We don't need roads

I’m 25 today. Here’s a list of things I wish I had learned earlier:

1. Time is the most important resource you have. Don’t waste it.
2. If you don’t ask for what you want, you won’t get it. Asking for it isn’t enough either.
3. Music is important. Listen to what has gone through centuries and inspired generations, forget about the rest.
4. Instead of watching TV, watch the world you live in: the touristic places will tell you about a country’s history, the local pubs about its people.
5. You’re not unique. Everybody is just like you, except they don’t tell you.
6. Do never spend the money you don’t have yet.
7. Write down every single thing you have to do, you’ll sleep better. GTD is a good way to do it.
8. Love is just a chemical phenomenon, but it’s still awesome.
9. Stuff you buy and services you pay are supposed to just work and for a long time. Choose wisely instead of spending your time and money on crap.
10. Stop complaining about free healthcare and free education.
11. Back up your data.
12. Family will always be there for you. Be there for them too.
13. Running is easy and good for you. The hardest part is to start: Couch to 5k will help you reach 5 kilometers and the RunKeeper platform will make you go further.
14. Learn to forgive: everybody can make a mistake as long as they learn from it.
15. Wikipedia is one of the most useful things we built. Think about how often you use it and give a few bucks to the creepy guy already.
16. Guitar is easy to learn and a great way to express yourself. Start with the Beatles, don’t stop at the F chord and skip Oasis.
17. Don’t force people to change their habits. Make them want to do it.
18. You won’t be able to watch every good movie. Focus on the great ones.
19. Be nice to most people and just ignore the assholes.
20. Watch Friends.
21. You have a lot to learn from your grandparents. Call them once a week.
22. Find out what the teacher expects from you and prove him you understood. The key to success in school is to never be surprised.
23. Don’t panic: if you can’t fix the issue, just wait until you have more information.
24. Technology is not perfect yet, but it still does more than you could imagine five years ago. Give it a second while it’s going to space.
25. Know how to order a beer wherever you go, and you’ll be safe.

Take care,

Kevin

ps: Stop riding your BMX with no hands, it’s going to end badly.

People wonder who between Apple and Google is winning at the smartphone war. Some say Google is, others argue it’s Apple. If you were to build a company, how would you define a success? And what is winning after all?

You can learn in business school that, for a company, winning is maximizing shareholder value. Winning at business is about money.

Apple is making shitloads of money by selling iPhones, iPads and iPods. They sell iOS devices and make money. Google is not making profit in the smartphone market directly by selling devices. When people buy a Samsung Bionic Optimus II X 3D, Samsung gets the money, and Google gets the user.

Google’s strategy is to capture a lot of user information to charge more for ads they serve to the users. The more Android devices are used (not shipped, not sold, not activated: used), the more information Google is going to capture and the more ads they are going to display.

While Apple is silently failing at using the iOS platform to serve iAds, Google wins at being the default search engine in nearly all desktop browsers and mobile devices but Microsoft products. They know what people want, what people say, where people are and want to go. They win at the advertising game.

For people who actually make products, winning is about having people use and love their products. Nobody thinks about customer satisfaction when their only goal is to make more money, but people who actually care about the user experience can be the ones who get the profits. Apple wins at the customer satisfaction game.

Now, you can look at the smartphone market and see the companies sharing the Android profits as one Apple competitor. Then yes, Android is winning. The vendors share the money, but Google gets all the users. If you think about Map and Search, Google even gets iOS users. Yes, two thirds of Google’s mobile search comes from iOS devices, but the remaining third is still for Google.

Or you can look at the market in terms of what I would personally call a success: people loving your products so much that they line up in front of your stores, recommend your products to everybody, and still get you twice as much profit on phones as everybody else combined.

It all depends on what your goal is.

2011 was the year I:

• left Paris for New York
• got my first real job and joined the awesome ChallengePost team
• took evening classes for a master in Information Systems Management
• started the Couch-to-5k program and ran a half–marathon
• attended a Fatboy Slim gig on a beach of Governors Island and saw Pink Martini in Central Park
• went to Asia for the first time when traveling across China

Let’s beat that in 2012. I want to:

• Reboot WatchThis
• Run a marathon
• Learn piano
• Apply for American citizenship

I hope you too set high goals for yourself.

