Good and great news, my preferred-business-partner, Nick Stefania, who is managing ecenter solutions with me, has finally started to blog – Zone out.

As you can see below, we are managing the stuff together. Really, count the number of fingers, we are 2 :-)

Why should you subscribe to his blog / RSS feed (I am giving you the URL of the feed, Nick has forgotten to make an explicit link to it :-) ?

1. He is a very smart, experienced (old? 44, umh, let’s say it is ok) and nice guy
2. He is “just” the best project manager I have ever seen in action, world class!
3. He is an incredible communicator
4. If you are reading my blog, you are sharing some values and points of interest with me. So do I with Nick. Consequently Nick will be interesting also for you
5. He has some strong Italian roots, which is annoying for soccer’s discussion, which is great for wines / meals / restaurants / etc.
6. He has a marvelous and very nice wife, also with “some” Italian roots, but more from the south of Italy ;-)
7. Great humor, excepted for soccer’s discussions
8. I am irritated, just because your are asking, I have a *lot* of respect for him, so have a look ;-)

Two great post-examples from Nick:

• about our discussion with Stephen Wallis (bio, blog), VP of Optaros, who is helping us to define a commercial license with Open Source advantages and components (hehehe, you are interested? Stay tuned :-)
• about Dabbawala (Wikipedia’s article), an absolute great Indian story coming from our last hired colleague, Roy, who joined us in Mai and who is coming from Bangalore.

Just forget the post about the Italian victory, less important….

So Nick, welcome in the blogosphere!

I am very proud to announce that one of our Board of Directors’ mate from Boomerang, Alex Martin – CFO of Bioxell and Member of the Executive Committee, has organized the IPO on the Swiss Exchange (SWX: BXLN) of the company he is working for. BioXell is a biotech company based in Milano – Italy and is coming from a Roche spin-off in 2002. It is focusing on the discovery, development and commercialization of novel therapeutics for urological disorders and inflammatory diseases that represent large unmet medical needs. They have raised to date a total of approximately €76m through top healthcare VC investors including MPM Capital, Index Ventures, BB BIOTECH, AlpInvest Partners, Life Sciences Partners, and TVM Capital, as well as Finlombarda. About 60 people are working now for BioXell.

Some links to the news:

• Press Release from BioXell (pdf)
• BioWorld: Italy’s BioXell Goes Public On Swiss Market, Gets CHF57.8M
• Forbes: BioXell says new shares priced at 44 sfr/share, at bottom of price range
• AltAssets: BioXell lists on Swiss Stock Exchange

Congratulations Alex, great step :-)

[via Cambridge Evening News]

Syd Barrett, founder of pop super-group Pink Floyd, was laid to rest at a family funeral in Cambridge. […] Syd, whose real name was Roger Keith Barrett, died earlier this month aged 60 at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, after living in Cambridge for 30 years. He was born in the city in 1946 and formed Pink Floyd in 1965, but later withdrew from public life and returned to live in the basement of his mother’s semi-detached house.

The band carried on without him, and penned one of their hits – Shine on You Crazy Diamond- as a tribute to their missing frontman.

Have a look at the great Wikipedia’s bio of Syd Barrett, as usual, great material, lots of interesting links. There is also an official website.

With such kind of beautiful weather, it is just wonderful to stay at home, to rest yourself, to make some reserve of sun, to play, to read, to swim :-)

These types of week-ends are as holidays. And, by being in the garden and the pool, I really remember of far we are lucky and why we are working hard.

I hope you also had a great time during the last days.

ComputerWorld New-Zealand published an article SOA hurdles forcing changes in IT units (pdf) from Heather Havenstein on May 15, 2006.

Helvetia overcame the “tough exercise” of bringing developers on board by using a change management programme from Hewlett-Packard, says Didier Beck, director of Helvetia’s eBusiness Centre.

Beck says the HP tools and services helped developers integrate 15 systems into a centralised SOA platform. “The way we are working today is really very different because before, there wasn’t any contact between the different subsidiaries — they had all their own development processes and tools,” he says. “The consequences and impact were really quite high.”

As planned, my old mate Manu, the CEO of Boomerang, and myself were at the Montreux Jazz Festival the day before yesterday evening.

