Pour paraphraser Guillaume Bertholet et son “Choisir son statut juridique – en 30 secondes”.
Une question qui revient souvent en création d’entreprise et semble faire un peu peur, surtout pour les plus jeunes créateurs, est celle du choix de la technologie utilisée par la nouvelle entreprise.
Je ne vais pas ici m’adresser à tous les entrepreneurs, les cas sont trop nombreux et il faut bien avouer qu’on a réussi à faire plein de technologies différentes histoire de s’amuser un peu et de faire couler l’encre, mais seulement à celles et ceux qui se retrouvent dans les cas suivants :
- envie de monter un service web
- trouver facilement des tonnes de ressources techniques et une communauté dynamique avec de l’expérience
- s’interfacer avec d’autres services externes (Facebook, Twitter, etc)
- possibilité à terme d’avoir besoin d’exécution asynchrone
- possibilité à terme de migrer vers MongoDB ou AWS (Amazon Web Services)
… ce qui devrait être le cas de pas mal de vous, mes chères lectrices et chers lecteurs 🙂
Bref, voilà les technologies que vous pouvez choisir :
Java/J2EEPython/DjangoPHP/SymfonyPHP/CakePHP- Ruby on Rails
NodeJS
Voilà, sujet clos, 30 secondes chrono.
Any comment?
Filed under: entreprendre, entrepreneurship, rails | 14 Comments
Appel aux orateurs pour l’Agile Tour 2011, Strasbourg
L’Edition 2011 de l’Agile Tour Strasbourg aura lieu le Vendredi 14 Octobre 2011 à Illkirch-Graffenstaden.
Le thème cet année est: Mise en place et évolution des méthodes agiles.
L’objectif est de connaître les outils qui permettent de démarrer l’agilité dans les projets, et ceux qui visent à améliorer son efficacité.
Les sessions interactives et les ateliers seront privilégiés, mais les retours d’expérience et les approches innovantes de l’agilité sont les bienvenues.
N’hésitez pas à diffuser largement cet appel autour de vous !
Comment proposer une présentation ?
Envoyez-nous vos propositions à:
agile-tour-strasbourg@googlegroups.com
avec les informations suivantes:
- Nom, prénom
- Mail et téléphone
- Courte biographie
- Titre de la présentation
- Résumé de la présentation
- Durée de la présentation, type de présentation (jeu agile, retour d’expérience, conférence …)
- Niveau et pré-requis des participants
- Audience cible
Pour les ateliers:
- Déroulement de la session
- Nombre maximum de participants et matériel nécessaire
Dates importantes
- Date limite de soumission des contributions: 10 septembre
- Choix des propositions: 20 septembre
- Envoi des présentations: 5 octobre
Nous espérons vous voir nombreux à Strasbourg !
L’équipe de l’AT Strasbourg 2011
Filed under: agile, alsace, technologie | Leave a Comment
Back from Ruby Lugdunum 2011
Disclaimer : my company, Novelys, sponsored RuLu, and I organized the last RailsCampParis.
After having hesitated a little bit, because of the slow-and-old transportation facility to go from Strasbourg to Lyon, we finally decided with Justine to go to Ruby Lugdunum, the two day, single track Ruby conference in Lyon, France.
Speakers
Of course, the 11 speakers (2 french, 9 “foreigners”) were all Ruby rock stars. That means that the talks were all quite high level. That also means that if you’re not interested in a talk, you’re screwed. Wait for the next one. And yes, that’s the gripe I have for every single track conferences 😉
Vision
I can see three types of conferences in the Ruby/Rails/OSS world :
- Single track conferences : think Frozen Rails, Euruko, etc. Ruby rock stars are speaking about their favorite subjects which won’t necessarly match your needs (or expectations!). Usually these events are made by the community, for the community.
- Gigantic multi track conferences : think RailsConf or FOSDEM. You can have what you want, on the menu, to the detriment of a less social interactions. Some stuff are made for the community, and some other stuff can be made to attract “outsiders”.
