’t work well. Business people are bad at deciding what to do with technology, because they don’t know what the options are, or which kinds of problems are hard and which are easy. And when business people try to hire hackers, they can’t tell which ones are good. Even other hackers have a hard time doing that. For business people it’s roulette.

Do the founders of a startup have to include business people? That depends. We thought so when we started ours, and we asked several people who were said to know about this mysterious thing called “business” if they would be the president. But they all said no, so I had to do it myself. And what I discovered was that business was no great mystery. It’s not something like physics or medicine that requires extensive study. You just try to get people to pay you for stuff.“

This state of mind is pretty well common amongst techies. That’s precisely what urged me to decide to go for a highly technological graduate major next year: try to gain some credit when talking to engineers. Being able to interact with different sorts of professionals is a key skill to have when planning to either start-up something or work on big and ambitious innovative corporate projects.

To wind up, and if I can repeat myself, reading Paul Graham’s essay on starting up is a no brainer. Paul Graham seems to be now helping entrepreneurial teams deal with the issues he had himself faced, since he now is a seed-capital VC at Y-Combinator, a Silicon Valley and Cambridge-based boutique for early-stage, technology-intensive start-ups.

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For those like me who haven’t yet had the time to read The Google Story, I recommend you to take a look at John Heileman’s well documented article about the historical evolution of the brains behind Google Inc., from the founders and managers to the VCs. John Heileman is an American journalist who published two books on Microsoft and the birth of the Silicon Valley.

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Hubert Fisselier (see picture, taken at the Gxllos headquarters in Barcelona), a gifted project manager and very effective software developer soon to join one of our investees here in Barcelona, aknowledged my call for displaying one’s business ideas in order to gather feedbacks from potential clients, and finally come up with a better product/service. Check his post here (post entitled “La recette pour donner un penchant Web 2.0 à son site“, sorry guys, in French only, not my fault).

Hubert has actually just opened a blog on his own entrepreneurial project: a one-stop collaborative, user-generated, Google Maps powered real estate investment platform. The project’s name is Geonimmo. I encourage all my French-speaking readers (sorry again, I obviously begged Hubert but couldn’t manage to convince him to blog in English) to participate in Geonimmo’s birth and future developments.

I hope more people will follow with such brave and yet pragmatic initiatives.

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IBM had achieved its goal in consolidating its by far leading competitive positions in both middleware software and consulting services – the latter aiming at implementing on demand e-Business solutions in all types of organizations.

However, Big Blue’s appetite doesn’t seem satisfied yet, and has made 2 major moves this week in 2 other, yet complementary, businesses: storage & security.

Storage: in a market dominated by EMC & HP (resp. 3,36bn$ and 2,97bn$ against 2,2 for IBM, source: IDC) , the Network Appliance – IBM partnership to deliver high performance 4 GBytes / sec. storage solutions (through combining Power 5 processing with a double-decked hierarchical classification: Fiber Channel for often accessed files, ATA for archives; this high-end solution’s named DS 8000 Turbo) has proved outperforming. The result is a significant increase of IBM’s market share, from 12,8% in December 2004 to 15,9% in December 2005, against EMC’s market share, down from 21,8% to 20,6%.

Security: IBM intended today a 1,3bn$ bid to take over Atlanta-based security company ISS (Internet Security Services). The plan is to integrate ISS into IBM Global Services and tackle better their clients’ growing concerns on intrusion matters. More about the potential deal on InfoWorld.

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Do you remember the Entrepreneurial Brainstorming Session concept? Basically, an idea´s worth nothing until it´s challenged, improved, and eventually executed (see this recent post).

Here´s one: sometimes, we just need to record phone calls. For many different reasons, having the quick & handy possibility to record a call or to use one´s phone call as a voice recorder may be just extremely useful in many situations.

So, before a call, you just dial 007, wait for the tone, and the regular number. The call will automatically be saved onto your storage space available at 007CallRecorder.com (.mp3, or .wmv) or calling back 007 and dialing your security code and client number.

