Si vous avez pris de jolies photos sur le site du Festival d’été, je vous invite à les déposer dans la page du groupe que j’ai créé sur Flickr . La colonne de droite de ce blogue affichera les 10 plus récentes. Il n’y en a qu’une présentement, une photo merdique que j’ai prise de mon cellulaire hier soir sur les Plaines, mais d’autres ne tarderont pas à s’afficher!

Ouaaaaa.... quelqu’un a acheté une de mes photos sur iStock !!! J’avais promis de faire la fête durant trois jours, je devrai donc me soumettre. Que l’on sabre le Champagne !

Mon ami Carl (qui a le nez fourré partout où ça commence par trois «w») a trouvé le site qui a acheté la photo, c’est là.

Puisque c’est au Québec, je soupçonne que c’est un aimable lecteur de mon blogue ou une connaissance quelconque... mais ça me fait plaisir quand même. Merci à toi, acheteur inconnu. Ça donne le goût de persévérer.

(le plus drôle, c’est que j’ai vendu une Casserole ce matin et pourtant, cette photo vendue me fait presque autant plaisir... même si ça me rapporte à peine assez d’argent pour me payer un café)

Noon: Branding China

The presentation was followed by a panel discussion on branding in China, led by Hong Kong retail scion Dee Poon. She grilled Richard Hsu (director of branding firm H+), Design Republic’s Lyndon Neri, and Shanghai Tang creative director Joanne Ooi on what it takes to create a successful brand in China—and why so few exist here on the luxury level. As Joanne put it, “Mao is still the biggest brand in China.”

For a little insight, I’m going to grossly oversimplify their three points!

1. Richard: The Chinese market is growing so explosively, many companies don’t feel the need to invest in branding—an attitude that will backfire once the market becomes more sophisticated.

2. Lyndon: Chinese consumers dwell too much on brand name—at the expense of product itself. More companies need to focus on the quality, integrity, and cultural underpinnings of their products. (Which is why he just launched his own housewares brand at the show, Neri & Hu.)

3. Joanne: Without marketing—which is lacking in sophistication here—you can’t get the brand message across. And Chinese consumers are still learning to understand themselves, their tastes, their style…it will take a more self-aware consumer for brands to really take hold.

Despite the occasionally conversation, there was a general consensus: that China needs to brand itself a bit better.

+ 100percentdesign.com.cn

Photo: Rogerio Barbosa

Pas certain que les feux du 400e, aient été les «plus meilleurs » jamais réalisé au Canada, mais j’y ai pris du bon temps avec mes deux copains Français venus à Québec dans le cadre d’une initiative de la la Fondation Internet Nouvelle Génération. Faudra que je commence à faire le tri parmi toutes les activités auxquelles je participe cet été en vue de faire mon top dix! Julie Lemieux du Soleil enfile ici ses «meilleurs et… moins bons moments du 3 juillet»; c’est inspirant.

Photo: La Presse Canadienne

L’interprétation de Marie-Jo Thériault de la chanson fétiche des Acadiens au spectacle «Rencontres» et le «J’entends frapper» de Pag viennent de se hausser en haut de liste.

Photo: Jean-Marie Villeneuve, Le Soleil

I can still go nuts and buy lots of fabric… Thanks to the Etsy online shops! I browsed around and found 4 fabrics I liked… And I bought half-yard of each! It’s a pretty good deal, about 20$ for 2 yards total. I made an average of prices in Montreal and it was 18$ a yard! So I know I am not getting ripped off… Now, just have to wait for it to arrive!

Today’s Photoblog pic is “Whale Body Parts” and it’s a duo of open mouth and pectoral fin.

In a poll which run here for the past 3 months, Amazon AWS and Google App Engine were choosen by MTW readers as the most promising technologies, well ahead of other new technologies with 34% of votes. I’ve grabbed then the opportunity to delve into virtualized and on-demand web hosting, aka cloud computing.

We sat down with Alistair Croll from Bitcurrent, MC of GigaOm’s cloud-focused Structure08 event and track chair for Interop’s Cloud Computing track, to find out about the cloud.

mtw: Back from last week’s cloudcamp, would you say that cloud computing is hype or it’s here to stay?

