I haven’t done this game in a while, but you guys usually like it – and I enjoy writing the post as well by the way. I guess the four first ones were too easy (to retrieve it, perform a “guess who” search in the right column), so this one’s a little trickier. Good luck in your search, I won’t post anything until you find out so you know what to do if you want “Tech IT Easy” to die));

“I was born and raised in Paris. Trained at elite research school Ecole Normale Supérieure in physics, I then moved to MIT in Cambridge; a time in the Boston area during which I met my wife who played an important role in my next to be set up ventures (she set up everything alongside with me, and her father had lent us his garage). I came back to France and worked as an account manager for a major software corporation. After a few years, I was sent to the corporate headquarters of the very same company in the Valley, where I fine tuned my already not bad programming skills. The Internet bubble came along, and I started up a first company that went bust (with all the others) in 2001. I was broke, and so were my friends, family and fools who had invested in my venture.

California had become too expensive, so I moved with my wife to Atlanta where I took some time to think. But I needn’t wait for so long: I got a call to give a lecture on an open source application server…That’s how it all started. In March 2006, I sold my company to a big player in the industry. Now, not only do I have more than I need to travel and settle in California again if I want to, I can also do what I love above all: attend house music festivals and occasionally perform as a DJ.

Guess who I am?”

Hint N.1 Sunday 29th October 2006 17:18: “JAVA”

Second hint tomorrow if nobody found who this entrepreneur is in the time between. But it’s getting easier and easier.

Hint N.2 Monday 30th October 2006 9:23: “I sold my company for 350 million USD” – come on guys, I can’t believe it! No way I’ll help you more than I already did.

Update 31th October 2006 18:13: COME ON GUYS, THE ANSWER IS ONE GOOGLE REQUEST AWAY. AND I WANT TO GET BACK TO BLOGGING!

Update 1st November 2006 15:22: Congratulations to Mark, who lets me back into blogging; Mark, I’d be glad to invite you to have a beer if you come to Paris some day, so let me know. The answer was of course Marc Fleury, founder of JBoss – a company sold to Red Hat in March 2006 for about 350 million $. I’ll post a biography of Mark Fleury tomorrow. To all other readers: how come couldn’t you think of Marc Fleury after all the details I provided? I can’t believe this guess took 5 days to be solved.

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The picture on your right hand shows how software are most of the time developed. This model is called the V cycle or V Software Systems Engineering Process.

Like most project management methodologies, the V-cycle was adapted one day from construction industry practices. Indeed, the construction business is 5000 years old and hence much more mature than the 30-year old software industry.

Although the V software engineering process is a proven methodology, my experience working for/with software start-ups in Israel and Spain as a functional project manager & business development analyst convinced me that using the V-cycle methodology implies:

- too much of an early-staged design (re-engineering is costly); the Society we live in goes too fast and nobody can afford to freeze one’s specifications too early.

- the end product is actually a ‘product end’. In other words, it’s hard to make your piece of software evolve and come up with new releases at a reasonable price.

- it suffers many bugs (there is one and just one delivery date) and the cost of non-quality’s pretty high.

However, I now study with software engineers and it appears that the V software engineering cycle applies well to industrial environments, embedded software, and huge outsourcing projects on the condition that the two teams (on-site & remote) know each other well.

But, as inexperienced as I am, I can tell the V cycle should never, ever used as a framework in fast-growing or -changing environments. In the latter cases, I recommend you use eXtreme programming methods.

EXtreme programming works best with small development teams in nascent & disruptive industries (Web 2.0, SOA, Web Services) in which the actual needs are yet to be defined accurately (that may also mean that the client is dumb or that your boss doesn’t know what (s)he wants).

This is how I’d define eXtreme programming: automatized unit tests, develop in pairs (2 software developers hand-in-hand), interact & iterate.

