[via Skype News]

A milestone is reached for Skype. Some interesting figures:

• At peak time, we’re pumping out close to 10 downloads a second. That’s almost a million downloads every single day by now. Not quite a million every day yet, but we’re getting there.
• The download traffic at peak time adds up to 500 Mbit/sec, or 0.5 Gbit/sec. That’s 500 times more than an average 1 Mbit home “broadband” connection.
• We got from 0 to 100M downloads in 595 days, from 100M to 150M in 124 days, from 150M to 200M in 83 days. There’s no signs of the pace slowing down.

[via Tom Peters]

As usual, feed for thoughts…and really cool to hear/read this kind of input from time to time :-)

“We have a strategic plan. It’s called doing things.”
Herb Kelleher

“A good plan executed right now tops a perfect plan executed next week.”
George Patton

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”
Charles Darwin

“If Microsoft is good at anything, it’s avoiding the trap of worrying about criticism. Microsoft fails constantly. They’re eviscerated in public for lousy products. Yet they persist, through version after version, until they get something good enough. Then they leverage the power they’ve gained in other markets to enforce their standard.”
Seth Godin

“I saw that leaders placed too much emphasis on what some call high-level strategy, on intellectualizing and philosophizing, and not enough on implementation. People would agree on a project or initiative, and then nothing would come of it.”
Larry Bossidy & Ram Charan

The Leader’s Seven Essential Behaviors

1. Know your people and your business
2. Insist on realism
3. Set clear goals and priorities
4. Follow through
5. Reward the doers
6. Expand people’s capabilities
7. Know yourself

Source: Larry Bossidy & Ram Charan/ Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

“The person who is a little less conceptual but is absolutely determined to succeed will usually find the right people and get them together to achieve objectives. I’m not knocking education or looking for dumb people. But if you have to choose between someone with a staggering IQ and an elite education who’s gliding along, and someone with a lower IQ but who is absolutely determined to succeed, you’ll always do better with the second person.”
Source: Larry Bossidy & Ram Charan/ Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

“Thomas Stanley has not only found no correlation between success in school and an ability to accumulate wealth, he’s actually found a negative correlation. “It seems that school-related evaluations are poor predictors of economic success,” Stanley concluded. What did predict success was a willingness to take risks. Yet the success-failure standards of most schools penalized risk takers. Most educational systems reward those who play it safe. As a result, those who do well in school find it hard to take risks later on.”
Source: Richard Farson & Ralph Keyes, Whoever Makes the Most Mistakes Wins

After Calvi (Corsica, France), we really needed to book our next holidays as quick as possible :-) So, after having “tested” St.Barths in the Caribbean this year, we decided ourselves again for the same destination for our Winter Holidays in February 2006. It is the first time that we return to the same destination more than one time. It was *such* a great time :-) We will combine a stay in Anguila and in St.Barths.

Anguilla – CuisinArt

So, we will first stay in the Hotel CuisinArt at Anguilla.

St.Barths – François Plantation

Then, return to the paradise at the Hotel François Plantation at St.Barths. Another interesting resource about St.Barths.

[via Novell Press Room]

Some news from Novell. Their new strategy doesn’t seem to be implement yet…

02 Nov 2005—Novell, Inc. today announced it will concentrate its business on key growth opportunities in the Linux and Open Source and Identity and Resource Management markets, resulting in a restructuring of the business that will reduce annual run rate expenses by more than $110 million.

[…] As a result of the restructuring, product development and consulting resources are now more focused on the company’s growth businesses, Linux and Identity. Novell also expects to continue to evaluate non-core consulting activities.

[…] Novell also announced today that its Board of Directors has authorized management and its financial advisor, Citigroup Corporate and Investment Banking, to explore strategic alternatives for Celerant, Novell’s consulting subsidiary. The company has previously stated that it intends to separate Celerant from Novell when market and other conditions are appropriate.

Celerant, as the e-Services division of Novell, integrates, among others, the former Cambridge Technology Partners.

Thx Philippe ;-)

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 :-).