On March, 2, I published a blog concerning Skype, a P2P net-phoning service, which works really great (excellent sound quality, ease of use, no firewall – routeur – NAT configuration required). We are using this tool intensively since then, and our experience is very good. You cannot imagine the positive impact on costs :-)

One anecdote: the two founders of this voice over IP (VoIP) company are Zennstrom & Friis, well-known as the founders of…KaZaA!

Now, let’s talk about business and strategy:

1) Skype announced a new investment of $19 million (this money is coming from two investors, one of them is Index Ventures, which is also investing in….MySql), to be able to finance the link between this VoIP tool and the traditional phone network. Skype will buy a huge amount of minutes by traditional telephone carriers, and sell them to their clients with a “premium-service”.

2) Skype will announce a deal with a major European cordless home phone maker which will integrate Skype in its phones.

3) Skype will furthermore announce a partnership with Pantronics, a maker of headsets for office and home phones.

Great!!

stowe boyd published his first impression about the new beta version of Groove. i’m a convinced (private and professional) user of Groove v2.5, which contains some strange and disconcerting user interface components (i agree with stowe) in the current version. the new one seems to be quite better in this area, and pretty well integrated in Windows. i will start the beta-test tomorrow. stay tuned!

offshoring – the outsourcing outside the US (eg. India, Vietnam, Philippines, China) of some activities as software development, call center, research & development – is becoming one of the most discussed theme in America. actually, an election theme! let’s read the position of Kerry and Bush. interesting to see (again) that the self-declared country of liberalism is actually … not liberal ;-)

if you are interested in the strategic topic of entrepreneurship, i would like to mention that the european union released last week some VERY interesting articles and studies about this field. yes, it is not a joke, i’m actually speaking about EU’s publishings ;-) really a great job, i was completely and positively surprised.

1) first, you can find a short introduction to the entrepreneurial theme and the situation today in europe. this paper contains also some clues about: why it is important to talk about that, the social role of entrepreneurs in the society, etc.

2) secondly, the EU released last year a study about the 10 questions for the european agenda on entrepreneurship, from balancing risk and reward, to the availibility of financing new businesses.

3) thirdly, the Gallup company conducts each year, and for the EU, a survey with the goal of comparing attitudes in Europe (also in the different european countries) and the US towards eutrepreneurship. really and definitely two different ways of tackling this subject (socially, financially, from an educational point of view, etc.).

4) finally, the working group proposed an action plan to be able to improve the situation in the comming years in Europe in this field.

i was impressed by:

– the quality and “ease of reading” (yes!) of the different contributions

– the fact that EU tries to push this strategic issue

a blog from the MIT’s technology review on 10 march informs us that sean breed, the Razor1911’s leader will have to stay for about 4 years in jail. this guy and his piracy group was definitely very active, and for quite a long time.

The article contains some imprecisions (cf. comments) but anyway… i was badly surprised that sean also “cracked” the cisco customer web site for …. money :-( nothing to do with the perhaps-now-old-fashioned hacker’s principles. a shame.

Again, a small interesting tool from Google: the so-called Google Deskbar, one of the Google Labs‘ idea (i.e. we are not talking about a released version).

This tool installs a search box within your Windows taskbar and enables Google’s searches without having to start your browser. The results appear in a small inset window opened near the taskbar. Another possibility: you can type mathematical operations in this box and resolve them. Try it, it seems to be worth :-)

Google Deskbar

if you are using adobe acrobat/reader, you surely agree with me that the loaded time for this program is damned unbelievably looooooong!! and there is a way to solve that: just install Adobe Reader Speed-up from Joseph Cox (i like this guy ;-), run it once (really, just once!), choose the option [SpeedUp – Fast] and you will see. your adobe reader is working like hell, faster than notepad, also the plug-in version integrated in the browsers.

this tool requires the VB runtimes and actually de-activate a majority of plug-ins which are completely useless for most of us.

a MUST HAVE.

Adobe Reader Speed-up v1.15

you think you can make the difference between digital and real pictures. let’s have a look at “Is it a fake or foto?” you will have to find out if the presented pictures are digital or real ones. whaou, quite challenging!! i got 6 out of 10.

a Fast Company’s article about the boom and crack of Internet during the last four years: what we learned in the New Economy.

i’ve added some pictures of my trip in Toscana (Italy) in August 2003 and i’ve updated some of my professional references. i’ve changed my homepage, which now contains a short description of the web site. furthermore, you can find a site map.