- BarCamp style un-conferences : think RailsCampParis. BarCamp means, you will get what you put on the table. But with less rockstars-style show than single or multi track conferences. Again, the events are made by the community for the community. And the level of social interactions is higher than in conferences, as BarCamps are made of pure social interactions.
- Prestige conferences : like Paris on Rails. Everybody wants to attend it and everybody wants to be on the scene. These kind of events are made for the community and to attract outsiders. You can see them as “look at what we achieved together !”
So if I understood well, the organizers want RuLu to be part of the club of European single track conferences made for the community where you can see your favorite hacker on stage. And that’s a fine goal. Even though I cleary prefers BarCamp-style conferences.
But we also need different styles of conferences (and un-conferences). But it seems there are also some other objectives pursued by RuLu : improving the adoption of Ruby in France. And this is where I don’t see the relationship between this kind of conferences and improving the Ruby community in France. I think that we need something else to enlarge our community. And I’m still searching the “what” and “how”. I mean we’re still searching, as we’re a community after all 🙂
And BTW, I would prefer if RuLu would find its own way. No need to mimick Euruko…
Conclusion
First, I will organize another RailsCamp during S2 2011. I think that Paris will be a good city to host the event, as it’s still central in France. We’ll see next year, after the inauguration of the TGV Rhin-Rhone, if I can organize something in Strasbourg 🙂
Second, of course, we still need to rejuvenate the Ruby/Rails community in France and we’re working on it ! Maybe organizing a prestige conference with all the gratin of the french IT world ? But that’s a tough task and we need a good team 🙂
Other articles on RuLu :
Filed under: rails, ruby | 1 Comment
EuRuko is THE european Ruby conference. Every year the venue is elected by the attendees of the event.
Last year, we were in Krakow with Justine, for the 2010 edition. It’s a great conference full of nice people (the speakers, the organizers and the attendees).
We are proposing Strasbourg as a candidate city for hosting EuRuKo 2012, so please, show your support by sharing the official website on Facebook and twitter !
Filed under: alsace, rails, ruby | Leave a Comment
Le mouvement Startup Weekend prends une belle envolée ces derniers mois en France. Des villes telles que Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Montpellier, Toulouse, Bordeaux et j’en passe ont déjà organisé un ou plusieurs Startup Weekend.
J’ai d’ailleurs participé au SWPA3 (Startup Weekend Paris 3), voir à ce sujet mon article nommé “Let’s fucking do it” sur le sujet.
Faisant depuis quelques années déjà la promotion des startups et de l’entrepreneuriat d’une manière générale à Strasbourg et en Alsace, c’est assez naturellement que j’ai eu envie de monter un événement de type Startup Weekend à Strasbourg.
J’ai donc monté un projet dont les partenaires seraient les membres de mon réseau actuel : l’ENSIIE (où j’interviens justement sur un module appelé “Stratégie des Startups”), l’Exia CESI (où j’interviens également), Alsace Digitale (dont je suis membre fondateur et qui promeut un projet de Cantine à Strasbourg) et le CJD (dont je suis membre). Sans compter quelques amis comme Justine, Stéphane ou Thomas. Bref, un projet plutôt teinté “ingénieurs/entrepreneurs”. Nous sommes tous adeptes des méthodes de management à la Team Academy : équipe auto-organisée, grande liberté d’action, confiance et respect entre les membres de l’équipe.
Nous avons rencontré dernièrement une autre équipe qui se propose d’organiser un Startup Weekend Strasbourg. L’équipe est composée essentiellement d’étudiants et d’anciens de l’EM Strasbourg (Ecole de Management de Strasbourg). Bref, je dirais un projet plutôt teinté “managers”. Leur leader nous a expliqué son point de vue : il y a un chef, tout passe par lui et les autres membres de l’équipe doivent respecter les règles.