It’s becoming more obvious that specs don’t matter these days, or at least that what really matters is harder to compare. People who need product recommendations will only find experts writing for other experts. Nobody knows what RAM is or what 802.11n means. They care about ease of use, time-to-Facebook and how long will the battery last.

I asked some regular people to tell me about their favorite or least-favorite device and explain me why.

My father on its iPhone 4:

The iPhone is a Swiss army knife that amazes me everyday with its intuitive features.

My sister Sarah on her Sony Xperia mini:

I chose it instead of an iPhone because it’s smaller and thus fits well in my pocket. I don’t know how to start a new paragraph when writing an email but for texting, making calls and Google things, it’s fine. It also takes great pictures.

My sister Sarah on her 7.1 megapixel Olympus camera (that’s actually how she refers to it):

My phone takes better pictures. Don’t buy it.

My sister Sarah on her MacBook Pro:

Just like any other Mac, it doesn’t crash and doesn’t get viruses.

My mom on her iPhone:

I been using it for a few years. It replaced the huge mess in my purse. If you run all day, just get one.

My friend Louis on his Eee PC:

Don’t buy that. After only a month, the battery is dead, it’s extremely slow, event while editing text. Yes, it’s lightweight and pretty cheap, but you should spend a little more to get a laptop that does the bare minimum.

I remember clearly my father recommending the iPad to his sister:

It’s easy to use, you don’t need to charge it very often, it’s light and small and you can do everything with it and it’s always connected to the Internet. Perfect for when you go on vacation.

Now, look how Best Buy describes a top-selling laptop to regular people. Below are the main product features:

VISION Technology by AMD / AMD Quad-Core A8-3500M Accelerated Processor with AMD Radeon HD 6620G discrete-class graphics / 8GB DDR3 SDRAM / Multiformat DVD±RW/CD-RW drive / 15.6” LED high-definition display / 640GB hard drive (5400 rpm) / AMD Radeon HD 6620G graphics / Built-in high-speed wireless LAN (802.11b/g/n) / Built-in 10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet LAN

Nobody talks about how how open their operating system is or the lack of Flash support. I’m stating the obvious here, but we’ll get there eventually. People needs tech reviews by people.

This is the new Droid Razr commercial:

Unless you’re a supervillain, why on Earth would you be interested in a flying blade that slices everything standing in its way?

I was just reading a thread on Quora where somebody asks why do people think that Apple’s success is due to making good products, and I believe one part of the answer is that Apple actually makes good products but doesn’t stop here. They know how to prove their products are good and they do it well in every commercial without trickery, showing the actual product in use.

Look how different the last iPhone commercial is, and tell me which one of these two videos is more convincing:

Who knows, maybe the Droid Razr is a very good product, but Verizon doesn’t want us to find out.

Since I’ve moved to New York a few days ago, I’ve been constantly videoconferencing over Skype and FaceTime. I was able to:

• Help Harmonie’s grandmother to blow out her birthday candles in Paris,
• Catch up with my friend Hugo who lives in Shanghai,
• Say “please don’t kill me” to my parents’ evil cat Charly near Paris,
• Chat with my sister Sarah who lives in Paris and my other sister Alice who lives at my parents’,
• Wish both my grandparents a speedy recovery.

I also had a giant international videoconference with:

• Arnaud and Hugo, Paris
• Pauline, Charlotte and Grégoire, Paris
• Lisa, Paris
• Amélie, Paris
• Guillaume, Paris
• Louis, London
• Hugo, Shanghai
• Me, New York City

Until recently, I knew videoconferencing was fun, sometimes useful, but I’ve never thought of it as something important. The world is just awesome.

I recently moved to New York City and temporarily living in a small apartment with three friends, which means nobody can’t turn on the TV in the morning unless everybody is awake.

Today, I woke up the first, grabbed my MacBook, fired up TextMate and build a Rails web app deployed on Heroku where each of us can tick a box when they’re awake. When everybody has checked the box, we all receive an e-mail to inform us the day can start.

It took me a few minutes and it got useful right away, since the first things Julien did when he woke up was to check his e-mail and to use this web app.

I’m just so amazed at how easy it is today to build and deploy useful apps for free.

