Alex Toulemonde's blog

Facebook in 10 Years

admin — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 16:21:57 +0000

A Story From The Future: “Internet Is In The Air”

admin — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 09:05:02 +0000

The shift that is happening is pretty crazy. Mobile & Tablets are blowing away the PC. But wait. The impact is bigger than we think, my friend Marty just came back from the future with a story:

“In China, I walking in a restaurant that I saw that 34″ screen showing not only my face but also of my best friends favourite meals that I’m more likely to enjoy. Then I started to realize that the menu was in mandarin so I asked to the waiter if I could have an english menu. Guess what?? She laughed at me. ‘Why don’t you get your phone to translate it? You Americans!’”

The cloud X building, face & voice recognition X translation on the fly X the social graph X miniaturization of the connected devices = Probably something you can’t even imagine!!

That’s it, now Internet is in the air. It is no longer true that internet is associated with a device. At least it won’t be in the future.

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In fact, it’s a pretty good news. It means that one way to innovate is to look around you and see if every moves, motions, interactions, facts or even relationships are stored somewhere. If not, there’s an opportunity to add value using technology to transform this data into something helpful.

The pace of innovation on the internet has never been faster, the cost of setting up outstanding web technology is so ridiculously low that thousands of start-ups are building the new tomorrow.

So what? Well, I don’t know… But I’m pretty skeptical.. Everything sounds great huh? Not really. Small businesses were just started to take off on the “new-affordable” web but now there’s no way they can afford a mobile App. At least until decent Mobile CMS start to show up. But if the web keep moving that fast, I’m scared that a new era will take place, increase the cost of ”being technologically remarkable”, and blow away bootstrapping start-ups. What do you think?

10 years ago, it costs 10.000$ to build a decent website, today it’s a cool mobile App, and tomorrow?

Have a look to how good we were 10 years after the TV went out, pretty shitty isn’t it?

How old is internet again?

6 Videos to Convince You That Education Needs to Change

admin — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 07:53:06 +0000

Technology has radically changed the way we should educate the next generation. By providing an instant access to the best experts of the world, what become the roles of our teachers? Should we play those videos in our schools? What should we say to a teacher who has half the level of an online professor?

The world understands really well how internet is changing our life however when it comes to education it seems that nobody want to talk about it most of the time because the teachers don’t want to be face to this reality: their competition is now worldwide.

Example: http://academicearth.org/ or http://ocw.mit.edu

1. We have built our education on the model of Fast-Food

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2. These kids will never fit in a traditional analogue classroom

3. We should raise entrepreneurs instead of lawyers

4. How Kids Did Better than Managers

5. The Worldwide School

6. Our education is failing desperately

If you know more videos, let me know!

Do Schools Kill Creativity?

How the kids can teach themselves

Hiring young professionals whom others disregard

3 Words Entrepreneurs Define Differently

admin — Sat, 22 May 2010 07:21:55 +0000

Have you ever met a real entrepreneur? The one who just never stop? The one who is about to start his 5th company? 2 of them went bankrupt and the 3 others have been acquired… I spend a lot of time with entrepreneurs and I tried to understand how they think and act. There’s clearly something different in their vision of the world.

Here’s 3 words that entrepreneurs don’t define the same way than the rest of the world.

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Failure? What do you mean by “failure”?

Failure isn’t about crashing his company, failure isn’t about quitting his job or laying off because the company didn’t make any benefits this year.

Failure for entrepreneurs is giving up. Is when you let your environment (Guy Kawasaki calls them “the bozos“) convincing you you are on the wrong path and should abandon. I personally define failure as a lack of control on his own destiny. Failure is when you stop using 100% of your capacities to help the world move forward.

Watch this video from TED is a good illustration of the necessity to “failure”.

Success? How can you “succeed”?

We all heard many times people saying “When I will be successful” or “We are close to succeed”.

Real entrepreneurs just don’t use this word: success. What does that mean? There are no limits to a quest. Can we say that Facebook is successful? Yes? So why do they keep working?

Talking about success is talking about barriers but there’s no limits to the entrepreneurs because they just like to see things growing indefinitely. Entrepreneurs don’t live to finish something, they already live their goal: trying to change the world.

Watch this conference which talk about “Why we should live in the moment?“.

“Rules”? What’s that?

How do you reduce the costs? How do you get traffic? How to you satisfy your customers? There are tons of rules, books to read about those answers.

BUT rules are meant to be broken and reinvented. Who would predict that Wikipedia could become the biggest encyclopedia of the world based on volunteering? Who would predict that Zappos (see their office) could become highly profitable? Would could predict Craiglist would be one of the top 10 most visited website?

There are no rules. It just doesn’t make sense. If you follow the rules you directly stop innovating and undoubtedly will never move from good to great. Instead redefine the rules by following your convictions.

Watch Tony Hseih explaining how he created a company which has 75% repeated customers.

Conclusion

Failure, success and rules are clearly three words that have a different meaning to entrepreneurs.

And you, what’s the definition you changed?

Why failure is the key to success?

admin — Thu, 13 May 2010 15:28:55 +0000

While our society is teaching us how to succeed, our brains are making of the failure a cultural issue. Friends, parents, neighbours, they will all point at our failure before anything else.

Controlled and repetitive failures is the best way to succeed.

If you think you’re being risky, you’re doing the safest thing you can. If you’re playing it safe, you’re taking a big risk. Seth Godin

“Safe is risky”, read Seth Godin or you can buy his book.

“Why you do” sells better than “What you do?”

admin — Mon, 10 May 2010 23:06:58 +0000

Tim O’Reilly, The Future Of The Web

admin — Mon, 10 May 2010 04:05:48 +0000

Tim O’Reilly is well-known to be a visionary of the web.