Coups de coeur dans les nuages

February 22, 2010

Is really Greece the bone of contention in Europe?

European Union governments are suspended to Greek Prime Minister's economic plan to save its country from bankruptcy. But what about the public finance states of the rest of the European Union?

First fact:

Government borrowing reflects a fundamental disequilibirum between spending and tax revenue. Borrowing as a % of GDP has been increasing in past few years, despite economic growth.

Second fact:

Present Government borrowing is not to finance investment in the economy. A large percentage of the debt is to finance transfer payments to an ageing population. Paying pensions and health care to an ageing population, will do nothing to facilitate economic growth and higher tax revenues. It will get more and more difficult to finance the national debt.

Third Fact:

As National Debt increases as a % of GDP, it means that the interest payments as a % of GDP increase. Therefore, higher levels of taxes have to be spent on just financing the national debt.

Best bets for a solution:

1. Inflation

A government may be tempted (or forced) to fill the shortfall in revenue by printing money. Printing money and increasing the money supply, will lead to inflation.

Impossible scenario inside the EU: all the governments are depending of the European Central Bank which unique politic is the deflationary one.

2. Unemployment

Social rules and supports in Europe are absorbing the long lasting unemployment in the european countries. It is increasing the public government debt, letting less fresh money for private productive investments. The shift to a new economy is delayed by politic measures of the 20th century.

3. Devaluation of the money.

Other impossible scenario! The weakest countries of the Euro-zone had to bear the weight of a high-valued money with no hope of a support coming from the richest (see case of Grecia).

The bone of contention is therefore the unique money, the Euro. Thanks to the British eurosceptics, UK is out the Euro-zone. Can you imagine the situation of the European Union with UK as one of the big player in the Euro-zone?

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* more to read : http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/wealthofnations/archive/2010/02/19/greece-is-far-from-the-eu-s-only-joker.aspx

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February 2, 2010

Enterprise 2.0 is trendy or...?

via youtube.com

David Terrar and Dennis Howlett on Enterprise 2.0.
Yes it is obvious that social media and enterprise have not met each other. Few early adopters (Coca-cola, Dell, StarBuck,...) have experimented social tools in the marketing area, others as a kind of social intranet (IBM,NASA,...) but the all in one Enterprise 2.0 (= a social platform with bottomup stream of information, integrating providers and customers voices to deliver the best "social service" to one customers' community) is not born.
Is it an utopy? is it a good medicine against crisis mood ? In my point of view the 20ie century pattern for enterprise had to change. Why?
- because of Information Technology. The enterprise cannot resist to the pression of customers' information nor to providers' information. This is a fact.
- what about the employees: they are best informed than their leaders! This is also a fact.
If Dennis Howlett is very sceptical with "enterprise 2.0" buzz, what about Enterprise Y ?

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January 24, 2010

Culture Jamming and Social Media culture

Tagging or cutting, splicing and reworking ads in the public area are illegual and controversial.
On January 30, 2009, while attending a benefit for Friends We Love artist's video documentaries, a person thought to be Poster Boy was arrested by undercover police agents waiting for him. This "Poster Boy" was charged with two misdemeanor counts of criminal mischief and went before a Judge on Monday, February 9, 2009.
The Poster Boy movement could be associated to Culture Jamming:
Culture jamming is intended to be a means of allowing the people to take advantage of their right to ‘free speech’ and to call into question what the media tells them to think or believe.

Social Platforms are claimed to be customers' loudspeakers and in a legal way they are a stage for people to create, talk, discuss, relaying Poster "boys" underground game.

What do you think about Poster Boy Movement?

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December 30, 2009

What about Europe Economic Union in 2010?

via fsteurope.com

Apart of the flagrant desiquilibrium existing in the Europe Union, between the top contributing countries and the remaining countries, apart of the constantely growing european bureaucraty contrasting with stagnant democraty, I think urgent to try to understand why Euro currency is so high against the USD despite low interest rate and deep recession.

One expert assets investor told me in 2006 he did'nt understand exchange markets, all the indicators were pointed to a situation which never happened. Now, after reading Financial systems and terrorism expert Loretta Napoleoni, I wonder myself if we maybe underestimate the the phenomenon of economic interdependence after September 11th, 2001.

