Rosa Parks died on October 24, 2005. I haven’t heard/read a lot about this on-line. Sometimes, the newspapers are still interesting…

Her role in American history earned her an iconic legacy in American culture and worldwide civil rights movements.

The Neville Brothers wrote a beautiful song called “Sister Rosa” in 1989 (present on their great album Yellow Moon produced by Daniel Lanois). Beautiful lyrics:

December 1, 1955, our freedom movement came alive. And because of Sister Rosa you know, we don’t ride on the back of the bus no more.

Sister Rosa Parks was tired one day
after a hard day on her job.
When all she wanted was a well deserved rest
Not a scene from an angry mob.
A bus driver said, “Lady, you got to get up
cuz a white person wants that seat.”
But Miss Rosa said, “No, not no more.
I’m gonna sit here and rest my feet.”

Chorus
Thank you Miss Rosa, you are the spark,
You started our freedom movement
Thank you Sister Rosa Parks.
Thank you Miss Rosa you are the spark,
You started our freedom movement
Thank you Sister Rosa Parks.

Now, the police came without fail
And took Sister Rosa off to jail.
And 14 dollars was her fine,
Brother Martin Luther King
knew it was our time.
The people of Montgomery sit down to talk
It was decided all gods’ children should walk
Until segregation was brought to its knees
And we obtain freedom and equality, yeah

[…] So we dedicate this song to thee
for being the symbol of our dignity.
Thank Sister Rosa Parks.

[via Jeff]

Jeff pointed out an interesting article from Business Week about Open Source Software, and more specifically, about sugarCRM, a software company which is developping a CRM open-source application.

Eighteen months ago John Roberts, Clint Oram, and Jacob Taylor decided to quit their jobs at Epiphany, a maker of customer-relationship software. The trio wanted to target the same market, but write a new application developed using open-source code. It took them only three months to create the program and just another month to close their first round of funding. Little more than a year later, their company, SugarCRM, has given away more than 325,000 copies of its software, and raised a second round of capital, for a total of $7.75 million.

Giving away software isn’t your typical path for a venture-capital-backed startup. But Roberts & Co., are smack in the middle of the next frontier of the open-source movement: business applications. “No one had funded an open-source application company at that point — it was all infrastructure,” says CEO Roberts. “We broke a glass ceiling.”

And this input from Jeff (wow):

[…] This is one of the few enterprise software companies I have been interested in tracking. The company had raised their $5.75M Series B and their $2M Series A respectively 10 and 15 months ago, and did not require a new cash infusion based on its reported market success. By implementing a dual license strategy, and leveraging the community to develop portions of the product, and make available through 21 languages less than 18 months after launch (which is more than Salesforce.com after 8 years).

I have downloaded the Sugar open source edition v3.5.0b (windows exe, about 23MB) and installed the software by our hosting provider OVH, as the solution is fully based on a LAMP stack (Linux Apache MySql PHP). OVH is supporting all the requested components, I just had to upgrade from mySql 3.x to 4.x. I was *really* impressed by the install process delivered with the open source version of sugarCRM. Impressive!! A kind of “windows setup”, great :-)

We are now testing the functionalities of sugarCRM and we will decide in some times if we will use sugarCRM or not.

I will publish in some days some thoughts about the business model and the approach of sugarCRM. There is something very interesting in it.

[via Skype Blog]

I find always interesting to know where a company name is coming from. Have a look at the meaning of Skype, great!

One of the names they came up with was “Sky peer-to-peer”, which got soon shortened to “Skyper”. But as happens in the Internet world, some of the domain names associated with “skyper” were already taken, so they thought what the heck, let’s just drop the “r” and make it “Skype”. It sounded good and the domains were available.

Initially the name didn’t make sense to many people. (Probably still doesn’t.) They go “Skype, what is that? A bird? Or a disease?” But after people learn about what Skype can do for them, the name seems to kind of work.

