Author Archives: Didier

ST BARTH DAY4 – Landing at St Martin and villa

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So, it’s snowing at home, -8°C in the morning. Here it’s extremely hot, more a summer weather than a winter one, actually. 31°C during the day, 24°C during the night. We are not so far away from the 40°C between our both “homes”!

It’s very dry and warmer than the other years at the same period. The sun is very aggressive, our son had a allergic reaction in his face, which never happened in the last 6 years… Today he’s going better, and we could have a super nice walk at Grand Fond. More on that tomorrow!

The villa over Saint Jean bay

Just to locate us from the Saint Jean beach.

 

Landing at Saint Martin

A small video from the right side of the Airbus A-340 300 we took between Paris and Saint Martin, during the landing at the Juliana airport.

http://visuals.didierbeck.com/ria/ShizVidz-2010012201.swf

Excellent!

ST BARTH DAY2: Saint Jean and Do Brazil

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Sitting on the terrace, 22:30, still 25°C, having a good cigar after a super dinner at Do Brazil. Had a Sex on the Beach cocktail (excellent!), a beef Tataki on fresh pink ginger with hand-made French fries :-) And a ginger rhum at the end. By the way, yesterday I had a fantastic Ti-Punch with a very interesting old rhum.

We were at the Saint Jean beach this morning, first swimming in the ocean (26°C). Just marvelous. We have met also two friends that are on the island since 4 months (lucky!!). Was not organized, but as usual, everything happens here in a “cool” way ;-)

Saint Jean beach

Landing at Saint Barth from the ocean

Another view from the villa

Playing with my EOS 5d MarkII with my new EF 35mm f/1.4L lens. ISO 200, f/9.

 

View from the villa by night

Same configuration, with a tripod. ISO 3200, f/4.5 , exposure time: 20s.

 

Stars in the sky

With the same configuration, I have taken also some pictures from the sky. No cloud but a crazy number of stars. Almost no light “polluting”. ISO: 6400, f/6.3 , exposure time: 30s.

As you see, life is hard here!

ST BARTH DAY1 – Knockin’ on Heaven’s door

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Wow, posting from the terrace of our rent villa in Saint Barth :-) 26°C, some wind, listening to Placebo. It’s now fully dark, beautiful sky with a lot of stars.

Wifi is perfectly working, with a better bandwidth as the one I have at home (download 335Kb/s, upload 130 Kb/s).

It’s 22:15 local time, i.e. we are up since … 23 hours. Which is good to forget the jetlag as fast as possible.

The travel was the faster ever, really no issue this time, including all our luggage on time. We were at Saint Barth at 15:45 this afternoon. So enough time to get the car (a Mini Cooper Cab), go to the villa, have a first quick dip in the swimming-pool, get some food at the supermarket for the breakfast tomorrow, and go to the first restaurant. As usual, we have started with a visit at the Hideaway. And a first walk at the Saint Jean beach by night after the dinner. Already seen/met a lot of “known faces” and friends on the island.

View from the Airbus before landing at Saint Marteen

View from the terrace

A part of the swimming-pool, overhanging the Saint Jean Bay

Weather forecast is quite good for the coming days here. It seems that a lot of flights from New-York were canceled due to some snowstorms…

The difference of temperature between Saint Barth and Zurich could reach about 40°C in 2-3 days :-)

Everything is just *fantastic*, as usual here…

Time to go to bed now. My son will be up very early tomorrow, to go to the beach.

On my way to Saint Barth!!

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Dear colleagues, friends, partners, competitors, customers, readers,

As you know, I am waiting for this moment for quite a while!

We have the chance again to visit our “second home-sweet-home”. I cannot say how far I am happy to be there with my wife and my son. To have the time for them. To think about something else as the business and Innoveo (although I love that ;-).

No holidays since last August, quite a long time…

So a good chance for a “hardware” reset, a re-load and recharging.

I wish you all a very good time, take care!

PS: yes, I should be able to publish some pictures & stories from *the* island ;-) Stay tuned!

Alsace nominated as one of the Top10 regions to visit!

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via Lonely Planet

Crazy! In its “fifth eagerly-awaited annual collection of the best places to go and the best things to do around the world for the year ahead”, Lonely Planet, one of the most worldwide renowned source for travelers, has nominated my region, Alsace, as one of the Top 10 Regions to visit in 2010!!

As one of the Top 10 Regions for 2010, Southwest Western Australia “offers variety in spades,” Lonely Planet’s book says. […] Other regions to make the list are Alsace, Bali, Fernando Noronha, Goa, Koh Kong Conservation Corridor, Lake Baikal, Oaxaca, Southern Africa and The Lake District.

For those who don’t know Lovely Planet:

For over 30 years, Lonely Planet has inspired and guided independent travellers to explore the world around them. Our team of expert travel writers are all about on-the-ground research and no-holds-barred opinion. Lonely Planet is passionate about responsible travel and encourages people to make their impact as positive as possible. Whether it be through our trustworthy guidebooks, innovative downloadable digital guides, award-winning website or cutting-edge television programmes, Lonely Planet aims to inspire life-changing travel, where every minute can hold a new experience.

Rehearsal re-launch

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As you may know, I am a “very-amateur” drummer. I have first learned and played percussion in a classical band. And then, played drums in a pop/blues band. Almost nobody knew us, excepted our friends and family, but hey, we had a lot of fun just to play together.

