I was abroad between June 2005 and September 2006. I had left an old and rusty France. Nothing was really happening, and I followed this French Web 2.0 thing from far away – not really believing in its actual depth, and actually assuming the Israelis and Americans were doing it better. I was ALL wrong. 14 months seems to be nothing, but in the digital world, 14 months is pretty much a century.

France is back on track! It’s the first time in my lifetime I heard serial entrepreneurs speaking with their heart, soul and brains rather than with their ego and virtual bank account bottom line. Some people really want to build true, self-standing, long-lasting European success stories. And maybe they already have.

Frankly, listening to these driven entrepreneurs rose in my deep inside some pride, pride of being French. Those who know me will start thinking that I’m going nuts, but this is true: I was proud that such change agents were from France and not from … Well, I don’t know. You fill the … yourself.

Right now I’m exhausted, but I’ll post IN ENGLISH (I received exactly 14 e-mails today asking me to do so, thank you NYC friends for giving me homework, as if I needed more than I already have) the full minutes of this great great lecture in the upcoming days.

Picture – from left to right: Philippe Berna of Kayentis, Pierre Chappaz (standing) of Index Ventures / Wikio / Netvibes, Pierre Krings of Price Minister, Tariq Krim of Netvibes, Stéphane Bohbot of Modelabs, Pascal Lorne of Miyowa, Dominique Agrech of Xange Private Equity, Eglantine from IE-Club.

“I knew I had seen this guy somewhere…” was I wondering right from the start of the class. Indeed, take a look at this video interview by Jean-Michel Billaut, a French Internet-World videopodcaster & blogger, I had watched some time ago.

Jean-Louis Bénard is a prominent entrepreneur on the French Internet stage. Back in 1993, right after graduation from Ecole Centrale Paris, where I’m currently studying Information & Communication Technologies, Jean-Louis founded F.R.A., a B-to-B web service company, selling intranet / extranet / e-Commerce solutions to big corporate accounts. After growing from 1 to about 100 employees, the company was bought out in 2001 by Business Interactive, today one of the main players of Internet platforms (CRM, intranets, mobiles solutions, ad campaigns performance-tracking tools) and marketing (design, marketing, banners, affiliation programs). Jean-Louis remained at Business Interactive as a CTO for 2 years.

As every entrepreneur, he probably couldn’t stand not starting all over again. I guess Jean-Louis could feel 3 years in advance the video hype coming, so he started in 2003 an IPTV service aimed at empowering corporate accounts (like IBM: see SoftwareTV, unfortunately in French) with the appropriate tools enabling them to open personalized Web TVs, a great marketing and buzzing tool. The name of the company’s Brainsonic. Brainsonic pioneered the industry and still is the European leader today on the Web TV landscape although competition is getting tough all over Europe. Apparently, a strong emphasis is put on R&D at Brainsonic’s, innovation being a key-driver for customer satisfaction and the top line; namely, growth.

For roughly 3 hours, Jean-Louis Bénard explained to us his vision of where the world computer sciences might be heading to.

The main topics discussed were: history of computer architecture, middleware, design patterns, birth of the Web 2.0, and the promising swordfight between Microsoft’s .Net environment and IBM & Sun et alii’s J2EE platform.

And at last I could hear a sound argument against the sustainable spreading of AJAX technologies: overwhelming callback requests will eventually kill the technology.

Definitely one of the best IT lectures we have had so far. Jean-Louis, we know you are extremely busy, but keep on coming teaching at Centrale!

For the next few weeks, I’ll make sure I read more on some of the topics lectured (design patterns, Web 2.0 architecture, the future of e-Commerce interfaces) to write posts on this very blog. So keep your eyes opened.