ST BARTH DAY1 - Knockin’ on Heaven’s door

Wow, posting from the terrace of our rent villa in Saint Barth :-) 26°C, some wind, listening to Placebo. It’s now fully dark, beautiful sky with a lot of stars.

Wifi is perfectly working, with a better bandwidth as the one I have at home (download 335Kb/s, upload 130 Kb/s).

It’s 22:15 local time, i.e. we are up since … 23 hours. Which is good to forget the jetlag as fast as possible.

The travel was the faster ever, really no issue this time, including all our luggage on time. We were at Saint Barth at 15:45 this afternoon. So enough time to get the car (a Mini Cooper Cab), go to the villa, have a first quick dip in the swimming-pool, get some food at the supermarket for the breakfast tomorrow, and go to the first restaurant. As usual, we have started with a visit at the Hideaway. And a first walk at the Saint Jean beach by night after the dinner. Already seen/met a lot of “known faces” and friends on the island.

View from the Airbus before landing at Saint Marteen

View from the terrace

A part of the swimming-pool, overhanging the Saint Jean Bay

Weather forecast is quite good for the coming days here. It seems that a lot of flights from New-York were canceled due to some snowstorms…

The difference of temperature between Saint Barth and Zurich could reach about 40°C in 2-3 days :-)

Everything is just *fantastic*, as usual here…

Time to go to bed now. My son will be up very early tomorrow, to go to the beach.

On my way to Saint Barth!!

Dear colleagues, friends, partners, competitors, customers, readers,

As you know, I am waiting for this moment for quite a while!

We have the chance again to visit our “second home-sweet-home”. I cannot say how far I am happy to be there with my wife and my son. To have the time for them. To think about something else as the business and Innoveo (although I love that ;-).

No holidays since last August, quite a long time…

So a good chance for a “hardware” reset, a re-load and recharging.

I wish you all a very good time, take care!

PS: yes, I should be able to publish some pictures & stories from *the* island ;-) Stay tuned!

Alsace nominated as one of the Top10 regions to visit!

via Lonely Planet

Crazy! In its “fifth eagerly-awaited annual collection of the best places to go and the best things to do around the world for the year ahead”, Lonely Planet, one of the most worldwide renowned source for travelers, has nominated my region, Alsace, as one of the Top 10 Regions to visit in 2010!!

As one of the Top 10 Regions for 2010, Southwest Western Australia “offers variety in spades,” Lonely Planet’s book says. […] Other regions to make the list are Alsace, Bali, Fernando Noronha, Goa, Koh Kong Conservation Corridor, Lake Baikal, Oaxaca, Southern Africa and The Lake District.

For those who don’t know Lovely Planet:

For over 30 years, Lonely Planet has inspired and guided independent travellers to explore the world around them. Our team of expert travel writers are all about on-the-ground research and no-holds-barred opinion. Lonely Planet is passionate about responsible travel and encourages people to make their impact as positive as possible. Whether it be through our trustworthy guidebooks, innovative downloadable digital guides, award-winning website or cutting-edge television programmes, Lonely Planet aims to inspire life-changing travel, where every minute can hold a new experience.

Rehearsal re-launch

As you may know, I am a “very-amateur” drummer. I have first learned and played percussion in a classical band. And then, played drums in a pop/blues band. Almost nobody knew us, excepted our friends and family, but hey, we had a lot of fun just to play together.

After a long break we have started to rehearse again together. And it brings a lot of pleasure and fun!

We have launched our rehearsals with some Sade and Womack & Womack tracks :-)

Cool.

SmugMug 2009, comparison with Flickr

Introduction

As you may know, I have left the Flickr service, where I had a Pro Account, for more than one year (in December 2008). Actually, I haven’t deactivated my Flickr account, it is “just” a normal account now, as I didn’t want to break different links on my photostreams. Some limitations are now appearing on my Flickr, i.e.:

• upload of 100 MB monthly and 10MB per photo
• 2 videos per month
• only smaller resized picture accessible
• only the most recent 200 photos are shown.