You pay for the storage space you use; no recorded phone call is ever deleted unless the user stops paying or the user deletes it.

You may also use your phone call as a quickly operational and unconspicuous recorder calling 007 and dialing ***. It would for instance have been very useful to me if I could´ve recorded the lies and rude tone of Delta Airlines employees I underwent 3 months ago (when I spoke to their manager, they were suddenly very nice & smiling – and re-lied saying I had threatened them));). I would´ve become rich suing the company for diffamation.

This alone doesn´t explain the ROI of the 007CallRecorder service, but I believe there would be a lot of potential in bringing to the mass market such a product, which must already exist. Especially in the Litigation Society we´re living in.

Telecom-wise, it´s not so complicated to design such a feature.

So what´s your opinion on this telecom-storage-compliance-security business opportunity?

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I eventually spotted a timeframe to read Baseline’s would-be exhaustive and really good analysis of one of the most secretive of the most famous companies worldwide: Google. The article’s entitled How Google Works, and I suggest you print it out (it’s really long) and take a look at it some day, unless you’re lying down on a beach and then it’s a perfect time.

The part I enjoyed most, since I’m a recent member of the Project Management Institute (Paris chapter), is the one providing an insight about Google’s project management internal tools. Take a look at this short extract, it’s really impressive.

“Consider how Google handles project management. Every week, every Google technologist receives an automatically generated e-mail message asking, essentially, what did you do this week and what do you plan to do next week? This homegrown project management system parses the answer it gets back and extracts information to be used for follow-up. So, next week, Merrill explains, the system will ask, “Last week, you said you would do these six things. Did you get them done?”

A more traditional project tracking application would use a form to make users plug the data into different fields and checkboxes, giving the computer more structured data to process. But instead of making things easier for the computer, Google’s approach is to make things easier for the user and make the computer work harder. Employees submit their reports as an unstructured e-mail, and the project tracking software works to “understand” the content of those e-mail notes in the same way that Google’s search engine extracts context and meaning from Web pages.

If Google employees found the project tracking system to be a hassle to work with, they probably wouldn’t use it, regardless of whether it was supposed to be mandatory, Merrill says. But because it’s as easy as reading and responding to an e-mail, “We get pretty high compliance.”

Those project tracking reports go into a repository—searchable, of course—so that managers can dip in at any time for an overview on the progress of various efforts. Other Google employees can troll around in there as well and register their interest in a project they want to track, regardless of whether they have any official connection to that project.

“What we’re looking for here is lots of accidental cross-pollination,” Merrill explains, so that employees in different offices, perhaps in different countries, can find out about other projects that might be relevant to their own work. Despite Google’s reputation for secrecy toward outsiders, internally the watchword is “living out loud,” Merrill says. “Everything we do is a 360-degree public discussion.””

By the way, Baseline Mag is a great Project Management resource for those who are keen on the subject. I also like Gantthead very much. These are my two favourites.

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I took the week-end to catch up on my never ending reading list. I came upon a very interesting article in the Harvard Business Review Working Knowledge section, “Creating Strategy in an Unknowable Universe”, by Eric D. Beinhocker (the article is said to be derived from the author’s last book, The Origin of Wealth).

Eric Beinhocker, a McKinsey & Company senior advisor, makes a point in illustrating, using Bill Gates’ experience, how strategy is the ex-post outcome of the action taken in a uncertain given business environment. There can be no anticipated strategy unless all parameters are frozen, which hardly occurs in today’s fast-changing and flattening world.

Back in 1987, Bill Gates had take action against the maturation of MS-DOS and the rise of graphical user interfaces in most competitor’s R&D labs and..store shelves (ie Apple’s Mac OS).

Facing this what could’ve been an overwhelming competitive threat, Bill Gates, instead of playing the maverick focusing all Microsoft’s resources on what he thought would’ve been the very best option, chose to go for a “portfolio of experiments” – as Beinhocker brillantly put it.

Bill Gates explored 6 differents pathways, the time for him to look at how the market was reacting, slowly divesting from the experiments he saw were fruitless, and then, ex-post, focusing on what would pay off.

