Rodrigo A. Sepúlveda Schulz

Get another book from Seth Godin

Seth Godin does it again; he has put one of his books up online for free in PDF format: The Bootstrapper's Bible. From the site:

"Seth Godin The ENTIRE book! FREE for TWO WEEKS ONLY! There's never been a better time to start a business with no money. This manifesto will show you how.

About the author:
Seth Godin is a bestselling author, entrepreneur and agent of change. In Free Prize Inside, his follow up to the best selling marketing book of 2003, Purple Cow, Seth helps you make your product remarkable with soft innovations. You need to make each of your employees idea champions so they can find the Free Prize. Godin is author of six books that have been bestsellers around the world and changed the way people think about marketing, change and work. Seth is a renowned speaker as well. He was recently chosen as one of 21 Speakers for the Next Century by Successful Meetings and is consistently rated among the very best speakers by the audiences he addresses. He holds an MBA from Stanford and was called "the Ultimate Entrepreneur for the Information Age" by BusinessWeek. "

Hurry up! (via BCIE)

Huge mobility party in Paris on thursday december 2nd

Mobility Party 2004 this thursday evening in Paris. They're expeting 30,000 visitors.

The partner list looks cool too:

Looks like fun. I have 3 (yep THREE) other commitments that night, but I'll try to make it.
(via Anina)

And glowria.fr wins another venture prize

Mihai Crasneanu, our dynamic entrepreneur and CEO of glowria.fr made it again earlier this month. After winning the best seed-stage start-up trophy at Capital-It Autumn 2003 edition (+ runner-up for best potential of development Trophy!!! out of 270 entrants), being one of the 500 recipients of the 5th Masters de la Création d'Entreprise at the French Senate in early 2004 (can you spot him on the official picture ? ;), Mihai recently defended our colours, and is the only French company winner of the European Unlimited Venture Capital conference Presenting Company Award.

We are also very satisfied of being #1 on the French market according to Mediamétrie's latest ratings, after just 1 year of commercial existence.

Not bad for our first venture at RISC Partners :o) ?

Now, I welcome you to visit our new venture, servidores.com, Spain's first triple-play IP operator: we launched domain name reservation, webmail, online backups & hosting in the spring, gaming in the summer, ADSL services in early September, and voice (carrier pre-select) earlier this month. Our new gaming portal Zonagamers.com went live this week! More to come!

Spanish blogger friends, your comments are welcome! How do you like these new services ?

That Netsky.P virus is killing me!

Folks out there: what is your favourite antivirus ? Please don't reply an Apple Macintosh...

I've been having trouble with M. W32.Netsky.P@mm!enc himself for way too long now. I've tried many kinds of virus removal tools (including Panda Software, TrendMicro and its free online scanner, McAfee, etc.). None seems to kill him dead completely. I'm now using a trial version of Norton Antivirus 2005: it detects the bastard pretty well, but is unable to kill it (desinfect or delete): just quarantine the file (my pending folder on my mail system - I go through mailblocks). I have to go thru a series of manual operations to get rid of the thing, until it gets back to me. Aaaargh... My NAV 2005 keeps popinp up a window all the time! Do you have a better solution?

Staying up to date on competition in France

One tool that I use to keep track of a number of companies, is an online registry of legal documentation. It's called societe.com and you can get company statutes, balance sheets, names of corporate executives, board members (hinting to shareholders), etc.
It costs almost nothing (a few euros) to download the legal documentation off the web site, which is just a scanned version of documents that are compulsory for any company under French law to deposit at the Greffe du Tribunal de Commerce.

As an example here is the entry for the company behind glowria.fr.

A very interesting feature is that you can subscribe to an email alert, whenever any information (or new document is added) for any company. You have to do this for each company you want to track of course. It is very useful to track a whole sector.

Another site providing similar information is Infogreffe. It is usually more accurate (and has an english interface), but somehow I use it less often. Now you won't have the excuse not to monitor your competition.

RedHerring preparing for top 100 Europe 2005

Back in June I wrote about the Red Herring's regional competitions for the hotest 100 companies. The new competition for the top 100 companies in Europe has just opened, and I believe Alex Vieux shall be hosting an invitation-only event next week in Paris to launch the campaign. Good luck to all contestants, it's worth the fight, as the promotion is more than interesting for a young company.
The registration documentation is available online.

How do large corporations work with start-ups?

Interesting topic: how do the worlds of large corporations and start-ups work together?

At glowria, our online DVD rental service in France, we decided very early on to work very closely with industry players, as if we were one of them, bringing each one of our partners something they didn't have, so that we could create win-win situations.
For example, we launched very early on a partnership with the 2nd largest retailer in the world, Carrefour. We have pushed that idea forward with our recently announced deal with Bertelsman.
In the meantime we have also entered revenue-share deals with all the major movie studios.

I have also recently touched upon managing innovation processes between large corporations and start-ups.

If you are interested in learning more about this topic, there is a conference in Paris tomorrow night that I shall be attending, organized by the IE Club.

Update: The Journal du Net has already (!) an article (French) on the topic.

