Christophe Deschamps publie un commentaire d’une étude de la Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA) sur les “bénéfices attendus” du télétravail :
67% des personnes interrogées pensent qu’il améliore la productivité des travailleurs du savoir (la leur donc)
59% qu’il réduit les coûts
39% qu’il permet d’accéder plus facilement à du personnel qualifié
37% qu’il permet de retenir les employés dans l’entreprise
25% qu’il améliore leur état de santé (ou qu’il permet qu’elle se dégrade moins).
Pas mal, non ? Vous lirez également que la France traîne toujours en queue du peloton des pays télétravailleurs.
(A propos de télétravail, voir aussi la vidéo où Pierre Chappaz explique comment...
Mister Edery, responsable du portfolio Xbox Live Arcade, a décidé d’écrire un livre, et ce dernier est disponible sur Amazon...
In
divers,
Business,
Marketing,
livre,
Amazon,
book,
changing the game,
consommateurs,
david edery,
excellent,
how video games are transforming the future,
Jeux-vidéo,
management
Marshall Goldsmith nous livre quelques unes de ses méthodes à travers un article publié sur HBR....
Les organisateurs de la Game Developer Conference, Think Services, annoncent que les inscriptions pour participer à la seconde édition viennent d’ouvrir. Elle se tiendra du 23 au 24 juin à la Défence, Paris....
You used to sell plastic and vinyl. Now, you can sell interactivity and souvenirs.
[Go read the entire post : Seth’s Blog: Music lessons]...
Nagios is a time-tested warhorse with a lot of community support. It’s ugly but it works and works well. [Via Hacker News | Ask YC: What tools are you using to monitor a site’s load?]...
But we were a little surprised by what occupied the No. 2 slot among identity stores: the open-source OpenLDAP project. That is, we were surprised until we started talking to readers. What we learned is that OpenLDAP is driving a number of Fortune 500 enterprise IdM efforts, and adoption doesn’t appear to be slowing.
[Via IT Automation: Identity Management - Desktop Security - Dark Reading]
enterprisey, idenity...
Where should I host DNS for a large global consumer website?
A few good answers, including DNS Made Easy, Zone Edit and “a large tier 1 provider” or “your own machines”. I could add Easy DNS for most needs, not sure I would vouch for them for a large global consumer website, depending on your definition of large....
tagging tech /john collins/: learnings from the valley: social text :
ross described silicon valley as “one big marketing function” with a lot of supporting services and advisors easily accessible....
A lenghty but great article on software development, worth your time if you care about software - Software Is Hard. It cites my new favorite truism for software development, on that was well received by folks sitting at the same table as me during wednesday’s lunch at IIW :
Hofstadter’s Law : “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s law.”
So what’s the lesson here? Release as early as possible and often! It’s better to release real imperfect software sooner than theoretical perfect software later.
Since it’s going to take you longer than planned to finish your project, you must release often. Therefore, one of the most important thing to optimize on your software project is your release process....
Software Is Hard: you bet! : This is a very convincing case for why writing and maintaining software are not engineering activities (go read it, it’s short and convincing)....
Jonathan Schwartz’s Weblog: All the Wood Behind One Arrow:
Talk to any datacenter adminstrator, and that’s what they want to hear - they live in a world managing the (often idiosyncratic) interactions of that trinity (computing, storage and networking - and just wait until they’re virtualized). We want to be in a position to innovate on their behalf, at the system level, beyond the boxes - across blades, racks, disk and tape.
I like this. On a somewhat related note : Enomalism (web-based virtual server manager). Canadian Co with offices in Montreal. Added under the radar!...
Being in the process of rethinking our office space (this is a nice side-effect that comes with funding… growing), I appreciate the perspective from Ask the Wizard: No Offices. I must say I am really divided on the subject. On one hand, I think there’s lots of merit to the Spolsky school of thought and having a quiet environment to “get in the zone”. But the energy level, instant communication and transparency that comes from an open space is awesome (for a small team).
