Rodrigo A. Sepúlveda Schulz

Pillow fight Paris

Pillow fight Paris, originally uploaded by Charles Nouÿrit.

amusing and stupid. At least the guys are having fun with it, but what's the point ?

It was earlier today in Paris... (see Slideshow on Flickr)

No voice today

No voice today, originally uploaded by rsepulveda.

Irony of life: I can't vote tomorrow, technically I have no official "political" voice.

And today I don't have any physiological voice left. The doc came by earlier this afternoon. Here are my drugs for the week... just a very bad throat.

testing Pandora again - great

I’ve written before about Pandora, the online service that helps you discover new music. I actually quickly met with the CTO at Techcrunch7 in the Valley. There are a few things I disliked about the service:

• there’s no opera. impossible to create a channel with my favourite divas
• I have a couple of channels about crooners for example. Every time I launch them I just keep on listening to the same stuff. tiresome.
• there’s no directory on which you can choose a channel. Imagine a tagcloud with the possibility to navigate in a couple of clicks to the music of your mood ?

I decided to give it a try again the other day. I wanted to listen to Italian Pop. right: how do you get there ? So I tried the only names of Italian Pop I know: Zucchero, Gianni Nanini, Eros (although I spelled him Enzo at first ) Ramazzotti. I got lucky with that last name, and by a small miracle I’m getting similar music but in SPANISH ! not in Italian. Even Ramazzotti in Spanish. I guess that’s because he sells albums in the spanish-speaking Miami ?

Then I tried something else, after seeing Martin’s funny flamenco video. Of course I know Camaron, and Paco de Lucia. So I tried typing in Paco, and I got this GREAT channel i’m listening to now:

http://www.pandora.com/?sc=sh149616744829292415

Now… when I’m in the mood for something else next time, such as Lebanese classics (Feyrouz…) what do I type ? I’m sure a catalog interface is easier to do than the fantastic catalog work that the Music Genome Project have been doing for years.

A chat with Denis Soupault, president of cigar club Cigarmania

Download clip

I had a great lunch today with my buddy Denis: we've known each other for years. Sometimes it's great to have a break for a couple of hours with a good friend. I'll let you guess where we had lunch (Paris). Here we discuss about cigars, in a very very generic fashion. Usually cigar fans talk about very technical details of their cigars.

I quit cigars about 5 years ago when my first kid was born, after over 10 years of heavy smoking :) Every now and then however a good friend and good spirit make me enjoy it again.

ps: www.cigarmania.com

great stuff on venturevoice

After years of travelling around the world, I've stated to develop habits:

1) I always try to find the cheapest flight around. Indeed air travel has become a commodity to me, and when I fly to our offices in Spain, I check of course www.vueling.com, www.easyjet.com, www.terminalA.com and www.easyvols.com. Often enough, www.AerolineasArgentinas.com offers the cheapest return flight to Madrid for less than 150 euros (the drawback is that 1) you have to go and get your ticket at their offices on Rue de Rivoli in Paris, 2) you fly through an international carrier, hence outside the Schengen zone, ie passport controls, etc.). Iberia and Airfrance tend to be way too expensive anyways.

That last site www.easyvols.com compares all the different carriers. Very similar to www.mobissimo.com. Of course I always also check www.opodo.fr (and check www.opodo.co.uk as well, the rates are sometimes cheaper with a stop-over in London) and www.expedia.com. I haven’t really found the ONE-stop site that will do it all for me.

No need to spend that extra cash for basically only a few hours of comfort. I’d rather spend them on somehting more tangible. This applies to both my private and professional flights.

2) my years in consulting have taught me that it’s a bad idea to work on your computer or sensitive paper files on public transport. 3M has released special filters for your laptop so your neighbour won’t see what you are typing. Well, since I’m travelling favella class anyways, there’s no room for opening a laptop, although Apple is positionning the latest MacBook for that.

So what do you do on planes and airports ?

a) my normal guess is that as an entrepreneur, whenever you can grab some sleep time, grab it. So I sleep. Drink a lot of liquid (you otherwise get dehydrated), put on your sexy sleeping mask (you do of course a lot those handing around right), and get yourself some good noise cancelling headphones. And off you go for some quality time with yourself (experienced it recently with my 2 return flights to the Valley from Paris = 20 hours each way…).