As usual, great evening, great atmosphere, great organization, music and public. Perfect :-)

Manu and myself with … Freddie

Freddie Mercury

Fourplay (Bob James, Nathan East, Larry Carlton, Harvey Mason)

Montreux by night

[via eWeek.com]

Open Source approach and Microsoft, there are links, have a look!

A commercial company has to build intellectual property, while the GPL, by its very nature, does not allow intellectual property to be built, making the two approaches fundamentally incompatible […].

Licenses like the BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and commercial software, on the other hand, are quite compatible with one another […].

“One of the things I have learned is that engineers who work on commercial software really can’t work on open source on GPL and engineers who work on GPL can’t work on commercial software. You really have to separate the two”.

Asked what Microsoft had learned from the open-source community and what it could still learn, he said the development methodologies are very interesting, and in fact Microsoft has made community development process a standard part of its process.

“There were definite learnings for us on that. Open source was way ahead of us on that five years ago and we have learned from them. This whole thing where Microsoft is an open blog environment is about us trying to really embrace these existing trends that are very important in the industry and to being open to our communities across all of our products. Fascinating things happen there. That model is the way of the future and we’re embracing it”.

I am using both LinkedIn and openBC for keeping in touch and managing my small network. I could find an interesting presentation about openBC from an Optaros‘ conference about the web2.0 trends. Interesting stuff.

• openBC was founded in 2003 and is currently the foremost business networking platform in Europe and Asia with 1.2 million members.
• openBC’s innovative networking and communications technology is offered in 16 languages and operates across all industries.
• openBC is an open and secure network. The “six degrees of separation” theory is put into practice both professionally and visually here.
• openBC offers a basic and a premium membership. This business model makes openBC a profitable business networking platform.
• Member numbers have increased approx. tenfold since Jul 04
• Monthly user growth 12%
• openBC usage: Over 220 million page impressions per month
• 70% of users have visited openBC in the last 30 days
• Groups on openBC: More than 3,300 groups on openBC, over 170,000 group articles per month
• The company

• Open Business Club GmbH was founded in 2003 in Hamburg by Lars Hinrichs (HH) and Bill Liao(AI)
• In 2004 it raised a first round through swiss matching platform BrainsToVentures within Business Angels serving as “Network Angels”
• Reached opeational break-even end of 2004
• In late 2005 a second round of financing lead by Wellington Partners and the initial investors raised over 8.7 Mio CHF
• In 2006 openBC is forcing its internationalisation acquiring First Tuesday Zurich and launching JV in China and India.

Have a look at my OpenBC’s profile here and LinkedIn’s profile there.

I am playing a bit with geoportail.fr, a new service like GoogleMaps. geoportail is more limited because it just shows the French territory, which is sometimes an adavantage :-)

Indeed, geoportail has some very good representation from the … French West Indies, including St.Barths. Hehe. Let’s have a small tour: geoportail picture, and then some “real” pictures from by two travels to St.Barths.

Baie de St-Jean

Les Salines

Plage des Salines

Plage du Gouverneur

Flamands

Gustavia

World Cup 2006: Our “sooooo-old-French-players” have just won against the favorite team, Brazil.

What for a great match, after having won against Spain on Tuesday :-) What is also just crazy is that the Brazilians had just one shot on goal during the whole game.

And what for a game for Zidane :-)

[via forbes.com]

In front of France President Jacques Chirac, the French made Brazil look so ordinary – at times amateurish – that the yellow-clad Brazilians in the crowd even were whistling at their team late in the match.

[via worldsoccer.com]

Ronaldo had a couple of fierce shots that Barthez managed to deny, but overall, the attacking quartet of Ronaldo, Ronaldinho, Kaka and Adriano simply had not functioned and on the night the French, and in particular the imperious Zidane, fully deserved their win.

The favourites are out, but they can have few complaints about their exit. They had struggled to justify their status as favourites from the moment they began the tournament and the lingering suspicion that the team were not as good as their individual reputations, looks fully justified.

For France, the dream continues, and on this form, they must fancy their chances of emulating their 1998 success. Such a thought seemed unlikely two weeks ago, but one can only marvel at their current renaissance.

[via cbc.ca]

France’s victory also keeps alive the career of Zinedine Zidane, who was sensational against Brazil with his magical play in midfield. Considered one of the greatest players of his era, the midfield maestro plans to retire at the end of the World Cup.