[via U2log.com]

U2 has played some concerts in Brazil for about one week. One crazy example of their success was the second concert in Sao Paulo, which was sold out in 7 hours. The tickets were exclusively sold by telephone, the call-center received more than 600’000 calls within these 7 hours…

And, in Monterrey:

U2 kicked off the fourth leg of their Vertigo tour in the Mexican city of Monterrey yesterday (Feb. 12). 48 hours before the concert, more than 600 fans were sleeping at the gates of the stadium in order to get into the ellipse; 24 hours before the show, there were more than 2,000 fans.

By the way, U2 won for every category they were nominated, again, at the last Grammy Awards Show:

• Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal for Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own
• Best Rock Song for City of Blinding Lights
• Best Rock Album for How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb
• Song of the Year for Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own
• Album of the Year for How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb

On the top, Steve Lillywhite won a Grammy for Producer Of The Year, Non-Classical category due to his work on How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb.

[via Jeremy]

Good analysis from Jeremy about the strategy of Oracle.

Trying to put MySQL out of business would be a fairly short-term tactical move. I think Oracle is looking 5 years down the road and seeing what the world looks like as the commoditization of enterprise scale infrastructure software components continues. They’re seeing that they “own” a progressively smaller piece of that pie unless they act soon. The rumors of Oracle eyeing JBoss and others are completely in line with this thinking.

If Oracle can become a one-stop shop for folks building the next generation of big business applications, whether or not they use “traditional” Oracle software, the company manages to stay relevant in the new world–and that includes their lucrative consulting services.

Is this reminiscent of IBM’s approach to Linux circa 2001? It sure is.

Gosh, back from 2 weeks in paradise(s). Incredible holidays :-) The eyes full of beautiful colors and wonderful landscapes. And these *beaches*…

As usual, to extend the holidays-feeling, I will publish some pictures and information to share our experience, step-by-step.

First package now!

Anguilla

[click]

[click]

[click]

St.Barths

[click]

[click]

[click]

We are just finished with all the preparation, we are flying in a few hours to Anguilla and St.Barths. The weather seems to be ok there :-) Let’s see how we manage the travel this time….

My dear friends and readers, more than 62’000 unique visitors have visited this blog in January, visits that have generated about 92’000 pageviews, 400’000 hits and 11GB of data transferred. In one month…

Thanks a *lot* for staying a bit here, you are always welcome :-) Take care for the next two weeks, I should post again from February 18, 2006.

[via LetterJames]

[via Seth Godin]

Have a look at this one from Seth, good input concerning speed.

Most businesses don’t fail dramatically.

They do it slowly. […]

The answer, more likely than not, is to consistently and regularly stop the bleeding. To improve the boring stuff.

Organizations fail slowly. They often succeed fast, though. That’s where the remarkable comes in. So, if I had to summarize it: You take a big step up… by being bold. But you avoid a slow death by getting every little thing right.

Pffuuu, 34 years today, happy birthday to me ;-)

Thanks to my grandmother who called me yesterday evening because she was afraid to be late :-) too nice, laurence, julien, andré, nicole, marlyse, joseph, hélène, dany, théo, toni, martine, lars, frape, hans, silvio, laurent, nick, michel, valérie, marc, markus, dominique, nelly, manu, patrick, véro, sylvie, openBC :-), giordana, thomas, nico, and all others I have forgotten to mention spontaneously (outch)….

Great to live with you and/or to work with you and/or to have fun with you and/or just to be your friend :-)

Swiss Company Proved Value of Services Architecture Before the Name Was Even Coined

Wow, that’s us :-)

I am very excited and proud to announce you that Edward Cone (contributing editor at Wired magazine; a senior writer for Inter@ctive Week; an opinion columnist for Greensboro News & Record; a freelancer covering business, technology, and a wide variety of other stuff; and a staff writer at Forbes) – Oh Ed, I haven’t known that you have a blog… – interviewed us end of 2005 for CIO Insight.

His article about the ecenter, called Insuring the future, is really great, thanks a lot Ed for your time and your great challenging questions! Have a look ;-) You can find the whole article here.

Before all the hype over service-oriented architecture, before the cumbersome acronym had been coined, and before the now infamous Microsoft memos were sent, one small insurance company in Switzerland had a big head start. Helvetia Patria Group, a St. Gallen, Switzerland-based insurance company put its service-oriented architecture in place four years ago, before anyone even knew what to call it. […]

Built on an electronic banking platform from Hewlett-Packard Co., with assistance from H-P consultants, the Helvetia Patria eBusiness Center makes more than two dozen products available on line. The company says it has realized a return on investment of 111 percent in the system’s first three years, and anticipates a six-year return of 201 percent.

Actually, the ROI study was done by a neutral external specialized company called Thoughware Worldwide. You can find an Executive Summary of this study here. We had really a great time during this study with Tim, Jacob, Fotios and Rose-Marie, thank you all ;-)

I am soooo sorry :-)

In about 5 days we will be in Anguilla and the week after, in St.Barths, with my wife and my son. Oh oh, we are waiting for these holidays as crazy. Just too much time since the last one. I am completely behind for the last organization and preparation tasks… Plus a *bunch* of things to do before going, plus by birthday, grrrrr…

It seems that the weather was not so cool there the last days BUT the sun should be present again from Wednesday, good timing :-) As usual, 24°C during the night, and 26°C the day, sea at 25°C. Oh I WANT TO BE THERE!!!

In the citycar, we had the chance to see some very nice Bentley’s cars. Wow!

Continal Flying Spur

• 12 cylinders, 6-litre engine
• 560PS, 650Nm
• 0-100km/h: 5.2s
• max.speed: 312km/h
• twin turbocharged engine
• weight: 2’475kg

Continal GT

• 560PS
• 0-100km/h in 4.8s
• 12 cylinders, 6 litres (W formation)
• twin turbochargers
• weight: 2’385kg

Bentley Speed 8 (winner Le Mans 2003)

Oups… I have just seen that, on last Monday (January 23), I had my biggest traffic peak ever in one day:

• 5’092 pageviews
• 2’681 visitors
• 0.52 GB transferred

And no, it is not coming from an attack and/or spam ;-) Somewhat slowly disturbing…