- Add the option to Remind me in 5, 10 or 30 minutes on calendar event alerts.

- Sync with the Mac OS Keychain so iPhone Safari can use it. 1Password doesn’t cut it.

- Add a Missed Notifications app to list all new emails, missed calls, new SMSs, missed calendar or clock alerts and other things. SonyEricsson phones have something like this and I found it very useful.

- Add tiny and discreet led light on the face of the phone to indicate the status. I.e.

+ Green if i have new mail or if a calendar event occurred. Pulsing green light if I missed a call or SMS.
+ Red light if the battery is dying.

Maybe the Pre does it already.

- Hunch – Active Buyer’s Guide
- Facebook – Six Degrees
- iPhone – Psion+SonyErricson
- Blogs – Sites on Geocities, Tripod, Angelfire
- Google – Altavista

What am I missing?

Pic not related.

A friend asked my opinion on the 5 key factors for the success of a casual games web site. This is what I said, out of the top of my head:

1. Plug into an existing user base. It won’t be easy to start a brand new service with zero credibility and no eye-ball capital. So you better partner with the facebooks, yahoos, netflixes or googles out there.

2. All online. Use Flash and DHML, don’t even bother trying to install a client application.

3. Multiplayer. The games themselves must be multiplayer, and ideally coop. Make public score boards, profiles, contact lists and other social features part of the games.

4. Free. Start with a fully free service, move to freemium quickly. Make it worth the extra $3/month, don’t rely on advertising.

5. APIs. Allow for integration with Facebook, Blogger, Wordpress.com, Twitter, Flickr, etc. Start with the single sign-on, then build ways to publish the high scores, play times, screenshots, challenges and relationship to those services. Also, make and easy to use SDK so it’ll be easy for others to do the work for you.

DISCLAIMER: This stuff is really off of the top of my head. Maybe if I give it some thought, those five points will change.

Filiera.fr is one my biggest Drupal sites. It was hosted on shared Dreamhost account since 2004. With time, it grew to tens of thousands of members and many times that number of page views. For the past year, the Dreamhost server was crawling under the weight, and the site was offline at least once every day.

I started looking for a fully-managed VPS service. I signed up for an account on a few of them and got a good feeling of how it would work. Unfortunately, a VPS tends to be as complex as a dedicated server, is not always well automated and is often quite expensive. Next I tried the more popular social-network ASP services like Ning or Grou.ps, but those proved insufficient, despite all the feature and comfort they provide.

It Was Time. My first dedicated server.

Moving the Drupal site was easier than expected. I did it all via SSH and CLI, like a big boy, and it went surprisingly smooth. Once the hosting was set up, I had a few issues with the DNS settings for the .FR domain, but those are now almost sorted out.

Then I was in for a reality-check cold shower. Once I’ve opened the doors on the new site, it started falling apart as more than a few dozen users logged in. Mostly a memory issue. I struggled with the situation for a few days, googling for information and learning as much as I could about Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP and Drupal optimization… with no success. It was time to ask for help.

Enter Lehel Valics from GrafX Software. With his guidance over IM, I managed to tune up the site to the point where the home page loads as fast as Google’s. I was blown away. The difference in performance is beyond anything I thought possible.

IT WAS WORTH IT!

But I guess Chrome will be just as cool when it’ll be done.

1. DH’s service level being less and less reliable. E.g. a WP home page with little traffic often takes more than 5 seconds to load.

2. One of my sites growing beyond what may be fashionable for a shared hosting service.

I decided to change things.

My question is: will moving to a PS server change things significantly? I need better MySQL and PHP response time. Or, should I start moving elsewhere all the I have piled up on The Panel?

Disastrous WiFi connection. Almost inexistent the first day, completely unreliable the second. We should ask for a refund, really.

The food. Not as fancy as last year’s and almost inexistent the first day. Sort of like a show in London. The next day there was plenty of food, but many participants brought sandwiches, just in case. Others were stepping out of the conferences 10 minutes before the break to get in the pole positions.