Autant dire que ça a un peu été le choc des cultures et que les premiers contacts ont été un peu douloureux ! Même si ça ressemble à cet affrontement séculaire entre ingénieurs et managers, on connaît vos attentes fortes par rapport au SWXSB et on est en train de monter ensemble un projet d’une belle envergure !
On devrait d’ailleurs bientôt vous annoncer une date définitive pour ce premier Startup Weekend Strasbourg !
Filed under: alsace, entrepreneurship, swsxb | 2 Comments
I love to speak at technical events (or social events if you prefer), to share my knowledge (or better “our” knowledge, as I learn many things with the Novelys Team).
Usually, I host my presentations on slideshare (you can check all of them on the Novelys slideshare account).
I’m happy to announce that we have now 3 presentations that passed the 1000 views mark (or nearly).
“Long Polling with EventMachine” was recently highlighted as we opensourced Cockatoo, a simple chat server.
“Ruby et MongoDB dans la pratique”, Ruby and MongoDB in practice, was presented at MongoFR, the french conference on MongoDB.
“NoSQL” was presented during a “Last Thursday”, a monthly gathering of tech geeks here in Strasbourg.
Filed under: mongodb, nosql, novelys | 1 Comment
“1 idea per month” revival
The energy and the enthusiasm at the last Startup Weekend Paris reminds me about the “1 idea per month” program I invented in the early days of Novelys.
The concept is very simple : everybody has tons of ideas every day. But usually you forget them or you say to yourself “maybe I’ll take care of it later”. That’s called procrastination. That’s why “1 idea per month” is born.
You take 1 idea and you take car of it during 1 month. You raise it. You grow it. Until it’s testable by others. A kind of Startup Weekend but during 1 month. The key concept is to constantly push the idea in the corner.
I will revive “1 idea per month”, starting next month. You can expect something testable at the end of November. Or, at least, I hope so 🙂 Of course, feel free to join me !
Filed under: 1ideapermonth, entreprendre, entrepreneurship | Leave a Comment
“Let’s fucking do it”
“Let’s fucking do it” could have been the motto of the past week-end at Startup Weekend Paris. I’m really amazed at how much work has been done in our team during this week end and how much energy has been burnt 🙂
Qualifeed
So, we released Qualifeed yesterday. In this really really early version, Qualifeed will help you “master your top tweets”: you will get the list of your 10 top tweets based on their actual audience (your followers + the followers of your retweeters). Also, we’ll calculate for you a “Qualifeed score” based on the impact of some actions (if the users have clicked your included bitly URL for example).
As a bonus, you will also get :
- a pretty graph showing the evolution of your followers
- a Facebook integration allowing Qualifeed to track the evolution of your fans on some of your pages
Grand vision
Unfortunately, the final pitch didn’t work so well for us, but here is the Grand Vision of Qualifeed.
There are a number of websites already positionned on the “Twitter statistics” stuff (Klout.com or twitteranalyzer.com for example). Maybe we’ll add this kind of number computations or graphs in the future but it’s not our core business. Our core business is about helping companies, politics and community managers in their search of what’s working and what’s not, and, help them track the creation of value based on their social activity.
Our vision is to provide solutions of Social Influence Management and Social Influence Optimization to help trademarks, community managers, politicians, etc. to measure and continuously improve the ROI (Return of Investissement) of their social campaigns. The first step will be to provide a Social Activity Dashboard for our targeting customers.
Future ?
We’re currently discussing who will continue on the project and who will not. And also, how to reach some VCs and Business Angels. In the meantime, we’ll continue consolidating the actual app and its infrastructure (which had some scaling problems yesterday night, please excuse us).
I really want to thank all my teammates that made this week end a fabulous experience. I hardly recommend to anybody who is interesting in the startup world to participate to a Startup Weekend. There are several around the globe and I will certainly organize one in Strasbourg early 2011.
Tech note for the geeks
Qualifeed has been developped with Ruby on Rails and MongoDB. It has helped us make a webapp a reality in a week end and it helped us save a lot of sleeping hours.
