Tag Archives: business

Presentation Zeitgeist 2009 @ SlideShare

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SlideShare has published its “ruling trends in the world of presentations for the year gone by”. Funny, interesting, well done!

Some highlights:

  • The average number of slides in a presentation: 19.3
  • The maximum number of slides: 1’375 (!)
  • Presentation typography: Arial 42%, Times New Roman 22% (!), Wingdings 17%
  • Average number of pages per language: max = French with 38 :-)
  • Presentation formats: PPT 61%, PPTX 17%, PPS 14%
  • Average number of pictures: 19, average size of picture: 205 kb
  • 7% of all presentations without a single image!
  • Average size of presentation: 5.4 MB
SlideShare Zeitgeist 2009http://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=mediadecknov1709-091231041051-phpapp02&stripped_title=slideshare-zeitgeist-2009

View more documents from Rashmi Sinha.

Cross-posted on the Innoveo Blog

Laurent is a Certified ScrumMaster!

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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

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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]

Supercomputing and Linux

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via 451 CAOS Theory

I haven’t realized yet how far Linux extremely dominates the Supercomputing market as Operating System.

Evolution of the Linux OS share in the Top500 (Supercomputing 2009):

  • November 2007: 84.6%
  • November 2007: 87.8%
  • November 2009: 89.2%

All Top10 systems are based on Linux.

The 451 Group published also another “worth-to-read” article about Open source software and the need for speed.

We’ve also seen speed as a factor for building and providing cloud computing infrastructure. Vendors report that Linux is ideal for cloud construction since the availability of source code means that unecessary pieces can be relatively easily and quickly cut out of the OS.

BY the way, more than 80% of the Top500 systems are using Intel computers, 10% IBM Power processors, and 8% AMD Opteron. More than 85% are already based on Quad-core processors! HP is delivering 42% of the servers, and IBM 37% (source: Top500 computer sites).

And: 82% of the Top500 systems integrate between 2’000 and 8’000 processors. 1% more than 128’000 processors (source: Top500 computer sites)!

And: the Top1 (a Lab of the US Department of Energy) uses 224’162 AMD Opteron Six Core 2.6 GHz processors and generates 1’759 TFlops (source: Top500 computer sites).

MVVM Light Toolkit V2

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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!

Full employment

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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

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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 is a member of the Oracle PartnerNetwork

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oracle[1] Innoveo Solutions enjoys its new membership to the Oracle PartnerNetwork, which is illustrating the long and successful deployment of our insurance frontend solution – Innoveo Skye® integrating Oracle databases.

Our partnership with Oracle helps us to leverage our expertise and build on the strong foundation that Oracle’s technology provides.

Innoveo news.

Cross-posted on the Innoveo blog.

VMware/SpringSource – About PaaS

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VMware announced on August 10, 2009 its willingness to acquire SpringSource for $362 million in cash and equity, plus $58 million of unvested stock and options (press release). The process should be closed in Q3 2009.

How can this acquisition be interpreted? What are the goals of VMware/SpringSource?

Some interesting inputs and analysis found on Internet.

A post from Rod Johnson, CEO of SpringSource

About the merge itself

[…] We have signed a definitive agreement with VMware, who will acquire SpringSource. Subject to regulatory approval, we expect the transaction to close in Q3. SpringSource will become a division within VMware. I will continue to lead SpringSource, reporting to VMware CEO Paul Maritz.

About the opportunity

[…] But the broader transformation in IT goes beyond Java frameworks, tooling and runtime infrastructure. The way in which people think about software stacks is changing. Virtualization is reshaping the data center, and cloud computing is set to drive far-reaching changes. Significantly, cloud computing blurs the division between development and operations, bringing new power (and responsibility) to developer.

And so the question becomes, what is the most simple, powerful, pragmatic way of utilizing SpringSource technologies in the data center, and in the cloud?