At iMarket in Israel, our software developers Raphaël Benzekri & Radi Isakharov did a fantastic job working physically close to each other, communicating constantly with the CEO (who basically behaved as a client), going back & forth constantly, and coming to me (functional PM) for troubleshooting, end-of-pipeline tests, budgeting & new idea generation & outside vendors integration (we were working with a graphic designer & a mobile communication services provider). Raphaël & Radi ended up devising an entire 80,000-lines-of-code-strong e-Commerce software in just 5 months using eXtreme programming methods. Working in pairs, I realized, is fast and is an insurance in itself of quality programming: when a method was implemented by, say, Radi, it was immediatly challenged by Raphaël, and so on and so forth. Both could share knowledge and lessons, and the entire team (there were 6 full-time people at that time in the company) was consistent and satisfied with the advancement pace.

Just to repeat myself, this is how eXtreme programming works: client –> developers –> client –> developers –> client –> developers –> client –> … Unlike in V cycle programming environments, deliveries are frequent, implementation is on-going, team consistency’s extremely high (two software developers working hand in hand) and the software enjoys an embedded documentation.

I hope I made my point: heavy projects, administrative burden, structured client –> go for a V cycle-like methodology; enthusiastic young developers, disruptive industries or environments, absence of well-defined specs –> that’s a no brainer: go for eXtreme programming. For outsourced software development projects, consider Agile over eXtreme (for an interesting comparison of these two methodologies, take a look at this post on Benjamin Mitchell’s excellent software engineering blog).

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Many thanks to Rupert for having sent me the Warriors of the Net link today.

Warriors of the Net is all about the journey of an http request. I like a lot the analogy between computer networking and the world of transportation and logistics and I think there are many things to be written on this topic. For instance, communication physical supports often follow railways/highways/electricity networks – mainly for historical reasons.

Anyways, I strongly recommend you watch this video (and listen to the English version). If you’re an dummy, the way the Internet works will be crystal-clear afterwards, and if you’re already an expert, well, it’s pretty refreshing and shows you a way to share your expertise with many. Opening a blog might be a solution too by the way…

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Although, according to my non-profit venturing partner and friend Jeremy G. “financial markets will crash on Thursday” , I believe there is currently NO Web 2.0 and/or real estate hype.

Crashes come when no one expect them; and there is hardly any sign of optimism dropping: real estate prices in the US have lowered by a mere 1% in 2006 in the US, and there is still an ocean of opportunities for would-be Web 2.0 entrepreneurs. Look, for instance, at all e-Commerce companies design: old, rusty, definitely not at the cutting-edge of consumer-focused mania. And I often write about entrepreneurial business ideas so check this blog more often.

The economic bubble burst will just not happen now, because everyone expects a crash, or at least the beginning of a downturn.

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Unlucky. I’m just unlucky. Two weeks after I received my Macbook Pro 17′ 120Mb HD, Core Duo 2,16Ghz, Apple announced the release of a Core Duo 2 / 200Mb. HD MacBook pro laptop. It sucks.

Anyways, can you imagine that I spend half of my time on MS Windows (the other half on Mac OS)? The 3 main reasons are:

1) The Flickr uploading software for Mac OS isn’t as good as the one available for Windows: there’s no “right button uploading” feature (obviously, there’s just one button on Apple mice);

2) I use Windows Live Writer to blog, and it’s not available on a Mac;

3) I’m testing IE 7, Firefox 2 and Vista…

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- I had purchased my tickets for quite a while, and what do I see on Ouriel Ohayon’s blog? “Don’t miss Yaron Herman’s concert…”.

Ouriel’s blog was one of the first I started to read, back in end of June 2005 when I arrived in Israel. I was happy to read about someone who with I thought I shared many traits: French guy, newcomer in Israel, both working in the Internet business (Ouriel was at that time working for ICQ; he now is a VC and the TechCrunch France editor), HEC alumni, etc. I was too shy and busy at that time to leave comments..Well no, the reason why I didn’t leave any comment was that I wasn’t blogging myself, and therefore didn’t understand the whole point of it all. Too bad, we could easily have met, back when I lived in Tel Aviv, where I spent 5 thrilling and frantic months. Anyways, it seems that we do share passion for jazz music as well.

