I’m leaving San Francisco in few hours, to pass my thesis (and hopefully be graduated) and spend the summer at « home ». Those 6 months of internship at Scout Labs have been extremely interesting, rewarding and it’ll be a pleasure for me to come back full-time in October. I have a couple of books to read this summer, I’ll share them with you, and I’ll try to find some time to change the design of this blog. I’m leaving, with « If you’re going to San Francisco… » in my ears. See you soon!

N.B: You can follow me on Dopplr that recently launched the public profile page, and I love it! Here’s my public profile. I know that I need to improve my velocity…

Photo taken at the Boeing Museum few weeks ago during a trip in Seattle. More photos on Flickr.

It’s not new, I’m a big fan of Flickr. A couple of weeks ago Flickr added the ability for its users to add and share videos in their flickr « photostream » (I would call it « lifestream » now). Their goal is not to compete with Youtube, Vimeo or other video sharing websites, no. Their just want us to share little videos, not longer than 90 seconds and not bigger than 150 Mb. It’s not a lot, but I think it’s enough (just like the 144 characters limit on Twitter). Little videos are great and add a little “something” in a series of photos. After few tests, I like this feature and I think I’m going to buy a little video camera soon, like the Flip. And you, what do you think about the videos on Flickr ?

Ce qui m’impressionne encore beaucoup ici, c’est le fait que toute l’industrie Internet et hi-tech est concentrée à quelques dizaines de kilomètres de San Francisco. Cela peut paraître stupide vu de l’extérieur, mais c’est tellement vrai. Dans les prochaines semaines, je vais avoir la chance d’assister à 2 conférences : Google I/O et Apple WWDC.

Google I/O est la première conférence de Google qui, après les Geo Developer Day et Developer Day en 2006 et 2007, regroupe tous ses développeurs en un seul endroit, pendant 2 jours. Les thèmes abordés vont être divers et variés, tout comme les API Google : Social (avec Open Social), Mobile, Géo (avec Google Maps) et bien d’autres choses. Merci à Google de proposer un ticket d’entrée pour étudiants, à seulement 50$, soit 8 fois moins cher que le ticket normal ! Il est toujours possible d’acheter vos billets en ligne pour la conférence qui se déroulera les 28 et 29 Mai prochains au Moscone Center de San Francisco.

La seconde conférence est la WWDC d’Apple (pour Worldwide Developers Conference) qui se déroulera du 9 au 13 Juin toujours au Moscone Center de San Francisco. Ce sera pour moi la troisième fois que j’aurai grand plaisir d’y assister, ayant été sélectionné pour la dernière fois pour la bourse pour étudiants. Cette année s’annonçant encore plus intéressante que les autres avec les innovations autour du Mac… mais aussi de l’iPhone et de son SDK. J’ai vraiment hâte de voir ce que les développeurs sortiront comme application pour l’iPhone.

Photo du logo Apple sur la facade du Moscone Center West, vu de l’intérieur. WWDC 2007.

Jeff Bezos, Founder of Amazon.com

Be prepared to be wrong. A lot.

This is one of the many things that David Lawee, VP of Corporate Development at Google, told us on saturday. I had the chance to attend with a bit more than 600 other persons at the fourth edition of Startup School at Stanford University. Startup school is an annual free conference organized by Y Combinator and BASES for hackers interested in startups. During one day, different prestigious speakers talk to us about how to create a startup: from having an idea and developing it, to financing your startup.

This year’s speakers were David Heinemeier Hansson (creator of Ruby On Rails and co founder of 37signals) who gave us “a” secret of making money online; Jeff Bezos (founder of Amazon.com) presented us the whole Amazon Web Services offering and how Amazon evolved from online book seller to supplier of storage and cloud computing; Michael Arrington (Founder and CEO of Techcrunch) told us how to make PR for your startup on the Web; Paul Graham (Partner at Y Combinator and founder of Viaweb) gave us many advices on how to build a successful startup now; that’s just few of the many great talks we had during the day. All the videos of the talks will be are available on Omnisio, a great service to share conferences content (video, slides, comments,…), and Justin.tv.

You could feel the effervescence in the room: hundreds of ideas, dozens of startups created, financed or already sold by people of only 20. Any Fears? No. Not really. Everybody seemed confident, ready to take a chance, ready to succeeded… or not. Whathever, it’s normal to be wrong, to make mistakes, you’ll learn from that. “Nothing is impossible”, this is what Paul Buchheit (founder of FriendFeed and creator of GMail) wanted to told us with this slide.

I wasn’t used to that. But you get used to it and you start to believe that you can also have a chance here. When I was a child, I wanted to be a veterinary, then a pilot and then I wanted to work in one of those prestigious Silicon Valley company. But since I arrived here, in California; since I leave and work in this fast-paced environment of ideas, startups, innovations and hard work, I’m starting to think of something else. Why not? Everything is possible.

All the pictures I took during Startup School 2008 are available in this flickr set.

They also talk about Startup School : Wired, Techcrunch, Stanford Daily, Jessica Livingston.

Demain matin je vais rejoindre mes collègues de la promotion MMTI 2008 ainsi que des étudiants MBA de l’ISC Paris pour le traditionnel voyage d’études aux Etats-Unis. Au programme : une semaine de conférences à Boston, un week-end à New York et une semaine à San Francisco. Le programme détaillé est disponible sur le site du voyage : ISC2USA.com. Pendant le voyage, il est fort probable que j’ai le temps de mettre à jour mon Flickr uniquement. Rendez-vous dans 15 jours pour un bilan complet !

Stanford University