Rodrigo A. Sepúlveda Schulz

Former UN official looks back at his university years

It seems my father, Claudio Sepúlveda Álvarez, is getting more acquainted with the Internet: the University of Concepcion - Chile, his alma mater, is running a story on him this week where he reflects on his career, and on what his university training brought to him.
I mention it here, because I would not be what I am today without the facts he mentions there. Please no comments about the beards ;) it does not run in the family as my grand-fathers only wore moustaches !

It seems we are all initiating coverage on our families, as Pascal did recently. I should maybe start a genealogy blog, as an example of a vertical blog suggested recently by Loïc. In the meantime, my personal genealogy site, a long-standing hobby, is at www.sepulveda.org.

e-bay expands both in the digital and the physical world

Fantastic coincidence last week. I was leaving a very silent pub after England lost their last game in the Euro2004, and bumped into a funny store, auctionning4U :

It was the opening night of the first UK store of Auctionning4U. The founder, Christian Brian, invited us in, and helped us to a drink and a few nuts. After some discussion, we discovered his business model:
he is planning to open a series of stores in wealthy neighborhoods (Sheperd's Bush in London now, Germany soon), where he invites people to drop in their old stuff. He will sell your stuff on ebay for you.

What ?
Yes, he has a full picture studio right there, 5-6 persons attending clients at any given moment, access to a whole lot of databases so that he can enter a very specific description of your item on ebay with many pictures. If your item is worth at least 10£ in his opinion, he'll take it, and launch auctions for 3 weeks max, at £1 so he makes sure they sell. If after 3 weeks the item is not sold, he will either return the item to you, or give to charity if you want to. He will even answer all the questions from potential buyers, and do the shipping, take care of registration fees on ebay, etc.

Each location has / will have a full cellar to store all objects and is nicely decorated (actually very simple light wood panneling with a huge customer desk and computers).
Cost of the service for you ? 1/3 of the selling price, all inclusive.
Expensive ? not if you consider that your stuff is lying around at home without monetary value...

I really find it interesting that people are creating physical stores to enable and boost online services. This approach to services will expand more and more I believe. What do you think ?

By the way, Christian also runs a venture capital fund: intrepid ventures. Definitively a good name.

On the online part of the game, ebay recently acquired similar online ventures in India and China, two of the world's most populous markets.

Electricity market being deregulated in France tomorrow

It seems this is almost a quiet revolution, unless you consider the recent strikes in France from the workers of the electricity and gaz monopoly,EDF-GDF. Parliament announced yesterday they were making EDF-GDF a societe anonyme, paving the way for a privatization in the near future, although cabinet members deny this allegation. A bit of déjà vu years ago when France Telecom was made an SA...

Tomorrow, the electricity market for SMEs is being deregulated, and a number of companies have prepared to enter this new market. One of them is Poweo, and Pascal has a note about them.

Another one is Direct-Energie, founded by 2 great folks and friends. I met Xavier and Fabien while they were still in prep school before going into Polytechnique and having a successful career in energy policy at EDF for Fabien, and in IT with start-ups for Xavier.

Congrats to them for bringing to market tomorrow their brainchild. I heard on BFM Radio this week that they have already signed a number of companies, including men underwear Arthur...

Patrick Devedjian, Minister for Industry gave a recent speech on the energy market in France.

Update: Direct Energie's press center is here. Le Journal du Net has a story about a deal between Tele2 and the company on 320.000 companies.

New CEO for AOL France

Le Journal du Net published the story less than 2 hours ago (update: follow up story here):
Carlo d'Asaro Biondo was promoted as the new CEO of AOL France as of today. He joined AOL Europe in early February as Senior VP in charge of Business Development, Telecoms, from Unisys where he was the VP and General Manager in charge of Telecommunications and Media in EMEA.
I met Carlo in his previous job, back in 1998 when he joined the new KPMG Consulting France practice as partner in charge of our ICE practice (Information, Communication & Entertainment = Telecoms & Media), then COO and eventually CEO. Under his leadership then, I built and ran the e-business practice at KPMG Consulting France. I advise him today on mobility matters.
Carlo had before that 10 years experience in consulting and telecoms, and has a doctorate in economics from La Sapienza University in Rome, Italy.

Please join me in congratulating him for this new endeavour.