After a long break we have started to rehearse again together. And it brings a lot of pleasure and fun!

We have launched our rehearsals with some Sade and Womack & Womack tracks :-)

Cool.

SmugMug 2009, comparison with Flickr

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Introduction

As you may know, I have left the Flickr service, where I had a Pro Account, for more than one year (in December 2008). Actually, I haven’t deactivated my Flickr account, it is “just” a normal account now, as I didn’t want to break different links on my photostreams. Some limitations are now appearing on my Flickr, i.e.:

  • upload of 100 MB monthly and 10MB per photo
  • 2 videos per month
  • only smaller resized picture accessible
  • only the most recent 200 photos are shown.

So, it is clear that I cannot use anymore this service. On the other side, it’s free!

Comparison Flickr vs. SmugMug

So let’s compare a bit more the different services (SmugMug and Flickr).

Disclaimer: this comparison is a mix of facts and my own subjective rating of both services (still as users from both during months).

CORPORATE FLICKR SMUGMUG
Overall information sold to Yahoo! in March 2005, founders left in 2008 independent, profitable and debt-free
Number of employees around 50 50
Number of photos 4’000 million 766 million
Founding year 2004 2002
STANDARD SERVICE FLICKR SMUGMUG
monthly upload limit 100 MB unlimited
limit per photo 10 MB 12 MB
max. video duration 90s not supported in “standard”
max. video size 150 MB not supported in “standard”
shown size (photo) smaller resized images no reducing resolution
number of photos shown last 200 unlimited
gallery personalization no yes, very nice
slideshows yes, but limited yes, lots of customization possible
costs per year free, but with ads $40
PRO SERVICE FLICKR SMUGMUG
monthly upload limit unlimited unlimited
limit per photo 20 MB 24 MB
max. video duration 90s 10 mn
max. video size 500 MB 600 MB
HD supported 720p 1080p
storage limit unlimited unlimited
bandwidth limit unlimited unlimited
statistics yes yes (far better)
customization no fully, including hostname
batch organization yes, but limited yes, extremely powerful
costs per year $25 $150 (an intermediary “Power” level exists for $60/year)

I am wondering, based on this tables, if it would not have been better to compare the “Pro” service from Flickr with the “Standard” level of SmugMug…

Anyway, you feel perhaps how far both services are different. Perhaps also not with the same target groups/segmentation of customers.

Why I have left Flickr

I have left Flickr for mainly three reasons:

  1. The huge functional differences between Flickr and SmugMug
  2. The lack of innovation and service updates at Flickr. In the last months, nothing happened at Flickr. SmugMug is principally launching new functions and testing new ideas each month!
  3. I was impacting by all the controversies and censorship stories (Thomas Hawk is relating some of them here and here) around Yahoo!/Flickr.

It is clear that the price differences is really huge between both services, but you get something from what you are paying!

Impact of having moved to SmugMug

First, it was quite easy to migrate from Flickr to SmugMug, as you can find a Firefox extension to automatically migrate all your pictures from your Flickr account to SmugMug. The tool is called “SmuggLr” and it is free.

Secondly, based on my SmugMug Pro Account, I have created a new subdomain called “visuals.didierbeck.com” of my own blog “www.didierbeck.com”. Both are now similar from each others, although I am definitely not finished with the customization. I will perhaps also merge both (blog and visuals) in the coming time. All my pictures and videos are now published under the “visuals” subdomains.

Thirdly, and perhaps the most interesting: the effect of having done these changes had a *huge* impact on the traffic of my pictures! I had about 18’000 views on my Flickr pictures within 2 years. I was many times above 100’000 views per month in 2009 on SmugMug! More data about this just below.

Some statistics of my SmugMug in 2009

Some data
about 2009 on visuals.didierbeck.com:

  • Number of image views: 755’000
  • Monthly average in the last 6 months: 105’000
  • Number of image views linked with Saint Barth: 620’000 (!), i.e. 82% of the overall views (!!)
  • Highest traffic in December with more than 130’000 image views
  • Highest image views in a day (since mid November): December 6 with 18’910 views in one day…
  • Bandwidth used during the year: 82 GB
  • Highest bandwidth usage in July with more than 20 GB
  • Most viewed photo since mid November (with about 8’500 views just on this one):

 

Visualization of the traffic during the last 12 months:

Presentation Zeitgeist 2009 @ SlideShare

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SlideShare has published its “ruling trends in the world of presentations for the year gone by”. Funny, interesting, well done!

Some highlights:

  • The average number of slides in a presentation: 19.3
  • The maximum number of slides: 1’375 (!)
  • Presentation typography: Arial 42%, Times New Roman 22% (!), Wingdings 17%
  • Average number of pages per language: max = French with 38 :-)
  • Presentation formats: PPT 61%, PPTX 17%, PPS 14%
  • Average number of pictures: 19, average size of picture: 205 kb
  • 7% of all presentations without a single image!
  • Average size of presentation: 5.4 MB
SlideShare Zeitgeist 2009http://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=mediadecknov1709-091231041051-phpapp02&stripped_title=slideshare-zeitgeist-2009

View more documents from Rashmi Sinha.

Cross-posted on the Innoveo Blog