NEWS: Spread-on mud

Can you believe that? An English company called sprayonmud is selling ... mud in spray, in order to ... Ok, have a look at the FAQ:

What do I use it for?

To give your friends, family and neighbours the impression that you’ve just come back from a day’s shooting / fishing / off-roading / visiting friends who live on a farm / looking for a country retreat / anything but driving around town all day or visiting the retail park!

Incredible! It seems that there is *really* a market for this product. BBCnews published an article about sprayonmud in June, 2005.
Ok, so not a joke BUT ... the reason why the product has some success is perhaps another one as to soil one's car. Other part of the FAQ:

What if my number-plates get obscured by the mud?

You may be pulled over by the police and asked if you knew. As we’ve said above, the law says that number plates must be visible. If they are not, you could be fined but won’t, under present laws, receive any penalty points

Now, the things are clear...

BUSINESS: Best global brands ranking 2005

Interbrand published its yearly global brands ranking by value for 2005. As usual, the results are quite interesting, have a look also at this BusinessWeek article.

Definition of the Brand Value

Brand Value is the dollar value of a brand calculated as net present value (NPD) or today's value of the earnings the brand is expected to generate in the future.

Goal of this valuation

The purpose of these valuations is to demonstrate to the business community that brands are very important business assets and in many cases the single most valuable company asset. We also aim to make branding and marketing a key business issues that have direct shareholder value impact. Through 7 years of publishing BGB we have created the world's most significant and influential brand and marketing survey.

Limitation of this valuation

The limitations (compared to doing a proper formal valuation project for the brand owner) are: that they are based on public data only; that there is no input from management (in order to maintain consistency); that complex multi-national brands (such as IBM or Shell) are better valued as a series of separate pieces rather than in one lump; that certain key brands are not listed; and that only a limited amount of time can be spent on any one brand. The main limitation is that they tell you how much the brand is worth but not what is driving brand value nor what would increase brand value going forwards.

Top 20

The Winners

1. eBay +21%


2. HSBC +20%


3. Samsung +19%


4. Apple +16%


5. UBS +16%

The Losers

1. Sony -16%


2. Morgan Stanley -15%


3. Volkswagen -12%


4. Levi's -11%


5. Hewlett-Packard -10%

High-tech companies

Car producer companies

NEWS: Blog 2.0

[via Loic - in French]

Loic is writing a book about blogging in a business environment and he is publishing parts of his writings on his blog (just in French ;-). Great experience. In his last post, he tells us how he organized one of the biggest European blog event, which ever took place: "Leg Blogs - Blogs and social software". *Very* interesting to learn how Loic used a wiki and viral information/marketing for the organization.

Loic also told us that the second edition of this event - Les Blogs 2.0 - will take place on Dec 5 -6, 2005 in Paris. I will do my best to come this time ;-)

Update: have a look at this post of Loic (in English). The inputs are confirmed: Blog 2.0, Dec 5-6, 2005, in Paris, keynote speaker will be Robert Scoble, the most famous MS blogger.

BLOG: Visitor log - Part II

As already discussed, I have tried gVisit.com for about 5 days. gVisit gives you the possibillity to visualize the location of your visitors (btw, without gathering any personal data) to your website by adding a small javascript piece of code.

Consequently, for the blogs, it doesn't take into account your visitors who are linking your RSS/atom feed.

The service is free, which is great, but tracks only the last 20 visitors. After having made a donation, I have upgraded my membership, and now, gVisit is tracking the last 100 visitors of my blog and of my website.

Really great and exciting to see where you are all coming from. Wow!

didier beck's weblog

didier beck's website

TRAVELLING: Corsica - Calvi (02)

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Piani and the Calanches

The UNESCO-protected site of the Calanches, 5km southwest of Porto, takes its name from calanca, the Corsican word for creek or inlet, but the outstanding characteristics here are the vivid Orange and pink rock masses and pinnacles which crumble into the dark blue sea. Liable to unusual patterns of erosion, these tormented rock formations and porphyry needles, some of which soar 300m above the waves, have long been associated with different animals and figures, of which the most famous is the Tête de Chien (Dog's Head) at the north end of the stretch of cliffs. Other figures and creatures conjured up include a Moor's head, a monocled bishop, a bear and a tortoise.

