Didier Beck's Weblog

Moby Releases ‘iTunes Live from Montreal’

2010-03-12T08:18:00.001+01:00

I like Moby very much, and much more live & accoustic!

While in the midst of an extensive critically acclaimed US tour in Fall 2009, Moby recorded an intimate live performance at the Montreal iTunes store to a captivated audience. […]

For this special recording Moby performed tracks from his most recent album 'Wait For Me,' as well as some other classics from previous albums, with a rare ‘stripped back‘ set consisting of just guitar, piano, violin and vocals. Joining him for this incredible and unique performance were the very talented lead vocalists from his tour - Kelli Scarr and Inyang Bassey.

Available exclusively via iTunes.

Snowy morning…

2010-03-11T08:44:00.001+01:00

March 11, still winter time.

This morning: snow and -3°C.

ST BARTH DAY16 – Bye bye St Barth…

2010-03-10T22:47:00.001+01:00

So, I’m closing this St Barth 2010 holidays report with this post.

It was always not easy to come back from St Barth, but this time, gosh…, it was even more difficult. These 2 weeks were so great.

Two pictures from the flight between St Barth and Saint Martin.

Saline beach and Petite Anse

Colombier…

ST BARTH DAY15 – Villa RGR and sunset

2010-03-08T09:13:00.001+01:00

Some views from the Villa we have rent this year…

From far the best one we have ever rent in Saint Barth! Among others, the view on Saint Jean Bay was absolutely fantastic…

Villa RGR

Panorama from the villa

Panoramic, 7’485 x 2’351, 12.5 MB

Panoramic, 10’918 x 1’724, 11.0 MB

Panoramic, 13’730 x 2’248, 18.8 MB

Sunset

ST BARTH DAY14 – Saint Jean and its sea turtles

2010-03-05T09:34:00.001+01:00

Again, Saint Jean Beach, with its sea turtles. So elegant!

Sea turtles

Saint Jean

ST BARTH DAY13 – Saline beach again

2010-03-04T09:39:00.001+01:00

Saline beach again…

Saline beach

ST BARTH DAY11 – The wild Toiny

2010-02-22T22:51:00.001+01:00

We are back…

So, we are back from Saint Barth, still jet-lagged, already missing our island, its colors, its people, the sea and the sun. Almost everything…

The “back to reality” journey is, as usual, not super interesting ;-)

It is really hard to leave after having such a nice time with wife and son. No drama but I always feel like I am leaving something behind…

Anyway, I would like to finish to post some pictures from our last days in Saint Barth. Good reminder for me, at least ;-)

The wild Toiny

Very breezy, but so fantastic, hike at La Pointe around Toiny. A rare wild area on the island. Second time there, again "plein les yeux"!

I will keep the lights and colors of this hike in my head/eyes for a while :-)

ST BARTH DAY10 – Morning and evening lights

2010-02-17T21:40:00.001+01:00

Some examples of the different lights on Saint Barth. Always changing, always interesting and beautiful...

From the villa at 07:00

From the Gustavia lighthouse at 18:00

Gustavia harbor at 18:30

ST BARTH DAY9 – Gouverneur

2010-02-16T04:09:00.001+01:00

Ahhh Gouverneur…

Surely one of our preferred beach on Saint Barth. The colors are just crazy. We had definitely a great time there!

Gouverneur beach

ST BARTH DAY8 – Big waves at Flamand and Lorient beach

2010-02-15T00:57:00.001+01:00

The swell has generated quite bug waves yesterday! We had a walk at Flamand beach in the morning, quite impressive. Never seen such kind of waves in the last 6 years…

Then, a visit to the Lorient beach, beautiful colors, lots of families. Really cool.

We had a super nice dinner at the Eden Rock. Always one of the dinners’ highlight on Saint Barth ;-)

Big waves at Flamand

Lorient beach

Intensive day ;-)

ST BARTH DAY7 – Palm trees shadows on Saint Jean Beach

2010-02-13T20:06:00.001+01:00

We had another great morning at the Saint Jean Beach. The afternoon was quite cloudy, but hey, that was ok for our skins ;-)

A “simple” evening at the restaurant/take away “Le Petit Bouchon”. I had a cool Beef Carpaccio, with a lot of Parmesan and … French fries!

Shadows on Saint Jean Beach

This evening should one of the “dinner highlight”!

