Jan 27 2012

by Brice Le Blévennec

English version of a comment published in Datanews.

I surf a lot, the digital universe is my passion. Lately I’ve grown particularly fond of applications to feed my insatiable smartphone, but I still pass a lot of my time every day hooked to a huge screen, to ‘watchdog’ evolutions in technology, explore the web, dig up the latest innovations, sniff at new trends, in short to be inspired.

I must say I’m supercharged with suggestions from my 350 colleagues, who post daily links on our wiki, or exchange them through various email lists, that drive our working groups. As I’m too curious, I signed up for all our groups and I cannot resist exploring each new link I find there.

The experience it offers is broad: from online high impact experiences to sites with creatives’ portfolios, apps integrated with Facebook, interactive videos, games in 3D with CSS3, WebGL or Flash, new frameworks for web development or HTML5, new social networks, fresh online services, with API’s that allow us to do digital magic tricks, etc.. In short, each day of my life is packed with discoveries and I’m a very lucky person.

Yet when I scan the wiki, I notice a peculiarity. There is hardly any link to be found leading to exciting Belgian online work. The Belgian web is desperately boring. There are not many innovative projects. Few e-commerce sites. Rare original mini-site experiences. No Web services or  API’s of interest … In short, there’s not much happening on the web in our kingdom at the heart of Europe…

Yet our creatives are highly respected in the international advertising world, as are our engineers in the field of information technology and communication. How can we explain this striking poverty?

In fact, Belgium is a victim of its size, of the linguistic and cultural fragmentation of its population and of the high cost of Internet subscription and Mobile Internet.
A bit like Switzerland or Luxembourg.

Most sites have to be available in French, Dutch, often in English too and even in German. This complicates the creation and updating of sites. The CMS must be configured with workflows that take into account the availability of translations of content, often increasing costs of implementation and slowing down updates.

This fragmentation of audiences has a large impact on projects based on communities, like networks and social media, when they feed on written content generated by users. It increases their costs of managing and moderating the participants. Very few community projects have reached a decent national size, or else they had to ‘balkanize’ their public by language, as Netlog did.

The small size of our audiences slows down risk investments. To be a profitable venture, investment in design and development must be returned by interaction with a large enough audience, a market of a sufficient critical scale.
For example, to achieve the same ROI on a project In  the french-speaking part of Belgium, the penetration ratios must be ten times higher than a similar project in France.

Imagine the same project with equal ‘traction’, an online service capturing 1% of the Internet audience. In France, it could be a huge success, generating sufficient funds for the startup to develop and grow. With the same 1% adoption rate in Belgium, that initiative would not even cover the development costs; the project could easily collapse.

This may explain a certain reluctance of venture capitalist in this country. They tend to invest in projects that have already proven their business model abroad, rather than betting on real innovations.

Finally, the high cost of Internet subscriptions, especially mobile internet subscriptions, and – although the law allows it – the fact that mobile operators all strangely agree not to subsidize the terminals, combine to slow down the adoption of the Internet and its frequent use.

So in short, if you are a web entrepreneur, think from the initiation of your project to (also) attack a market outside of Belgium.

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Dec 9 2011

By Antoine Wellens – Emakina.BE

November has flown by. And once more the great concept of Movember came to life.  Come again? Movember? During the month of November each year, Movember asks men across the world to grow a moustache with the aim of raising vital funds for men’s health issues.

The formula is simple: take a good cause, add a fun challenge and limit the timeframe to participate: shake up well and you get “Movember”. While growing a Mo is left to the guys, Mo Sistas (women who support their men) form an important part of the action, by recruiting Mo Bros, helping to raise funds and attending Movember events. Movember, as in ‘Mustache and November’, also aims at educating as many as possible on men’s health questions and illnesses such as prostate cancer.

Born in 1999 in Australia and recycled in 2003 by the Movember association, the movement this year crossed all borders and went global. Teak a peak at www.movember.com and see what it’s all about.

Why does it work so well ?

The campaign is viral in many ways . In addition to a universal idea that it can be introduced in all countries – including Pakistan, Movember has managed to combine three elements that ensure its virality:

1. A good cause you really want join

Values you share ​​on your wall can bring respect and credibility from your friends. Even if Facebook would have been called MyBellyButtonEgoBook, it would still be a positive thing to share a good cause with others. By doing so, you suddenly feel useful and proud, when you can share: “you see, I do not only think about Me, Myself, and I !”

2. A fun challenge you always wanted to be part of

Proud of his three day facial hair growth, modern man seeks to distinguish itself. And what if I tried a mustache for a change? No, seriously…that would be  ridiculous. Enter Movember…and now you have a great reason to try it. It’s not for me, it is to campaign against prostate cancer!

3. An effective online activation with massive offline impact

A change of look, obviously, that’s a topic that gets talked about.  And in this lies the gene for the genious idea. Even if you ‘like’ the Movember page on your Facebook, Movember’s success is mainly achieved around the coffee machine . So the true virality, is not just the one we share just as soon forget. It’s the one that stays in the mind, and grows (like a mustache).

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Sep 2 2011

- By Brice Le Blevennec -

Is email ‘Out’? Social networks want to follow the Facebook model in the ambition to become full operating systems on the web. So yes, we would be tempted to believe e-mail is on its way out.

But electronic mail continues to receive the thumbs up of the Internet user.
A recent study made by Microsoft indicated that email is still the privileged channel for messages of an official nature. Social networks remain platforms dedicated first and foremost to recreation and private life. The same survey highlighted that only 50% of contacts are shared between the account for e-mail and and the ones for social networks.