One way to see the fantastic cliffs of the Calanches is by boat from Porto; excursions leave daily in summer, cost €18 and last about an hour. Alternatively, you could drive along the corniche road which weaves through the granite archways on its way to Piana. Eight kilometres along the road from Porto, the Roches Bleues café is a convenient landmark for walkers.

[source: france-for-visitors]

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NEWS: It's Google turns as the Villain

[via Jeff]

NYtimes published an article (free subscription) about the shift between MS and Google in a lot of geek's minds. Good analysis. Things, and specially *reputation*, are moving so fast, and much more when the development is negative...

[...] Many in Silicon Valley are skittish about its size and power. They fret that the very strengths that made Google a search-engine phenomenon are distancing it from the entrepreneurial culture that produced it - and even transforming it into a threat.

Nowadays, when venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and technologists gather in Silicon Valley, they often find themselves grousing about Google, complaining about everything from a hoarding of top engineers to its treatment of partners and potential partners. The word arrogant is frequently used.

Bill Gates certainly sees similarities between Google and his own company. This spring, in an interview with Fortune, Mr. Gates, Microsoft's chairman, said that Google was "more like us than anyone else we have ever competed with."

"Google is doing more damage to innovation in the Valley right now than Microsoft ever did," said Reid Hoffman, the founder of two Internet ventures, including LinkedIn, a business networking Web site popular among Silicon Valley's digerati. "It's largely that they're hiring up so many talented people, and the fact they're working on so many different things. It's harder for start-ups to do interesting stuff right now."

NEWS: It is about trust

[via Loic]

Loic points to a great post of Jeff Jarvis. This post is one of the best I have read this year. A must-read, have a look!

In the end, isn’t the only asset worth owning trust?

Content is not king.

Distribution is not king.

Trust is king in the kingdom of conversation.

BLOG: Visitor log

[via vowe]

Volker refers to a complete pointless, i.e. a must-have, on-line free service called gVisit.com (have a look in the comments).

How it works...

1. Register your website using the form below. It is free and we don't collect any personal information - not even an email address.


2. Copy and paste a single line of JavaScript to your website. It is easy and doesn't change the way your website works or looks.


3. You will be given your own URL that lets you track the visitors to your website using Google Maps.

The service is free, but limited to the 20 most recent visitors to your register website/blog, which is still great for a free service.

The "usual" limitation of this kind of service (as the on-line statistics): it doesn't take into account the atom/rss requests...

You can access to the didierbeck.com's visitor log here. Also accessible as an RSS feed.

An example below:

TOOLS: Google Talk

Incredible buzz everywhere about Google Talk... So, I couldn't decently avoid to test it ;-)

Google Talk is a downloadable Windows application that offers:

• Free calls over your computer anytime, from anywhere, and for as long as you want


• A simple and intuitive user interface for sending instant messages or making calls--no clutter, pop-ups or ads


• Superior voice quality through just a microphone and computer speaker


• A shared Gmail contacts list that updates automatically with the people you communicate with most often

BUSINESS: Perception of time

[via Jeff Bussgang]

Again, a great post on Seeing the both sides about the difference of the perception of time between a VC and an entrepreneur.

When friends ask me what the biggest change has been in transitioning from sitting in the entrepreneur’s seat to the VC’s seat, I often think of the profound difference in the way entrepreneurs and VCs look at that all important dimension of time.

When you’re an entrepreneur, time is your enemy. You need to solve the problem of “simultaneity” – hire the team, build the product, raise money and close deals – all in parallel.

When you’re a VC, you have a very different relationship with time. VCs seem to love the passage of time. When you’re evaluating a deal, more time means more information.

TOOLS: Foxit PDF Reader

Foxit released a new version of its free PDF reader. Have a look, a must-have, quicker, smaller...better than the original. I'm using it since about 2 months, really great.

Latest changes

• Foxit PDF Engine now comes in a separate DLL, therefore Foxit Reader has been splitted into two parts


• The size of download package increases too


• A number of bugs fixed, including the most reported Printing crash problem, and many other display problems

PICTURES: Saturn's Dragon Storm

[via CICLOPS]

Again, from CICLOPS, i.e. the Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS, a beautiful picture from a gigantic Saturn's storm called The Dragon Storm.