That’s the way we are setup right now, a large round table that can sit 4-5 people. But there’s the “people doing phone calls” problem, even if the information is not confidential, they *are* noisy (sorry Harry, you are doing a *great* pitch, but I’ve heard it many,...
A long and thoughtful post from Chris Messina - Stop building social networks :
We need to stop building independent spider webs of sticky siloed social activity. We need to stop fighting the nature of the web and embrace the design of uniform resource identifiers for people. We need to have a user agent that actually understands what it means to be a person online. A person with friends, with contacts, with enemies, with multiple personas and surfaces and ambitions and these user agents of the social web need to understand that, though we live in many distinct places on the web and interact with many different services, that we as people still have one unified viewport through which we understand the world.
Posting this while Should I stay or should I go from the Clash plays in my ears...
I Want a New Platform… <aol>me too!</aol>...
As discussed on Montreal Tech Watch, job boards are on my radar these days (for several reasons) and I think there’s some traction there… I really like the SimplyHired approach but they insist on a city in the USA to work with them, so I am playing with these ones for now :
More on the subject in a few days…...
Where natural links come from?
He talks about three groups, the browsers, the buyers and the linkerati. You have to market to the linkerati. Even if they are not customer, you need to market to them, to serve this audience group. They are influencers. They own blogs and websites, techy and often geeky. Participate in social media sites. Enjoy humor, great design. Not interested in your product. They hate to be marketed to.
Building friends/relationships in the blogosphere and online social sites. Participating in the conversation is key. Youtube, wikipedia, linkedin, flickr, craigslist, facebook…
How does a story go viral? Influence the influencers… Some tips to reach the linkerati. Use catchy titles. Add social media links on only a few posts, maybe one out of twenty....
Here’s the recap post I wanted to write but now I don’t have to, thanks to this one : Red Herring Canada 2007 roundup at George Favvas’ blog
The good
Company presentations: You don’t go to conferences for the boring talks, do you?
Red Herring CEO Alex Vieux’s ego: He’s not shy to ask direct questions and push his presenter
The bad
Disappearing speakers: You could not find a better disappearing act even if it were put on by the Cirque du Soleil. Gérard Lopez (of Mangrove Partners) was scheduled to give a “fireside chat.” Alas, there was no fire, and no chat. Salman Ullah (Director of Corporate Development at Google) was quietly dropped from the program and Sean Wise (From Dragon’s Den show on CBC) didn’t show because he had a paid gig elsewhere. Worse yet,...
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canada,
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lang=en,
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I missed the first day, but I am here for most of today, to listen a bit but mostly to meet people. As Mat wrote yesterday on Montreal Tech Watch : “it’s all about the social interaction” (Yes, I think this is an universal rule about conferences and events). I don’t know yet what level of posting I will be able to achieve, I am not looking to live blog the event like I sometimes do, I will probably take a bit more of a perspective and sparkles approach, quick bis and tidbits as the day goes by and maybe a recap post after the event…
Tags: event, montreal, quebec, canada, startups, redherring, vc, financing...
Could also be titled “why you don’t need a CIO” :
The chasm between end users and the IT department has never been greater, in part because the tools available on the wide open web have never been better…
[Via The Long Tail: The Black Wire and the White Wire]...
This is where I think I am right now, but personally and professionally…
Chance IV is the kind of luck that develops during a probing action which has a distinctive personal flavor. (…) Chance IV comes to you, unsought, because of who you are and how you behave. Chance IV is so personal, it is not easily understood by someone else the first time around (…) Chance IV, [is] involved with personal motor behavior.
From blog.pmarca.com: Luck and the entrepreneur, part 1: The four kinds of luck - go read the whole post, it’s tought provoking!...
From Paul Graham’s excellent collection of essays : The 18 mistakes that kills startups.
1. Single Founder
2. Bad Location
3. Marginal Niche
4. Derivative Idea
5. Obstinacy
6. Hiring Bad Programmers
7. Choosing the Wrong Platform
8. Slowness in Launching
9. Launching Too Early
10. Having No Specific User in Mind
11. Raising Too Little Money
12. Spending Too Much
13. Raising Too Much Money
14. Poor Investor Management
15. Sacrificing Users to (Supposed) Profit
16. Not Wanting to Get Your Hands Dirty
17. Fights Between Founders
18. A Half-Hearted Effort
And one of the most interesting note:
[5] You should take more than you think you’ll need, maybe 50% to 100% more, because software takes longer to write and deals longer to close than you expect.
