innoveo, the reason why I haven’t got the time to blog.

innoveo, the result of months of discussions, negotiation, turbulences, pressure, risk-taking, unknown, and really, sometimes, just BIG shit.

On the other side, since February, an incredible phase, full of learnings, of absolutely great and decisive support from so many people. From my family and Friends. And hey, the most important support, the reason of this new venture, the TEAM. Yes, the driver of the Management Buy-out was not ego-driven. The driver was not the money. The driver was simply to keep this crazy team together, to build-up a platform for our future, with the necessary strategic freedom. And some room for implementing our vision!

We have always said that we have a particular, a quite special team-spirit. A lot of people thought that we were arrogant. Now, guys, I think that it is difficult for you *not to recognize* that we have a strong team-spirit ;-) During the 6 months of the negotiation process, the team has remained absolutely stable and compact, we have delivered greatly all the time (I am very proud of that!), and 14 of the 15 people are joining innoveo on October 1, 2007.

So, my colleagues and friends, Andrea, Bojan, Cédric, Consti, Laurent, Lorenz, Oli, Olivier, Peter, Philippe, Rolf, Roy: it is so great and exciting to work with you, such an honor for me that you have so much trust, a kind of gift :-) Thank you so much!

[left to right: Roy, Peter, Consti, Laurent, Oli, myself, Lorenz, Cédric, Olivier, Rolf, Andrea, Nick, Bojan, Philippe]

All this process would have been totally impossible without my friend and Business partner, Nick Stefania. Alone, we wouldn’t have reached this success. So, “1 + 1 = 3”. Or, as Lorenz said one time: “2 4 all, all 4 2”. We are growing together, and … it is not finished! Some people have tried to divide us, but hey, it is not so easy ;-)

We are also very proud to have constituted such a Board of Directors, but this is for another post!

What else? Perhaps a short explanation of the “why today“: actually we have all resigned today and signed our new working contract with innoveo. So I have thought it is a good time to post ;-) And I must admit, I couldn’t wait anymore to share that with you.

Our Corporate website – http://www.innoveo.com – will be launched on October 1, 2007.

My dear readers, I am really sorry, not enough time to post for the moment. A new professional story will be started on October 1, 2007. More on this blog in some days ;-)

For now on, you can find me on:
– twitter
– facebook
– flickr (I have a pro-account now there and uploading tons of pictures).

See you there in some days!

Take care, Didier

via nytimes.com

Some great pictures from Vincent Laforet, all in the field of sports, and specially a great serie in Hawaii, Oahu for the Rip Curl Pro Pipeline Masters in 2006. Just impressive.

© Vincent Laforet

via vpod.tv

The real world and why it matters.

During the last leweb3 conference in Paris (December 2006, I know I am…late ;-), I had the chance to be “confronted” with the reality of Hans Rosling (his blog, wikipedia).

Confronted, because this very smart guy is definitely bringing a new and fresh view on a lot of stereotypes we have concerning the different countries in the world… Really.
Chance, because yes, it was a great chance to see Hans and to ask yourself if the way you are thinking is the right one or not.

Very very refreshing. Have a look, it is also very entertaining and funny. Great what Hans can do with statistics :-)

Some inputs I have noted down during the presentation:

• we meet wrong preconceived ideas concerning the situation in the world, our common taxonomy: western world – long life in small family vs. third world – short life in large family
• in 1962, 2/3 of the countries, representing 3 billion people, were in the situation of “short life in large family”
• in 2004, about all the countries have joined the “long life in small family”!
• about 2 children per woman all other the world
• 2050-2060: 9-10 billion people, stabilized
• the bedrooms of the world have not globalized, but modernized!
• we have to think in terms of modernization, and not globalization
• length of life is not medical doctors, it is the bathroom and the kitchen
• if you have food in the kitchen and soap in the bathroom, the life expectency is going from 40 to 60
• medicine will bring the years above 60
• basic life conditions have dramtically improved all over the world in the last 40 years
• poverty line is at 1$/day, that means when you have to invest 80% of your income to buy the food (we are talking about purchasing dollar, i.e. what you can locally buy with the dollars)
• the 20% richest take 74% of the money, the 20% poorest take 2% of the money, 60% of the current population take 24%. this money is investing in the kitchen and the bathroom
• success is when a population can reach the 3$/day level: there, families have secured school for the kids and medical services for four family
• we have to develop a fact-based world view fron now on
• the countries of the world are going through their own modernization projects, each at its own pace
• rural development has stopped now, there are about 3 billion people living in cities and 3 billion people living in rural areas, the 2 next generations will live in cities
• http://www.gapminder.org!!!
• there is not real factual link between democratization and modernization
• cheap electricity first in poor countries!
• we are loosing 10 million kids per year because we cannot deliver enough drugs to the countries, 10 million kids per year
• Sweden should be a good part of the world vs. Sweden should be part of a good world!

via Stephen Walli

Stephen has published some inputs concerning 3 possible benefits of open sourcing, and 3 things that you *cannot* expect from such kind of process.