About the vision

Working together with VMware we plan on creating a single, integrated, build-run-manage solution for the data center, private clouds, and public clouds. A solution that exploits knowledge of the application structure, and collaboration with middleware and management components, to ensure optimal efficiency and resiliency of the supporting virtual environment at deployment time and during runtime. A solution that will deliver a Platform as a Service (Paas) […]

About the vision (said in other words)

The next chapter of our work at SpringSource is tackling those challenges: Building on our Build/Run/Manage solution to provide the industry’s best solution from developer desktop to cloud deployment. Bringing Spring’s power and simplicity to enabling the millions of Java developers to benefit from the full power of cloud computing. […]

About the representation of this vision

SpringSource Build/Run/Manage and VMware Cloud

About the open source community

Our commitment to open source practices, licenses and traditions will remain unchanged. We expect our contributions to open source to increase. Our open source projects will retain their commitment to enabling user choice. Spring will retain the portability between deployment environments that empowers users. […]

An analysis from 451 CAOS Theory

Part I

[…] VMware is clearly in need of a story beyond virtualization, even if we are still relatively early on in enterprise adoption. Still, looking into the future, it sees clear skies, and that does not fit with the multi-billion dollar opportunity shaping up in cloud computing. Thus, VMware is willing to invest a significant amount in SpringSource, which does represent a crossover in customers without much, if any, crossover in competition.

Part II

VMware is working to address its increasing competition from all sides. While it may seem somewhat odd for VMware to want to get involved in enterprise Java application development and deployment, it may want to take advantage of SpringSource’s relatively quick climb in the enterprise Java development and support business. VMware may also be looking to offset any gain in enterprise Java influence and control by Oracle, which may do so with its more than $7 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems.

Part III

VMware is also facing increasing competition from OS vendors, including Microsoft, Novell and Red Hat, which is among SpringSource’s biggest competitors with its JBoss business. Again, SpringSource may not seem the most likely suitor for Java application development, but VMware may see this as an area where it can most effectively integrate its own technology and talent to differentiate in virtualization and cloud computing.[…]

Open source?

Although SpringSource’s open source nature has been critical to its developer reach and success, this is likely not as important to VMware, which may view SpringSource more as a subscription software company than as an open source software company. Either way, it seems VMware, similar to Oracle, may have somewhat limited vision when it comes to open source software, seeing it for its development and time-to-market advantages, but missing other community benefits — including user and customer communities, feedback and contributions — that help make things work.[…]

Disclosure: Innoveo Solutions is using Spring in its Innoveo Skye™ software product.

cross-posted on the Innoveo blog.

Lifelong learning & “growth mindset”

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via Jeff Busgang

I personally like the idea that we are all able to learn during our entire life, thanks to our family and private life, thanks to our social and business activities.

I am also convinced that it is extremely important to be able to change your goals (without being frustrated) and, at the same time, to be very resilient, which is totally antinomic :-) A question of balance perhaps.

Anyway, super food for thoughts from Jeff!

[…] If you aren’t facile at adjusting your goals, and they’re overly ambitious goals, it can lead to depression.

[…] As investors, we VCs are always attracted to entrepreneurs who set big, hairy audacious goals (BHAGs).  Who wants to invest in an entrepreneur whose pitch is, “I’m going to make a nice living in a small niche,” as opposed to, “I aspire to achieve world domination”?  Yet are those entrepreneurs more susceptible to depression and defeatism when they’re unable to achieve those outrageous BHAGs?

To reconcile these two views I am reminded of an excellent book I recently read by renowned Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, called Mindset .  Dweck’s research shows that successful people in business, sports and life have “growth mindsets” rather than “fixed mindsets”.  The “growth mindset” is one in which a person believes that one’s world view is less about ability and more about lifelong learning.  “Growth mindset” individuals feel they can always learn from experiences (failures and successes) and develop resilience because they’re focused on personal growth rather than achievement tied to rigid objectives.  When a “growth mindset” individual faces adversity, they focus on the learnings and the self-improvement opportunities that come from adversity.

I have seen in my own work that the best entrepreneurs do set BHAGs, sometimes outrageous and unattainable ones (create a $100 million company in 5 years from scratch?  Is that really possible?), and push themselves to achieve excellence.  But the ones that really distinguish themselves are the ones who embrace the “growth mindset”.  They embrace life long learning, no matter how great their achievements, and allow themselves to occasionally hit the reset button and adjust their goals […]