A large, bright and complex convective storm that appeared in Saturn's southern hemisphere in mid-September 2004 was the key in solving a long-standing mystery about the ringed planet.

Saturn's atmosphere and its rings are shown here in a false color composite made from images taken in near infrared light through filters that sense different amounts of methane gas. Portions of the atmosphere with a large abundance of methane above the clouds are red, indicating clouds that are deep in the atmosphere. Grey indicates high clouds, and brown indicates clouds at intermediate altitudes. The rings are bright blue because there is no methane gas between the ring particles and the camera.

The Dragon Storm was a powerful source of radio emissions during July and September of 2004. The radio waves from the storm resemble the short bursts of static generated by lightning on Earth. Cassini detected the bursts only when the storm was rising over the horizon on the night side of the planet as seen from the spacecraft; the bursts stopped when the storm moved into sunlight. This on/off pattern repeated for many Saturn rotations over a period of several weeks, and it was the clock-like repeatability that indicated the storm and the radio bursts are related. Scientists have concluded that the Dragon Storm is a giant thunderstorm whose hail and cloud droplets generate electricity as they do on Earth. The storm may be deriving its energy from Saturn's deep atmosphere.

BUSINESS: Skype, what next?

Knowledge@Wharton published an article about skype, which will be two years old at the end of August. Some good inputs. Let's see how the things will evolve!

Skype's software had been downloaded nearly 145 million times as of Aug. 4, and the company claims to have 47 million people using its services. More than 1.8 million people use SkypeOut, a pay service that allows users to call traditional phones from their PCs for low minute rates. Skype also charges for voice mail.

For now, Zennström's position is that Skype isn't a voice service at all. When asked whether Skype would enable 911 emergency calling services, Zennström said he didn't see the need. [...] Regulating Skype would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, adds Werbach. "The regulation issues are a challenge [for the FCC]. What extent could you apply regulation to a Luxembourg company with free software? It's hard to see how anything would be enforced." Skype may have to "walk a fine line, but it can't get sucked into that regulation fray," adds McGeown. "If it does, it could just become an underground business."

What the future holds for Skype is unclear. Its options include:

• Skype could emerge as a new communications platform that ties voice and video, not to mention millions of people together via handheld devices.


• It could be acquired by an established communications or media company. [...] Indeed, a report in CNET.com this week says that Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. allegedly discussed buying Skype for around $3 billion, but that talks broke down. The big question is valuing Skype.


• The company could be pulled into a regulatory fray over issues such as 911 calls as it grows into a de facto telecommunications company.


• Or it could remain an underground movement that continues to garner millions of users across the globe and is able to skirt regulatory concerns altogether.

TRAVELLING: Corsica - Calvi (01)

[click]

As usual, after my first days at work, I would like to extent a bit the good and positive influence of my last holidays...and to share this feeling with you. I will post some pictures of our last trip to Calvi in Corsica - France.

Where is Calvi?

Calvi

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Seen from the water, CALVI is a beautiful spectacle, with its three immense bastions topped by a crest of ochre buildings, sharply defined against a hazy backdrop of mountains. Twenty kilometres west along the coast from L'Île Rousse, the town began as a fishing port on the site of the present-day ville basse below the citadelle, and remained just a cluster of houses and fishing shacks until the Pisans conquered the island in the tenth century. Not until the arrival of the Genoese, however, did the town become a stronghold when, in 1268, Giovaninello de Loreto, a Corsican nobleman, built a huge citadelle on the windswept rock overlooking the port and named it Calvi. A fleet commanded by Nelson launched a brutal two-month attack on the town in 1794, when Nelson lost his eye; he left saying he hoped never to see the place again.

The French concentrated on developing Ajaccio and Bastia during the nineteenth century, and Calvi became primarily a military base, used as a point for smuggling arms to the mainland in World War II. A hangout for European glitterati in the 1950s, the town these days has the ambience of a slightly kitsch Côte d'Azur resort, whose glamorous marina, souvenir shops and fussy boutiques jar with the down-to-earth villages of its rural hinterland. It's also an important base for the French Foreign Legion, and immaculately uniformed legionnaires are a common sight around the bars lining avenue de la République.