Skip Digital Fortress in your shopping list

After reading two good books by Dan Brown (The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons), I thought I would give it another try.
This time, I got hold of Digital Fortress, written before the other two books, and it shows. The plot is still the same: someone gets murdered at the beginning of the book, and some professor (not Robert Langdon this time) with a lovely girl (cryptologist & fiancée Susan Fletcher in this book) set out to solve a complicated riddle throughout the book at the eleventh hour just before the carriage turns into a pumpkin.
I found this book to me of much thiner writing skills as the other two: the plot is almost too simple, the characters are hardly decribed (e.g.: no Mickey Mouse wrist watch here), the settings are hardly described either (something Dan Brown does very well in his other two books), and there are almost no teasers to other parts of the chase, nor intertwining stories. Part of the action happens in Sevilla, but it could have been in SmallTown, USA, as there is no reason whatsoever to be there.
Also, no esoterical symbology, no mystical brotherhood, no art description. It seems this was Dan Brown's first attempt at writing a book. I'll try deception point in some future, but it might turn out to be just that: a deception point...

Nevertheless, the book has some interesting background into the NSA (the dreaded National Security Agency) and into cryptology. If you are fond of mathematical games, I can only recommend the excellent Pulitzer-prize winning essay by Doug Hofstadter: Gödel, Escher, Bach. A fantastic read into the intrinsical subtleties of mathematics in music and graphical art. Also, if you are keenly interested in learning about computers, how they were built, check Hackers by Steven Levy. The first 2 parts dwell into the origins of the mythical MIT, and the Silicon Valley. You will recognize the names of the heroes: Mitch Kapor, Gates, Jobs, and many others, including the origins of the BBS The Well, the Grateful Dead, and the EFF (mentionned in the Fortress). If you are interested in a fictional thriller chasing a computer hacker, then The Cuckoo's Egg by Cliff Stoll is the book for you. Should be on your shelf next to Barbarians at the Gate ! Fascinating.
Finally, for a real account on how Kevin Mitnick, the notorious hacker was caught, check both sides of the story; his account written with Jonathan Littman: The Fugitive Game and his chaser's own account written with NYTimes' John Markoff: Takedown differ somehow. A number of web sites still fight each sides theories. Nevertheless, the man has been hurt by the US Justice system for well too long. Enjoy the read to know why.

Wireless technologies merging together

Great story from Smartmobs' blog:
UPS is enabling a mix of short range + mid-range + long-range wireless technologies:

"United Parcel Service of America(UPS) have announced it will begin deploying wireless technologies to package facilities and drivers in Europe."The first part of the deployment will occur inside UPS sorting centers and hubs. It involves pager-sized Bluetooth scanners, worn on the middle finger, which send package tracking data to small Wi-Fi (802.11b) terminals worn on the waist by package sorters. The Wi-Fi devices then send the tracking data to UPS’s computer network, where it can be accessed by customers,"the companies press release states.Further from the article."The deployment of the wireless scanning systems will be further boosted by the rollout of the newest hand-held computer to UPS’s delivery drivers. The DIAD IV (Delivery Information Acquisition Device), currently in field trials in the United States, is the first handheld computer to include wireless connectivity options for personal (Bluetooth), local (Wi-Fi) and wide-area networks (GPRS or CDMA)"."

Now think what else you could to if you replace Bluetooth by Zigbee, Wi-Fi by UltraWideBand, and GRPS or UMTS by Wi-Max... Lack coverage ? Add a bit of mesh networks into it...
Close to the ubiquitous high-speed internet...

BusinessWeek had a recent report on wireless commercial applications and a glossary about all these technologies.

Tired of typing URLs onto your phone ?

Are you tired of turning on/off the predictive texting on your mobile
phone when you are trying to enter a very long URL?

Why don't you try to turn the URL into a 2D-barcode, and read with your camera on your phone ? A number of companies are offering this technology including Scanbuy (it is also offering a number of other applications), and Semacode (an easy step by step is here).

Then, just point and click your phone to the barcode. I found it difficult to get it right on my laptop's screen, but it worked immediately after printing the code. And there it was, the whole super long URL entered in a click on my phone. I believe the number of applications for this point-n-click-barcode technologies are enormous. Check the guys' above web sites for ideas.

By the way, after you scan my URL to the left, don't forget to make it a bookmark on your phone ! ;)

Lots of activity in online and mobile music markets

It seems time is running faster this month than any other previous ones... A whole load of announcements in the music space have stormed the European marketplace in June 2004. To start off, the much awaited announcement of the launch in Europe on June 15th of iTunes was preceded by a few days by the launch of Roxio's Napster UK launch.
Well it seems the studios are finally sorting out the rights issues in Europe.