So, it is clear that I cannot use anymore this service. On the other side, it’s free!

Comparison Flickr vs. SmugMug

So let’s compare a bit more the different services (SmugMug and Flickr).

Disclaimer: this comparison is a mix of facts and my own subjective rating of both services (still as users from both during months).

CORPORATE	FLICKR	SMUGMUG
Overall information	sold to Yahoo! in March 2005, founders left in 2008	independent, profitable and debt-free
Number of employees	around 50	50
Number of photos	4’000 million	766 million
Founding year	2004	2002

STANDARD SERVICE	FLICKR	SMUGMUG
monthly upload limit	100 MB	unlimited
limit per photo	10 MB	12 MB
max. video duration	90s	not supported in “standard”
max. video size	150 MB	not supported in “standard”
shown size (photo)	smaller resized images	no reducing resolution
number of photos shown	last 200	unlimited
gallery personalization	no	yes, very nice
slideshows	yes, but limited	yes, lots of customization possible
costs per year	free, but with ads	$40

PRO SERVICE	FLICKR	SMUGMUG
monthly upload limit	unlimited	unlimited
limit per photo	20 MB	24 MB
max. video duration	90s	10 mn
max. video size	500 MB	600 MB
HD supported	720p	1080p
storage limit	unlimited	unlimited
bandwidth limit	unlimited	unlimited
statistics	yes	yes (far better)
customization	no	fully, including hostname
batch organization	yes, but limited	yes, extremely powerful
costs per year	$25	$150 (an intermediary “Power” level exists for $60/year)

I am wondering, based on this tables, if it would not have been better to compare the “Pro” service from Flickr with the “Standard” level of SmugMug…

Anyway, you feel perhaps how far both services are different. Perhaps also not with the same target groups/segmentation of customers.

Why I have left Flickr

I have left Flickr for mainly three reasons:

1. The huge functional differences between Flickr and SmugMug
2. The lack of innovation and service updates at Flickr. In the last months, nothing happened at Flickr. SmugMug is principally launching new functions and testing new ideas each month!
3. I was impacting by all the controversies and censorship stories (Thomas Hawk is relating some of them here and here) around Yahoo!/Flickr.

It is clear that the price differences is really huge between both services, but you get something from what you are paying!

Impact of having moved to SmugMug

First, it was quite easy to migrate from Flickr to SmugMug, as you can find a Firefox extension to automatically migrate all your pictures from your Flickr account to SmugMug. The tool is called “SmuggLr” and it is free.

Secondly, based on my SmugMug Pro Account, I have created a new subdomain called “visuals.didierbeck.com” of my own blog “www.didierbeck.com”. Both are now similar from each others, although I am definitely not finished with the customization. I will perhaps also merge both (blog and visuals) in the coming time. All my pictures and videos are now published under the “visuals” subdomains.

Thirdly, and perhaps the most interesting: the effect of having done these changes had a *huge* impact on the traffic of my pictures! I had about 18’000 views on my Flickr pictures within 2 years. I was many times above 100’000 views per month in 2009 on SmugMug! More data about this just below.

Some statistics of my SmugMug in 2009

Some data about 2009 on visuals.didierbeck.com:

• Number of image views: 755’000
• Monthly average in the last 6 months: 105’000
• Number of image views linked with Saint Barth: 620’000 (!), i.e. 82% of the overall views (!!)
• Highest traffic in December with more than 130’000 image views
• Highest image views in a day (since mid November): December 6 with 18’910 views in one day…
• Bandwidth used during the year: 82 GB
• Highest bandwidth usage in July with more than 20 GB
• Most viewed photo since mid November (with about 8’500 views just on this one):

 

Visualization of the traffic during the last 12 months:

Local and Saint Barth weather forecast…

What’s the better place to be now, and for the next days?

Still too early for me ;-)

Local

 

Saint Barth

 

Countdown started for Saint Barth :-)

We are extremely lucky to be able to travel to Saint Barth again this year…

Our last visit there was in February 2009. I have the feeling it’s 5 years back!