Qualifeed team aka 12 angry men (and girls) :
Justine Adam @toutielicious
Capucine Surrel @supercapu
Brice Argenson @bargenson
Nicolas Blanco @slainer68
Jerome Etienne @jerome_etienne
Nicolas Hennion @nicolashennion
Yann Klis (me!) @yannski
Florent Merian @fmerian
Camille Roux @camilleroux
Matthieu Segret @MatthieuSegret
Quentin Tousart @quentin_t
Sylvain Theveniaud @JOBPass
Filed under: entrepreneurship, rails, ruby, swpa | 4 Comments
I’m currently at Startup Weekend Paris (#swpa on twitter). For those who haven’t heard of this concept before, it’s very simple : you have 54 hours to create a new company. The event is structured in phases :
- first phase: anybody can pitch a project (1 minute)
- second phase: everybody can vote for his favorite project (we can vote for 3 different projets)
- third phase: the 10 (or something like that) most voted projects are kept and the teams are formed
- fourth phase: the real work begin for the weekend!
Below you will find my notes on the 46 (!) projects that were pitched (in french, sorry) :
#1 streaming live événèments sportifs. Mais je choisis mon commentateur
#2 submate me-too
#3 from Vienna. International project. Offer information about you will buy some food. 150k€ funding.
#4 super fête. mariage. plein de photos partout. AfterTheWeekend. Pour la fin des WE ratés où il n’y a pas de photos.
#5 tracker ses activités sportives. Heia Heia me-too. != Skimble (?)
#6 Chatroulette clean. Chatroulette + HotOrNot.
#7 Food Social Club. Food club. (Super-marmite me-too ?) (Super-marmite + Lepotiron ?)
#8 Adebo. Aggrégation et partage de contacts en ligne. Silentale me-too.
#9 tracker mes dépenses. analyse des extraits de compte.
#10 vendre des anti-virus pour mobiles.
#11 recruter des experts dans d’autres domaines que le mien. “Comme louer escort girl mais pour cerveau”.
#12 impossible de trouver une baby sitter. Groupon pour les parents.
#13 Smart. Plate-forme de coachs personnels.
#14 Ruby on Rails. Orthographe des jeunes laissent à désirer. Faire un site communautaire de correction de texte.
#15 Quentin T. Vendre aux ecommerçants des recommendations sociales. Emerchandising social.
#16 Où est-ce que je vais boire un coup/manger avec mes potes?
#17 Breizh Mobile. Breizh Cola. BreizhBook.
#18 Reputeo. Ereputation hotel, restaurant. Moment où elle paye on tend un iPad. Livre d’or numérique. Vendre les datas à Foursquare, CityVox, etc.
#19 Important is the Team. PhD Parallel Programming -> startup
#20 Bière. Savoir quelle bière dans quel bar est disponible.
#21 Vide grenier online. Valeur du marché d’occasion.
#22 Neara. Le proche plus proche. Commerce de proximité nous. Gardien d’immeuble lien entre nous et commerçants locaux.
#23 Pas de taxi dispo. Demandes de taxi géolocalisé. Rapprocher le service du client.
#24 WiFi + Sandwich. Which Company. Concours ludique entre entreprise.
#25 PhD. My Patterns. Notation pour les développeurs.
#26 Camille Roux. Est-ce que mes tweets intéressent vos utilisateurs ? Quelles sont les horaires qui favorisent la lecture de vos tweets ?
#27 Secure Timer !!!!!!!!! Un soft pour m’aider à gérer mes time slots.
#28 Soft pour nous définir. Portrait chinois. Rapprochement de portrait chinois.
#29 Simplifier comment les gens trouvent leur logement. Là où on bosse. Là où on a nos centres d’intérêts. Là où on mange. Optimiser mes temps de transport.
#30 Réseaux sociaux. De plus en plus d’hommes politiques, de bloggeurs influents. Statistiques de leurs comptes Twitter, Facebook. Socianalytic.