The coincidence is: I was excited about Yaron Herman’s concert, and Ouriel started praising Yaron Herman’s jazz music. And indeed, THE CONCERT WAS JUST AMAZING (see my picture right on the right hand of the screen; planning to broadcast a video soon).

- Another, even funnier coincidence. Random surfing on the Internet, I once left a post on Damien Debin’s weblog, someone I didn’t know from anywhere. About 3 days later, Damien came to Ecole Centrale Paris, where I study this year, to make a brief presentation of his company, a software start-up named Serensia, which actually sponsors my program. And you know what? No, you obviously don’t, but I’ll tell you: I was the student in charge of making sure both the sponsor company and the students are happy. So I met with Damien, certain that I had heard his name before. Later in the evening, Eurêka! I had just visited Damien’s blog (in French). By the way, Damien happens to be an amazing photographer and I strongly recommend that you take a look at his pics (access from his blog, see my blogroll).

As far as Serensia is concerned, I will soon (in November) share my humble opinion about a dozen French software or Internet company business models that, according to me, deserve more blogging coverage for one reason or another. If you want to do your homework well, here’s the list I’m planning to go through: Serensia, Neolane, Exalead, Netvibes, CEGID, iGraal, Apodis, ILOG, peuplade.fr, U-Lik, Miyowa, Business Objects, and Brainsonic.

I should also, pretty soon, write a soft of review of my Blogroll because far too many blogs (Hadrien, Xavier, etc.) are just SLEEPING! Lazy people ));

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I had already written about FON, Martin Varsavsky’s newest project consisting in creating a worldwide community of people sharing wireless hotspots.

Martin (I don’t know him personnaly but since I read his excellent blog – see my blogroll, everyday, I believe I have the right to skip his last name) recently published a post showing (entitled “T-Mobile vs. FON”, in Spanish) how FON should take over T-Mobile pretty soon in Germany, as the leading hotspot provider.

Well, for once, the French won’t try to compete, but rather coopete. To my knowledge, the following piece of information hasn’t yet been released anywhere, and I don’t know whether anybody at FON knows about it (I guess they do though), but Orange plans to integrate a FON IP pattern in its soon-to-be-launched (Spring 2007) software named Connexion Kit.

This is good news for all parties:

- For Orange who won’t have to fight against the French FON community (often client of Orange as well), which would anyways have been a pure utopia provided that FON hotspots are..free;

- for FON who gains credit for securing partnership agreements with major telecommunication operators, France Telecom being the leading one in Europe;

- for the French and people visiting France: there are currently 17,000 hotspots available in France. The figure seems impressive, but the total area covered is just ridiculous in this 550,000 km2 big country.

PS: to check the FON blog in English out, over here.

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Thanks to this great idea, the police will track your speed limit through your GSM cell phone.Why do you look so unhappy?

Indeed, the mobile communications system being clusterized, a base station permanently tracks your geographical position to manage cluster handover. Don’t worry about privacy, you need to grant access to your GPS localization to the people willing to locate you; that’s why only the police can track you down without you knowing about it.

The system would behave as such: every time the base station locates your signal, your speed is re-calculated. And then, according to the type of the road (city center or highway) and its corresponding speed limit, you get a ticket if you go over the speed limit, and you get bonuses/points/credit/miles/gas discounts for being a good driver.

Of course, many people would switch their cell phone off if such a system was implemented. Which would be great to lower crashes due to people talking on the phone whilst driving. This is called a ‘win-win’ Big Brother – Good Driver system.

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And here’s some evidence i.e. figures from the French market.

• Cable & DSL access figures: x9 in 4 years!

End of 2002: 1,4 million DSL lines opened

End of 2006: 10,5 million DSL lines installed + 600K cable accesses = 11,1 million (62m inhabitants in France)

• Use of VoIP as a support for comunications (you may use it without even noticing): x5 in 1 year!