I got a convertible TabletPC HP TC4200 for some months now (I have to tell you how far this machine is *great*) and I had an issue for some days with the pen. I couldn’t use the pen anymore, as it was de-activated, although all the drivers were present. I have solved this issue by installing the original wacom driver (the TC4200 is using a wacom pen). You can find this driver here.

Back to full productivity (in fact, I have a day-off today :-).

[via BetaNews]

The free open source database leader MySQL has some new competition from expensive enterprise database leader Oracle. The company on Monday unveiled a beta release of 10g Express Edition, otherwise known as Oracle Database XE, which is free to develop, deploy and distribute.

Oracle’s new edition is aimed at students, small organizations and software developers looking to integrate a database into their applications. Although it offers the same core as Oracle’s more pricey business offerings, XE is limited to systems with a single processor, 1GB of RAM and 4GB of database storage space.

[…] Oracle Database XE is slated for a final release before the end of the year. Downloads are available for both Linux and Windows.

[via Heiko]

Cool, Scott Adams opened a Dilbert’s blog since October 25, 2005!

[via CICLOPS]

Great view of Hyperion, another moon of Saturn (diameter: 360x280x225 km).

This stunning false-color view of Hyperion reveals crisp details and differences in color across the strange, tumbling moon’s surface that could represent differences in the composition of surface materials. The view was obtained during Cassini’s very close flyby on September 26, 2005.

Hyperion has a notably reddish tint when viewed in natural color. The red color was toned down in this false-color view, and the other hues were enhanced, in order to make more subtle color variations across Hyperion’s surface more apparent.

Images taken using infrared, green and ultraviolet spectral filters were combined to create this view. The images were taken with the narrow angle camera from a distance of approximately 62,000 kilometers (38,500 miles) from Hyperion and at a Sun-Hyperion-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 52 degrees. The image scale is 362 meters (1,200 feet) per pixel.

Remember what is gVisit? I have posted about this visitors’ map generator in August. gVisit allows to generate this kind of maps:

I find this service pretty cool because it materializes the different visitors’ locations much more than the logs. For example, on this blog in the last hours, I had the visit of people from (just some exotic – from my point of view – destinations, a *lot* of you are “just” coming from the US, which is not quite exotic, but hey, thanx to have a look here from time to time, you are warmly welcome ;-):

I searched a way to integrate a kind of “uptodated-short-list” of my last 10 visitors directly in my blog. gVisit gives a tip how to bring dynamically an RSS feed within a page, with the help of PHP and Javascript. This service called Feed2JS is free, you can also installed the code directly to your website, if you’d like to (GNU license). You can now have a look on the right-side of the blog, you could find the discussed short-list (RSS reader, come and have a look :-).

PS: the visitors log is updated every few hours, so do not refresh each minute, not really efficient/useful ;-)

Wow, I am back and happy to be at home again for the week-end. It was definitely great but exhausting this year. I had 24 face-2-face in 3 days + the conferences + workshops + … the good foods and wines ;-)

Different themes this year:

• Growth strategies – expanding the corporation by Christoph Lechner, who is Professor of Strategic Management at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland. I *have* to come back to this one, one of the best strategic inputs in my last 2 years. Impressive.
• How to develop a Sales Channel Management Strategy by Marcus Schoegel, Professor in Marketing Management at the University of St.Gallen, Switzerland
• Last but not least, the first inputs concerning the new strategy 2007-2010 of the Helvetia Patria Group. This part is … confidential ;-)

Very good contacts, a *lot* of great talks, very inspiring! And what for a weather, crazy!

Again, a “mark-this-day-without-having-the-possibility-to-say-more”. In fact, it will be tomorrow, before the start of my fourth Management Forum.

The name is choosen, the logo is great, the domains are reserved, the partnership contract is on the good way, the last legal clarifications are on the good way, the … is defined. And tomorrow, I will have the honour to live my first foundation …’s meeting. So great! An incredibly exhausting 12 months process, with some huge political games, *so* interesting. I am so proud.

I am completely excited, a bit stressed, my dream (perhaps nightmare in the future, but NOW it is *still* a dream) is coming true!