We were quite lucky last year when we have reserved the villa we will be in in some days (a renovated villa that was just put on the renting market). I think it’s from far the most beautiful villa we have rented. With an absolutely crazy view on the Saint Jean Bay, the Eden Rock hotel, and the airport. Have a look below…

So, in exactly 30 days, we will be on this terrace!

Laurent is a Certified ScrumMaster!

As you may know, we are more and more using Scrum as a team-based framework for developing our Skye® standard software product (front-end solution for insurances) at Innoveo.

What is Scrum? (ScrumAlliance definition)

Scrum: A team-based framework to develop complex systems and products.

Scrum is an iterative, incremental framework for developing any product or managing any work. It allows teams to deliver a potentially shippable set of functionality every iteration, providing the agility needed to respond to rapidly changing requirements.

The Scrum framework constantly challenges its users to focus on improvement, and its Sprints provide the stability to address the ever-changing needs that occur in any project.

These characteristics have led to Scrum becoming the most popular method in the world of agile software development.

We are consequently very proud to inform you that Laurent Kempé, who is acting as our Innoveo ScrumMaster besides being our internal “Scrum champion”, has successfully passed his ScrumMaster certification!

Congratulation to Laurent for this nice step and recognition.

Next step is now to apply for the next level: Certified Scrum Practitioner, as shown below (ScrumAlliance certification process):

cross-posted on the Innoveo blog

Seesmic has acquired ping.fm

Loic LeMeur, the CEO of Seesmic, announced yesterday that his company has acquired ping.gm. As a “happy-user” of both services, I find this acquisition definitely interesting ;-)

I am using Twhirl as a Windows Twitter client, and the ping.fm service to spread my updates to LinkedIn, Facebook, Flickr, Plaxo and FriendFeed.

We're happy to share with you very big news if you have not heard. We've acquired Ping.fm. Get ready to update 50 social networks from Seesmic.

[…] Ping.fm has more than half a million active users who post daily from any device just by sending an email, a text message or chat - simple tools that existed since the early stages of the Internet are available on all connected devices. This is why Ping.fm is extremely easy to use and access -just send an update and it can touch on 50 social networks including Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Ning, WordPress, TypePad, Yammer, Status.net and many more. Ping.fm is compatible with every single Internet device in the world, which is why it has become so successful among thousands of users. 

[…]

Thanks to its powerful and simple API, more than a hundred applications already use Ping.fm to update all the main social networks and Seesmic commits to maintaining and improving the Ping.fm platform. Not only has Twhirl supported Ping.fm for about a year, but we are also preparing to open Seesmic apps with our own plug-in architecture so we understand and care about the developer community. Ping.fm co-founders, Adam Duffy and Sean McCullough, are joining the Seesmic team full time and will keep improving Ping.fm as well as integrating it with our Seesmic applications. The number one request from Ping.fm users is to have more powerful clients support postings to their social networks, so they should be pleased to know Seesmic applications will be adding this functionality.

Seesmic is also welcoming ping.fm angel investors as shareholders and advisors Joi Ito (@joi), Reid Hoffman (@quixotic) who was already a Seesmic shareholder and Mohamed Nanabhay (@mohamed). Seesmic applications on Blackberry,  Android,  Web,  Windows  and OSX via Air will all have advanced Ping.fm integration very shortly and therefore will instantly support 50 social networks.

[via Loic’s information mail]

A wonderful 2010 to everyone!

Saint Barth Portfolio 2009 (wrap up) – February 2009

Finally the wrap up/poster of my Saint Barth Portfolio 2009.

I have started to publish this portfolio on June 18, 2009 with this post.

The idea was the following:

I will publish 2 pictures from each region of the island per post. Force to choose ;-)

I hope I haven’t bothered you too much with these 16 posts!