Here are the 6 pathways, extracted from Eric Beinhocker´s writings, although I suggest you take 10 minutes to read the full article, since it’s sincerely worth it:

1) “Microsoft continued to invest in MS-DOS”;

2) “Gates and IBM agreed to turn IBM’s OS/2 operating-system project into a joint venture”;

3) “Microsoft held discussions [...] about participating in joint efforts on Unix”;

4) “Microsoft bought a major stake in the largest seller of Unix systems on PCs”;

5) “Microsoft built its position in software for the Apple Macintosh, passing Apple itself, as the leading supplier”;

6) “Gates made major investments in Windows”.

That is a lesson of humility by Bill Gates: only God would’ve known what were the right steps to take before the market decided a few years later. And it looks as if the right decisions often come from humility. That’s what we call “common sense” – unfortunately not so common.

I found this whole little story a great example of why & how experimentation may help decision-making processes. It applies to business, but to many other fields too (diplomacy, love, charity, etc. – to French-readers, here’s a link to an article I wrote almost 2 years ago, advocating for experimenting during business and/or geopolitical negotiations in the Middle East).

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I basically couldn´t help laughing when reading “Wise Guy”´s hilarious Top Ten Lies of Entrepreneurs when raising money.

I could picture myself fundraising for an e-Commerce marketplace in Israel that has unfortunately since a couple weeks gone bust. 4 out of the 11 (not exactly 10, that´s a good, funny, very Kawasaki habit) lies Guy Kawasaki, a former Apple Corp. Evangelist and now an early-stage VC, describes apply to our team. So fun)); Guy, where did you put that f***ing video camera in our Tel Aviv office?

Lie #1 according to Kawasaki is:

“1. “Our projections are conservative.” An entrepreneur’s projections are never conservative. If they were, they would be $0. I have never seen an entrepreneur achieve even her most conservative projections. Generally, an entrepreneur has no idea what sales will be, so she guesses: “Too little will make my deal uninteresting; too big, and I’ll look hallucinogenic.” The result is that everyone’s projections are $50 million in year four. As a rule of thumb, when I see a projection, I add one year to delivery time and multiply by .1.”

Ahah, that´s exactly what we used to say to business angels and VCs! Look at the picture above (a slide extracted from the Business Plan I had written for the road show):

This is not over. Lie number 5 is as follows:

5. “No one is doing what we’re doing.” This is a bummer of a lie because there are only two logical conclusions. First, no one else is doing this because there is no market for it. Second, the entrepreneur is so clueless that he can’t even use Google to figure out he has competition. Suffice it to say that the lack of a market and cluelessness is not conducive to securing an investment. As a rule of thumb, if you have a good idea, five companies are going the same thing. If you have a great idea, fifteen companies are doing the same thing.

The thing is that some had actually tried, but none of the marketplace players had managed to become a landmark in the C-to-C Israeli Internet industry (there were very strong players in B-to-C such as Walla, but no sound leader otherwise – and eBay hasn´t yet been translated to Hebrew).

We also fell in the “we have a proven management team” trap. Look at that (lie #9):

“We have a proven management team.” Says who? Because the founder worked at Morgan Stanley for a summer? Or McKinsey for two years? Or he made sure that John Sculley’s Macintosh could power on? Truly “proven” in a venture capitalist’s eyes is founder of a company that returned billions to its investors. But if the entrepreneur were that proven, that he (a) probably wouldn’t have to ask for money; (b) wouldn’t be claiming that he’s proven. (Do you think Wayne Gretzky went around saying, “I am a good hockey player”?) A better strategy is for the entrepreneur to state that (a) she has relevant industry experience; (b) she is going to do whatever it takes to succeed; (c) she is going to surround herself with directors and advisors who are proven; and (d) she’ll step aside whenever it becomes necessary. This is good enough for a venture capitalist that believes in what the entrepreneur is doing.