As Loretta Napoleoni told us:
1- "...the Patriot Act, which was a piece of legislation aimed at blocking the funding to terrorist organisations, eventually created a terrible and detrimental situation in other Countries, in this case Europe as a whole, turning Europe into the money laundering capital of the world, all of this between September 11 and now..."
2- "...Many of the problems that you have heard about regarding the banks are precisely linked to deregulation, to the lack of legislation and to the fact that the banks were granted high levels of freedom with very little control by the State.
What happens with deregulation? In essence, it amounts to the removal of financial barriers and the removal of financial legislation and the controls between two countries. But who has benefited from this?...From the mid-sixties through to 2001, a certain amount of new money, namely the bills printed annually by the Federal Reserve, was illegally taken out of circulation in America in suitcases or cardboard boxes that left the country in the form of boxes required for removals, etc, illegally in other words, and this money went towards satisfying the demand for cash, not only from criminal elements, but also from terrorist organisations and various other sectors of the underground economy..."
3- "...the Patriot Act was only introduced in the United States and is only applicable to the Dollar, so it has totally revolutionised the cash flows of the legal economy and the underground economy alike...no one wanted any Patriot Act introduced in another country that would enable outsiders to scrutinise any dealings between a bank and its customers...the international banks advised their customers to abandon the Dollar Zone and switch to the Euro. The Euro was the new European currency that had just recently come into circulation, so it offered numerous opportunities and, above all, Europe did not have any legislation similar to the Patriot Act and indeed there were tax havens in existence in Europe that worked very well, with no one checking up on anything..."
5- "... this money laundering is occurring via the real estate sector and it is thus very difficult to control because, for example, the Deeds Registry Office on the Costa del Sol has no way of communicating with the Deeds Registry Office in London, so they will never know whether the same company is busy making purchases in various locations in Europe, either simultaneously or at different times and, furthermore, there is no system in place to monitor the financial and cash transactions in Euro that may be taking place across European borders, there is no such thing!"

Europe has become the money laundering capital of the world. This is one more aspect we have to take in account as we think about Europe Union as the only mean to maintain peace and economic development in the old Western Continent.

Do you think Europe Union free market is good for Europeans?

ref: http://www.beppegrillo.it/en/2009/04/european_parliament_loretta_na_1.html

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December 14, 2009

What are the differences between European and US entrepreneurs?

Image via Wikipedia

As usual after LeWeb conference in Paris, we have plenty to learn and read from US people feedback about the European event.

This year 2009 was particularly interesting as one part of the conference focused on Startups and some of the american bloggers (Scoble heading the team) on the French ones.

According to my readings, mixing the ideas, I will give you my feelings about the differences between EU and US entrepreneurs (startup), expecting to read yours.
1- US entrepreneurs are very well prepared to make public presentation and EU less.
2- EU entrepreneurs are dealing with more state rules (and EU rules) and do need to adapt themselves.
3- US entrepreneurs are in the cloud (Twitter,Facebook,Skype) and EU less.
4- EU entrepreneurs usualy are trying to settle first in their country using their social connections on the ground and US do the same.
5- US entrepreneurs are in an homogeneous environment and do not imagine how is the world outside their borders and EU imagine it quite perfectly.

Despite world globalisation, new technologies, social tools and reds, culture or mankind do not change so quickly. We have great entrepreneurs on both sides, no matter how they make the job (by the way, what is the origin of "entrepreneur"?).
Deezer CEO is french, not well kown in US, but he dealt successfully with the Majors, permitting listening whole song or sonate for free. Maybe this is the main reason of his discretion.

At the end of the day the weaknesses pointed out here are nothing regardless to our natality curve on both sides of the Atlantic.

Are you ready to change for the other continent OR do you feel well in yours?

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November 13, 2009

Enterprise 2.0: the Best of

Two conferences about Enterprise 2.0 in one month, one in San Francisco (US), one in Frankfurt (Germany, Europe), is the business world looking for a magical remedy to the recession?

Obviously the 2.0 "revolution" is boiling for longer time ago than the financial crisis. In the companies the recession had give a push to what could be the end of mass-consumption, mass-production...maybe end of capitalism, version. 19th century.

This video is setting the stage to give you the Best of the two conferences and invite you to comment on:
* http://diwiki.com/index.php/Best_of_Enterprise2.0_Summit

What large companies understand about Enterprise 2.0
What about the workforce
Measuring collaboration benefits: Wiki-experiment in the German Armed Forces

via blip.tv

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Filed under // disruptive economy

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October 10, 2009

Frugal happyness in a kitchen

via youtube.com

Lulu and the Lampshades doesn't need an orchestra, sophisticated lights and sound mixing...just a good sence of rhythm and beautiful voice, et voila everybody feels better.

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Filed under // music

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September 28, 2009

Usability of MediaWiki in Enterprise 2.0

Editing interface of MediaWiki 1.7, showing th...

Image via Wikipedia

Gil Yehuda's blog post "MediaWiki limits Enterprise 2.0" boosted me to write a short post about the usability of the open-source product MediaWiki in an Enterprise 2.0.
Enterprise 2.0 means...first issue. Maybe an enterprise 2.0 is:
- a non-pyramidal organisation.
- who engage real conversation with customers
- who share information inside and outside to add value to the whole community.
Is MediaWiki useful and user-friendly to this kind of organisation? Here are 3 arguments as a response to this question:

1- A costless, wide-open document and information silo.
The wiki markup is a joke compared to the commercial text-processing software. From the MediaWiki markup you only need to know:
- Click on the "edit" tab and write, write and write.
- You want some bold or italic text, just select the word and click on the corresponding "edit buttons" up on top of the page.
- You need to insert a URL, copy and paste it
- You want some paragraphs to make it more readable, write the title of the paragraph and enclose it with one "=" or 2 or 3 depending of the level of the paragraph.
- DON'T forget to save at the bottom of the page.
Et voila! Some people then will ask for more but only if they need it and consequently they will learn it quickly as the first step was easy.
Storing document will slowly desappear as all the writing stuff will be saved in the wiki and retrievable as printed document (printed version of Mediawiki or PDF document thanks to a simple extension).
Of course stuff like important emails can be copy and paste in the MediaWiki.