Alistair Croll: Cloud is here to stay. The economics are too good to pass up. But there’s a ton of hype surrounding it, because everyone is jumping on the cloud bandwagon. Duncan Hill said it best: Cloud computing is self-service IT outsourcing. That’s a good definition, because it recognizes that what’s new is the ability to self-provision.

I just finished a joint Bitcurrent/GigaOm report on clouds ($250 at http://briefings.gigaom.com), and I was surprised at just how much innovation there is within the field.

Amazon web services and also Google App Engine are the most known providers, with mostly similar features and pricing. But do you see a space somewhere that can by occupied by another startup, by offering for instance different service level agreements, prices, technology, or custom services? Or would are we going towards a market driven by scale, and dominated by Amazon and Google?

It’s still open territory. There are two dimensions of cloud: Operational clouds are about letting someone else run things, and here, Amazon is king (though there are lots of others — Joyent, XCalibre, Gigaspaces, Rackspace.com’s Mosso, for example. On the other hand, Development clouds are about making it easier to build things. The extreme example is Ning, which lets you build a social network.

Generally speaking, development clouds lock you in; operational clouds are “open” and portable, but you have to do a lot of the heavy lifting. Because of that, there are companies like Rightscale and Platespin and enomalism that try to make it easier to manage a cloud.

There’s also a class of companies and open source projects that let you build your own clouds. 3Tera is commonly mentioned here, but there’s also the Eucalyptus project and others.

There are still popular web hosting providers such as dreamhost who offer commoditized web hosting plans. Do they still have a place here? How unique exactly is the cloud computing technology? Would it be possible for web hosters to transform their data centers and offer competing services?

Shared hosting means you’re on the same machine. If someone else kills the machine, you die too. Admittedly, it’s a blurry world — I would say, at a minimum, that a cloud has to have virtualization (to put the customer in a “sandbox”) and self-provisioning. Generally, the virtualization runs atop a grid of commodity hardware so it can expand and shrink as needed.

Many companies (Enki is one) have taken 3Tera’s software and made a cloud. But simply offering a Plesk server and a virtual IP on a load-balancer does not make someone a cloud provider.

How wise is it for a company to host their software to a company like Google or Amazon? Isn’t there a problem if those web giants rolls out a competing product?

Some have claimed that Google Apps is a “farm team” for Google, since you can’t really run your app somewhere else if you want to.  There’s always a tension between the OS and the apps — think about Microsoft introducing disc compression (which competed with Stac) or remote desktop (which competed with Citrix Winframe.) Heck, once upon a time someone competed with MS Paint!

In general, the market will sort out which things belong to virtualization companies like Citrix Xen, VMWare, and Microsoft; which belong to clouds like Amazon, Mosso, and Joyent; and which belong to the apps on top of them.

But consider this: If you build something and run it yourself, you’ll spend a ton of time running it instead of innovating. If you let someone else run it, at least you get to keep developing new features to stay ahead of them. I’d say for many startups, not using the cloud is a huge mistake.

Are cloud computing meant for temporary computing needs? such as handling traffic spikes or temporary data analytics? or are we going towards complete transfer of server infrastructure?

“Bare metal” clouds like Amazon can spin up a server quickly. Enterprises are using them tentatively, for just the kinds of tasks you mention. Internet companies are building their entire businesses on them (think Smugmug.) Some clouds are even built on clouds (like Rails cloud Heroku, which runs on AWS.)

Eventually, cloud computing will be taken for granted. When you come right down to it, you’re not going to build a data center next to a dam, or construce a nuclear power plant. But Google or Amazon might.

There’s seldom any differentiation from running your own hardware. And many services coders normally need to build — like authentication, or storage, or a friend feed, or a mailing system, or a message queue — are already built, and connected to millions of users. So why would you build your own?

To finish, do you have any data on cloud computing adoption? or pointers to best practices for web startups?

The number of developers on Amazon is approaching 400,000. The data from Amazon Web Services already outstrips Amazon.com. This is a fundamental transformation. Companies are building new applications in weeks, and refusing VC money because they don’t have to buy servers in advance.

