Loïc Le Meur blog

The first French book about blogs in France

Thanks, Cyril, for having sent me a copy of your new book exploring the phenomenon of blogs in France and in French.

Blog Story - Cyril Fievet and Emily Turrettini, Eyrolles.

Six Apart Europe Who's Who

Heiko has a fun Who's Who of Six Apart Europe's Team.

Email nightmare today

My .Mac account does not work anymore today, I probably exceeded the 200Mb IMAP storage and it is my main account... Probably not a right choice for a professionnal account so I am shopping for a new IMAP 1Gb storage service (Gmail being both a partner and a competitor and not IMAP I exclude it for obvious reasons).

So if you have a good mail service to suggest me, I was told mailstreet was good, I would appreciate it !

If you tried to send me an email today, please re-send it, sorry about that.

The Guardian launches new blogs

The Guardian has just launched (or relaunched) new blogs: The Guide and Newsblog.

All on Movable Type, thanks for your trust !

A brand new imac G5 fully opened

Some people don't really care about the warranty being void if opened... (via engadget)

Congratulations, Roland Piquepaille

Congratulations, Roland, for this article in Times, it is so unsual to see a French blogger with international PR.

R&D Investment Shifts to China and India

I have no idea on the accuracy of these figures I have just read from the DaVinci Institute Report, but these are quite impressive:

R&D Investment Shifts to China and India - When you look at investing in R&D, China has emerged as the clear favorite in a new survey. A global survey of 104 senior executives conducted by London-based Economist Intelligence Unit shows the growing attractiveness of the Asian markets as the choice location for technology innovation.

"China was way in front with 39% of respondents naming the mainland as their top choice for R&D spending. A total of 29% chose the US, while 28% favored India for overseas R&D spending over the next three years.

A total of 52 per cent of firms plan to increase their overseas investment in R&D over the next three years, while another 38 per cent plan to maintain current spending levels over the same period.

Britain was in fourth place, favored by 24 per cent, and Germany was the choice of 19 per cent of the executives polled. Others in the top 10 were Britain (24 %), Germany (19%), Brazil (11 %), Japan (10 %), France and Italy (both 9 %), and the Czech Republic (8 %).

Among companies that are publicly traded in the U.S., those that are headquartered abroad are spending more than U.S. firms on R&D as a fraction of sales. This ratio, which is termed research intensity, is 4.2% for firms based in Japan, 3.2% in Germany, 5.7% in Finland, and 5.1% in Sweden. But this figure is just 1.7% in the U.S. and the U.K."

Follow the French harvest 2004 in the Beaucastel blog

If you like wine, Beaucastel is one of the most famous wine in France, and they have a new blog to follow the 2004 harvest.

Do you still want a gmail invite ?

have a look here: gmail invite spooler

The A9 Search Engine

I have just discovered the A9 search engine via Cyril. Do you know it and do you like it ?

The fashionable ice-cream in China: the green-bean ice cream

Just before I had to re-boot on account of jet-lag, we discovered the fashionable ice-cream in Beijing, the green bean ice cream.

Honestly, it tastes terrible and I have been impressed that my friend Pascal tasted it in a deep way. Here is the effect it produced on me. To say the least, an awful taste that stays for hours in your mouth.

There were all sorts of weird tastes, that we may see one day arriving in our Countries...

China to become the #1 tourism Country very soon

Last week at the China Summit I attended a very interesting session on Tourism and China. We learnt that incoming tourism is growing at a fast pace with more than 100 million tourists visiting China every year. At this pace, it will very fast become the #1 tourism destination in the World and a very large market both for Chinese and foreign companies in the tourism sector.

Mr Haji-Ioannou, head of Easy Jet shown his interest in China tourism sector by participating at several Summit sessions. He said he qualified to speak about China tourism as a current tourist and noted that there were many opportunities not only in the airlines sector but in any products and services to be provided to this new flow of tourist. Mr Haji-Ioannou mentioned China starting to welcome international companies such as Starbucks, already present in the Forbidden City.

I learnt that China Airlines is growing at 50% a year and after a slow down in growth with the 2003 SARS effects, its number of passengers is very high again.

Another business opportunity to consider is the number of Chinese starting to have the means to travel abroad. The participants noted though that it was still difficult to get a visa for Chinese to leave their Country: it requires a one hour face-to-face interview that can be taken in very few places and costs about $100, the fee being not reimbursed in case of failure to obtain the visa. With such a large population and the per capita income increasing rapidly we can expect the Chinese to visit our cities very soon in large numbers, when China eases its Visa process.

