Rodrigo A. Sepúlveda Schulz

Great interview of me on Tiburon TV

I had almost forgotten about this interview, taped at SIME'07 in Stockholm last November. Viktoria (the Journalist for Tiburon TV - "hungry for business") had the whole theater just four ourselves at the end of the conference.

Here I talk about our business at vpod.tv and about entrepreneurship. Thanks Viktoria for a nice time !

Facebook has extended that great feature they had on pictures to videos: I got pinged in my email inbox about this video because they tagged me in the video.

Hey, I also appear in this little clip at LIFT conference (I had never noticed it before on Facebook video).

Nice article in El Pais

Really nice article about vpod.tv in El Pais, the leading spanish newspaper. Thanks for the article published in January (I had forgotten to blog about it). Ivan did a good job explaining our work.

And I like being the last words of the article :)

My interview at LeWe3'07 by IntrudersTV

Just out I believe. It was back on Dec 12th, 2007.

itw on RFI (Radio France International) at LeWeb3

Catching up on my interviews from last year. Here's the full interview by French journalist Philippe Couve from RFI (Radio France International), taped at LeWeb3 2007. An excerpt was broadcasted as part of show N°10 of l'Atelier des Medias.

itw on NetEco at LeWeb3

I had missed this interview on NetEco.com done at the recent LeWeb3 event.
I'm redirecting you to Neteco's site. It would be easy to grab the .flv file as they don't provide an embed code, but hey... they need to count pages :)

Thanks Jérôme doe the interview.

Quoted about LeWeb3 in 20minutes.fr

(via 20minutes.fr)

on the chat of the Journal du Net today at 5pm

Cheesy title :/... It will happen here.

btw, that great picture is (c) Benjamin Boccas.

Great article on Martin Varsavsky in Forbes (I'm quoted :)

It all started back at the Innovate!Europe event this year, when minutes before heading to the airport , Erika Brown from Forbes magazine decided to join us on our Menorca retreat. Thanks Erika for the interviews and for quoting part of the vpod.tv story!

The article is here.

From that weekend, many things have happened, including the strengthening of this European Ecosystem designed by Martin Varsavsky.

Watch the videos here on Loic.tv, and pictures on Flickr.

quoted about fast Broadband in France on the BBC

Following my previous post on the BBC covering a story on fast broadband in Paris, here's the write up :)

My point about the correlation between broadband and business opportunity was :

* if more people have a great experience with broadband video, than more services (created by individuals, brands, corporations, startups...) will emerge. Hence more opportunities for my company that sells video services to do business.
And this must be one of the reasons there are so many video companies in France, compared to other countries in Europe.

quoted about employment contracts in Les Echos

I had a nice phone interview a couple of weeks ago with a journalist from Les Echos, the French premier financial newspaper. She wanted to know whether entrepreneurs supported or not the "CNE", a new form of employment contract in France turning ONE year old. It basically allows an employer to have a 2 year trial period instead of just 3 months. Supposedly it helps manage labour friction and fire people more easily if the economic activity of the company justifies the cost savings.

I personally do not like this contract, because

1) on the one hand, it puts the burden of the economic activity of the company on the employee and not on its managers. Indeed, after a 3 month trial period, any manager should know whether an employee will fit in the company. There is even a provision under current French law to extend the trial period to 6 months. I've used it a couple of times, and we've never kept the person. Hence, 3 months should be enough. There is no need for 2 years to test a person's capacity.

2) on the other hand, even though we had a 2 year trial period, what if you wanted to fire the person after 2,5 years for instance if the economic conditions justify it ? In France it's very complicated to do so, and you usually end up justifying yourself to a government organization (DDTE), and paying up to 6 months severance package. We need more flexibility here. In Spain, where we have a subsidiary, there is ONLY a 15 days notice (both for the employer and the employee) to end a job contract. Although it's sometimes not desirable for an employer, it allows for a very fluid job market. And of course, sometimes even 15 days is too much a time. I understand that it's also 15 days notice in the US ? and sometimes on the spot (the "you're fired" you see in movies :(

Hence, in my opinion, the CNE contract doesn't address the issues of the current job market. What we need it
- a simplification of job contracts (we have lots of different ones)
- more flexible termination criterion.

Otherwise job creation will move to markets that naturally favor employers...