ST BARTH DAY6 – Colombier and Petite Anse

2010-02-12T18:05:00.001+01:00

Colombier Bay is still so marvelous. We were there quite early in the morning and were alone on the beach during 2 hours. Nice experience ;-)

The views during the walk to the Colombier beach are quite fantastic.

Nice evening too at the Pipiri Palace restaurant in Gustavia. As usual there, good atmosphere, good service, nice people, and very good meal.

Colombier

Walk to Colombier

Petite Anse

Yes, we know that it is still snowing at home, again 10cm!

ST BARTH DAY5 – Grand Fond and its “baignoires”

2010-02-11T11:43:00.001+01:00

Yesterday was another great “Saint Barth’s” day!

First a great 3-hours stroll at Grand Fond, where we have visited the so-called “baignoires”, i.e. the natural baths created by the ocean erosion.

Also our first shopping at Gustavia: Pati of Saint Barth, Mia Zia, etc.

Then a very good dinner at Maya’s restaurant. Cool and efficient service, very fresh. I had first a Mojito cocktail, then a big salad (mesclun, how do you call it in English?) and a fantastic Tandori (no Roy it wasn’t so much spicy, as you would like it ;-).

Everywhere, a lot of cool known faces, who made us feel at home!

Grand Fond beach

The famous baignoires of Saint Barth

That’s exactly the kind of perfect day which will make us come back here as soon as possible…

Tomorrow should be another stroll to Colombier, with a snorkeling session.

ST BARTH DAY4 – Landing at St Martin and villa

2010-02-10T18:05:00.001+01:00

So, it’s snowing at home, -8°C in the morning. Here it’s extremely hot, more a summer weather than a winter one, actually. 31°C during the day, 24°C during the night. We are not so far away from the 40°C between our both “homes”!

It’s very dry and warmer than the other years at the same period. The sun is very aggressive, our son had a allergic reaction in his face, which never happened in the last 6 years… Today he’s going better, and we could have a super nice walk at Grand Fond. More on that tomorrow!

The villa over Saint Jean bay

Just to locate us from the Saint Jean beach.

Landing at Saint Martin

A small video from the right side of the Airbus A-340 300 we took between Paris and Saint Martin, during the landing at the Juliana airport.

Excellent!

ST BARTH DAY3 – Saline Beach

2010-02-09T14:07:00.001+01:00

Monday was very hot, no wind until the evening. Wow, good for the tan and heavy for the skin ;-) No restaurant, but BBQs at the villa.

Saline beach

Swimming-pool of the villa

Cool day, again!

ST BARTH DAY2: Saint Jean and Do Brazil

2010-02-08T04:14:00.001+01:00

Sitting on the terrace, 22:30, still 25°C, having a good cigar after a super dinner at Do Brazil. Had a Sex on the Beach cocktail (excellent!), a beef Tataki on fresh pink ginger with hand-made French fries :-) And a ginger rhum at the end. By the way, yesterday I had a fantastic Ti-Punch with a very interesting old rhum.

We were at the Saint Jean beach this morning, first swimming in the ocean (26°C). Just marvelous. We have met also two friends that are on the island since 4 months (lucky!!). Was not organized, but as usual, everything happens here in a “cool” way ;-)

Saint Jean beach

Landing at Saint Barth from the ocean

Another view from the villa

Playing with my EOS 5d MarkII with my new EF 35mm f/1.4L lens. ISO 200, f/9.

View from the villa by night

Same configuration, with a tripod. ISO 3200, f/4.5 , exposure time: 20s.

Stars in the sky

With the same configuration, I have taken also some pictures from the sky. No cloud but a crazy number of stars. Almost no light “polluting”. ISO: 6400, f/6.3 , exposure time: 30s.

As you see, life is hard here!

ST BARTH DAY1 - Knockin’ on Heaven’s door

2010-02-07T03:20:00.003+01:00

Wow, posting from the terrace of our rent villa in Saint Barth :-) 26°C, some wind, listening to Placebo. It’s now fully dark, beautiful sky with a lot of stars.

Wifi is perfectly working, with a better bandwidth as the one I have at home (download 335Kb/s, upload 130 Kb/s).

It’s 22:15 local time, i.e. we are up since … 23 hours. Which is good to forget the jetlag as fast as possible.