[source: france-for-visitors]

BUSINESS: LinkedIn, social software

[via Loic]

Loic tells us an interesting but quite bad story about a strange experience he made by linking somebody he didn't really known in LinkedIn... The story itself is more an anecdote to my mind, the conclusion brings the added value:

Conclusion:
1. be careful when you give endorsements to people you don't know enough
2. accept connections from people you know only
3. Social software, blogs and the Web in general create a transparency that should be respected and dealt with. If you play with it, it will burn you one day or another.

As usual, no difference between the "Internet world" and "Real world". Too many people are still forgetting that...or are thinking that you can behave yourself in a bad way, just because they are on-line.

By the way, Loic also gives us some figures about LinkedIn:

OpenBC seems to have about 500,000 users total and claims to be the biggest in Europe but
1. LinkedIn adds this number of users (500,000) every two months currently and it keeps growing
2. LinkedIn has 1 million European users whereas Open BC has 500,000 worldwide and Linked In hasn't even localized their product

You can also find me under LinkedIn.

PICTURES: Saturn, again

[via CICLOPS]

As if drawn by an artist, this sublime scene speaks of the powerful beauty in the outer solar system: the domain of giant planets encircled by rings and orbited by small cratered moons of ice. In this view, Dione (1,118 kilometers, 695 miles across, at left) and Enceladus (505 kilometers, 314 miles across, at right) orbit the mighty ringed planet, while two bright storms swirl in the atmosphere below. This vantage point shows that the deceptively expansive rings are actually paper-thin in comparison: only tens of meters thick.

The image was taken in visible blue light with the wide angle camera on February 28, 2005, from a distance of approximately 2.6 million kilometers (1.6 million miles) from Saturn. The image scale is 154 kilometers (96 miles) per pixel.

BUSINESS: Tim Berners-Lee, about blogs

[via PointBlog]

A great interview of Tim Berners-Lee - you know, the guy who invented the World Wide Web with Robert Cailliau and President of the W3C - in BBC News.

This is humanity which is communicating over the web, just as it's communicating over so many other different media. I think it's a more complicated question we have to; first of all, make it a universal medium, and secondly we have to work to make sure that that it supports the sort of society that we want to build on top of it.

[The Web is] a new medium, it's a universal medium and it's not itself a medium which inherently makes people do good things, or bad things. It allows people to do what they want to do more efficiently. It allows people to exist in an information space which doesn't know geographical boundaries. My hope is that it'll be very positive in bringing people together around the planet, because it'll make communication between different countries more possible.

The idea [of the Web] was that anybody who used the web would have a space where they could write and so the first browser was an editor, it was a writer as well as a reader. Every person who used the web had the ability to write something. It was very easy to make a new web page and comment on what somebody else had written, which is very much what blogging is about.

When you write a blog, you don't write complicated hypertext, you just write text, so I'm very, very happy to see that now it's gone in the direction of becoming more of a creative medium.

One of the reasons that I want to keep [the Web] open like that, is partly because I want humanity to have it as a clean slate. My goal for the web in 30 years is to be the platform which has led to the building of something very new and special, which we can't imagine now.

NEWS: Technorati to be sold?

[via whatsnextblog.com]

Technorati is about to be sold to a large search engine company. The deal should go down in about a week.

BUSINESS: The Long Tail - Shorter, Faster, Smaller

[via Seth]

Again, a very good, solid and interesting development of the Long Tail concept from Chris Anderson. Have a look, this analysis represents a *huge* trend.

The rise of shorter, smaller content is actually a trend that's affecting all media and entertainment, reflecting not just the taste of a quick-change generation but also an increasing variety and flexibility in the ways we can consume media. As we leave the era of one-size-fits-all distribution, we'll increasingly see the end of one-size-fits-all content. Indeed there's an increasing amount of evidence that this is already underway:

• Music: Consumers are moving from albums to singles.


• TV: Networks are looking for short video that works as well online as on broadcast.


• Movies: Online distribution is creating a big new audience for short films.


• Videogames: Between cellphone games, "casual" web games and downloadable content, smaller games are on the rise.


• Magazines: Reflecting the pace of a browse-and-skim culture, articles are getting shorter.

