Catching up on my interviews from last year. Here's the full interview by French journalist Philippe Couve from RFI (Radio France International), taped at LeWeb3 2007. An excerpt was broadcasted as part of show N°10 of l'Atelier des Medias.
Jean-Michel Billaut, host of the now almost legendary French show "the BillautShow" came by our offices on Friday. That turned into a long conversation in front of the webcam of my macbook pro (25 min...) where we discussed about the online video industry, competition, venture capital, P2P, reaction from TV networks, B2B, und so weiter...
He posted the original show here, and there is some discussion going on there as well.
What? miss sexy un-conventional anchor of favourite show Rocketboom (and she’s up there with Amber from CommandN, Rachel from 88slide and Luria “Cali” from Geek Brief TV) has decided to call it quits (I met her here in Vegas, said hi in San Francisco)
Happens all the time. In French we have a saying: “cemetaries are full of indispensable people”. Right.
What is interesting in this piece of news is what Amanda says in this clip: “my partner owns 51%, I own 49%. Hence he makes decisions and I have to learn how to live with it”.
Remember as entrepreneurs, that starting a company together is like marriage. Although the honeymoon part is great, thinks might get sour at some point, and you need to manage that and plan for it. Indeed, your business partner also has a personal life: s/he might evolve, want to move on, grow into a different job. How do you split? Who makes decision when you don’t agee?
It requires extensive TALKING before signing the partnership document. Make sure you address all your concerns early on. Don’t be shy. Thinks like these happen, and both will be better off when you have addressed them early.
In my case, I’ve had a 50/50 split in everything we do with my business partner since we started working together years ago. And we have written rules for our equity stakes, and we hace discussed rules for decision-making. Not personal, only business.
On a more optimistic note, hey Andrew: keep the spirit up I’m sure you’ll continue producing great show. And to Amanda: all the best in your acting career. You’re very young so you have plenty of time to build a career.
ps: have you noticed the number of people moving on lately: Om Malik, Scoble, Scott McNealy, Freddy Mini of MusicMe, etc. etc. something to do with the full moon maybe?
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.
Last week at vloggercon, I had a great chat with Tim, the founder of FrenchMaidTV, just before Amber of CommandN.tv dragged him away for an interview 
: I’ve got to go and watch that.
Well he was telling me all about his business model: product placement. See, the problem with online video ads is that users can skip them. That’s what happened to traditional TV when Tivo was introduced: Tivo users could skip the ads, hence taking away part of the revenues of advertisers, who cried wolf. The solution ? They tried product placement; I’m sure you’ve seen this happen in most episodes of “24” (a lot of Apple stuff, and Cisco recently), in the James Bond movies, etc.
Episode 3 of French Maid TV is out: it promotes heavily 2 brands / services, and the pretty girls are just a way to bring eyeballs. Smart. I’d just recommend toning down a little bit the commercial part, and working a bit more on the script. Tim showed an unreleased episode of how to change oil in your car: very sexy, and SPONSORED by an oil company.
Cali Lewis (not her real name, IRL she’s Luria Petrucci) was there at the conference too, although I didn’t have the opportunity to talk to her (next time ?). She also does product placement in a very intelligent way: I loved the way the introduced her sponsor in a recent episode with a clip on Bogart & Baccall. She seems to reinvent all the time the way to present her sponsors.
Indeed, godaddy.com have advertised their brand in a number of shows already (diggnation, commandN, etc.) and I have used their service several times already with the discount code on the shows, just because of their presence.
So product placement in videos are not easy to skip, fun to watch, and the brand does stick. Online video allows to experiment with more formats than just inserting them. Expect a lot more on this. I missed the morning sessions last friday in NYC at the first “online video ad forum”, and this was only slightly touched upon in the afternoon sessions.
got podcasted on hotfromsiliconvalley.com a moment ago.
Update: here’s the link to the audio interview.
Ivan (my business partner at vpod.tv) has a nice chat on Sunday evening with Joh Furrier, CEO of Podtech, the person who hired Robert Scoble.
So... straight from the horse's mouth. Only on vpod.tv.
And another video and audio podcasting company announces financing today: podemus.com's founder & CEO, Bertrand Lenôtre, was with me today on French TV LCI. We had a quick chat before the show, and he confirms the already widely spread rumor among the French blogosphere that he has raised some business angel money recently.
He won't reveal the numbers, but confirms that Isabelle Bordry (former managing director of Yahoo! France) or Marc Perrin (CEO of wine & co) have become shareholders. He did confirm other names off camera, but you'll have to ask him ;)
I was invited to talk about podcasting and videoblogging along with Bertrand Lenôtre of Podemus.com today on French news television LCI.
It will air several times over the weekend, in the "Plein Ecran" program, and will be available in streaming on the web as well. (can anyone tape it for me ?)
I'll be posting a couple of videos later tonight with Bertrand, and our hosts, Cédric Ingrand of LCI, and Virginie Robert of the great French economic newspaper, Les Echos, in the weekly Innovation supplement.