Cross-posted on the World Economic Forum weblog.

Metroblogging switches to Movable Type

Thank you for your trust and the fact that you are working on a customized version of Movable Type, Metroblogging !

"What is Metroblogging?
Metblogs are a hyper-local look at what's going on in the city. Our regional bloggers give each site a new perspective on daily life; less calendar listing, more friendly advice."

If your City is not there yet, they will launch it when you have 10 bloggers in your area committed to the site.

My new Moblog

Thanks to TypePad 1.4 (released !), here is my new moblog.

Rodrigo defines new terms

Being Ito-ized [n.] (stronger effect) and Lemeurized [n.] !

Heard in China last week: US should learn respect.

"America is very arrogant when China's culture is about respect. Each time the US makes a mistake China's prestige grows in the World. What China learnt from its ancestors is to respect others and whenever we are arrogant we make a mistake. The US is losing its prestige in the World and less and less respected because of its behaviour in the last years".

I don't agree basically on everything because China has proven many times it does not always respect people either. But generally, it summarizes pretty well the feeling about the US, heard from China.

The best of the blogs contest is open for suggestions

The Deutsche Welle International has opened suggestions to nominate the best weblogs in the World. You can suggest a blog in English, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese or Arabic. Unfortunately their current team did not allow them to judge French blogs in French.

We are happy that TypePad is one of the sponsors.

The first European Business School Course around a blog

To my knowledge, this is also the very first European Business School that launches a course articulated fully around a blog, Euro-med-Marseille Business School blog, that Cyberlibris announces and helps on.

China executes 4 bank employees

I was wondering why I was feeling so secure in China. If you steal anything there, they kill you. (CNN via Mihai). OK, this was a $15 million fraud !

Conference at LISA Forum Europe

Thanks, Michael Anobile for having invited me to Keynote the next LISA Forum Europe on October 12, 9AM in Paris Marne la Vallée. Lisa is "the premier non-profit organization for the GILT (Globalization, Internationalization, Localization, and Translation) business community. Over 400 leading IT manufacturers and services providers, along with industry professionals representing corporations with an international business focus, have helped establish LISA's best practice guidelines and language-technology standards for enterprise globalization"

Getting around the Chinese blocking weblogs

China blocks TypePad, Blogger and other blog platforms. At the China Summit, I met with Fons Tuinstra who is a journalist and blogs every day from China and I asked him how to get around and read all the blogs. Here is his answer that I thought some of you might find interesting:

"Most easy method is a web-based anonymiser like http://anonymouse.ws/anonwww.html that offers a one click solution.

 Sometimes they are down for maintenance or when you have a habit of visiting many banned websites in China, you can install a permanent proxy by changing the settings for our internet connection. This is a list of proxies: http://www.stayinvisible.com/index.pl/proxy_list

They sometimes change, or get blocked, so you should change them regularly. Important to know is after installing them is testing whether it really works by going for example to the website of the People’s Daily. Also you should not forget to disable it, otherwise you might one day discover that nothing is working anymore."

Thanks, Fons !

Back

So long, Beijing. Thanks for all the meetings and all the fun.

"China's growth is a tougher event than anything we faced since World War Two" - Jeffrey E. Garten, Dean, Yale School of Management

I am here in Beijing attending the World Economic Forum's China summit (there are summaries of most sessions available online). I only spent a few days in China so I am trying to get as many feelings as I can and try to sum them up.

China's growth has been very high in the last years, and you can feel it everywhere. China and Russia had a similar politic and economic situation a few years ago and I am trying to understand how the Chinese made possible this growth, compared to Russia. What I learnt today is that one of the reason of China's success is that Russia changed at the same time its politics system and its economy, where China moved to a market economy keeping a very stable political system. I agree, I think that doing both at the same time has created many unexpected issues in Russia.

China has grown at 8% per year for many years, it is the sixth economy in the World. The standard of living has improved dramatically with an average per capita income above $1000, it was only $300 twenty years ago. 400 million Chinese are now above the global poverty line.