I really had to finish, as the countdown is running for our next stay in Saint Barth (February 2010)! About 50 days to go :-)

More than 5’000 pictures uploaded on SmugMug

I have passed the 5’000 pictures uploaded on SmugMug / visuals.didierbeck.com in about one year.

I *really* like SmugMug more and more. Still discovering a lot of very useful functionalities there. So happy to have left Flickr!

It seems that you like it too, as the traffic there is increasing more and more :-) I have now almost the same number of “photos viewed” as “pageviews” on this blog, i.e. more than 100’000 per month for each. Gosh!

Thanks for your interest!

SmugMug statistics from November

Again, quite an high traffic on my visuals this month :-)

Second time over 100’000 views per month. And more than 600’000 pictures & video viewed since January…

Wow, thanks for your interest, don’t deserve that!

Saint Barth Portfolio 2009 (13) – February 2009

In a way, this morning, I need to see some Saint Barth pictures ;-)

Have a good Friday!

 

Shell beach

 

Saint Barth Portfolio 2009 (12) – February 2009

Still not in St Barth. 70 days left to go.

Saline

 

Week-end in Strasbourg

We had some great time this week-end in Strasbourg (wikipedia) with my wife and son. Always a great pleasure to go there, as it is a great city, and also because we have studied there for a while ;-)

We had two great meals:

• a lunch at an Italian restaurant called “La Grappa”, really great. Good atmosphere and service, everything fresh, reasonable price.
• a wonderful dinner at “La cuiller à Pot” (no error ;-), a gastronomic restaurant. Really worth a try!! And not just because we know one of the owner ;-) The Chef was nominated as a “Young Talent 2009” by the Gault & Millau. Have a look:

[…] Numerous gourmet guides have noticed the restaurant, the cuisine being daring, and the mixes being done with “opposites attract” as a motto. A star is born...
Here is Gault Millau Young Talent that really charmed ideal gourmet. Ideally located, decorated with a lot of taste and personality, this gourmet address is on the rise and it will no doubt surprise you thanks to an ideal gourmet menu composed according to the season, with a thousand and one surprises in store for you. […]

Besides the meals and shopping, I could test a bit more my new Canon EPS 5D MarkII, this time with my “old” wide-angle lens (Canon EF 17-40mm f/4.0). I could really feel the advantage of the “full-frame” for the first-time. Great!

Full gallery here.

Saint Barth Portfolio 2009 (11) – February 2009

I am still not in Saint Barth…

Saint Jean

 

Slideshow function in SmugMug

SmugMug is evolving very well, nice new features are published very regularly. Really a great service. From far better than Flickr…

An example of the embedded slideshow feature below:

The beginner’s guide to St Barts

via passionateforparis and The New York Times

I have found by chance this excellent article introducing St. Barts (Saint Barth for the French-speaking persons ;-) to newbies. Really worth a read, very funny and informative, a good summary of the possible explanations of the “why do so many people go back to Saint Barth?”.

It's relatively easy to maintain a healthy disdain for the renowned fabulousness of the Caribbean island of St.-Barthélemy until you actually go there and find yourself up to your neck in deliciously warm turquoise water, not quite hungry after your recent two-hour lunch but beginning nonetheless to ponder your plans for the drinks and dinner to come. […]

It's not an instant process, but there are steps you can take, places you can pause and genuflect, like stations of the cross, on your way to that nirvanalike state of a St. Barts veteran. It needn't take as long as you think, or even, perhaps as much money, though a credit card certainly helps.

"Yes, St. Barts, I am here, at last, here I am where I belong." […]

Too late for us ;-)

MVVM Light Toolkit V2

via Laurent and the Innoveo Blog

Cool stuff!

At Innoveo Solutions we are using .NET and WPF for our Innoveo Skye® Editor application. Skye® Editor is a distribution channel editor targeting business people letting them edit and configure their insurance products.

From the beginning we have adopted the Model-View-ViewModel architecture. Having our solution growing we were facing the issue of having our ViewModels dependency growing too. Some ViewModel became too much dependent of others. This was obvious in our unit tests whose complexity to setup were growing too. It was time to find a solution to decouple the ViewModels.