Actually, the founder (30) had a strong background in politics, although he had recently acquired some online advertising skills. I was 22 and a trainee, with only internships & non-for-profit-management experience at the time, working as the Project Manager & soon to be replaced as my 5 months training period was ending by a 29 year old guy, freshly graduated from an Australian MBA program. I had convinced a great and talented friend from France to join the adventure to become the CTO: he was 23 at that time and was just a trainee, like me. The company had also hired to replace him a bright software engineer (27), who had just completed his undergraduate degree too (Israelis tend to enter the job market pretty late because all of them, boys and girls, spend between 2 (girls) and 4 (officers) years at Israel Defence Forces) but who had no prior professional programming experience. Our graphic designer was 25, still a Digital Fine Arts student at Betzalel Institute in Jerusalem. However I have to say that, although young, the software development team did a fantastic job and I´m not certain it would´ve been much faster and better with more experienced folks (we had several external advisors to give us a hand when needed: a reliable and sharp-minded chartered accountant; an online advertising company named WebSense; a free-lance 40 something pretty expensive software developer; a 32 software developer again; a telecom billing company, Unicell, who helped us implement a bid-from-your-cellphone feature, 2 lawyers – one of them an investor in the project; an online secured monetizing system, NetPay; a transactions 3rd party, SafeCharge). Our sales manager was 25, a part-time business management student with some team management background. Our CFO was 29, and had Finance Ministry background, online advertising and economics teaching experience.

We definitely had a good, not to say great team. But we were all virgin cowboys. We had a beautiful, user-friendly and full of good products website, and lacked the most important. We were missing the kind of top-gun sort of guy, who “had been there” already. A 40+ year old manager with e-Commerce experience, industry credit, VC-backing, and on and all. We thought investment banking & consulting summer internships were making of us crème-de-la-crème managers. How naïve…We were all beginners presenting ourselves like GE-trained managers & Microsoft-style software developers. At least the atmosphere was fantastic, and I´m pretty sure we were compensating with a bullish enthusiasm and hell a lot of hard work.

Last, but not least, Guy Kawasaki wrote:

11. “All we have to do is get 1% of the market.” (Here’s a bonus since I still have battery power.) This lie is the flip side of “the market will be $50 billion.” There are two problems with this lie. First, no venture capitalist is interested in a company that is looking to get 1% or so of a market. Frankly, we want our companies to face the wrath of the anti-trust division of the Department of Justice. Second, it’s also not that easy to get 1% of any market, so you look silly pretending that it is. Generally, it’s much better for entrepreneurs to show a realistic appreciation of the difficulty of building a successful company.

Look on the table right here:

The line e-Commerce market refers to the size of the Israeli market according to a consultancy (another lie, #2). Right below is our market penetration target, related to our marketing cash-burn rate. And Kawasaki pointed it right: we had to grab a single percent of the market to break even in the second year!

Guy Kawasaki´s really good. His tone is sarcastic, his advice usually relevant and true, his examples sound and genuine. I haven´t yet read his last book, The Art of the Start, but I´m planning to do so very soon. My New York-stationed buddy and fellow blogger Dave Notik wrote a review about it. I might soon post something about Dave´s really amazing project (Dave is an entrepreneur), I´m just waiting for the Beta release of his platform.

By the way, I´m making fun of myself here. But VCs are, according to my experience, probably worse. Guy Kawasaki also wrote a “Top 10 Lies of VCs” sort of post, and I can swear I heard most of these back in Israel. Here´s a sample: “I like you company buy my partner doesn´t”; “If you get a lead, we will follow”; “Show us some traction, and we´ll invest”; “We love to co-invest with other venture capitalists”; “we like early-stage investing”. I heard 5 VC lies out of 9, and lied on 4.5 points out of 11. VCs are slightly worse));

I´m in the process of business planning again in my current training position, & this time I´m abiding by Kawasaki´s pitching advice – namely the 10/20/30 rule you may find on this post on his blog. 10 for 10 slides, 20 for 20 minutes maximum, 30 for 30 points minimum for the font size being used.