Some clouds (Joyent is a good example) offer “accelerators” specifically aimed for development of a type of application, such as Facebook. So if you’re a new startup, you’d better have a good reason to not use the cloud. And even if you have one, the cloud should still be factored in for things like testing, bursty capacity, and backups.

For companies wanting to be a cloud, the answer is to specialize. “Vertical” clouds like Salesforce.com’s focus on a specific industry or application. Salesforce is for CRM; Webex is for communications; and so on. I think we’ll see cloud platforms for video (Nirvanix is doing some of this), or for HIPPA compliance, or for travel, and so on. There are big advantages to tailoring your cloud to a specific industry.

Thanks to Alistair Croll for the opportunity!

I would also like to take the opportunity to invite readers to share what their web Infrastructure is. Going around events and blogs, I know this is one of the least talked about subjects, even though it’s a crucial point for a technology company. So, don’t hesitate to leave a comment on how and where you host your software, and your experience with web hosting providers, be it aws or other services. 

Thanks!

Valerie Green maps out shopping habits in by pinning consumers to the wall.

Find the loner in works from the series entitled Alone by James Homer.

Olger’s Benjamin Baumgarten has a new suit.

Are Nate Frizzell’s characters hiding behind their masks or merely trying to make the birds feel more at ease?

Not all of Krista Huot’s subjects are so graceful …. . SM

More at Art MoCo.

La journée était trop belle hier pour que je me laisse aller à commenter les pisse-vinaigre qui ne savent pas que c’est la Fête, à Québec ces jours-ci.

Je reconnais à Francis Dupuis-Déri le droit de manifester son opposition au déploiement de force militaire; c’est loin d’être un minable ce type. Mais hier, l’idée de perturber la Fête était de mauvais goût .

Je reconnais aux cinq syndicats municipaux de la ville de Québec le droit de poser des gestes d’affirmation pour obtenir les meilleures conditions de travail possible; ils ne sont pas «des fourreurs de système», en tant qu’institution. Mais hier, c’était de mauvais goût que de s’être mis le nez là où ils n’avaient pas d’affaire.

Je reconnais aux chroniqueurs Gagné et Lagacé le devoir de nous livrer des opinions affirmées, et parfois dissonantes pour nous aider à apprécier les différentes façons de voir une même réalité; ils ne sont pas de mauvaise foi. Mais hier (aujourd’hui dans un cas), c’était déplacé d’avoir voulu nous secouer le pommier avec la publication de chroniques de mauvais goût (Patrick, Jean-Simon).

Oui je sais, il y avait la pluie, aussi, qui ne voulait pas collaborer; mais certaines journées, on voudrait que les casseux de partys arrêtent de venir cracher sur le perron. 399 années, 364 jours de temps, je suis capable de vivre avec ça… J’aime ça, même!

Mais hier, ce n’était pas le moment… Vraiment pas.

N.B. Dans ces circonstances, la gang de Luck Mervil (que j’apprécie beaucoup normalement) a participé à un événement qui portait bien son nom: OFF!

Everything else being equal, picking the right problems is the key factor determining your success as a researcher (no matter how you define success). In a previous post, I proposed three categories of research problems:

1. explain a previously unexplained observation;
2. perfect an existing technique;
3. invent a new problem.

It appears that all 3 categories are equally valid. Which technique you prefer is a matter of style.

Today, I would like to propose a new, orthogonal, categorization in terms of the depth of the problem you tackle. Some problems

1. are narrow and well-defined, you can complete them in a few months;
2. form a set of narrow and well-defined problems, likely to keep you busy for years.

I have tended myself toward the first category (see “my research process“). The benefit of a focused burst of research producing a distinct result should not be underestimated. The most obvious benefit is that you can quickly move on and thus, you can afford to try your hand at random problems. It is the equivalent of a hit-and-run. If you are the curious sort, it allows you to learn about a new topic, without investing your career in it. However, it makes applying for grants more difficult. You are also less likely to achieve some recognition because the depth of your contribution might be less.

The second category means that you must find yourself a niche and work over it for years. Indeed, preferably, not too many people in the world must be aware of these problems you have identified. The catch is: how can you know, ahead of time, that the topic and the problems you see now, will still be interesting in two or three years? Are you investing in vain? Presumably, if you can follow this strategy, grant applications and recognition may come more easily. But what happens if you get bored?