The solution came out after a discussion with Laurent Bugnion, the famous author of MVVM Light Toolkit. At that time we used the V1 that already helped a lot in this decoupling.

Now with MVVM Light Toolkit V2 it is even better with the new Messenger API. What we also really appreciated in comparison to other frameworks is that it is really light and the ability to open and edit the user interface into Expression Blend.

So Thank you Laurent for this GREAT framework and I looking forward for V3!

I also would like to thank my managers at Innoveo Solutions who understand Open Source and the need to have people contributing to Open Source projects, even during their professional working time. A Win-Win situation and not just a one way benefit as often.

Thanks also from my side to Laurent Bugnion, great work and contribution!

Saint Barth Portfolio 2009 (10) – February 2009

Just a precision based on some of your comments here and there: no, I am *not* in Saint Barth right now. Actually the next stay there is planned for February 2010. Unfortunately, still some months to wait. On the other side, we are lucky enough to be able to go there again ;-)

As a reminder, I am re-publishing parts of my last Saint Barth portfolio from February 2009!

No fear, you will know when I will be again “back home” :-)

 

Lorient

 

Full employment

via Seth Godin

So true…

You will never be out of work if you can demonstrably offer one of the following:

• Sales
• Additive effort
• Initiation

Sales speaks for itself. If you can sell enough to cover what you cost and then some, there will always be someone waiting to hire you.

Additive effort is distinguished from bureaucracy or feel-good showing up. Additive effort generates productivity far greater than the overhead you add to the organization. If your skills make the assembly line go twice as fast, or the sales force becomes more effective, or the travel office cuts its costs, then you've produced genuine value. That surly receptionist at the doctor's office--she's just filling a chair.

The third skill is the most difficult to value, but is ultimately the most valuable. If you're the person who can initiate useful action, if you're the one who makes something productive or transformative happen, then smart organizations will treasure you.

Vincent Bolloré

I have the chance to be a member of the “Four Seasons Club” (in French: le club des quatre saisons), which is a private business club founded in 2003 and based in Zurich, Switzerland. It is a French-speaking club, gathering personalities from the economical, political, academic, cultural and media worlds.

The number of members is limited to 120. For me, a quite unique opportunity to speak French, my mother-tongue, and not (broken) English or (broken) German!

The Club is also an opportunity to see and to meet extremely interesting people, coming from different horizons, and not “just” the business.

On last Wednesday, we could see, listen to and meet Mr. Vincent Bolloré (wikipedia):

Vincent Bolloré (b. 1 April 1952 in Boulogne-Billancourt, France) is a French industrialist, corporate raider and businessman.

He heads the family investment group Bolloré and is ranked 451st richest person in the world according to Forbes, with an estimated fortune of US$1.7 billion. He is married, with 4 children.

Vincent Bolloré is from a well-off family from Brittany, and he graduated with a Bachelor of Laws (LLB) degree from Université Paris X Nanterre. Bolloré started his investment career as a bank trainee at investment bank Edmond de Rothschild.

His personal investment career began when he took over the reins at his family-controlled conglomerate Bolloré, which deals in maritime freight and African trade, and paper manufacturing (cigarette and bible paper). The company he leads today employs 33,000 people around the world.

He is a well-known corporate raider in France who has succeeded in making money by taking large stakes in French listed companies, in particular the building and construction group Bouygues, where he left with a sizeable capital gain after a power-struggle.

In late 2004, his investment group started building a stake in advertising group Havas, becoming its largest single shareholder. He mounted a coup and replaced Alain de Pouzilhac as Havas Chief Executive Officer on July 12, 2005.

In 2005, through his family company, Bolloré expanded his media interests by launching the Direct 8 television station. Towards the end of 2005, he began building a stake in independent British media planning and buying group, Aegis. As at 19 July, 2006, his stake in Aegis stood at 29%. Direct Soir, a free newspaper, was launched in June 2006. In January 2008, he manifested interest in becoming a shareholder of famed, but troubled, Italian car manufacturer Pininfarina.