What strikes me the most is how unprepared the US and Europe are to China's growth. The impact of China's economic development is now already huge on the Global Economy. The first consequence that is very often seen is of course jobs being transferred to China but the impact of China's internal demand for energy for example is equally important, China is for example now the second largest importer of oil and second largest electricity consumer. This has an impact on global energy prices and it will only increase.

I think generally in the USA and Europe we do not realize the impact of China's growth and we are totally unprepared because of the speed at which the change happens. It is impossible for Countries and people used to live in comfort to react to this new competition at the same pace.

Vice-premier of the People's Republic of China Zeng Peiyan shared with us today his vision of China becoming a 4 trillion dollar GDP Country by 2020. I was impressed by how many times the word Entrepreneur was quoted. China is definitely committed to creating an open door market environment favorable to Entrepreneurs and private companies. Another reason of China's success has been its shift towards accepting foreign investments. China has been the Country in the World that has received the largest investments last year, ahead of the US and the participation of many international investors and venture capital firms to this Summit shows their interest and their willingness to invest in China. Many new funds are created to invest only in China and I met many investors who where focusing before on the US or Europe that moved here. Robert Yung for example used to work for Intel in the USA and he is now based in Beijing, raising a $75M private equity fund totally dedicated to early stage Chinese startups. In the Technology session, Robert said that five of the ten most successful IPOs at the Nasdaq recently have been Chinese (Robert quoted SINA or SOHU for example), some of them are multi-billion dollar market cap companies and he predicts we will soon see the first ones that are valued above ten billion dollar.

The technology education available in China is according to Robert to World Class Standards. China graduates 2 to 2.5 million students a year and 60% of them are in the technology sector, where India graduates 1 million for 50% in technology and the USA 2 million a year with only 25% in technology.

We mostly think about toys or clothes production when we think about China. China has become the manufacture of the World but with such high standards of education and such a high number of highly qualified technology graduates China is now ready to move to the next step and create World Class leaders and companies. It would be a big mistake to consider China's competition to the US, Europe and Japan as low cost subcontracting capabilities only. The innovation capability I have felt all around these days, the speed at which information circulates in today's information Society and the level of globalization enables China to move from the positioning of the manufacture of the World into the fastest growing innovation center of the World. Microsoft's head of Research in Asia Harry Shum insisted on the contribution of his Chinese team into new Microsoft's worldwide products. I quite agree when the Technology panel said that the question is not if China will be the R&D center of the world, the question is when.

Seen from the US and Europe, the threat is generally understood as loosing jobs subcontracted in China. It should probably be understood more as new fast moving Chinese companies created and not only addressing their local market but becoming new leaders. I had a great dinner with the New Asian Leaders which is a very active community of young entrepreneurs and investors of the World Economic Forum and they are not wondering how they will increase their revenues by getting more business from subcontracting but rather how they can help building new Chinese World leaders.

Of course there are also important challenges ahead and Jeffrey E. Garten, Dean of Yale School of Management said that "the whole movement of globalization is going to slow down. China's growing impact on global manufacturing is going to put enormous pressure to western economies and it turn put enormous pressure to China." Mr Garten does not see China's growth to continue without a major crisis in the next years.

It is absolutely possible, but the energy and the fast pace we can all feel both at a Government and an Entrepreneurial level in China is incomparable with the way Europe for example got used to live in comfort.

The reaction of the USA and Europe could be to protect their markets from this threat for their economies and Kristin Forbes of the Office of the President of the United States insisted on the fact that free trade was the only way to go and that building trade barriers was useless. I agree, but the impact will be so huge on jobs and on the competitiveness of European and US companies that it will become harder and harder for Governments not to react.

How do you feel China's growth impact in your Countries and what do you think should be the reaction of both US and European Governments and businesses to this new situation ?

Please comment on the World Economic Forum Weblog, where I cross-posted this note.

Nokia partners with Six Apart to make TypePad the preferred destination for Lifeblog

Christian Lindholm, in charge of Lifeblog at Nokia just announced that Nokia and Six Apart launched a partnership to make TypePad the preferred destination when you blog from Lifeblog on your Nokia phone.

Just arrived in Beijing

I will be in China for four days for both the launch of the n-star network and for the China Summit of the World Economic Forum.

I am unfortunately on-line on a very low end PC in the business center of the hotel (quite painful) and it is weird to experiment how I can access without any problems the TypePad admin pages, but no TypePad blogs. Most other blogging tools such as blogger blogs are not accessible either from China. Self hosted blogs such as Joi's are accessible (Joi is also joining us today).

