Have a great 2005!

01 January 2005

Have a great 2005!

Dear readers,

It's been a great and exciting year for me. In 2004 I expanded upon the skills I developped over 10 years of consulting + those from business school.

In January 2004 I finished my first year as board member at glowria.fr, an online digital media retailing company. I also finished a special 7 month assignment with the company to set up an industrial-grade IT infrastructure (recruitement of an in-house team under Antoine Bonavita: Java development skills, user support skills for data mining, system administration + 99,99% SLA support at our hosting) + redefining the company's financial control (budget mechanisms, reporting, etc.), among other things.

With my partner Ivan from RISC Partners, we also tried in January to buy a distressed company in the software industry that we thought we could merge with one of our other companies. In the end, we got over-bid in the final round in the commercial court of the Paris Tribunal.

From March to October, I had the honour and pleasure of working with a great person at AOL Europe, Carlo d'Asaro Biondo, in defining a pan-European strategy for AOL in the mobility space. Part of the approved strategy was announced in the French press in early November.
I met many many folks in the mobile industry including service providers, entrepreneurs and mobile operators. I would like to mention a few of them who have in the process become real good friends: Patrick Parodi (from PacketVideo Network Services, an Alcatel company ;) and also chairman of the Mobile Entertainment Forum), Gilles Babinet (chairman and founder of Musiwave, the chaku-uta champion in Europe ;), Rajen Lakhani (founder of SoreThumbs.biz) and Pascal Lorne (founder & CEO of Miyowa, also president of the i-mode service providers club). I apologize for not mentionning everyone, you all deserve it!

RISC Partners, the company I co-founded with Ivan, was also involved with the launch of servidores.com, a multiple-play operator in Spain, offering domain name reservation, on-line gaming, server hosting, fantastic ADSL connectivity, Voice-over-IP (carrier pre-select), and really really soon TV over ADSL with VoD features as well.

Since December, I'm back at glowria.fr, giving a big hand to its founder, Mihai Crasneanu, with stabilizing growth (we are #1 on the French market) and preparing for our other news businesses of which video-on-demand and on-line gaming have been announced in the press recently.

In addition, I had the pleasure of doing a bit of travelling this year: many many trips to London and Hamburg to coordinate AOL's thinking in matters of mobility; a great trip to Beijing with Ivan in early september to discover this emerging superpower; another fantastic trip to Japan with Pascal to meet most mobile players there (Great to meet you there Pierre!). Not to forget a week-end escapade to Athens in the summer for the first week-end at the Olympics 2004 and a couple of expos/trade shows such as Milia in Cannes, and CebiT in Hannover.

By the way, I stopped flying Air France this year, and switched to British Airways (much better prices through opodo.co.uk, much better service with client reps, better seats in the place, better food). Too bad for Air France... They suck big time.

It has been a busy year, with lots of fun in the professional world: I managed to merge all my interests well: technology, strategy, growth ventures, venture financing, media and retail.
For some of you, I thought it would be fun to transcribe my thoughts on this blog, which I started in early April after Loic convinced me to do so. You will of course forgive me for not giving you all my business advice that clients pay for, or that I plug back into our own business ;) As Loic says: "the idea has no value, only execution matters". That is very true, although it requires infinite execution capacity, which we don't currently have. So I've kept some information to ourselves.

Other joys came on the night of May 1st, when 10 new countries joined the European Union. I look forward to discovering (I mean travelling this year ;) those 9 countries that I still haven't been to: Ireland, Luxemburg, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Cyprus, Slovenia, Slovakia, Finland (yep, I've been to the UK, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Malta, Austria, Hungary, Czech Republic, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Greece, Belgium, The Netherlands, Poland).

Finally, I managed to relaunch my genealogy site, sepulveda.org, using typepad's blog platform for easy updates.

Bad news were not many, but included the re-election of W., this time democratically it seems. So be it.

I'd like to thank you all for your support (not really for your comments, since there were not that many :), but for coming back to read this blog regularly. I still don't know how to track those folks that get this feed via RSS, but I'm sure I'll find out with your help this year. To the left are my stats for 2004.

Finally, a note on the future:

- President Jacques Chirac gave an eloquent speech last night: please do not forget to help the relief network over the Asian Tsunami. I'm not convinced that all the money will get there, so choose your NGO well, to make sure they can use that money elsewhere in the future. He also pledged the French people to vote for the new European Constitution before the summer. Whatever your political spectrum affiliation, it's the only way forward for the continent. Vote wisely.

- Although it doesn't really show, I did not take any vacation in 2004: hence I'll be off tomorrow for 2 weeks holidays in South Africa with the family. Expect some photo blogging from there (hey I got myself a 7.2 mega-pixel pocket camera from Sony: the DSC-P150 following this review), but not much more.