He is a close personal friend of French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

I haven't known any detail about the Bolloré Group before this meeting. Actually very interesting! As Vincent Bolloré, a very charismatic and fascinating person, with quite a lot of distance and humility with his business successes. And a definitely not common strategic approach (“we do what the others don’t want to do”), with a very diversified group founded in 1822!

It was also the last day of the very long Indian Summer in Zurich.

Innoveo 2nd anniversary

We could celebrate today our 2nd anniversary (already!) at Innoveo.

As usual, some great time with great people.

On top, we had a super weather in a super restaurant (Seerose - “we take care of nice people”).

A bit of time for us, after some extremely intensive and successful months!

Tomorrow, back to business!

Adcubum and Innoveo agree to a strategic partnership!

We are very happy to announce that we, at Innoveo, could agree to a strategic partnership with Adcubum, a Swiss product software company also focused on the insurance market, and developing a very complementary product, adcubum SYRIUS® (back-office), to Innoveo Skye® (front-office).

A step-by-step process, very solid, between the two companies, integrating both Boards of Directors, Executive Management Teams and operational experts, to be able to mature the cooperation model on a strategic and product levels. The first operational activities have started for exactly one year in September 2008, with the first contacts in spring 2008.

And, it is always better to announce this kind of partnership, when both partners have already won together a customer, which is the case for us ;-)

Some words about Adcubum

Adcubum was founded in 1998, is privately held, with more than 100 people, and a capital of 7.5 million CHF. Our colleagues have so far achieved 60% market coverage in Switzerland (health insurance) and 100% in Slovakia (social security) with adcubum SYRIUS®.

They are now expanding their activities to the important markets of Germany and Eastern Europe, and to the Property & Casualty (P&C) lines of business.

 

PRESS RELEASE

 Adcubum and Innoveo contract a strategic partnership to integrate the multi-channel distribution solution Innoveo Skye® with adcubum SYRIUS®.

St. Gallen, 30th September 2009 - Adcubum and Innoveo intensify their co-operation and agree to a product and strategic partnership. Goal of this agreement is the seamless integration of the multi-channel distribution solution Innoveo Skye® in the insurance core solution adcubum SYRIUS® as an optional module. Therewith, their customers are in a position to use the software for all lines of business and to holistically support respectively control their products and services sales. Moreover, with this co-operation Adcubum and Innoveo consolidate their complementary competences and experience in the insurance industry.

Like adcubum SYRIUS®, Innoveo Skye® is based on a state-of-the-art scalable 4-tier-architecture and is easily embedded in any portal solution. Innoveo Skye® comprises all lines of business in the insurance industry (health insurance, property and casualty insurance, life insurance) and supports various back-office systems simultaneously. Furthermore, Innoveo Skye® is capable of multi-channel operations, which enable insurance companies to quickly and consistently offer new products and services via different channels like branches, agencies, insurance brokers or via the Internet.

"The partnership with Adcubum allows to offer our complementary expertise and insurance solutions in one integrated product", says Nick Stefania, Managing Partner of Innoveo. "Customers benefit of a reduced time-to-market for their insurance products and we enable them to offer all insurance products and services for every distribution channel with one single module."

"We are already working together intensively with Innoveo in a customer project", says René Janesch, member of the executive board of Adcubum. "Insurance companies seek more and more for an end-to-end solution supporting the continuous process from the back-office management to the multi-channel distribution. Hence, the current point in time is most convenient for such a collaboration. Above all, we are able to considerably strengthen our know-how in the property and casualty insurance market."

Press release English / German

Innoveo corporate fact sheet English

 

Adcubum AG
Adcubum is a leading Swiss software manufacturer in the international insurance business. The core solution adcubum SYRIUS® is a modularly built back-office system for health, accident and property and casualty insurances based on the Java Platform Enterprise Edition (Java EE) technology. The foundation for the successful company history was laid in St. Gallen in 1998. Since then, the product has been continuously enhanced according to customer and market requirements. At present the company employs more than 100 high qualified and specialised experts. Multiple millions of insured persons with more than 30 million claims are administrated by the core solution adcubum SYRIUS® - tendency rising.