Trying to make the leasrt amount...
Whoa. I clean this up every few weeks and it has been quite consistent for the last few cycles… 5000+ spams on this blog. Many thanks to Akismet!!...
I was today at a local event, le forum financement - capital de démarrage - la nouvelle vague (the title of this post is a rough translation). Great insights on the local scene in Montreal and the canadian perspective on angel and VC financing. Check out my posts (in french) on the other side of the language barrier… ;-)
Tags: canada, event, montreal, quebec, startup, vc...
I am looking for a combined dev/sysadmin for two of my startups. A few hours per week to start, managing and automating an interesting emerging tech stack. Linux + Ruby on Rails (deployed with capistrano) + MySQL for one part of the application, Asterisk + Python for another part. I already have developers working on the projects, but I need someone to help us scale up in the next few months and put in place scripts and tools to manage this installation…
I am not looking for a lot of experience with Asterisk or RoR (it’s still quite infrequent as a choice) but MySQL replication and python skills are a definitive plus and several years of Linux administration of internet servers is a must. If you are interested or know someone who could be, drop me a note. I am ideally looking...
Alex Williams has a post about choosing how to sell your (software) product or service. He outlines three options ;
1. Closed-source hosted application running on my own servers with various subscription plans (i.e. blinksale)
2. Closed-source downloadable self-hosted application with a one-time fee + extra charge for upgrades (i.e: userscape)
3. Open-source extendable & downloadable self-hosted application with a one-time fee + extra charge for upgrades (i.e. mint)
He then goes on pros and cons of each, from a sales perspective. It struck me how this “selling prcess” was such a strong influence on the software development process (including operations and post-sale tech support). Here my partial accumulated wisdom on this subjet (posted in his comments) :
That’s a...
I always find it fascinating when I have an idea and that boiling on the backburner and then serendipity does it’s magic. I started to discuss with a few local entrepreneurs and startup related folks about doing some cocktails or breakfast just to get things going. Thru some blogosphere echo, I stumbled on Ben Yoskovitz’ post “Entrepreneurs Unite! Let’s Do Breakfast in Montreal“…
As I shifted my interest back to internet startups last summer, after a 3 years stint at tech consulting (now I am in mixed-mode doing both), I figured that the constant signals I was receiving from the markets where quite strong. Uptake in tech job posting for architects job on online local jobs and freelancing markets, number of requests from my network for project managers...
Patrick Tanguay has a good wrap up of a discussion emerging on some local blogs about the local web/tech scene in Montreal. It’s a subject I have been thinking about since my return from Silicon Valley (where my nickname got christened for those not aware of the fact).
Here is the comment I made on his blog, because I think I will not have enough time to write anymore about it in the next few days…
My short take on the subject of Montreal being under represented is a bit more sociological : generation gap.
I have a gut feeling that there is a much stronger discontinuity between generations here than elsewhere, brought by several historical/local patterns : profound change in demography, the “french entrepreneur complex” (old stuff from several generations ago) and the...
I used the venture technologist label a few times in the last few years to describe what are my objectives for my professional life. The definition of what exactly is a venture technologist and how it would apply to me is something that has been soaking for a while in my gray matter. I can now say that it has moved from a vague concept to a more concrete approach to my business life.
I know have a clear definition of my aspirations and goals. Part business analyst, part technology architect, part strategy consultant, a venture technologist applies his depp technological know-how and his business acumen to invest in technology project with high returns. Sometimes these returns are of the financial realm, sometimes in the form of technological accomplishments. The great success would have...
This is a must-do task for any consultant… good suggestions in the comments of the webworker daily article : how do you time track?. This is one of the hardest thing to do, it requires a good balance of discipline and methodology, adapted to your own style.
Tags: consulting...