NEWS: IE 7.0 - Rebranding

[via BetaNews]

Windows Internet Explorer 7: new look, new name.

TOOLS: Reinstall WinXP without re-activation

[via vowe]

I haven't tested this, but it seems to be interesting. If you have a *dynamic* WinXP installation - i.e if you are instaling/uninstalling/testing a lot of softwares and tools, you surely have already re-installed your machine, because of the performance.

It seems that there is a way to avoid the re-activation process after your re-installation, by backup-ing a small file called WPA.DBL (in \windows\system32\) and by replacing this file after the re-install.

Have a look at the full article.

TOOLS: Audio CD Ripper -CDex 1.51

CDex is an old-fashioned tool (release 1.51 from September 2003!!) but surely still one of the best Audio CD Ripper. Completely free (Open Source), very powerful but quite easy to use, very stable. A must-have.

I ripped about almost all my CDs (> 900) with this tool.

CDex is a tool to do all sorts of things audio related. Mainly focused on ripping and converting, things like turning your home Compact Disc collection into an mp3 collection on your hard drive become extremely easy. With built in support for many encoders you wont find any shortage of options for your media files. Below is a more in-depth explination of CDex features.

CDex Feature List:

* Easy to use interface
* Media File Player
* Create PLS and M3U playlist files
* Advanced jitter correction
* Support for many file formats/audio encoders (WAV, MP3, OGG, VQF, APE, etc)
* Support for ID3 V1 and V2 tags
* Support for normalization of audio files
* Support for transcoding of compressed audio files
* Support for CDDB
* Support for recording from the analog input line

CDex is one of the most downloaded application (all-time) at sourceforge (more than 24 million downloads!).

NEWS: Open Source

[via Rodrigo]

If you have some interest in the Open Source field, worth a bookmark, to my mind ;-)

InfoWorld released a very extensive and *great* report about, I think, all the current Open Source projects for the following fields:

• A buyer's guide to open source
  Open source provides low-cost, community-supported alternatives to commercial enterprise apps


• Open source business intelligence
  Low-cost alternatives to costly reporting tools will arrive soon


• Open source business process management
  Orchestrating SOA is a heady task, but new projects are stepping up to the plate


• Open source content management
  The hardest part of choosing a CMS solution is narrowing down the choices


• Open source CRM
  Manage sales and customer relationships without spending a fortune on software


• Open source ERP
  The features of free ERP packages vary widely, but some gems can be found


• Open source enterprise service bus
  Middleware options proliferate, but jumping ship from commercial vendors may be premature


• Open source identity
  Free tools can give developers a head start on advanced security infrastructure


• Open source directory
  LDAP servers move closer to becoming commodity items


• Open source portals
  Competition in the open source Java portal space heats up


• Open source point of sale
  Free commerce terminals lend flexibility to businesses of all sizes


• Open source RFID
  Free tag and EPC data management software is in its infancy, but looks promising


• Open source VoIP/Telephony
  Options abound for PBX applications and interactive voice response


• Open source licensing offers many choices
  Before you use that code, make sure you understand its terms

InfoWorld also published a PDF report (free subscription required).

TOOLS: SauceReader - R.I.P.

Synop, the company which was developping SauceReader, my RSS/Atom reader for quite a while now, has closed for business.

The SauceReader source code and product are for sale.

I will have to move to another reader, although this one was ok for my own usage :-( I am actually not really convinced that you have a big chance to *sell* a product of a company which is out. Strange process, to my mind.

BUSINESS: GM & Ford rated as "Junk Bond"

I've missed this news from May '05 but I haven't read anything about this on-line. Standard&Poor's cut debt ratings for General Motors and Ford to "junk status" or "non-investment-grade" in May 5, 2005. In other words, G.M. and Ford are rated as junk bonds....

End of March 2005, G.M. had a consolidated debt of $292 billion and Ford a total debt of $161 billion!! That means, G.M. and Ford together have a cumulated debt of ... $453 billion.

Just to give you a possible comparison: Spain, with 43 million inhabitants, had a public debt of $485 billion in 2004 (source: Wikipedia)...

Have a look at this NYTimes' article (free registration required).

In explaining the downgrades, the agency used nearly identical language to describe a range of parallel concerns at each company, like falling sales of sport utility vehicles as gas prices have risen.