So it’s not surprising that big actors of the web continue their cutthroat competition to offer the best tools to manage your daily life. The whole scope is available, from sharing your calendar with colleagues and friends, organizing your inbox content, checking your task list, managing documents to consult whenever you want…

On this market, all the giants of the Internet are competing:

• Google and Gmail:  flagships of the office suite Google Apps. Gmail also plays an important role in Android, the operating system the search engine giant wants to impose n in the mobile’s world.
• Microsoft and Hotmail, that finally opened up to other social platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
  Outlook recently chose the same course.
• Apple and MobileMe, successors of .Mac and iTools. Steve Jobs described MobileMe as Exchange for the rest of us, which clearly shows the ambition of the brand with the shining apple in this field.

But we also discover smaller actors:

• Zimbra is a collaborative suite first bought by Yahoo!, then by VMware at the beginning of the year. This service is commercialized both as open-source and as a closed-circuit in its commercial version.
• ContactOffice is a Belgian company active in the virtual workspace segment for over ten years. Belgium can be proud that one of its companies, long before others, had the vision to bet on the emergence of new nomad users, even before high-speed and wireless were topics you heard about. In its last evolution, ContactOffice offers an interface completely in Ajax, nearly identical to the one you commonly find installed on the hard disk of a computer.

On this extremely competitive market, all companies continuously innovate, in order to offer the most fluent and flexible user experience. A state of the art service must offer for example ActiveSync, a protocol invented by Microsoft in 1996 that lets the users synchronize information (calendar, tasks, messages…) between their mobile device and their computer. Besides Microsoft, Google and Apple have also opted for this standard. They will soon be joined by ContactOffice.

The underlying stakes of this fight are immense. To become the reference of private users, SME’s in the field of cloud computing, … It’s the grail, creating a fundamental movement with thousands of applications migrating towards gigantic data centers. Here, software from now on is available on demand, like water or electricity.

In that new landscape, a key question remains unanswered: who will be the master of the data in the clouds?

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Aug 29 2011

- By Brice Le Blevennec -

Online television, it’s the next great battle. Already today, it’s making the minds of many race.

Announced some fifteen years ago already, the infamous convergence between Internet and TV is becoming a reality today. By the end of the year, the major TV manufacturers (Sony, LG, Samsung …) prepare to flood the market with machines permanently connected to the web. For their part, telecom operators also prepare the merger between the two media.

Social tv

As you read this, Mobistar launched its platform close to the Apple AppStore, which adds features such as Facebook, Twitter and Flickr to the electronic program guide. And major players in the video game market like Microsoft and Sony have never hidden their dream to transform their respective consoles as privileged centers of all forms of digital entertainment.

Always online, television of tomorrow will also be mobile. Smart phones, tablets, laptops: the images begin to appear on all screens, a trend that will profoundly transform the way we consume television. Telenet launched Yelo, an application that allows you to watch (via wifi) a selection of channels on your iPad. Mobistar makes the same move, with 3G customers gaining access to a variety of broadcasters through an iPad/ iPhone application. And  Belgacom launched its mobile platform as well mobile in June. So  in short, welcome to television “AnyWhere, AnyTime, AnyDevice”, freed from the living room and dictated by the ceremonies linked to the schedule of TV programs.

A concept that we experimented with at Emakina in 2006  with VW EscapeTV, the first TV show that could be viewed via download on any mobile device.

American startups are already a step further and want to use mobile to combine the power of television with that of social networks. They are called IntoNow, Yap.tv, Miso, Philo, GetGlue … Some have already been bought up by large US “networks” or receive the  support of Internet giants (eg Miso is financed by Google Ventures).

Closer to home, the WizzChat application for the iPhone focuses on European channels and allows you to specify the TV program you are watching, share that information on Facebook and chat live with other users.

The beginnings of this trend arrived in 2008, during the U.S. elections. For the first time, televised debates did not stop at the end of the TV show; they continued on social networks. These social media became the natural ‘fora’ for comments and discussions between the viewers.

Mobile further accelerates this change: a study by Nielsen and Yahoo made ​​last year, indicates that 86% of mobile Internet users use their mobile device to talk live about a TV broadcast while they’re looking on their on their small frame.

Connected, mobile and social: these are the three attributes of the television of the future.
For advertisers, the consequence of these many changes is that the consumer’s attention is more fragmented than ever. Besides airing a 30-second TV spot, it will now necessary to be present at the same time on the major social platforms, if you want to activate your  brand by covering its entire target group.

For broadcasters, this “Television 2.0″ will also be a new, very different playing field. Regardless of the “format”, TV will have to be considered as an ongoing conversation with the audience, where both of these media mutually benefit from these interactions. Even if it was an abysmal idiocy, “Carré Viiip”, the already deceased reality TV show on TF1, was a fine illustration of this coagulation between two media: when the show ended, social networks took over and were used to generate content that was part of the next part of the competition.

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Dec 22 2010

Brice Le Blevennec, CVO

The need to belief is fundamental to mankind. The end of the last century witnessed the end of the authority of a lot of nonsense, form communism to monotheistic cults. Consumerism and rationality triumph and new technologies help us to quench our thirst for the absolute and the belief of a better life. Would this be the new form of spirituality?

Churches are emptier every Sunday, whereas keynotes of technology gurus have become high masses that are devotedly followed by thousands of passionate geeks. The parallel may shock you at first but it makes sense when we take a closer look at the gestures and words of these giants of technology.

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