2- As it is costless you can have as many MediaWiki as you need, wide-open or "wide-shut".
The co-existence of the two kinds of wiki does'nt mean that NO relation or exchange is possible.
It could be convenient to let some persons manage private wiki (access controled by a login and password) but even in this case these persons would conveniently and quickly copy and paste what they want in the wide-open wiki.

3- Collaboration "mashup and boostup".
MediaWiki is a versatile tool: it becomes what you need it to be. For example the enterprise have to keep an eye on the automotive industry so two ways:
- google alert
- twitter search
Results of both of them can be embedded as RSS feed in MediaWiki, always readable 24h/24 from anywhere.
It will boost the responsivness of the enterprise as all is in one place, quickly retrievable thanks to the Mediawiki search engine.
One more tip: you can embed safely all kind of stuff : blog feeds, youtube feeds, last fm feeds...

If you decide to use a MediaWiki in your entreprise, you also may open a blog, twitter, slideshare, youtube account...Enterprise 2.0 is just about conversation and you can store and see all in your MediaWiki.

PS1: if you are still reluctant to try MediaWiki markup, let me know and help you through Twitter with the hash tag #diwiki

PS2: As Posterous, you can feed your MediaWiki with email...let me know if you are interested comenting this post.

NB:Andrea Gohr wrote about Usability sessions during the RegioWikiCamp on September 25th-26th-27th

http://www.cosmocode.de/en/blog/gohr/2009-09/30-usability-sessions-at-regiowiki-camp-09

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August 24, 2009

Semantic and Mediawiki: free and little by little approach

As an early Mediawiki user and evangelist I will only write about Mediawiki as a CMS.

Nowadays Content Management System refers mainly to Database Management System and Mediawiki stores the content of the wiki in a database. This storage is as easy as writing freely in "edit" mode and save. You can use or not some mediawiki markups to improve presentation of the text (bold, italic...) and link one page with another or refer to an external website.
So MediaWiki is the most powerful way to quickly store and retrieve any data
But at the end of the day you can SEARCH in the wiki every single word you want BUT you will NOT be able to ASK a basic question (query) to this wiki database.

Example:
- search : "Berlin" > you will get an amazing page of results with all the pages which titles contain the word "berlin" and all the pages which contain the word "berlin" in the core text content.

- ask :"What is the capital of Germany" > no way.

The Semantic Mediawiki Extension adds a "dissipated structured database layer" to MediaWiki. Any data, anywhere inside the text of any MediaWiki page, can be selected to be structured as having some values of some property. Properties are similar to the traditional fields of a structured database. So adding property and values to some data in your Mediawiki allow two tremendous features:
1- Ask (query) : for example in your international company you decide to run one unique wiki. This wiki has to be multilingual. A nice way to know where are the pages written in French is to do a simple query to the database. You decide then to create a Property:Language. To do so:

you open a new page with title "Semantic Properties" : everybody will be invited to check it before "editing" a page in the wiki.
this new page contains a very short list of mandatory properties according to your wiki target use.
each property is written in the page with the following mediawiki markup : [[Property:Language]]
when you save the "Semantic Properties" page you click on the link 'Property:Language'
the page with title 'Property:Language' explains the different value of Language: English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, ... This is not an exhaustive list, any user can add a new value (ex: Chinese)
new page has to contain this tag [[Language::English| ]] or [[Language::French| ]] to be reported as an English or a French page.

2- Report (Printout) : every query could be reported or print out in a customized format. This is a hugh and valuable improvement to compare with the result SEARCH page of standard Mediawiki.

3- Forms: on my point of view it is the less operating feature as it reduces the "free editing" feature which gives more power to the wiki content compared to blog content. Enrichment of content is open in a wiki and this is what enterprise 2.0 are looking for.

To wrap it up, Semantic tool must not kill the free access to knowledge that Mediawiki gives, offers to organisation.
Let a free folksonomy prevail and do not impose a presupposed taxonomy. Life and time will build it as it should be...

Credit Jean-François Ayel > Michelin, Jean-François Tavernier, CEO Versailles NewYork, Jean-Pierre Ayel, Direct Marketing Handbook, Years of experience: Dbase 1984, Internet 1994, Mediawiki 2004, Zaragoza.DiWiki.org 2006...

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