The travel was the faster ever, really no issue this time, including all our luggage on time. We were at Saint Barth at 15:45 this afternoon. So enough time to get the car (a Mini Cooper Cab), go to the villa, have a first quick dip in the swimming-pool, get some food at the supermarket for the breakfast tomorrow, and go to the first restaurant. As usual, we have started with a visit at the Hideaway. And a first walk at the Saint Jean beach by night after the dinner. Already seen/met a lot of “known faces” and friends on the island.

View from the Airbus before landing at Saint Marteen

View from the terrace

A part of the swimming-pool, overhanging the Saint Jean Bay

Weather forecast is quite good for the coming days here. It seems that a lot of flights from New-York were canceled due to some snowstorms…

The difference of temperature between Saint Barth and Zurich could reach about 40°C in 2-3 days :-)

Everything is just *fantastic*, as usual here…

Time to go to bed now. My son will be up very early tomorrow, to go to the beach.

On my way to Saint Barth!!

2010-02-05T20:21:00.001+01:00

Dear colleagues, friends, partners, competitors, customers, readers,

As you know, I am waiting for this moment for quite a while!

We have the chance again to visit our “second home-sweet-home”. I cannot say how far I am happy to be there with my wife and my son. To have the time for them. To think about something else as the business and Innoveo (although I love that ;-).

No holidays since last August, quite a long time…

So a good chance for a “hardware” reset, a re-load and recharging.

I wish you all a very good time, take care!

PS: yes, I should be able to publish some pictures & stories from *the* island ;-) Stay tuned!

Bugatti Veyron at the Autocar National Museum

2010-01-24T17:30:00.002+01:00

What for a car!

Seen at the Autocar National Museum of Mulhouse, France last week.

Alsace nominated as one of the Top10 regions to visit!

2010-01-22T10:57:00.000+01:00

via Lonely Planet

Crazy! In its “fifth eagerly-awaited annual collection of the best places to go and the best things to do around the world for the year ahead”, Lonely Planet, one of the most worldwide renowned source for travelers, has nominated my region, Alsace, as one of the Top 10 Regions to visit in 2010!!

As one of the Top 10 Regions for 2010, Southwest Western Australia “offers variety in spades,” Lonely Planet’s book says. […] Other regions to make the list are Alsace, Bali, Fernando Noronha, Goa, Koh Kong Conservation Corridor, Lake Baikal, Oaxaca, Southern Africa and The Lake District.

For those who don’t know Lovely Planet:

For over 30 years, Lonely Planet has inspired and guided independent travellers to explore the world around them. Our team of expert travel writers are all about on-the-ground research and no-holds-barred opinion. Lonely Planet is passionate about responsible travel and encourages people to make their impact as positive as possible. Whether it be through our trustworthy guidebooks, innovative downloadable digital guides, award-winning website or cutting-edge television programmes, Lonely Planet aims to inspire life-changing travel, where every minute can hold a new experience.

Rehearsal re-launch

2010-01-19T00:05:00.001+01:00

As you may know, I am a “very-amateur” drummer. I have first learned and played percussion in a classical band. And then, played drums in a pop/blues band. Almost nobody knew us, excepted our friends and family, but hey, we had a lot of fun just to play together.

After a long break we have started to rehearse again together. And it brings a lot of pleasure and fun!

We have launched our rehearsals with some Sade and Womack & Womack tracks :-)

Cool.

SmugMug 2009, comparison with Flickr

2010-01-17T13:58:00.001+01:00

Introduction

As you may know, I have left the Flickr service, where I had a Pro Account, for more than one year (in December 2008). Actually, I haven’t deactivated my Flickr account, it is “just” a normal account now, as I didn’t want to break different links on my photostreams. Some limitations are now appearing on my Flickr, i.e.:

upload of 100 MB monthly and 10MB per photo
2 videos per month
only smaller resized picture accessible
only the most recent 200 photos are shown.

So, it is clear that I cannot use anymore this service. On the other side, it’s free!

Comparison Flickr vs. SmugMug

So let’s compare a bit more the different services (SmugMug and Flickr).

Disclaimer: this comparison is a mix of facts and my own subjective rating of both services (still as users from both during months).