G.M.'s downgrade "reflects our conclusion that management's strategies may be ineffective in addressing G.M.'s competitive disadvantages," S.&P. said in its report. For Ford, "the downgrade to non-investment grade reflects our skepticism about whether management's strategies will be sufficient to counteract mounting competitive challenges," S.&P. wrote.

[S.&P.] also blamed much of the companies' problems on their huge financial commitments to its retirees, both in pensions and in medical benefits. Ford's unfunded pension liability was $12.3 billion and its unfunded medical liability $32.4 billion at the start of the year, S.& P. said, while G.M.'s unfunded medical liability was $61 billion.

BUSINESS: Mozilla Foundation Reorganization

[via Joi]

Have a look at the official press release and at the Mozilla website.

On August 3rd, 2005, the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit public benefit software development organization, launched a wholly owned subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. The Mozilla Corporation is a taxable subsidiary that serves the non-profit, public benefit goals of its parent, the Mozilla Foundation, and will be responsible for product development, marketing and distribution of Mozilla products.

The board of the Mozilla Foundation includes Mitch Kapor, Brian Behlendorf, Mitchell Baker, Brendan Eich, and Joichi Ito.

The board of directors of the Mozilla Corporation includes Mitchell Baker, Christopher Blizzard, and Reid Hoffman, CEO of LinkedIn. Mitchell Baker is president of the Mozilla Corporation.

PICTURES: Splendid Saturn

[via CICLOPS]

Cassini offers this lovely, crisp view of Saturn, which shows detail in the planet's banded atmosphere, as well as the delicate ring system.

The image has been rotated so that north on Saturn is up; the Sun illuminates Saturn from below. Saturn’s tilt throws ghostly shadows of the rings onto the northern hemisphere during the current season.

The image was taken with the wide angle camera on January 23, 2005, from a distance of approximately 2.8 million kilometers (1.7 million miles) from Saturn through a filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 728 nanometers. The image scale is 166 kilometers (103 miles) per pixel.

NEWS: Three CNET Top10

[via Heiko]

Top 10 Downloads of the past 10 years

When CNET Download.com opened its doors in 1996, it was home to 3,000 small shareware and freeware applications. Online software distribution was still in its infancy. What a difference a near-decade makes! Since 1996, we've watched the rise of instant messaging, digital audio and the MP3 format, file sharing, spyware and antispyware, and the open-source movement, just to name a few. And we've watched as online software distribution has gone from pipe dream to reality. These 10 applications best represent the top trends in downloading over the past decade.

1. ICQ


2. Winamp


3. Napster


4. Firefox


5. Winzip


6. iTunes


7. Ad-aware


8. Skype


9. RealPlayer


10. Adobe Acrobat Reader

Top 10 dot-com flops

The most astounding thing about the dot-com boom was the obscene amount of money that was spent. Zealous venture capitalists fell over themselves to invest millions in Internet start-ups; dot-coms blew millions on spectacular marketing campaigns; new college graduates became instant millionaires (albeit on paper) and rushed out to spend it; and companies with unproven business models executed massive IPOs with sky-high stock prices. Of course, we all know what eventually happened to this world. Few of these companies actually made enough money to recoup that cash, and when their investors fled to the hills, these start-ups died dramatic deaths. These are the celebrity victims of the new-economy bust.

1. Webvan (1999-2001)


2. Pets.com (2000)


3. Kozmo.com (1998-2001)


4. Flooz.com (1998-2001)


5. eToys.com (1997-2001)


6. Boo.com (1998-2000)


7. MVP.com (1999-2000)


8. Go.com (1998-2001)


9. Kibu.com (1999-2000)


10. GovWorks.com (1999-2000)

Top 10 tech of 1995

Let's stroll down memory lane to 1995. William Jefferson Clinton was president of the United States, and you were probably getting acquainted with six new friends (Rachel, Ross, Monica, Chandler, Phoebe, and Joey)--unless you were hanging out in the coffee shop, brooding in your grunge gear. We were stunned and saddened by the Oklahoma City bombings, and the "trial of the century" ended with O. J. Simpson's acquittal. Heck, the San Francisco 49ers were Super Bowl champs (see, they were good at one point). All in all, 1995 was jam-packed. To kick off our anniversary, we have rounded up the 10 technologies from 1995 that helped shape the present and moved us into the future. Drumroll, please.

