education

1. Change the rewarding system to celebrate failure. Not only failure is key to accelerate the learning curve but it’s usually the first fear that stop students from becoming an entrepreneur. At school, failing is not perceived as an accelerator and slows down entrepreneurship.

2. Experiment to change the world instead of virtual project. I spent hours of courses trying to build stuff that have already been done. Not fun. Today technology can connect any problem to anyone who is willing to solve it. If teachers were pushing students to “try to change the world” during their courses, students would understand how motivational and amazing it is to be an entrepreneur.

3. Create a culture of “we”. At school, we don’t live or even learn how to build a great culture. Ranking students individually create selfish personalities. Schools keep promoting how much you can make with their diploma while the most important is how much your team or maybe your users can benefit from your work. Entrepreneurs have been raised to be altruistic.

4. Rethink the Business Model. Technology are moving about 10x faster than 10 years ago and it’s not likely to slow down. We can no longer let people who haven’t be facing to the “real world” for the past 5 years. School administration could offer projects and/or money to researchers, engineers and entrepreneurs to tell their story about “How they fail or succeed?”. Knowledge has become real-time as well so teachers should go part-time and executives should go back to school.

But first of all, changes come from people. Students need to stand up and say loudly how bored they are at schools. Lots of them would become entrepreneurs if the system was celebrating innovation.

Our children will need a way better education system to face the very challenging world we’re heading to. We need to start to change it now.

The best way to predict the future is to create it. Peter F. Drucker

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Ted: “We built our school like Fast-Food.”

“Taking Internet To The Next Level” est une conférence que j’ai donnée le 13 décembre dans les locaux de l’Iteem (une des rares écoles d’entrepreneur/ingénieur en France).

L’objectif de cette conférence était de démontrer que l’internet est en croissance exponentielle, que cela crée une montage de nouvelles opportunités et que le “web entrepreneur” n’a jamais eu autant d’avenir grâce à la magie du cloud computing.

“Je pense que les ingénieurs français sont très compétents mais que leur manque d’optimisme les empêchent de détecter les opportunités qu’offrent le web.”

Vous trouverez ci-dessous ma présentation qui résume les leçons que j’ai retenues des multiples conférences américaines auxquelles j’ai pu assister ainsi que de la création de ma start-up à Vancouver.

Si vous avez des retours, remarques ou questions, n’hésitez pas à commenter ci-dessous.

You’ve probably been amazed too by the lastest changes technology brought to our life.

Thanks to Facebook, you can share memories better with your best friends, thanks to Meetup you can meet people who share the same passion than you, thanks to your mobile you can have an instant access to any information you’re looking for, learn anywhere and never be bored anymore.

I personnaly recently realized that without Skype I would probably not be able to handle a long-distance relationship and lose the one I love.

It just makes me so happy. Really. In fact, the creators of all of these technologies knew they were working really hard for a reason: increase their users happiness. And they did.

So I started to look other sources of happiness around me that were not amplified by the effect of technology. Here in Canada, it’s hard to not see how happy Canadians are when it comes to hockey. Watching and playing hockey is probably the 2nd best source of happiness after… Sex (-;

Hockey and sports in general help a lot of people to live better. But there was no decent platform to connect players each other, nothing that creates this WOW effect from connecting with people you wish you met earlier. You know them: same passion, levels, availability or even location. No technology to improve your hockey experience.

This is why we created hockey-community.com, to increase the players happiness by helping them to play more hockey instantly with people they would never connect with before.

If you don’t think it is worth the effort, go in Canada and visit the dressroom after a game. Players are just genuinely happy. At the same time, others would love to play more but they just don’t have the time to look for their matches.

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Failure? What do you mean by “failure”?

Success? How can you “succeed”?

“Rules”? What’s that?

Conclusion

• Innovate on top of others services and build a service which always differentiate you.
• Focus on building sustainable businesses in France first then go global.

Here’s his speech during The Next Web 2010. He explains a bit more why the new business model is based on the cloud. For now here’s a older speech:

Keynote Werner Vogels – The Next Web Conference 2010 from Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on Vimeo.

Thanks a lot Werner.

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I’m always wondering How The Technology Can/Should Change Our Education? . Do we really know how to push our brain boundaries? You will find some answers in those great websites.

TED.com – Ideas Worth Spreading

Google Talks

Poptech – World-changing people, projects and ideas

Fora.tv – The World is thinking

Update: I also recently discovered Big Think, 99 percent and Academia Earth.