#31 Player de photos.
#32 Marin. Bateau + Apéro. Trouver les spots d’apéro gratuits ou évènements sympas.
#33 Mon journal électronique.
#34 Acheter des conneries sur internet. Lotterie version ebay + couponing.
#35 Priscilla. Startup digest pour l’ensemble de la cible entrepreunariale. Startup déjà lancée.
#36 AR. Petits messages dans des lieux. Messages à retardement. Géocache textuelle.
#37 Capucine. Acheter sur internet et donner des avis. Influx. Etre rétribué pour les produits que je recommande.
#38 Nicolas et Justine me parlent dans l’oreille.
#39 Egarer mes affaires. Liste de choses que j’égare souvent.
#40 Marianne. J’ai une peur dans la vie : que ma mère me demande comme ami sur FB. Réseau social familial.
#41 Déco : 2 camps : ceux qui font et ceux qui ne font pas. Mettre en contact les bricoleurs du dimanche et les gens qui demandent. Réseau social des gens qui bossent au black ?
#42 Application de coaching personnalisé. Y a déjà Bonjour Madame ! (ou Bonjour Monsieur)
#43 Dig my tweet. Tweet souvenir affectif. Silentale me-too.
#44 Mourad. Recherche géolocalisé de services à la personne.
#45 Un livre théâtre pour les enfants. lol mdr je kiffe.
#46 Site de ventes en ligne. En fait, site d’achats en ligne. Pour ce qu’on ne trouve pas en France. Play Asia me-too mais pour tous types de produits 🙂
I voted for #1, #24 and #26.
#1 is a web platform where you can choose your sports speaker (dunno if it’s the right word in english) : mute your TV, just watch it and hear personnal commentary from amateur speakers.
#24 social gameplay for companies (I immediately thought about this video).
#26 twitter advanced statistics to measure your ROI (Return On Influence) <- thanks Camille for this one!
Although #24 was my favorite one, just #1 and #26 were selected. And I’m finaly part of #26’s team. Expect more updates soon 🙂
Filed under: entreprendre, entrepreneurship, swpa | 5 Comments
With Thibaut (@thibaut_barrere) we recently discovered that we have the same kind of unanswered questions about building a SaaS service in France and billing customers located in US and in Europe.
I, as a european guy, I’m used to buy some services billed in USD (think about Campfire, Hoptoad or Freckle for instance). But I don’t think US customers would pay in EUR. So, do I bill my service in EUR ? In USD ? Both ?
And regarding the VAT, how to handle it with US customers ? With European customers ? If it’s a company or not ? If the customer is european, do I need to ask him his intra-communautary VAT number ? And then, which bank should I use? Which payment provider?
We didn’t find a lot of documentation and feedback around those subjects. If you have, it could be very cool to share them!
We were even afraid that the only answer to those questions would be : build a company in the US, or maybe a subsidiary.
Fortunately, a few days ago, I was at the “Salon Ecommerce” in Paris. A giant ecommerce bar mitzvah where you could meet web shop makers, payment providers, CMS guys, etc.
I went first to MoneyBookers to ask my questions, based on an advice from a Kiubi friend. Well, they cannot provide some answers, and their technical level was not very high… The Paybox guys seemed to be very busy or very “I don’t care that guy wearing a laptop backpack”. And finally I went to the Ogone guys. Well in fact, it was a lady. Who answered a lot of my questions. She answered all of them. And they even have solutions for me.
She told me that I’d better go for a multi currencies approach, with a bank account in USD and another one in EUR. The account in USD should be opened in the US or through an international bank that can open a USD account in the US. And a bank account in EUR in France. She told me that HSBC do this kind of stuff. After that, I can have several geographical areas defined in ogone, tight to one ogone account.
Regarding the VAT mess, Ogone as a “we calculate the VAT for you” option. I’m waiting for some more documentation on this option.
Filed under: MasterSieve, SaaS | 1 Comment
Strasslab 