June 2005: 7% of overall voice communications

December 2005: 15%

October 2006: 40%

The telco market has been consolidating for quite some time, with stocks constantly underperforming financial market trends. I believe it’s time for a come-back of this industry, and I’ll definitely invest my bucks in the companies that have most exposure to the booming broadband Internet & VoIP (both infrastructure & service) markets.

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For those who plan to set up their own company with an idea they got from travelling, pay attention to this post.

True: there are some great ideas abroad; in Japan in telcos and video games, in the US in e-Commerce & retail, in South Korea for consumer electronics, etc. But pay attention to culture.

Here’s one telling example. Look at this statistic (2003): in France, 75% of cell phone users have a contract with a telecom operator. In Italy, 75% of cell phone users use a prepaid card.

Why is that in Italy? Well, the reason is that there is an extremely low minimum wage in Italy. So, the youth often stays at their parents’ home until their late 20s. Consequently, not only do they want to master their communication expenses, they also feel that mum and dad would intercept their mail and see how much money and time they spend talking.

That all makes a hell of a difference in termes of revenues: margins are different (lower in pre-paid, although services higher the bill), distribution channels are unrelated (cost more in prepaid: need for advice; remote refill with pre-paid), pricing differs (more expensive in pre-paid), choice and services too (the French are very keen on sending many SMSs, a huge margin business). Two mobile telecommunications operators, one in France, the other in Italy, are basically (and broadly speaking) involved in 2 different businesses.

What do you think of this major consumer difference between two neighbour countries? Have you experienced similarities between two remote countries, or big discrepancies between two countries close to one another?

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Today, Centrale Paris Master in IT classmates and I enjoyed a breathtaking lecture by Alain Cardon – a French university Professor and genius. Alain Cardon did it all: mathematics, psychology, computer science, neural networks, psychiatry, neuro-biology, philosophy, etc. The width of the domains he masters is never-ending.

To make a very long story very short, Alain Cardon (on the left; on the right: Dimitri Dagot, head of the Centrale Paris Master in Information Technology ) just finished a 20-year long research project to actually come up with a computerized model of the way human brains are conscious, aware of their existence. The potential applications of such discoveries are HUGE, and I prefer not to speak about it not to alter the complex reality of these findings.

IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT TO MAKE YOUR CONTRIBUTION TO THE XXIst CENTURY:

If you are a VC, if you work for a major industrial corporation, or if your personal wealth allows it, Alain Cardon is looking for 1,5m€ (roughly 2m$) to recruit a team of top-level programmers for 18 months, either in France or in the US, and make you make a fortune. You may contact Pr. Alain Cardon at the following mail address: alaincardon[at]aol[dot]com, or calling on his cell phone: +33 6 88 24 01 05.

To prepare for the call, I suggest you brainstorm and start due diligencing from the information available on these websites:

- http://www.alaincardon.net

- http://www.alaincardon-inc.com

- http://www.artificial-brain-project.com

Sorry for this ‘ad’ sort of post, but I find it hard to transmit my enthusiasm for what I heard from Pr. Alain Cardon, who blew us away with the depth of his thoughts and research findings. The above-mentioned websites all have an English section so, even if you’re not from Sequoia, I suggest you take a look at the future of computing.

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The idea is actually not mine but emerged from entrepreneurial talks with one of my current classmates and friend, also named Jeremy.

Our generation came to know about the Internet pretty late compared to the newest offsprings, whose hands are as much dedicated to instant messaging as they are prepared to hold a fork and a knife.

Take a 15-year old boy today: he’s got a blog on which he may write really nasty things about other people, politics, organizations, etc. But what if in 10 years from now, after having forgotten about this late blog, a potential employer googles this boy having turned a brillant lawyer, and finds out about this still on air teenage stupidity? Much worse: what about people on the verge of going under the spotlights? We’re talking here about blogs, but what about articles one would’ve published or pictures/videos having been uploaded a decade ago?

Hence the idea: a geek squad specializing in erasing your past from the Internet, or at least erasing the past you don’t want to hear about anymore.