The two categories relate to how you read papers. If you read papers thinking “maybe I could build on their work”, then you will naturally tend to the first category. Reading a lot of papers on different topics favors random hit-and-run research projects. Are you reading the list of accepted papers looking for clues as to what you will work on next? Are you attending talks to pick up random new ideas?

However, if you tend to “pull” research papers out of the (virtual) library based on your own ideas, then you will more likely gravitate toward the deeper research projects. In this case, your mental filters are much stronger: you tend to filter out everything that does not directly relate to your goals. You may still attend many conferences, and read lists of accepted papers, but your brain will filter most of the data out.

Marie-Eve Morasse, journaliste pour Technaute, m’a téléphoné plus tôt cette semaine pour discuter de l’iPhone suite à mon billet précédent à propos de la tarification que je juge abusive de la part de Rogers.

En général, on trouve toujours quelques disparités entre ce qu’on pense avoir dit que ce qui est rapporté, mais cette fois tout est presque parfait (même si on ne pensait pas offrir des iPhone à tout le monde ici ou là, mais plutôt donner la possibilité d’adhérer à un plan corporatif pour obtenir de meilleurs tarifs.)

Merci beaucoup à Mme. Morasse pour l’excellent article!

Enfin, ça donne ceci : Rogers et l’iPhone, la grogne persiste.

PS : Vendeurs de cellulaires, inutile de continuer à me téléphoner. Cela fait déjà 2 ce matin, et non, je ne suis pas plus intéressé à acheter des imitations d’iPhone. :)

I was asked to create a “sinister-looking flower” to accompany an article about microenvironments and cancer for the McGill News.

I had a lot of fun with the colours. I wanted them to be a little unsettling but also a little Sci-Fi.

On dit souvent que les critiques de films sont élitistes et que leur opinion n’a ultimement aucun lien avec les recettes au guichet.

Il semble bien qu’on se trompe. Le journaliste Erik Lundegaard a publié un article dans le magazine Slate (Why We Need Movie Reviewers) dans lequel il fait des calculs qui prouvent selon lui le contraire. Rien de scientifique, mais les chiffres qu’il fait ressortir sont intéressants. En utilisant la méthode de calcul des revenus des films par salle (vs les recettes totales), le journaliste constate que les films qui ont reçu de bonnes critiques rapportent plus par écran que ceux qui ont reçu de mauvais commentaires et ce, même dans le cas des soi-disant inébranlables blockbusters.

Sa conclusion?

Almost any way you slice it, if a majority of critics like a movie, chances are it will do better at the box office than a similar film the majority of critics don’t like. Far from being elitist, movie critics are actually a pretty good barometer of popular taste.

What does all of this mean? Not much and everything. I certainly accept the fact that America’s overall cultural tastes have degraded. Serious films for adults, such as The Best Years of Our Lives, The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Graduate, and The Godfather, were all No. 1 box office hits for their respective years. So was Saving Private Ryan as recently as 1998. Seems an eternity ago. Now even our most critically acclaimed films are cartoons: Persepolis, Ratatouille, and The Simpsons Movie.

Euh… Persepolis et Ratatouille, ce sont des cartoons? J’aurais eu plus de confiance envers la conclusion de ce journaliste si son opinion n’avait pas été aussi réductrice. Les films étaient bien meilleurs dans le temps, bla bla bla. Ben oui. Et moi quand j’étais jeune je devais marcher sur une distance de 20 kilomètres dans la neige en montant une pente pour me rendre à l’école. *baillement*

Mais tout de même, il faudrait que quelqu’un fasse le calcul avec les films et les critiques québécois pour voir si on en arriverait aux mêmes conclusions.

Pour ceux que le sujet intéresse tout particulièrement, je vous conseille la lecture de la retranscription d’une conversation en ligne entre l’auteur de l’article et les lecteurs de Slate. On y donne plus de détails sur la signification de ces chiffres et sur l’évaluation des méthodes de calcul des revenus générés par les films.

Trouvé via Writer’s blog