Further information under: www.adcubum.com

 

Innoveo Solutions AG
Innoveo emerged as an independent software manufacturer from a spin-out of the Helvetia Group in 2007. It is characterized by a unique combination of technology expertise and insurance industry knowledge. The SOA/Java EE based agile insurance front-office system Innoveo Skye® is based on more than 12 years of experience in the implementation of flexible distribution systems for all lines of business as well as in the integration of any back-office and CRM systems as well as portals. In an increasingly diversified market a consistent, per distribution channel and insurance product configurable solution offers crucial strategic possibilities, considerable time savings as well as remarkable cost efficiency for the launch of new products.

Further information under: www.innoveo.com

100’000+ photos viewed in August on my SmugMug account

As some of you have already observed, I have completely left my Flickr account since beginning of this year. For different reasons. I have to post about that too ;-)

I would like to mark this day because I have passed the 100’000 photos viewed on my SmugMug account within one month! These views have generated more than 16 GB of bandwidth usage for the same period (actually, exactly 29 days).

On my Flickr account, with about the same portfolio, I have today 18’341 views within … more than 2 years. Crazy, no?

 

All my photos and videos can be found under:

visuals.didierbeck.com

Cédric nominated to the EOS Directory Advisory Board

I am very proud to announce that Cédric Walter, one of our colleague and founding member of Innoveo, is nominated to the EOS Directory (Enterprise Open Source Directory) Advisory and Expert Board. Cédric is a very well-known contributor of the Joomla community since 2004.

EOS Directory is a great catalog of more than 350 open source projects, that are listed, described and analyzed. It is today the leading online platform to help enterprises and organizations identify and evaluate Open Source technologies. Initially launched by Optaros, about two years ago, the platform has been recently handed over by Bruno von Rotz, initial sponsor of the initiative, well known Open Source specialist, and one of our Innoveo Board Member.

In support to strengthen the neutral approach to ratings and selection of the technologies, the new EOS Directory Advisory and Expert Board has been established over the last weeks.

The Advisory and Expert Board will be both instrumental in guiding the future development of the EOS Directory Platform as well as in making sure that the content is accurate, relevant and fairly represented. (Source: EOS Directory Blog)

Congratulations to Cédric!

More Information on Cédric’s blog and the EOS Directory blog.

Cross-posted on the Innoveo Blog.

Saint Barth Portfolio 2009 (03)

Colombier

 

Mark this day :-)

Yesterday (Thursday) was an absolutely important and central milestone in the life of our company - Innoveo.

I am very proud, totally exciting for the coming steps, exhausted, and also in a way - relieved. First confirmations that our vision, strategy, and tactics are not sooo bad ;-)

As usual, a bit of luck, plus a great help and support from very smart people (hello René), and from our Team!

I remember a thought of one of my former boss, saying that:

Good stuff needs time to mature

This is absolutely true ;-) I would just extend it a bit:

Good stuff needs time AND a lot of energy to mature

Nick, mate, a big thought in your direction, you did such a great job!

Coming challenges are big, again, but first … there are coming! And second, they are super interesting!

A last one now, about “vision” :-)

(© Despair, Inc)

 

But gosh, now, I just want to sit down with a good grappa, and to appreciate this moment.

Bonifacio 2009 – Part IV

Bavella, the highlight of the Corsican mountain!

For a very good reason : from one side the mountain pass, and on the other side the forest. It summarizes itself the particularities of the island relief, with dramatic rock formation and colours from most delicate red to the darkest grey and all “sprinkled” with giant Laricio pines. The most beautiful panoramas on the Bavella Needles can be seen at the passed called Col de Bavella ( 1218m high ) inside the regional reserve.