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I had recently came accross a brillant analysis by Fabrice Grinda (click to see his excellent blog “Musings of an entrepreneur”), a French entrepreneur now living in New York (founder of the late Aucland – an auctions website which had become pretty famous during the “new economy” hype), of the two main risks entrepreneurs have to cope with when starting up their ventures, & investors face when screening a business plan: idea risk & execution risk. Here´s a quote from Fabrice Grinda´s post: “Idea risk is the risk that the business you enter is not attractive and ends up not working for whatever reason (market too small, bad business model, etc.). You can minimize that risk by applying the 9 business selection criteria previously mentioned and/or copying an already successful idea from abroad. Execution risk is the risk that you are not able to execute and take the business from an idea to a functional product that can generate revenues.” I recommend that you read the rest of it here.

You can minimize the idea risk by copying an already successful business idea from abroad! This is where SpringWise.com comes in. I came to know about it this very morning, on French entrepreneur Michel de Guilhermier´s blog (in French, sorry; however, top-of-the-class on e-Commerce, customer care & investment topics).

SpringWise.com is nothing else than an entrepreneurial business ideas database. Thousands of people from all over the world screen for local entrepreneurial successes and report it on the database. The categorization of the business ideas catalog makes it easy and convenient to browse. I´ve just subscribed to SpringWise.com´s newsletter too. I hope you´ll enjoy brainstorming on the business ideas you´ll read about there.

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“IT Addict” has become “Tech IT Easy”, but I´m still writing it. I hope you´ll enjoy the new user interface and additional features. Please feel free, as usual, to provide some feedback in the comments section.

Here is a copy of the last post I left on Blogger:

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Since I started blogging, exactly two months ago, I have been advocating that the very best enterprises needed to focus on serving their customers everyday better – one of my favourite topics being that Information Systems & Technology could empower these companies´ processes towards the necessary “operational excellence” achievement. In other words, I´m a strong believer that tomorrow´s leading companies in all industries will be the ones which will have proven a certain mastery in creating and servicing a competitive advantage thanks to IT-driven projects.

There is a word for all this mess, “e-Business“: use the best technologies, and make these used and understood by your ecosystem (suppliers, employees, etc.) to serve you customer best.

I felt that I had no right writing about something I actually wasn´t applying nor planning to implement. This blog is an enterprise in its own: it requires dedication, time, patience, and the drive to write, or at least try and do my best to write interesting “IT Addict” stuff. Furthermore, I have a fast-growing portfolio of very bright customers: you! Through gathering feedbacks, I realized you were overall pretty satisfied with the content & design, but that you wanted me to switch, for reasons I still don´t understand well, from Blogger – a tool you consider being “blogging for dummies”, to a more “professional” platform like TypePad or WordPress. I´ve chosen the latter.

My goal being to serve better my community, of which you belong to as long as you read me and leave comments, I hope I found a good way to illustrate how a technology upgrade (from the Blogger platform to the WordPress software) may enhance customer satisfaction.

Now that the message has come accross, here are a few housekeeping remarks:

- Do not leave comments on http://itaddict.blogspot.com anymore, go to http://www.techiteasy.org instead (update your bookmarks); you will anyways be able to find my blog on http://www.jeremyfain.net.

- I made a slight blog title change, from “IT Addict, high-tech made easy” to “Tech IT Easy”, under the name of a shop bearing such a name I saw in Rome;

- Update my RSS feed on your RSS reader from itaddict.blogspot.com/rss.xml to http://www.techiteasy.org/feed/ for posts and http://www.techiteasy.org/comments/feed/ for comments;

- I´m in middle of the migration process (making sure all the comments are there, pictures right-sized, no broken links, browsing features, etc.) and I should be done by the August 30th 2006. Consequently, I should be most grateful if you do excuse any inconvenience likely to happen until then.

- I´d like to thank: Blogger for providing me with a very simple tool that helped me start blogging; WordPress for making its superb software platform available to all for free (I added many interesting new features such as the last comments published); and you for your time and faithfullness in my writings & thoughts. I hope this is only the beginning of our collaborative sharings on the utmostly interesting topic of Information Technology.

See you right now on Tech IT Easy.

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