[via vowe]

Volker refers to a complete pointless, i.e. a must-have, on-line free service called gVisit.com (have a look in the comments).

How it works…

1. Register your website using the form below. It is free and we don’t collect any personal information – not even an email address.
2. Copy and paste a single line of JavaScript to your website. It is easy and doesn’t change the way your website works or looks.
3. You will be given your own URL that lets you track the visitors to your website using Google Maps.

The service is free, but limited to the 20 most recent visitors to your register website/blog, which is still great for a free service.

The “usual” limitation of this kind of service (as the on-line statistics): it doesn’t take into account the atom/rss requests…

You can access to the didierbeck.com’s visitor log here. Also accessible as an RSS feed.

An example below:

Incredible buzz everywhere about Google Talk… So, I couldn’t decently avoid to test it ;-)

Google Talk is a downloadable Windows application that offers:

• Free calls over your computer anytime, from anywhere, and for as long as you want
• A simple and intuitive user interface for sending instant messages or making calls–no clutter, pop-ups or ads
• Superior voice quality through just a microphone and computer speaker
• A shared Gmail contacts list that updates automatically with the people you communicate with most often

[via Jeff Bussgang]

Again, a great post on Seeing the both sides about the difference of the perception of time between a VC and an entrepreneur.

When friends ask me what the biggest change has been in transitioning from sitting in the entrepreneur’s seat to the VC’s seat, I often think of the profound difference in the way entrepreneurs and VCs look at that all important dimension of time.

When you’re an entrepreneur, time is your enemy. You need to solve the problem of “simultaneity” – hire the team, build the product, raise money and close deals – all in parallel.

When you’re a VC, you have a very different relationship with time. VCs seem to love the passage of time. When you’re evaluating a deal, more time means more information.

Foxit released a new version of its free PDF reader. Have a look, a must-have, quicker, smaller…better than the original. I’m using it since about 2 months, really great.

Latest changes

• Foxit PDF Engine now comes in a separate DLL, therefore Foxit Reader has been splitted into two parts
• The size of download package increases too
• A number of bugs fixed, including the most reported Printing crash problem, and many other display problems

[via CICLOPS]

Again, from CICLOPS, i.e. the Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS, a beautiful picture from a gigantic Saturn’s storm called The Dragon Storm.

A large, bright and complex convective storm that appeared in Saturn’s southern hemisphere in mid-September 2004 was the key in solving a long-standing mystery about the ringed planet.

Saturn’s atmosphere and its rings are shown here in a false color composite made from images taken in near infrared light through filters that sense different amounts of methane gas. Portions of the atmosphere with a large abundance of methane above the clouds are red, indicating clouds that are deep in the atmosphere. Grey indicates high clouds, and brown indicates clouds at intermediate altitudes. The rings are bright blue because there is no methane gas between the ring particles and the camera.

The Dragon Storm was a powerful source of radio emissions during July and September of 2004. The radio waves from the storm resemble the short bursts of static generated by lightning on Earth. Cassini detected the bursts only when the storm was rising over the horizon on the night side of the planet as seen from the spacecraft; the bursts stopped when the storm moved into sunlight. This on/off pattern repeated for many Saturn rotations over a period of several weeks, and it was the clock-like repeatability that indicated the storm and the radio bursts are related. Scientists have concluded that the Dragon Storm is a giant thunderstorm whose hail and cloud droplets generate electricity as they do on Earth. The storm may be deriving its energy from Saturn’s deep atmosphere.

Knowledge@Wharton published an article about skype, which will be two years old at the end of August. Some good inputs. Let’s see how the things will evolve!

Skype’s software had been downloaded nearly 145 million times as of Aug. 4, and the company claims to have 47 million people using its services. More than 1.8 million people use SkypeOut, a pay service that allows users to call traditional phones from their PCs for low minute rates. Skype also charges for voice mail.

For now, Zennström’s position is that Skype isn’t a voice service at all. When asked whether Skype would enable 911 emergency calling services, Zennström said he didn’t see the need. […] Regulating Skype would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, adds Werbach. “The regulation issues are a challenge [for the FCC]. What extent could you apply regulation to a Luxembourg company with free software? It’s hard to see how anything would be enforced.” Skype may have to “walk a fine line, but it can’t get sucked into that regulation fray,” adds McGeown. “If it does, it could just become an underground business.”

What the future holds for Skype is unclear. Its options include:

• Skype could emerge as a new communications platform that ties voice and video, not to mention millions of people together via handheld devices.
• It could be acquired by an established communications or media company. […] Indeed, a report in CNET.com this week says that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. allegedly discussed buying Skype for around $3 billion, but that talks broke down. The big question is valuing Skype.
• The company could be pulled into a regulatory fray over issues such as 911 calls as it grows into a de facto telecommunications company.
• Or it could remain an underground movement that continues to garner millions of users across the globe and is able to skirt regulatory concerns altogether.