1. Sony PlayStation


2. IBM ThinkPad 701c


3. Digital cameras


4. Sony DCR-VX1000


5. The Web


6. Java


7. USB Standard


8. Flat-screen plasma display TVs


9. CDMA (Qualcomm)


10. eBay

BLOG: blog design completely changed

So, after some months, I wanted to change the design of my blog. You see the first version...if you are not using a RSS/atom reader ;-)

If this is the case, may I suggest you to haver a look at www.didierbeck.com with your "usual" browser? Please, let me know if you have some issues with the new design (specially for my Safari's readers, I have no chance to test the CSS with this browser).

Feedback generally speaking welcome ;-)

NEWS: Google News now supports Atom and RSS

Finally, Google News supports Atom and RSS..... Have a look here.

Feeds: You can receive various sections of Google News or Google News search results as a RSS or Atom feed. When you subscribe to a feed from Google News in your favorite feed reader, youll be provided with updates from Google News.

BLOG: 500th post :-)

This little post to mark my 500th post in about 18 months...

TOOLS: Konfabulator v2.1.1

[via BetaNews]

New version 2.1.1 of Konfabulator has been launched since some days now....

(Some of the) Latest changes

• Fixed problem with determining night time with other timezone names in TheWeather


• Make sure to remove handlers when passed an empty string or null


• Fixed issue where animations now make sure that the object they are animating can’t get garbage collected during the animation


• Fixed problem where windows were getting chopped off after a display change.


• Fixed bug where popupMenu could crash if the popup items were garbage collected too soon

PICTURES: From the Discovery's mission

[via vowe & NASA & NASA again]

Self-Portrait

Astronaut Steve Robinson turns the camera on himself during his historic repair job "underneath" Discovery on August 3. The Shuttle's heat shield, where Robinson removed a pair of protruding gap fillers, is reflected in his visor.

Unprecedented Vista

Discovery's underside floats over the Earth in this first-of-its-kind view, taken during astronaut Steve Robinson's dramatic August 3 spacewalk. Riding the International Space Station's robot arm, Robinson ventured under the Shuttle to remove a pair of gap fillers sticking out between tiles on the orbiter's heat shield.

Earth in Perspective

The STS-114 crew captured this view of Earth from the Shuttle-Station complex on day nine of the mission.

BUSINESS: ego and optimism

Knowledge@Wharton released a good article about the difference between manager and leader (typical discussion ;-) and how far you have to be an optimist guy to be a leader.

The good manager knows that not all employees work the same way. They know if they are to achieve success, they must put their employees in a position where they will be able to use their strengths. "Great managers know they don't have 10 salespeople working for them. They know they have 10 individuals working for them .... A great manager is brilliant at spotting the unique differences that separate each person and then capitalizing on them."

It may sound elementary, but a quick glance around the business world indicates that many companies have yet to grasp this simple concept of putting people's strengths to use, Buckingham said. That's because the business world -- and the world at large -- is obsessed with weaknesses and finding ways to fix them. Buckingham cited a recent poll that asked workers whether they felt they could achieve more success through improving on their weaknesses or building on their strengths. Fifty-nine percent picked the former.

"I do think there is a rather keen and distinct difference between managing and leading," Buckingham said. The chief responsibility of a leader, for example, "is to rally people for a better future. If you are a leader, you better be unflinchingly, unfailingly optimistic. No matter how bleak his or her mood, nothing can undermine a leader's belief that things can get better, and must get better. I believe you either bring this to the table or you don't."

Along with that optimism, great leaders can also bring big egos -- and that's not a bad thing. While some have blamed the business world's recent string of scandals -- Enron, WorldCom and others -- on bloated executive egos, Buckingham disagrees. It's not ego that ruined Ken Lay, but rather a lack of ethics. There's a big difference, Buckingham said. And considering the responsibility facing business leaders to build a future for their companies, a big ego might be what is needed.

BLOG: Back from Corsica

Hi all! Back from the beautiful Corsica. Very restful time there, as expected :-) Regarding the weather, it seems that we should have stayed in Calvi (Corsica) a little bit longer...