On my trip to Africa the most inspiring thing that happened to me happened on my last day, on the Nairobi international airport. It was still couple of hours before the flight would start to board but we were already at the gate. And next to us was sitting Phil. I don’t know if he’s [...]
As is usual when I take a long break from writing, my blog posts end up becoming insanely long. Take it as you will, but I’ve tried to make it as coherent a post as possible. P.S. this is a post written under de cover of my “leave of absence,” which means I still write, [...]
What many of you might not know is that the reason Nokia became the biggest mobile phone manufacturer is because of Apple. When all their competitors were standing still, Nokia decided to think a bit differently. This story was one of the hidden gems in “Fast Strategy“, a book co-authored by Mikko Kosonen, a former [...]
First of all, Paris was great! For three days, Jeremy (Fain, founder of Tech IT Easy & Verteego.com) drove me crazy in a good way, by mapping out every single minute of my life. Similarly to how we met up in Barcelona, it was a great way to get to know the city and at [...]
Almost two years ago, Jeremy praised Kiva here on Tech IT Easy. I’m also a strong believer in microlending and Kiva. It makes a lot of sense to help build businesses and help entrepreneurship thrive in developing countries. But, for entrepreneurship and business to work, the would-be entrepreneurs need skills. Here in the western world [...]
As I’m currently applying for jobs, I naturally often get asked what my dream job is. I hate that question, as there’s no simple answer. My dream “job” is to set up companies, which is really a great number of jobs. Following series of steps is the way I visualise this process, seen from a [...]
In chess, a gambetto – say it with an Italian accent, consists in sacrificing a piece at the beginning of a game to gain a competitive position on the exchequer – for example through the control of the center of the chessboard or one of the long diagonals. Getting back to business (we’ll get back [...]
This another part in the saga of my thoughts on ‘Grinding it out‘, an account of Mcdonalds, written by Ray Kroc. I’m about 3/4 into the 210-page book. Let me start with a disclaimer: ‘Grinding it out’ is a book written to promote the McDonalds way and aimed at motivating existing staff and operators, as [...]
Tech IT Easy is dead, long live Tech IT Easy! Today is our Independence Day: this blog is now fully accessible through www.techiteasy.org. All existing jeremyfain.wordpress.com/something trackbacks are automatically redirected to www.techiteasy.org/something. Our search engine referencing might suffer for a couple weeks, but since I noticed we have quite a captive audience (people coming back [...]
You tell me! In a few days, we will celebrate the first anniversary of Tech IT Easy. Although the growth of Tech IT Easy has overall been pretty amazing (+25% / month on average), it’s been slowing down a bit in May and beginning of June. For next year (24th June 2007 –> 24th June [...]
Marseilles, Southern France, is a hot place for mobility start ups. The city has been investing heavily in promoting not only the warm climate but also the tremendous human capital & software capabilities in the region. So far, nothing so original, except this feeling of sincere and deep commitment from all the authorities there: the [...]
I’m about to organize a demonstration in the streets of Paris to protest about a software architect not blogging about software architecture. My friend Youssef el Alaoui, aka Joseph Cargo when online, is a software architecture specialist in a Paris-based consultancy. And you know what? Youssef has blogged about everything (politics, books, TV shows, education, [...]
It’s not the ‘what’ or the ‘which’, it is the ‘how’. Desktop applications haven’t killed server applications: the former has taken the lead over the latter but server apps have in no way disappeared. Both technologies cooperate, collaborate & co-exist. The same will go for web applications: Software as a Service won’t kill desktop applications, [...]
Unlike in the software industry, 0-default in terms of integration is the quality standard of aeronautic giants Airbus, Boeing, Dassault, Cessna and Embraer. It takes thousands of suppliers to manufacture a plane. And guess what? Suppliers don’t immediately get paid for their work. Airbus, for instance, has built risk sharing partnerships with all its suppliers [...]
You don’t steal what you bash! On the one hand, I see many people using cracked versions of (amongst others and for instance) Microsoft Vista and Microsoft Office 2007. These people often pride themselves by saying they never bought a software from Microsoft apart from OEM versions. And on the other hand, the very same [...]
