Rodrigo A. Sepúlveda Schulz

Podcasting keeps raging

Yesterday, Adam Curry, the host of the DailySourceCode (Delta-sierra-charlie) hosted his 200th show using podcasting! Great stuff. It seems distributing digital content (in this case audio, expect video soon ;), is becoming easier by the day, and that users are growing exponentially.

A startup company called Odeo is still in beta (anyone have an account for me?) and is trying to expand this business. I found interesting this link to one of the founders' blog, explaining how the idea originated with him. Good entrepreneurial case study.
Check the startup's development on their corporate blog. And beta users are posting screenshots all over Flickr.

PS: these guys are also on Fortune magazine's list of the top 25 breakout companies in 2005.

Trying some new IM software

Jeff pinged me a couple of weeks ago with a new piece of software he's working on from a company called Userplane. It's an Instant Messenger application with full audio/video features, built it Flash I believe, that requires no client download on your computer. Hence I suppose close to 100% portable.
And of course it supports multi-chat rooms. It's now free... Check it out.

... and I just noticed Jason is playing with it as well...

interview of Orb's CEO

If I were you, I'll keep watching this company real real close. I've talked about Orb Systems before. Here's an interview with their CEO.

Excerpt:

What’s your business model?

We achieve revenues in several ways. First, much like Yahoo, we have users who look through our interface to get to their content, so we have an opportunity for targeted promotions. If they buy a ticket or song or album, we’ll get a percentage of the purchase price. Over the next few months we’ll announce several alliances in the music streaming and video on demand areas, with a premium fee per month. We also private label our service. Sprint Broadband has a private label version of Orb, and we have a revenue relationship with them.

50 coolest sites around in 2005

Time Magazine has just compiled a list. It's great to see that our French Clotilde Dussoulier, founder & writer at Chocolate & Zucchini, a food blog made it to the list !
Other great finds are Zappos, the total consumer buying experience on the web, and Flickr ;)

It's really HOOOOOT in Paris this week

Way too hot this week in Paris. It started last week-end! Over 33°C today.
And I cycle to work! Feels like the Bay Area sometimes: just missing the smoothies, the short trousers, and a cool T-shirt...

Pffff... whom else is melting in his office ?

ps: get updated temperature forecats from Yahoo!

Loïc Le Meur, awarded the entrepreneur of the year prize @ Innovate'05

Loïc Le Meur, awarded the entrepreneur of the year prize @ Innovate'05, originally uploaded by rsepulveda.

I case you missed my pictures on Flickr about Innovate! Europe, there are a lot of them online. Here you see Loic playing with his trophy:

Out of the 4 awards (early adopter given to JP, seed-stage VC given to Philippe, and one given to the mayor of Zaragoza), our Loïc Le Meur got the Entrepreneur of the Year award!

Actually - and this is amazing - Loïc told me this was the FIRST time ever that anyone had given him such an award, and that he was really moved by it. Thanks guys at Innovate! for recognizing the energy and passion of this French guy!
OK, if you missed the ceremony, here it is on video, uploaded on DailyMotion!

Connecting GSM phones to Skype: IPdrum

I'm not totally convinced. Patrick A. forwarded me a link to IPdrum, a company creating software (?) and a cable to connect your old mobile phone to your computer and use Skype.
Someone sees the interest of this cable? Why not use a Bluetooth connection ? I'm puzzled.

Bridging SMS and Skype

Top model Anina points us to a new service from Conectotel, allowing any GSM user to send an SMS to a Skype user. Cool, but useful ?

There is no presence information in the SMS world, which is why we all like IM so much. In addition, how do they interface to skype's address book ? I guess you'd have to enter all contacts one by one.

So the big question is: who's launching Skype-to-SMS now ?
Actually a number of people have already tried this (just google://"skype SMS"):
- conectotel run a test for 3 days in February 2005; but the service is no longer available. why?

Who's bridging the IM community and the SMS community ? (many have tried on Y!IM, AIM, MSN... Mobile operators still have a closed-fence approch to interconnecting both these worlds: a quick math should show that the cannibalization threat is rather small, and a first-mover advantage from mobile operators should help drive the market. Olivier had a good analysis a while ago.

Actually, googling myself on this blog:
- in october 2004: "I wouldn't be surprised at all, if a SkypeIM to SMS were made available on the market real quick..."
- in august 2004: "I have already warned that Skype is getting into this space. I really wouldn't be surprised at all it they offered IM-to-SMS functionnality in the VERY short term!"

TheDeal.com likes linking to me :)

By now, I guess you figured out that I attended an Innovation conference last week in Zaragoza, Spain. Josh Jaffe from theDeal.com was there, and posted great comments on the conference. He was kind enough to link back to me a number of times.

Mike Sigal had invited me to blog the event among a small crowd of less than 10 bloggers. Funnily enough I even got a Press badge! After starting to blog live, I found it rather difficult to write insightful posts, while talking to everyone, and listening to the debates. That job is probably better left to professional journalists.

Hence, I decided to experiment with multimedia, and took many pictures (posted on Flickr) and videos (posted on DailyMotion) to give you all a feeling of the conference. I found the format of short 1 minute interviews of folks rather amuzing, and useful.

Thanks Chris for the organization!

John Roberts of SugarCRM: "Our products are bought, not sold."

That's exactly the spirit for any new product or new service. I keep on telling my teams : "you have to stop selling and make customers buy our stuff". I actually have a top 10 list of key business axioms. I should publish them here sometime. Another one I use all the time: "if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys".

(via Ross)