Herve Cuviliez

I just finished the latest book of Prof. Muhammad Yunus (founder of the Grameen bank and 2006 Peace Nobel Prize) called “Creating a world without poverty“.

I’d liked his analysis of capitalism and more precisely his vision on the far too simple way we are dividing the economic world: On one side companies with only on objective, maximizing profit and on the other side none profit organizations in charge of taking care of poor people & environment.

You, like I first done, will object that now big firms have sustainable development and CSR programs. that’s true but at the end of the day what is the one and only indicator the market will use to rate a company : PROFIT.
So if a CEO has to choose between profit and doing a good action, he will choose profit in 99% of the time because it’s what the market expects.

You know what it’s normal and Prof. Muhammad Yunus find that normal also.

That’s precisely what is liked in his approach, he is not an anti-everything kind of guy but a very practical and realistic one.

He proposes to create a new business concept: The social Business. A social business will be have the same mechanisms as a standard business but with two major differences it’s first goal is poverty reduction instead of making profits and propose products and services that’s enhance poor people life.
They will not distribute dividends, the investors will only get back their investment that’s all. So it will help to low products and services prices.

Social businesses and standard businesses will compete on the same market and at the end, consumers will decide.

I think it’s a brilliant idea it will give talented people another option than “profit companies” without sacrifing their revenues (remember a social business will be pay the same salary as a standard business) plus it will leverage the money given to non profit organizations by giving them the ability to get back their investment instead of just spending it.

My only concern about social business is how do we ensure social businesses keep their structural costs sharp without the profit pressure from the shareholders (really important to be able to keep the lowest prices). The board members will have to play hard on this otherwise it will turn into an inefficient administration and then back to beginning.

I strongly recommend this book and to think about this social business concept, if you have any input or comment, feel free.
On my side, I have a idea for a social business, I work on it and I keep you updated.

I went visiting the Digiport in Lille (north of france).
they provides a full range of services for IT companies from a business park to host your business to personalized support for your incorporation.

I was really impress by the quality of the infrastructure and the skills of the team.

If you are a startup CEO looking for the perfect place for european headquarter, you should really consider this place.

Cherry on the cake: By the high speed train, London is at 1h20, Brussels at 30 mins, Paris at 1h and charles de gaulle airport 40 mins.

Seen yesterday @ emerging art festival, a twitter device for your plants.

So you can be anywhere on the planet and receive status updates of your plants: Need water, urgently need water, etc..

So cool,

You will find everything on botanicalls.com to build your own device, don’t forget to them feedback.

As soon as I get back to Paris, I’ll try to make mine

While the vaste majority of us just getting tired of facebook, the Web 2.0 is entering into phase 2. I will say a more mature phase.
With phase 1, we learnt how to connect to each other, sharing basic information, etc… I’m talking about facebook, dopplr, linkedin, Xing and hundred of others.

With phase 2, we will learn to share informations with others forms of intelligence. I’m talking about artificial intelligence, I’m talking about robots, sensors, any kind of devices. Scared ?
To make it simple, everyday there is millions of information gathered by sensors that could be valuable for us: temperature sensors, mobile for localization, wifi hotspots, RFID chips, etc…
In fact, we are already surrendered by sensors collecting information and “socializing” between them.
This phase 2 will be the connection of this 2 kinds of social networks: us and them.
Don’t Believe me ? Need some signs ? Here is some

Tim O’Reilly at the ETech08:

the future of Web 2.0 will be applications driven by sensors

But in fact, the first person, i ever heard talking about this, is Bernard Benhamou that’s was a year ago and he made a interview (in french) about this in may 06.

and then start to google this there tons of pages on this: A good article on the economist

So what’s new ?
It’s getting real. In 2008, we will move from prospective to concreate applications.

Need another sign ?

Yahoo just released Fire Eagle (a way to share your location with sites and services online) that collect localization informations and centralize them in an unique application then you can feed this into your applications. Sources could be wifi hotspots, mobile, gps, etc…

I will continued to investigate that and invest myself and my money into this type of application.

To be continued…

I’ve found that last month in San Francisco, not in the Apple Store but at the theater!

Selling ipods like chocolate bars, i like this.

thanks Mr Jobs,

Is it possible that a technological advanced country as a so poor mobile network (talking about AT&T).
I bought a prepaid card 2 days ago and I still pissed off.
You pay when you receive phone calls even when you receive texts (a shame everybody know that it cost them nothing). It remembers me the early 90’s in Europe.
Definitevly, USA is #1 on the web (watch out china, guys) but for mobile you should definitely look East.

I just attended a keynote from Tim O’Reilly. It was amazing

He talked about hackers philosophy and why Emerging Tech conference is the place to be for them. Does that make me an hacker ? I hope so.

Hackers are people who try things that have never been done before
Hackers don’t know where is the business opportunity but do things because they love it, because it matters

they don’t know if it will be the next big thing, they just loved it.

to make his point he showed this picture : “Microsoft, 1978: Would you have invested?”

Don’t follow the ease path then you will be an hacker…

I just bumped into Unity 3D. That’s amazing, i went through a lot of 3D tools last 10 years (VRML, Nemo, etc..) but this one is real great.

It worses spending some time on it, install the plugin and start to browse the demo pages.

they present themselves as a multiplatform game development tool but I’m sure we will see other applications as branded content for example

I will spend 4 days (3-6 march 2008) in San Diego for the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2008.

An amazing program is waiting for me: Mobile, Data vizualitation, Gaming, robotics, etc… with worldclass speakers.

4 days of mind opening, cool I just want through the attendees list I’m the only french. is that normal ? ok it’s far but 14 hours in plane is not so much regarding the program.

Hope next year, there will be more.

next post about the Tim O’Reilly keynote.

Cashstore is a shopping engine with a cashback reward system.

The mother company has been founded in 2003 with a simple goal use online technologies to increase people purchase power.

I won’t disclose anything about the technology but Cashstore combined an search engine, a buyer community and a tracking system that analyze every purchase order of members to calculate the cash reward. Really impressive