You perhaps remember (post), Nick and myself were in Moscow, Russia last November for the first International Life & Pension conference.

An article about this conference was published in a Russian newspaper called The Insurer. Have a look, specially p19!

The Insurer – Breeders of Life (p14-19)

Technological aspects of life insurance were discussed broadly, then in considerable detail. The ins and outs of multichannel distribution were covered by Didier Beck, CEO of e-Center Solutions, Helvetia Patria Group, Switzerland and his colleague Nick Stefania.

Second evening at a Venecian Palazzo

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[via Knowledge@Wharton]

Some thoughts about some strategic moves by Microsoft.

Indeed, Microsoft is a company in transition, and investors, customers and the entire technology industry would be wise to pay attention. At issue is whether Microsoft has grown too big to be nimble enough to compete with its long list of rivals on many fronts: Google in Internet search and advertising, Sony in video games with the launch of its Playstation 3 on November 17, Linux inside the corporation, and Apple Computer in digital media, to name just a few. […]

Kaplan, however, argues that Microsoft should be experimenting with new markets and that even a failure isn’t a waste of money. “A big company like Microsoft should be running a lot of (potentially conflicting) experiments. Only some will work out. Creativity must almost by definition involve failed experiments. That’s why creative destruction is the essential dynamic of the marketplace.” […]

Microsoft is worth $236 billion as of May 12. If a startup becomes a company with $2 billion in annual revenue, it is considered a success. Microsoft would need more than 100 successful business launches just to keep its current market capitalization if the Windows and Office franchise were eroded. “There’s nothing you can do to be offensive when you are talking about hundreds of billions of dollars,” says Metrick. “All of these new ventures are small potatoes if you lose Windows and Office.” […]

Meds is the great last album from Placebo. Yesterday, it was annouced that Placebo will bring a concert in Zurich, Switzerland on October 6, 2006. This time, I have managed to buy two tickets, one for Laurent and one for myself.

I am sure, this will be a great experience ;-)

It seems that enough of you have crossed their fingers to help us :-) The migration went well during the week-end, the System Acceptance Test was ok for all the Application Owners. And this infrastructure is … FAST (factor 3 to 4, based on the first statistics).

A lot of our 12’000 users wanted to test the new infrastructure, so that it seems that we had one of our highest load of the history of the platform. As proof-of-the-pudding, not bad!

More to come till the end of this week and the end of the first stabilization phase.

First evening at the restaurant Cipriani

First wonderful evening at the restaurant Locanda Cipriani. This special restaurant is situed on the Torcello island at the northern end of the Venetian lagoon.

Me eating….fish :-)

[via Seth Godin]

Some interesting points from Seth.

I think comments are terrific, and they are the key attraction for some blogs and some bloggers. Not for me, though. First, I feel compelled to clarify or to answer every objection or to point out every flaw in reasoning. Second, it takes way too much of my time to even think about them, never mind curate them. And finally, and most important for you, it permanently changes the way I write. Instead of writing for everyone, I find myself writing in anticipation of the commenters. I’m already itching to rewrite my traffic post below. So, given a choice between a blog with comments or no blog at all, I think I’d have to choose the latter.

So, bloggers who like comments, blog on. Commenters, feel free. But not here. Sorry.

[via Jeff]

As one of our marketing consultants, Richard Currier, has always told our portfolio companies, “you market the vision, and sell the product.” If you get too locked into talking about a product, then your partner or customer gets stuck into thinking about who else does this and why are you different. Getting into a feature/function battle in the first meeting is not a great way to start. Sure enough, our prospective partner started naming several companies asking us how we differed from them. If you start with a vision first and clearly talk about your view of the market in the future and how your product evolves from where it is today to a roadmap of the future, then it is easier to differentiate your company and bring the discussion to a higher level.

My dear readers, as you were more than 81’000 (unique visitors) last months to access/read my blog, which means, on average about 2’500 visitors per day, I would like to ask you to cross your fingers for us. Just in case ;-)

Our infrastructure (dev, pre-prod, prod) is now 5 years old (!) and we are completely at the limit of its capability… Time to change ;-) And what for a change!!

We are finalizing this week-end the following migration:

• from HP L2000 (RISC Processor, 32 bits, 440MHz) to HP DL385/DL585 (AMD Opteron processor, 64 bits, 2.6GHz)
• from HP-UX v11 to SLES 9 (64 bits)
• from Apache v1 to Apache v2.0.49
• from Tomcat v3 to Tomcat v5.0.19
• from JDK v1.4 to JDK v1.5 (64 bits)
• from Oracle 9i to Oracle 10g (64 bits)
• from a Frankfurt – Germany location to a Basle – Switzerland one
• with a two datacenters concept (as Business Recovery Service)
• and about 650GB to transfer (net)

The “old” infrastructure is now stopped, we are transferring and importing the data on the new Linux infrastructure. On Sunday, System Acceptance Test for all the applications and Go/No go for the launch of the new environment.

So, again, if 2’500 people cross their fingers on Saturday and 2’500 people on Sunday, this should *help*.

Thanks in advance!

This evening, we had a marvelous sunset at home. Picture taken with my Canon EOS 20D, lens EF 17-40 at 21:30 CEST.