The 3 benefits

1. Open source software is a great way to enable innovation on your platform. […]
2. Your community of users is an incredible asset to spread the word.  It’s not just about people using your software for free and telling other people about it, but rather the fact that developers will start taking it to work and it will sneak in under the floorboards. […]
3. Use open source software to rapidly develop new product complements for your solution.  It helps amortize the cost of development/support/maintenance across the community of developers/users/customers/partners/competitors. […]

The 3 “do not expect”

1. Just because you published the source code does not make your product any more remarkable to your customers.  At the end of the day, you have a business to run, and that means customers need solutions to their problems. […]
2. Understand your value proposition and your core competency, and choose your license wisely: if your entire core competency that enables your core value proposition to your customers is embodied in the software, DON’T publish it in such a way that you give away the company. […]
3. Just because you published the source code does not mean the world is going to work for you for free.[…]

via CICLOPS

Again, an absolutely fantastic view of the Saturn rings from the Cassini-Huygens mission, with great shadows and light effects.

The rings of Saturn glow softly as sunlight from below wends its way through. Some of the Sun’s light bounces off the rings’ opposite side and can be seen illuminating Saturn’s night side southern hemisphere.

Such a view is only possible from the Saturn-orbiting Cassini spacecraft.

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 33 degrees above the ringplane. Shadows of the innermost rings are cast upon the planet at upper left. The edge of Saturn’s shadow cuts a straight line across the rings near upper right.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on March 30, 2007 at a distance of approximately 1.9 million kilometers (1.2 million miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 117 kilometers (73 miles) per pixel.

So, it is done and signed :-) About 5 months for 11 pages and an appendix of 191 pages.
The new foundations are now in place.

It is just…crazy that we could manage that.

I will need some days now to recover.

Laurent said a *lot* more here ;-)

via Adding Simplicity

Laurent has sent me (for a while…) this interesting presentation concerning the eBay infrastructure (Nov 2006).

eBay, some figures from end 2006

• in 33 countries, in 7 languages, 24×7, 99.94% availability
• number of registered users: 212 million
• number of pageviews per day: over 1 billion
• volume of data stored: over 2 PB (petabytes)
• number of API calls per month: 3 billion
• number of SQL executions per day: over 26 billion

Code production

• about 6 million LOC (Line Of Code) in production
• 300 new features per quarter
• 100’000 lines of code rolled-out every 2 weeks
• entire site rolled every 2 weeks
• about 100 WAR config

Architecture Lessons Learnt

• horizontal scaling at every tier
• prefer asynchronous integration
• virtualize components
• automated failure detection and notification

Current architecture

• since 2002, a J2EE architecture
• MSXML framework for the presentation layer
• no stored procedure
• extensive use of prepared statements and bind variables
• scales on servlets and a rewritten connection pool
• keep Application Tier completely stateless
• cache where possible
• strictly partition application into tiers: presentation, business, integration

via Tom Peters

Don’t know if you follow the Tom Peters’ blog (yes THE Tom Peters), very interesting stuff there, very inspiring and empowering. In one of his last post, Tom is speaking about his “rules”. I personally like them a lot, very simple but very powerful. Have a look:

• Hire Great People (Resilient, Passionate)
• Try a Lot of Stuff (S.A.V.-Screw Around Vigorously/R.F.A.—Ready. Fire. Aim.)
• All “Wow” All the Time (Shoot for the moon—in every circumstance)
• Enjoy It While It Lasts (And it ain’t gonna last forever, so you might as well keep swinging)

In the same post, Tom is also bringing two very nice quotes:

From BusinessWeek
In business, you reward people for taking risks. When it doesn’t work out, you promote them because they were willing to try new things. If people come back and tell me they skied all day and never fell down, I tell them to try a different mountain.

From Bloomberg by Bloomberg
We made mistakes, of course. Most of them were omissions we didn’t think of when we initially wrote the software. We fixed them by doing it over and over, again and again. We do the same today. While our competitors are still sucking their thumbs trying to make the design perfect, we’re already on prototype version #5. By the time our rivals are ready with wires and screws, we are on version #10. It gets back to planning versus acting: We act from day one; others plan how to plan—for months.

So, again, let’s mark this very special day :-)

Take a lot of innovation on the business and technology sides – inno.
Put a Latin verb which means “I see” – veo.
Extended by some very nice solutions – solutions.

Add the most important and central part: the core, the “reason why”, the driver, a completely great motivated and compact team, made of very nice professionals who are sharing strong values, some dreams, and a vision. And who would absolutely like to continue to work together for some years.

And you have: innoveo solutions

Next chapter in some days/weeks. Stay tuned.