The business. Steek was a partner, as it was in ‘07, so I had to man the booth for most of the time. There were many, many visitors, loads of interesting and interested people.

Working day and night on a product, you get used to its features and take its benefits for granted. Demoing them to new users gives a good feel of what the world really thinks. And it was awesome: our products kick ass. They’re all over them. The world loves Steek. LOVES IT.

The other business. I could trow my 8 Points business card around a couple of times. I’ve also got some new ideas from the presentations and from the guys demoing on the booths. More about that on later posts.

The show and the stars.I was an unofficial booth-babe during the first day, so I couldn’t attend the conferences. The second day I had a bit more time, but I had to leave early. Well. Here’s the stuff that I did see:
– Paulo Coelho – boring.
– Virtual Goods Make Real Money, by Susan Wu, CEO, ohai – The topic is really dear to me, but this one presentation managed to be really boring.
– Yossi Vardi – Investor & Entrepreneur interviewed by Kara Swisher – To be honest, I was there for Kara, but Yossu Vardi is awesome. It made me reconsider my reluctance about VC money.
– Joichi Ito, CEO, Creative Commons – Nothing new in his presentation, but a really powerful and enjoyable presence.
– Money Talks: Getting Financed in a Recession – Eric Archambeau, Jeff Clavier, Martin Varsavsky, Fred Wilson moderated by Ouriel Ohayon – Interesting, but nothing to write home blog about.
– Lauren Feldman, 1938 Media He’s as bullish, macho and explosive as he appears on his videos. There’s little acting and second degree on his goofy videos, he really is that dumb, or brilliant.
– Scoble – Lauren’s right, he is the A-list douche.
– Christine Lagarde, French Finance Minister – Speaks openly, clearly and in good english. A very pleasant surprise. See here.
– The Gillmor Gang LIVE – I wish I could see this, but I had to leave early.

Probably there should’ve been more talk about the future and less about VC, but I’m not the one to complain about it being too start-up oriented.

The Parties Only went to the private Steek event, which was cool. Always fun to be with the Bordeaux gang, and the special guests were fun too.


Conclusion. Le Web 08 was far better that what I hoped for. Worth 1700€, despite the “Leemure” blunders.

Apple Mail – The default email client is not bad. However, there are so many little quirks in its UI that using all day makes for a stressful experience.

Microsoft Entourage – A beautiful mail client and nice PIM, has great IMAP support. The only problem I have with it is its “Main Identity / Database” storage system. Entourage stores all its data in this huge file, prone to corruption and impractical for daily backups. It’s also incompatible between different language versions of Mac Office; I still have a database with few gigs of data from French Microsoft Office for Mac 2004, waiting for a way to import it.

Mozilla Thunderbird – It’s as ugly and unreliable as ever. It has the drawbacks of both Mail and Entourage.

Web mail client – Impractical.

There are projects like MailCore and GyazMail but those are not quite there yet.

I’ll keep using Apple Mail until Entourage changes its storage system. It’s not impossible, given that it most of its users insist for Time Machine compatibility.

- sûrement devient surement
- événement devient évènement
- corolle devient corole
- des scénarii devient des scénarios
- vingt et un mille cent trente-huit devient vingt-et-un-mille-cent-trente-huit
– on n’écrit plus oignon mais ognon
– on n’écrit plus cuissot mais cuisseau
– on n’écrit plus relais mais relai

These two are a bitch to Rob, for some reason I wish I grasped:

- coût devient cout (!)
- contre-appel devient contrappel (!)

Of course, Rob is not happy about it, cause he’s a cranky old man who’s had it with youths slaughtering Proust on their pesky SMSs. But I, a barbarian slaughtering Balzac on my mails and blog, I can’t be happier about these changes. You see, French is actually easy to understand and get along with, especially for a Romanian, but its orthography is a killer. Where English has a few dozen irregular verbs and four pronouns, French has entire books on conjugaison.

Sure, the French will keep laughing their Molieriesque asses off when they hear a Belge saying “nonante-neuf”, but still, this is a step in the right direction. Here’s to the death of “quatre-vingt-dix-neuf”!