One may extend the concept by offering an integrated online brand management boutique (targeting CEOs, show business people and politicians for instance), for both organizations and individuals. At first, the service would be tailor-made and therefore not so profitable (cost of learning the tricks of the job), but automatizing the whole process in the same time as market size grows fast, with the upcoming Internet generations, can make of this business such a huge thing that even God might want to put it on his résumé.

Managing one’s self brand or image will necessarily be one of the hot topics of the next decade.

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Or maybe just one comment: Apple makes a margin 25% higher in Europe than in the US provided that 1 Euro is roughly 1.25 USD. So if you purchase for more than 2000 euros on AppleStore, which – I acknowledge, doesn’t happen every day, you’d better go to New York (fare: 500 euros max. for a return trip from Paris or London; it takes no more than 6 hours) for a week-end, bump at Soho or 57th/5th Avenue’s Apple Store for a while, and enjoy Greenwich’s bakeries, Harlem’s Jazz music and Lower East’s restaurants, than wait 3 weeks for your laptop to be shipped.

Consumers don’t usually enjoy being taken for fools. Right now, Apple is surfing on the iPod wave and its brand is in the middle of a momentum (like its stock price). But one day or another, Apple will have to deal with the disruptivity of the Internet, which allows for better price transparency.

PS: by the way, how do you do the Euro symbol on a Mac keyboard?

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Steve Ballmer will be giving a lecture on Wednesday night at Ecole Polytechnique, 10 minutes from where I live on the Ecole Centrale Paris campus, and I’m not sure I’ll be able to make it because it’s exam time over here. Too bad.

So, if any of my beloved readers plan to go there, I’d be glad to publish right here on “Tech IT Easy” the minutes of the event you would write. Please, do it for me, I’d be really grateful if I could just hear (podcast or video podcast) or read what Microsoft’s new captain has to say.

Thank you in advance. I repeat: if you plan to go and listen to Steve Ballmer, let me know!

Addendum 19th October 2006: Benjamin Gauthey, a blogger and Microsoftee I met recently, just published a video podcast of Ballmer’s speech at Ecole Polytechnique. Everything’s here, I especially recommend..no, just to listen to everything.

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I had mentioned in a prior post (click on link for description) that my field project during my Master in Information Technology here at Ecole Centrale Paris could be a network physical mapping software. Well, this is now confirmed.

Our three-strong team (+ 1 project supervisor: Simon ‘Garf’, a computer science Ph.D. student and graduate from Ecole Centrale Paris; + 1 business plan advisor: Olivier Ezratty; + 1 software modeling advisor: Dominique Sauquet; + 1 sponsor company: we’re looking for sponsorship: if you work in a computer networks company and may provide some technical expertise, feel free to contact me) made up of Jean-Sébastien (well..by telephone ), Pierre and I recently gathered to kick-off the project. The present post is a debriefing of our thoughts, since we thought it could be interesting to see how people challenged our technical decisions.

We started with housekeeping issues such as project management tools and the work breakdown: my mates are not in favour of a plain vanilla blog, so we decided to MAYBE go for a wiki; on the responsibility side, Jean-Sébastien will deal with software engineering & development breakdown, Pierre with computer networking issues and relations with technical experts, and I with the business plan and handling relations with potential clients that will help us develop the functional specs. We will all take part of all processes: writing a rather brief business plan to help us keep in mind that the software has a market (if it actually has one), meet with potential clients, take part of technical meetings, develop the software, etc. On this latter point, I should be assigned with parts of the user interface, which is fine since it’s a rather simple part and I’m a beginner in software programming.

Technically speaking, Jean-Séb and Pierre had priorly thought of potential solutions to our problem: we plan to map networks. That’s right. But…isn’t security one of the major purposes for having a network? So why would a computer network allow our software to actually draw a map of it?