[click]

As usual, after my first days at work, I would like to extent a bit the good and positive influence of my last holidays…and to share this feeling with you. I will post some pictures of our last trip to Calvi in Corsica – France.

Where is Calvi?

Calvi

[click]

[click]

[click]

[click]

Seen from the water, CALVI is a beautiful spectacle, with its three immense bastions topped by a crest of ochre buildings, sharply defined against a hazy backdrop of mountains. Twenty kilometres west along the coast from L’Île Rousse, the town began as a fishing port on the site of the present-day ville basse below the citadelle, and remained just a cluster of houses and fishing shacks until the Pisans conquered the island in the tenth century. Not until the arrival of the Genoese, however, did the town become a stronghold when, in 1268, Giovaninello de Loreto, a Corsican nobleman, built a huge citadelle on the windswept rock overlooking the port and named it Calvi. A fleet commanded by Nelson launched a brutal two-month attack on the town in 1794, when Nelson lost his eye; he left saying he hoped never to see the place again.

The French concentrated on developing Ajaccio and Bastia during the nineteenth century, and Calvi became primarily a military base, used as a point for smuggling arms to the mainland in World War II. A hangout for European glitterati in the 1950s, the town these days has the ambience of a slightly kitsch Côte d’Azur resort, whose glamorous marina, souvenir shops and fussy boutiques jar with the down-to-earth villages of its rural hinterland. It’s also an important base for the French Foreign Legion, and immaculately uniformed legionnaires are a common sight around the bars lining avenue de la République.

[source: france-for-visitors]

[via Loic]

Loic tells us an interesting but quite bad story about a strange experience he made by linking somebody he didn’t really known in LinkedIn… The story itself is more an anecdote to my mind, the conclusion brings the added value:

Conclusion:
1. be careful when you give endorsements to people you don’t know enough
2. accept connections from people you know only
3. Social software, blogs and the Web in general create a transparency that should be respected and dealt with. If you play with it, it will burn you one day or another.

As usual, no difference between the “Internet world” and “Real world”. Too many people are still forgetting that…or are thinking that you can behave yourself in a bad way, just because they are on-line.

By the way, Loic also gives us some figures about LinkedIn:

OpenBC seems to have about 500,000 users total and claims to be the biggest in Europe but
1. LinkedIn adds this number of users (500,000) every two months currently and it keeps growing
2. LinkedIn has 1 million European users whereas Open BC has 500,000 worldwide and Linked In hasn’t even localized their product

You can also find me under LinkedIn.

[via CICLOPS]

As if drawn by an artist, this sublime scene speaks of the powerful beauty in the outer solar system: the domain of giant planets encircled by rings and orbited by small cratered moons of ice. In this view, Dione (1,118 kilometers, 695 miles across, at left) and Enceladus (505 kilometers, 314 miles across, at right) orbit the mighty ringed planet, while two bright storms swirl in the atmosphere below. This vantage point shows that the deceptively expansive rings are actually paper-thin in comparison: only tens of meters thick.

The image was taken in visible blue light with the wide angle camera on February 28, 2005, from a distance of approximately 2.6 million kilometers (1.6 million miles) from Saturn. The image scale is 154 kilometers (96 miles) per pixel.

[via PointBlog]

A great interview of Tim Berners-Lee – you know, the guy who invented the World Wide Web with Robert Cailliau and President of the W3C – in BBC News.

This is humanity which is communicating over the web, just as it’s communicating over so many other different media. I think it’s a more complicated question we have to; first of all, make it a universal medium, and secondly we have to work to make sure that that it supports the sort of society that we want to build on top of it.

[The Web is] a new medium, it’s a universal medium and it’s not itself a medium which inherently makes people do good things, or bad things. It allows people to do what they want to do more efficiently. It allows people to exist in an information space which doesn’t know geographical boundaries. My hope is that it’ll be very positive in bringing people together around the planet, because it’ll make communication between different countries more possible.

The idea [of the Web] was that anybody who used the web would have a space where they could write and so the first browser was an editor, it was a writer as well as a reader. Every person who used the web had the ability to write something. It was very easy to make a new web page and comment on what somebody else had written, which is very much what blogging is about.

When you write a blog, you don’t write complicated hypertext, you just write text, so I’m very, very happy to see that now it’s gone in the direction of becoming more of a creative medium.

One of the reasons that I want to keep [the Web] open like that, is partly because I want humanity to have it as a clean slate. My goal for the web in 30 years is to be the platform which has led to the building of something very new and special, which we can’t imagine now.