Telemarketer: Hi, would you be interested in switching over to TMI long distance service?
Jerry Seinfeld: Oh, gee, I can’t talk right now. Why don’t you give me your home number and I’ll call you later.
Telemarketer: Uh, I’m sorry we’re not allowed to do that.
Jerry Seinfeld: Oh, I guess you don’t want people calling you at home.
Telemarketer: No.
Jerry Seinfeld: Well now you know how I feel. [hangs up]

(from Seinfeld episode The Pitch)

This is seriously brilliant. I would love to use it against those intrusive phone calls. (Un)fortunately, I never have to deal with them:

• My awesome Internet/TV/Phone provider gives me the option to never ring my land phone when the caller masks his number. Instead, he’s told to unmask it and call me again, which he’ll never do.
• I never pick up my iPhone when the caller’s id is blocked. I reject those calls and send those people to my voicemail which says “I can’t talk to you right now. If it’s important, please leave a message”. Telemarketers never do that.

Also, when I set up this message, my friends understood the concept of voicemail and started to leave useful messages instead of calling me until I pick up.

We all laughed pretty hard at that big disappointing teaser of Apple’s. Just a few things I wanted to say:

1. The best thing I read so far about it is this tweet by Marco Arment:

Also: Major Apple promotion may have been one of the negotiation terms required to GET the Beatles on iTunes.

2. This would be a big deal if the Beatles were about to release a new album. Unfortunately, it’s not going to happen while Lennon and Harrison are dead. Since the ’60s, everybody has already bought the LPs, the CDs or the remastered collection, ripped them into iTunes or illegally downloaded them. I wonder what’s in for Apple except pride and a tiny margin.

3. You can buy most of the remastered CDs on Amazon for half the price their sold on iTunes and even rip them in lossless quality. I know some people would prefer to pay more to avoid the actual material object and the ripping part, but they are a minority.

4. Let It Be… Naked and 1 aren’t available on iTunes. I wonder why, since they both have been released by Apple Ltd. just like the other albums and the Past Masters compilations.

5. I’m really glad to finally be able to create Genius playlist out of Beatles songs:

Last week, my sister asked me wether she might break something by sending an e-mail without a subject.

She knows how to use a computer, how to surf, how to send an e-mail, but she clearly thinks the Internet is so fragile that not filling one of the three fields Gmail shows would impact the delivery of the message.

While we could overanalyze this message box (why not kindly explaining the situation here?), let me remind you that while it failed to replace Gmail, the only thing Google Wave simplified in the process of sending e-mails is it didn’t offered more than one field.

(yes, I went back to nowhere land just for a screenshot.)

Since nowadays, the n00bs use Facebook Messages instead of Gmail, even for professional e-mails, I think yesterday’s event was a big deal:

Add this to the recent Facebook Secret Groups feature and you have your replacement for casual e-mail. I’m sure it will replace that 10-recipients e-mail my friends always reply to every week so that they don’t to forget anyone in the list.

(the title of this post is a quote from Seth Godin’s amazing talk “It’s Broken”.)

It is becoming very hard to find something simple in this world.

The other day I realized I was a snooze button victim and decided to relearn how to wake up. I asked on Twitter for the perfect alarm clock, but the results were inconclusive.

Beside the lack of a snooze button (otherwise I would just keep turning it off for 9 minutes every morning between 6 and 9), here’s what I think my perfect alarm clock should have:

• a digital clock (the mechanical ticking noise makes me become Hulk),
• a display I could turn off once the time is set (I have already way too much LEDs in my room),
• a progressive buzzer (so that I can wake up without feeling like somebody is shouting at me).

Here’s what I found out:

• you just can’t find an alarm without a snooze button,
• a display can’t be turned off in this world,
• you can forget about digital alarm that doesn’t do radio (which means you have extra buttons for tuning, presets, FM/AM, extra antenna cable and everything),
• you need to physically move to a real store in the outside world to listen to the actual sound of the buzzer,
• almost every alarm clock I found was plain ugly,
• people give 4 stars out of 5 to alarms they judge as too complicated to use and not loud enough to wake them up.

I ended up with the Philips Some-Letters-Followed-By-Random-Numbers:

It has an auto-dimming display (that you can’t actually turn off) and a sweet progressive buzzer, but in the end, it’s just a big fat digital display on a radio tuner with a snooze button.