Stelios expands easyCinema to online DVD rental

Not quite a real online-DVD rental service as we know it (Netflix, glowria.fr), but a service able to create confusion in the minds of consumers that Stelios is launching such as service. After entering the MVNO market (well, announcing really...), he partners with probably the best online DVD player in the UK, VideoIsland.

Everyone in the DVD industry had been expecting this move for a long time, as easy has a brand permission to extend into this space.

From their press release:

This online service at www.easyCinema.com will offer consumers the chance to rent DVDs for as little as £1.99 a time on a pay-as-you-go basis and will allow consumers to keep their DVDs for up to 21 days. Consequently, easyCinema DVD rental will be both about half the price of its high street competitors and will allow its customers to keep their DVDs for about ten times longer.

easyCinema DVD rental will have a stock of 25,000 titles available to rent including the latest new releases, documentaries, world cinema and TV series, offering ten times the selection available on the high street. As an online service easyCinema DVD rental will be open to customers twenty-four hours a day and will also offer free delivery and free return postage.

New stuff from Skype: new phone handset agreements + APIs

Hey... no month goes by without praising the Scandinavian lords of VoIP. I now use Skype daily to call business partners around Europe. They're all on Skype (talk about the power of viral marketing).
Today something weird happened: I had to call someone that didn't have Skype installed, but used a plain old phone ! So 20th century. So I decided to give it a try: SkypeOut !!!

Registration was super easy, I bought a pre-paid bundle of 10€ (please note that Skype does not have a refund policy). Add to that the 15% VAT for Luxemburg (why on earth is Skype billing from Lux ;) ?), and there I was a few moments later, after paying by CC, with an account to play with. So, easy, I started calling up a few folks, both on fixed and mobile. They all tell me they hear a very strong noise, although I hear them crystal clear. Something wrong somewhere there, hopefully it will be solved shortly so that we can all start using Skype in a professional environment, for it is so helpful. Funnily, communications to mobile phones (which generate about 10x revenues) have much much less noise than communications to fixed lines... I wonder why. Is it the difference in infrastructure ?

On another note, I noticed Skype launched a couple of weeks ago, something with Siemens: embedded Skype with DECT phones. It won't be too long before it shows up in Wi-Fi devides as well (already available for PocketPC PDAs and smartphones right?). They are also promoting USB logitech headsets. Too bad I bought mine before the promotion ;;)

Another great news is that Skype has finally published an API to extend the system:

Skype Developer Zone helps you integrate Skype functions in your hardware, software or services. You can download documentation and example code that helps you get going quickly. We’ve also assembled a number of ideas about how you could expand Skype.

Among their ideas for expanding Skype are:
- Personal Information Managers
- Online gaming
- Providing on-demand content
- Call-center and IVR solutions
- Phone handsets

I'd like to throw into that:
- a non greographical number for people to call me from POTS
- a voice mail service
- an extension to add SkypeIM to either gaim or Trillian, so that I can have everything in one place
- better import mechanisms for contact lists (the current version can't find my contacts from PalmDesktop); a tool to update them thru CSV would be fine

Skype is basically becoming a telco with a bunch of services:
- telephony, conference calling and IM today.
- file sharing, videoconferenceing, unified messaging, fax tomorrow, with the little twist of being able to plug voice easily into any application (see the API above for games), a leap forward from any major telco today on VoiP.

By the way, call rates on SkypeOut (add 15% to the price list) are even cheaper than the rates for VoIP of the cheapest of French ISPs, Free...

Fedora Core 3 (linux distribution) is out; using BitTorrent to download it

Which one of you folks has already installed this latest version of Fedora ? It is available through traditional mechanisms, and through the torrent. It was released 2 weeks ago, but I missed it with my trip to Japan.
 

The fedora page doesn't say much, so I had a look at my usual source for information: OSNews. They have articles on What's new in FC3, a comparison with Suse 9.2 Pro, an intro to Fedora Core 3, among other news:

Fedora Core 3, codenamed Heidelberg, was released this morning. FC3 features Gnome 2.8, KDE 3.3, and Linux kernel 2.6.9, as well as the introduction of Firefox and Thunderbird in Fedora.

As a matter of fact, following my post on Azureus, I couldn't get the torrent client to work, so I had to reconfigure my home firewalls a bit. Here are the 2 things you need to do (example here are for one my SMC barricade routers):

- port forwarding on your NAT router for ports 6881-6999 (you can restrict that to a less wide range if you want less simultaneous connections) to your local machine. (the other 2 ports defined here are for the little Donkey... Just testing!)

- allow port triggering for port 6969 (outbound), opening up ports 6881-6999 on the way back.

BitTornado is an alternate software client for BitTorrent. BT's official page is here, and the FAQ page is here.

Now that you can get BitTorrent to work in your home configs, did you know it represents already one third of internet traffic ? Absolutely wild. (via Om Malik).

By the way, although very legit companies use the torrent technology in very legit ways, some slightly less legit folks are getting enthusiastic at suprnova.org and torrentreactor.com. People, be good and respect IP.