I will be blind posting to this weblog and try to work on fixing the issue sometime with some of my Chinese friends.

Join the CEO bloggers Club

The CEO Bloggers Club, a great initiative, if you are a CEO and you blog, you can join immediately.

Looks like I have to test Flickr again

Flickr seems to have good new functionalities

My new Kite Surf board

I have been spending most of my Sunday answering and cleaning about 500 emails so I though 4 AM was a good time for some fun before going to sleep, here is my new Kite Surf board that Jérôme of Radical shaped with love.

It is much smaller than the old one , about 1m40 which is very small for my heavy weight of 103Kg. This board is so light the jumps and maneuvers are extremely fast. Speed is very high as well, close to perfection for me.

The new ailerons look really nice, they are rock solid.

This new custom board is pure adrenaline and lets me go to sleep with Kite Surf ideas rather than email ideas...

A new VC blog: Marc Goldberg

My friend Marc Goldber, VC, has just started blogging.

Chocolate & Zucchini featured by the AFP agency

Just discovered the Chocolate & Zucchini blog, written by Clotilde Dusoulier in Paris. Incredibly good blog about food and restaurants that has just been featured by the AFP (Agence France Presse) that explains it has 70 000 visitors a month. Congrats, Clotilde !

310 million mobile phones in China, more than fixed lines.

310 million mobile phones for 299 million fixed lines in China. Mobile phone subscribers increased by 40.3 million since the beginning of this year (compare with France's total population of 60 million !).

The 5th worldwide forum on electronic democracy

This year the 5th worldwide forum on electronic democracywill happen on September 30th in Issy les Moulineaux. Online registration is available and it is open to all.

André Santini hosts a round table on net campaigns. Joe Trippi, who was behind Howard Dean's campaign will be one of the main speakers.

I was invited to speak on another conference about "the new tools and electronic means of expression", organised by the Club de l'Hyper République, a big thanks to Eric Legale.

Our friend Joi Ito was selected amongst the top 25 worldwide who change the world of Internet and politics, you can support him if you like by voting for him here.

Blog T-shirt project, what do you think ?

We are planning to create some Blog T-Shirts, done by Patrice, what do you think ? Do you like it ?

Gmail invites for sale on Ebay

Just realized people sell their free gmail invites on Ebay... You can buy one immediately for $9... If I was in the Gmail team, I would not like that very much but the buzz keeps building around it.

aSmallWorld: another social software that positions itself "exclusive"

I have been invited by three friends to join aSmallWorld that positions itself as a very exclusive social network. For example, they don't allow people below 5 connections to invite other people (I have three...).

Here is how they present themselves.

Apples for lunch at Apple Expo in Paris

I managed to go to the Apple Expo in Paris that opened yesterday without buying anything !

The buzz around the morning Keynote was amazing as Tiger features were demoed, the new Ichat AV, the new search engine "Google like" in your Mac, the Widgets and of course the new Imac (where has the G5 box disappeared by the way ? Ah Yes, in the screen).

I have spent long minutes in front of a G5 with two 30" flat screens ending up with the conclusion that it was really not reasonable (G5: 3000 euros, mandatory graphics card: 600 euros, two thirty inches 2x3500 euros total around 11 000 euros it starts getting *a bit* expensive...). Still, it is nice to see the dream machine in front of you.

. Many innovations around the Ipod, especially sound speakers. These have an amazing design and sound for *just* 4000 euros.

Bose has also presented its news portable speakers for the Ipod, very nice and great sound, on the market in October for around 400 euros.

Movable Type 3.1 is out

MT3.1 is out and it comes with a plugin pack.

Here are some of main features:

Dynamic pages
The Best of Both Worlds: The most prominent new feature in Movable Type 3.1 is the dynamic page functionality, allowing you to choose between static page generation or dynamic pages on a per-template basis.

Subcategories
You can easily create new subcategories, and move a subcategory from one parent category to another using a sleak, intuitive interface.

Post Scheduling
Using post scheduling, you can set a time and date for your posts to appear, permitting automatic updates to your weblog even when you're away.

Better extensibility
Building on the new extensibility in Movable Type 3.0 are new features that developers will appreciate. The object callback interface added in 3.0 allowed developers to intercept all calls to save, remove, and update data objects in the database.