Sony's Connect download service is expected to launch on desktops before the end of the year. In the meantime, another division of Sony (Sony Pictures Digital Entertainment) has just launched last week a mobile music download service called Streamman, basically a blend of personnalised services and streaming radio (similar to Rhapsody's service - a Real company). A big congrats to the folks at end2endmobile and packetvideo for making this service live in Scandinavia with TeliaSonera. It should expand shortly into Western Europe and onto the desktop. If you recall well, I was predicting this service only a weeks ago in a post called 'Streaming iTunes'... Had I known it was about to launch ;)

And now the news. The #1 on-line music platform in Europe, OD2, was acquired today by a US company, Loudeye, a much smaller company from what I understand looking at their numbers. From the WSJ Europe: "Loudeye Corp. of Seattle agreed to acquire On Demand Distribution Ltd., a company co-founded by musician Peter Gabriel that is Europe's largest online distributor of music, in a deal valued at least $38.6 million." You will find many comments on the whys of this sale, and on the deal structure. I've posted about it on Pascal's blog. The Register has a great analysis of the deal.
Basically I believe that although it had a B2B strategy, white-labeling its service to the likes of MSN, OD2 was trying to make money as a pure-play, whereas iTunes makes money for Apple by cross-selling iPods... Different numbers, hence different strategy. The difference in download numbers (3m for OD2 in 4 years vs. 85m for iTunes in little over one year), can be explained by consumer uptake but definitively more by analyzing Apple's fantastic global marketing machine. As an example iPod ads appeared all over Europe months before the service was even launched over here...

In the meantime a number of wanabees in this space have delayed their launch of a mobile service in Europe. Fnac is just one example of difficulties industrial heavy-weights (Microsoft, Wal-mart, etc.) are encountering.

Let's hope this B2B strategy will allow Loudeye to reach enough scale to make online music a success, by enabling all the other brand holders to create their own download service...
Then we should probably see consolidation again, as it happened in internet properties (portals, communities, search engines, etc.)

Unless MusicNet decides to react quickly...

Draft book for the Da Vinci Code

I seldom get the impression of reading the same book again. Even weirder when you read the 'sequel' before the current book.

Half-way into one of Dan Brown's (the author of the Da Vinci code) other opuses, Angels & Demons, and into 3 murders already (out of 5 supposedly), the similarities are striking:

• the main character is Robert Langdon, the - same - Harvard professor running around Paris in the Code. He is assisted - again - by a lovely lady, daughter - again - of the first murdered character - again - and very knowledgeable about her father's work (Vittoria here is some kind of particle physicist...)
• the plot deals with an -again- obscure brotherhood from medieval times (the Illuminati - traces all over the web...), trying to destroy the Vatican -again-; followers of the brotherhood are very well connected (read infiltrated into the upper ranks of society), with links to the Masons, and almost brain-washed followers. Both brotherhoods use expert killers, and descriptions of both brotherhoods are said to be factual in the preface.
• Langdon is woken up in the middle on the night -again- and is supposed to follow a plot, and like in a mistery trail -again-, follows hints found in art; each new discovery leads to the next (here it starts somehow at the Vatican Archives)
• murders are committed with a complex symbological set up
• etc. I'll update this post when I finish the book, but coincidences are all over

And if you are into conspiracy theories, a very similar story can be found in the cartoon series "Le Triangle Secret" (8 volumes). Another very disturbing book is close to the plot in this story: 'In God's Name: An Investigation into the Murder of Pope John Paul I' - many unswered questions and details with a background of conspiracy by Banco Ambrosiano, Masonic Lodge P2, Opus Dei, etc...

I am sure these stories are going to make great action/suspense fiction films. I understand from the web that the Da Vinci Code is already being planned; the books have a fantastic kind of ambiance, such as those found in the great 'Silence of the Lambs' or the less good but still interesting 'Seven'.

Has anyone read both books ?
Don't get me wrong. Even this one is VERY entertaining (give it a try Pascal !)...

Does football teach anything to our kids ?

I seldom watch sports on TV or elsewhere (although I am told I should really try the ambiance at a stadium), but how can you miss what is happening around Europe this week ? 16 finalists from Europe (in the geographical sense, as Croatia for example is included) are playing each other in the Euro'2004 cup !
I watched half a match in a pub in London last week, and indeed it makes a difference with me seating at home in front of my TV wondering why grown up men keep running behind a ball in shorts, with other grown ups dressed up as if for Rio's Carnaval and screaming like at Paul McCartney's concert ?

My last live experience was a pre-season game from the 76ers in Philadelphia a couple of year ago. Fun, but it lasts forever over there (4 hours for a game ?), with commercials (or their equivalent during time-outs) all the time, making the experience a bit weird.

I have always heard that sports teach great moral values to our kids: they learn effort, collective spirit, focus, etc. So good for their bodies and good for their minds as well.
So does it make sense that all these players at Euro2004 play foul with big close-ups on TVs ? They kick each other, punch eachother, pull the shirts, mimick they're hurt when they are not ? The referee doesn't even challenge half these encounters! Not to mention the racist slogans that appeared earlier last week on the stadiums !

Shame on them. What a bad example for our youth.
Somehow modern sports do not live up to the moral values sport should convey.
Let's hope the Olympic games this year bring a different attitude (and stay free of drugs...).