CORPORATE	FLICKR	SMUGMUG
Overall information	sold to Yahoo! in March 2005, founders left in 2008	independent, profitable and debt-free
Number of employees	around 50	50
Number of photos	4’000 million	766 million
Founding year	2004	2002

STANDARD SERVICE	FLICKR	SMUGMUG
monthly upload limit	100 MB	unlimited
limit per photo	10 MB	12 MB
max. video duration	90s	not supported in “standard”
max. video size	150 MB	not supported in “standard”
shown size (photo)	smaller resized images	no reducing resolution
number of photos shown	last 200	unlimited
gallery personalization	no	yes, very nice
slideshows	yes, but limited	yes, lots of customization possible
costs per year	free, but with ads	$40

PRO SERVICE	FLICKR	SMUGMUG
monthly upload limit	unlimited	unlimited
limit per photo	20 MB	24 MB
max. video duration	90s	10 mn
max. video size	500 MB	600 MB
HD supported	720p	1080p
storage limit	unlimited	unlimited
bandwidth limit	unlimited	unlimited
statistics	yes	yes (far better)
customization	no	fully, including hostname
batch organization	yes, but limited	yes, extremely powerful
costs per year	$25	$150 (an intermediary “Power” level exists for $60/year)

I am wondering, based on this tables, if it would not have been better to compare the “Pro” service from Flickr with the “Standard” level of SmugMug…

Anyway, you feel perhaps how far both services are different. Perhaps also not with the same target groups/segmentation of customers.

Why I have left Flickr

I have left Flickr for mainly three reasons:

The huge functional differences between Flickr and SmugMug
The lack of innovation and service updates at Flickr. In the last months, nothing happened at Flickr. SmugMug is principally launching new functions and testing new ideas each month!
I was impacting by all the controversies and censorship stories (Thomas Hawk is relating some of them here and here) around Yahoo!/Flickr.

It is clear that the price differences is really huge between both services, but you get something from what you are paying!

Impact of having moved to SmugMug

First, it was quite easy to migrate from Flickr to SmugMug, as you can find a Firefox extension to automatically migrate all your pictures from your Flickr account to SmugMug. The tool is called “SmuggLr” and it is free.

Secondly, based on my SmugMug Pro Account, I have created a new subdomain called “visuals.didierbeck.com” of my own blog “www.didierbeck.com”. Both are now similar from each others, although I am definitely not finished with the customization. I will perhaps also merge both (blog and visuals) in the coming time. All my pictures and videos are now published under the “visuals” subdomains.

Thirdly, and perhaps the most interesting: the effect of having done these changes had a *huge* impact on the traffic of my pictures! I had about 18’000 views on my Flickr pictures within 2 years. I was many times above 100’000 views per month in 2009 on SmugMug! More data about this just below.

Some statistics of my SmugMug in 2009

Some data about 2009 on visuals.didierbeck.com:

Number of image views: 755’000
Monthly average in the last 6 months: 105’000
Number of image views linked with Saint Barth: 620’000 (!), i.e. 82% of the overall views (!!)
Highest traffic in December with more than 130’000 image views
Highest image views in a day (since mid November): December 6 with 18’910 views in one day…
Bandwidth used during the year: 82 GB
Highest bandwidth usage in July with more than 20 GB
Most viewed photo since mid November (with about 8’500 views just on this one):

Visualization of the traffic during the last 12 months:

Presentation Zeitgeist 2009 @ SlideShare

2010-01-16T21:34:00.002+01:00

SlideShare has published its “ruling trends in the world of presentations for the year gone by”. Funny, interesting, well done!

Some highlights:

The average number of slides in a presentation: 19.3
The maximum number of slides: 1’375 (!)
Presentation typography: Arial 42%, Times New Roman 22% (!), Wingdings 17%
Average number of pages per language: max = French with 38 :-)
Presentation formats: PPT 61%, PPTX 17%, PPS 14%
Average number of pictures: 19, average size of picture: 205 kb
7% of all presentations without a single image!
Average size of presentation: 5.4 MB

SlideShare Zeitgeist 2009

View more documents from Rashmi Sinha.

Cross-posted on the Innoveo Blog

Local and Saint Barth weather forecast…

2010-01-08T11:20:00.001+01:00

What’s the better place to be now, and for the next days?

Still too early for me ;-)

Local

Saint Barth

Countdown started for Saint Barth :-)

2010-01-06T08:09:00.001+01:00

We are extremely lucky to be able to travel to Saint Barth again this year…

Our last visit there was in February 2009. I have the feeling it’s 5 years back!

We were quite lucky last year when we have reserved the villa we will be in in some days (a renovated villa that was just put on the renting market). I think it’s from far the most beautiful villa we have rented. With an absolutely crazy view on the Saint Jean Bay, the Eden Rock hotel, and the airport. Have a look below…

So, in exactly 30 days, we will be on this terrace!