Rodrigo A. Sepúlveda Schulz

Amazing diggnation show 38

 ‘Nuf said. Watch it.

Microsoft invests in vpod.tv

You’ll find the (fake) press release on Codor’s blog with a (fake) quote of mine.

OK April’s fool joke, broken a bit early to the world. I mentionned the Action Pack / Empower deals on the Mry & Rodrigo Show 12: great value for money.

 

Entrepreneur-only dinner (CGS 4.0) is back on April 28th.

People> the entrepreneur stint happening in Paris now for over a year, uniting the forces of the entrepreneur (Sepulveda), the business angel (Clavier) and the Venture Capitalist (Goldberg) is back in it’s 4th edition. It’s invitation-only, and you have to register ON MARC’s BLOG!

It’s on April 28th. People tell us they loved the previous editions. So web 2.0 … :D

Why I like the Internet

Above: my great-great-grand-father Wilhelm Schulz with wife Albertina Pett and their 7 children.

I had the great suprise and luck to be pinged by Karen Schulz Ibaceta yesterday by email. She found me just by googling “Schulz in Chile”. Karen is the daughter of Dr. Ronald Schulz Grangier, who’s my mom’s distant cousin, and who is the doc who delivered me, ie. the first person to ever see me…  What a surprise.

Karen lives in Bath, UK, as she recently got married there. We spent a couple of hours last night by IM (I have a voice extinction, so I can’t talk since yesterday morning), and added lots of information from her family’s side + names + pictures.

This kind of odd connection happens to me all the time. I have established links to cousins in Brasil, Canada, Australia, Germany, without ever having met them. Tools such as the Internet with VoIP, fast file transfer, IM, search engines, genealogy hosting sites have enabled these conversations that otherwise would almost never have existed.

So I’m glad I’ve been involved professionally on the net for the past 15 years, and with genealogy for the past 25. By the way, the links to names do work, but they are reserved to members of my family and friends who have the password: just to protect the names of those people born less than a 100 years ago.

And for the curious of you out there, as far as I know, we have no link to Charles M. Schulz, the creator of the Snoopy cartoon, although his family came from Berlin too. 

Springtime in Paris

Place de la Concorde in Paris, yesterday afternoon with Ivan, my business partner at vpod.tv.

Our datacenter at Redbus Paris is having electrical issues

There was a first 48 min outage this morning around 11am. It’s down again at 3pm. So if you are experiencing issues with watching videos hosted at vpod.tv or trying to use the back office, our machines are down, among I guess all the clients there.

It’s really not the first time Redbus is having electrical issues in Paris. They’ve had them in London as well. I can only qualify this as professional incompetence. They are supposed to be a first rate data center with multiple layers of backup equipment and processes. This is one too many. We’re moving out ASAP.

Update: my friend Tariq Krim of netvibes.com is down too, and so are the 200,000 blogs at over-blog.com… way to go Redbus!

Update2: 20:48, our French provider iKoula for our test servers, hosted at Redbus has just sent us an update:

“Dear customer,

Redbus Interhouse, Data Center where are located our equipments including your hosting solution, faced today a major power crisis.

- 10h55 : A power failure caused by EDF touched all the West of Paris including Redbus Interhouse building in Courbevoie. The blackout is global.
- 10h15 : The Ikoula team on site is reinforced. Our technical staff is at 100% ready to face any situation
- 11h54 : Power is back. All Ikoula equipments are immediately up. Everything works at 100%

Redbus hsa not yet explained the abnormal outage of one hour.

- 14h32 : 2nd global power failure
- 15h16 : Power is back but the situation is not stable

Consequences of these incidents:
- The building is working on two generators (apprently the 3rd is out of order)
- All the UPS are empty
- The main dijonctor (EDF) is broken, thus, the switch to EDF power is not possible
- The switch to EDF network will involve a new outage
- The situation is highly unstable

Ikoula took the decision not to switch back on its equipments. Machines do not stand multiple brutal electrical cut. The damage risk is high. A broken hard drive can mean the loss of data and hours of work for you to get the service back online at 100%.
We took the decision to secure your data, your work rather than getting back online a few minutes before.

Update 3: monday 21:30. This is an email I got earlier today. it’s already been 1,5 hours. Not yet back online.

“
Dear Customers,

Redbus is planning a maintenance opreation on Redbus Interhouse which will consist in :

-   A corrective maintenance of the Main incoming circuit breaker
-   The  Reconnection of the UPS to the generators
-   And the Connection of Customer load to the UPS

In order to prevent any damage on your servers due to accidental power
restarts :  We ask you to turn off all your equipments before 7:30 PM.
At 7:45 PM Ikoula technical staff will cut off all electrical connexions
between our equipment and Rebus.

The main electrical supply will be turn back when the Redbus'maintenance
will be over.

As we said previously this operation is made to prevent any damage to your equipment and your datas.

Regards, ”
We were right.

- 17h01 : 3rd global power failure
- 17h05 : Power is back
- 18h00 : Redbus inform us that the intervention on the main dijonctor will not take place tonight. But, the situation is more stable
- 18h30 : We switch on all our equipements, including your hosting solution.
All the Ikoula team is still at work to help you getting back your services if needed.

WARNING:
The intervention on the main dijonctor will take place tomorrow. In order to preserve the machines, your data and your work, we will turn off all our equipments before it. We will warn you before of course. Since then, we highly recommand that you back up all your data.

We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your confidence.
We will get back to you as soon as we get news. “

update 4: tuesday 3:20am – servers are back up. pfff…

Dell buys Alienware

This is news, as it comes unexpected to me. DELL-the-super-low-cost-supply-chain-co-and-hence-high-margin PC paker is buying the ultra-slick-design-and-max-power-assembler Alienware.

I’ve been wanting to get myself an Alienware box for years now. Its brand just exudes POWER and COOLNESS. Similar to Apple’s “Think Different” attitude, but more oriented to the Cyber world.

Anyways, surprising, interesting, and hopefully prices will come down a bit… although “Dell said Alienware would operate as a wholly owned subsidiary and will keep its brand name and its own product development, marketing, sales, technical support and other operations.”

By the way, people:

“Alienware is on track to hit $225 million in sales this year, up from $172 million in 2005, according to recent projections by Gonzalez, the privately held company's CEO.”

A chat with Virginie Robert (Les Echos Innovation) & part II of my chat with Cédric Ingrand (LCI television)

So should Cédric get a blog or not ?

A chat with Cédric Ingrand - LCI television host (part I)

Funky chat during make-up today. Let me know what you think ;)

7th INSEAD trophies ceremony, celebrating family entrepreneurs (3 out of 5)

I don’t mention often my alma mater business school, INSEAD, but every now and then it’s great to join other alumni and celebrate the year we all spent in Fontainebleau reflecting basically on our future, and the impact we might have or not in our professional careers.

Every year now, the INSEAD alumni association hands out an award to distinguished entrepreneurs, to folks working in social causes, to the INSEAD alumn of the year,

Thierry Breton, French Minister of Economy & Finance was on stage at the Ministry of Bercy handing the awards. Here’s an extract of his opening speech.

Here is also some footage on M. Jean-Claude Decaux receiving the Asian entrepreneur award, and to M. Patrick Ricard receiving the best entrepreneur award. Pierre-Alexis Dumas received an honorary award in the name of his father, CEO of Hermès, and The Salvation Army was awarded the social cause award. The CEO of Rexel, Jean-Charles Pauze,  who led the company through its buy-out from PPR received the INSEAD of the year award. Lots of funny touches in the speaches: give yourself a treat and watch it