For some heavy time zone shifts, I usually don’t sleep the previous night and get a lot of work done. Hence I just fall asleep when I board the plane, and get immediately on my destination’s timezone. By the way, since you’re so tight on your seat, but asleep, you shouldn’t worry too much. Try to get a window seat and a pillow; better for leaning agains it.

b) if you don’t want to sleep, keep those headphones on, and browse through the press, trade magazines, or that book you hadn’t had time to read. You’ll get there wiser and with the right feeling of having caught up with your backlog.

c) on this flight to the US I tried something else: catching up with podcasts. I tuned into VentureVoice which I hadn’t listened to for a long time. With my headphones on, a lot of water, AND my sleeping mask on. Well not only do you really relax, but I enjoyed the different shows about Fabrice Grinda, David Sifry, John Bogle and many others. Listening to other entrepreneurs telling about their own experiences was great, and I was focusing just on them.

Give it a try, and feedback always welcome.

lunch at the circle

 

Pierre from Priceminister is the speaker today

Today is Saint-Rodrigo

 Aha ! This is one day I always forget to celebrate: partly because the protestants in my family do not celebrate Saints. Partly also because it means nothing to me. But Olivier in the comments sent me a greeting for Saint-Rodrigo. Thanks, I always appreciate the thoughts though.

Now back to real stuff:

although I could grabd a copy of the agenda & contact list on my laptop hard disk, I can’t read them for the moment: I use an old program called Palm Desktop, and as far as I know, it will only allow you to EXPORT then IMPORT your data in order to read them on another computer. So I’m stuck : I do not remember all my appointments for this week, and more importantly, I only have a backup of my contacts list from end of august 2005…

So if we are meeting THIS week, and in the upcoming weeks, please drop me a quick email. Also please send me your contact details again as well at rodrigo.sepulveda [at] gmail.com.

If I miss our appointment this week, I’m very sorry, but I really had no backup of my agenda

RSS: Meet Lukasz Gadowski (founder & CEO of Spreadshirt) [english]

I was really impressed by Lukasz when I met him a few months ago at ETRE in Athens back in October. He built his company - Spreadshirt - organically, with no venture capital. He sells branded apparel (T-shirts for example) today in Europe, USA and Canada, and has over 120 colleagues today.

As his T-shirts says: Keep it simple. Grow your business one customer at a time, using cash-flow...

Blog et Rugby : Rodrigo

Blog et Rugby : Rodrigo, originally uploaded by Altaide.

Someone spotted me in a late dinner this week with Pierre Salviac in Paris. It was snowing lightly outside the whole day, and some Armagnac was more than welcome...

just got my SIM card back: I now have a phone again

Forget the temporary spanish number I had published earlier on on this blog. I just got back a SIM card for my French mobile number. It feels really weird to running around town with no easy for people to reach you, and no easy way to call anyone.

In the meantime, the thief in Spain has given me a nice over 150 euros bill for a single day. Indeed he was using my French hence using roaming tarifs in Spain. Let’s hope my operator, Coriolis Telecom, will cancel that bill, as there IS NO WAY to call their 0800 numbers from abroad. I tried many times. I was just given today their international number for abroad, but it was nowhere to be found on their site. So I had to try to find a friend in France who would call in for me (thanks Lim!). Crazy customer experience.

In addition their call center hours are just ridiculous…offices / call center closes around 5pm.

Last week, when I called them in Paris, I was told I should have gone to the Spanish police offices and reported my phone loss. Right… who’s going to go to a foreign police office in a foreign language to report a stolen phone ? And then I would have to pay for an official translator to get the document in French, and *maybe* get something done with that document ?

Oh, and they also got my keys, so I have no keys to my house. Luckily I have wifi at home, so I used it for about 45 minutes sitting at my doorstep last night, until my wife came home… I’m having a copy done at some point today. I think I have a key loss/theft insurance with one of my credit cards. I’ll let you know in an update the funny stuff my bank will tell me when I try to use the insurance: I’m sure they’ll ask for an official document with the diameter of the earth in picometers or something….