Here’s a list of the potential outcomes of our problem, provided that our application architecture is so far based on a Live CD (a CD on which one may write data) we would insert on one of the network’ machines:

* Provided that the Live CD would already detect the IP address of the machine it’s running on and that a private IP address starts may start like this (see picture on your right) 192.168.[XXX].[XXX], we may first write a software that would ping all IP addresses network possibilities. Provided that 000<=XXX<=256, that’s 65 536 possibilities. Jean-Sébastien having tested detection time (3 sec. when there’s no firewall, 30 secs. when there’s security), this solution would cost between 54 hours (if no firewall at all) and 546 hours (if highly secured) – lowered down to respectively 30 minutes and  hours considering that a 100-strong multi-threading is feasible. This is reasonable. There should however exist a more elegant outcome like limiting the search to between 5 and 45 minutes. But then, we couldn’t certify effective results unless we give the software clear instructions like “scan the nearest addresses first, and extend your range”. Feasible.

* A second option could be to insert, further to the master Live CD, a slave Live CD on a second machine in a nearby sub-network. Both CDs would send a traceroute message to each other, mapping out the path between themselves. We could repeat the operation until the network’s entirely mapped. Probably effective, but not so time efficient: it costs someone to monitor mapping operations, and SME CFOs (also doing the CIO job) we target probably have other things to do. This is however an option we’ll explore.

* A third option relies in slightly changing the software’s aim and making it a tool to help firewall settings. The Live CD would send an nmap request to all neighbouring ports, enabling the mapping of all used and useful ports in the sub-network – which can really help an administrator configure a firewall. This option doesn’t anyways prevent us from searching and mapping the IP addresses, MAC addresses and masks of the network machines, as primarily defined.

* A fourth option could be to focus on Windows-powered companies with a domain name networks. Indeed, such networks are regulated by a domaine controller, which constantly (every 30 secs.) sends a message saying “I’m your domain controller” to all the devices plugged on the network. Therefore, provided that the only way to infiltrate the domain controller is through Windows, we would just have to collect data.

Four last, not uninteresting things (Our Market, The Competition, Legal Disclaimer, So What?):

1) Our Market: Provided that our software won’t technically fit huge, complex MNC networks, we first decided to remain in the less than 200 machine companies range. But most probably, a company with 200 network devices already have a network administrator, who would already have purchased a router – hence making the results provided by our software sort of less certain. Consequently, our market will probably be the 5 – 50 headcount range companies. I have to thing about it more, but that’s already a huge market, even if we only focus on the Paris region (although we plan to write the software in English).

2) The Competition: We’ve decided to thoroughly look at the following software to see what has been done in the past and which functions still remain unimplemented:

http://www.10-strike.com/lanstate/ – LanState has many many features, but it is probably too broad a software and not enough a mapping software to be competing with our project

http://www.microsoft.com/mom/evaluation/overview/default.mspx – MS

Operations Manager, a network monitoring software; needless to say, we’re Microsoft’s number one enemy as Paul Allen recently stated (just kidding);

http://nagios.org/ – an open-source networks administrator, pretty hard to set up;

http://www.neon.com/ls1.shtml?gclid=COOvsMe3q4cCFSV-Qgod729v6Q – very serious competition in many respects;

http://insecure.org/nmap/ – free, open source, and it works pretty well;

http://www.i2g.fr/ – for physical networks mapping (cemetaries, electricity, gas, etc.);

http://www.quaternet.fr/whatsup/whatsup.asp – for very small networks (<=10 machines) only.

3) Legal Disclaimer: we’re not hackers, we want to empower our clients with the appropriate physical mapping tools. Anyways, this wouldn’t be of any interest to us: in France, breaking in into someone’s office and stealing a laptop costs 1 year in jail whilst penetrating and stealing information through the Internet costs 5 years in jail and up to 200Keuros (250 K$). Food for thought…

4) So What? – We plan to make, upon completion of the software prototype, of this project an open-source project available to the free software online community for programmers from all over the world to build on what we would’ve done in 4,5 months.

There you go with the network mapping software project’s first review. I’ll keep you readers posted. Ideas most welcome, both on the technical and business sides.

If you’ve got a footstep in a small or medium company and you fell such a software may help, please contact me so that if you help us with devising the funtional specifications, we’ll assist you in the deployment of the software for free.

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