Can I drive my smartphone safely ?

On the matter of safety, it may happen that the old and established car industry has things to teach to the young and dynamic mobile industry.

 Middle social class passengers getting into their car do not even think that their car security may be a problem. This peace of mind was not given from the beginning of this industry. We all know that first cars were dangerous. But due to citizen and governments pressure – driven by a willpower to protect lives and save national health budget – combined with automotive manufacturing collaboration – agreeing on a minimal barrier to access the safe and comfortable car market – a vehicle has now to survive several security steps, including crash tests, before being driven by a smiling father of a family (well know that only fathers are conducting in families, right ?).

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[Photo] Magnifique Koudelka

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 This post is encouraging anyone staying around Arles (France) to enjoy photography exhibition of Koudelka related to gypsies, in “Les Rencontres Photographie Arles”.

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    Arles,tranquille petite ville du sud de la France, réveillée chaque année par les rencontres photographies [1]. Arles, quelques minutes volées de bonheur, face à l’objectif de Koudelka.

Église Sainte Anne, une volée de marches et l’œuvre de Koudelka vous accueille. Koudelka Josef, tchèque de naissance (mais depuis citoyen du monde), a photographié les gitans de Slovaquie Orientale dans les années soixante dix. Une centaine de clichés nous sont présentés à l’occasion de la ré-édition d’un de ses livres [2]. L’occasion de soumettre aux yeux novices ce génie de la photographie. Les gitans. Un sujet mêlant romantisme et question de société. Koudelka est ici sous leur toit, dans leur vie, et leur demande de poser pour nous restituer des clichés beaux et émouvants en noir et blanc. Alors, oui, il y a les violons, les deuils, la pauvreté, les tapis rapiécés, les familles nombreuses, la pauvreté crasse, les chevaux, l’air bravache des hommes-enfants, les vieilles dames ridées.

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Here, we accept competitor’s coupons !

Visiting the Silicon Valley for a french worker, working in a normal french company, submitted to the standard european economic crisis can be sometimes a destabilizing experiment. Once you remember that in the US, everything is bigger than everywhere else (4 lines highway minimum, enormous cars, gigantic malls, …), you think you are now an integrated tourist. But the Silicon Valley is not the US, it stays a special land, shaped by the presence of biggest software companies. Demonstration.

Advertising on the highway : ‘you will be able to migrate your app from your personal to your professional cloud in a second’. Another one : ‘Hypervision, virtualization, we have your suitable solution’. Is this advert supposed to be read by the average US citizen ? Probably not. Maybe because the average citizen in the silicon valley is a brilliant software developer who deals everyday with problems related to cloud.

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Take Mozilla, Microsoft, Tony Stark…

Take Mozilla, Microsoft, Tony Stark, add a motivated team of volunteers, and you have the recipe to gather more than 130 people during a W3Café in Microsoft Conference Center in Paris, along the Seine. The W3C Café appealing program was made of great plenary presentations and workshops –  for the generous price of 5 euros ticket. Paris traffic jam made me missed the general presentation and when I joined the conference room, David Rousset @davrous was on stage, demonstrating with expertise and great sense of show the Internet Explorer 10 features [0]. David wrote in 5 minutes a simple webapp delivering RSS flow, with a look & feel compatible with the Windows 8 Metro style  Windows 8-style UI Windows 8 Modern UI and spirit. On the basis of free developers tools, with a mixing of standard HTM5, CSS and javascript and specific WinRT APIs (some people said in the room, well Microsoft as usual…) he optimized a bit the application look. In addition, David suggested that the seamless and efficient integration of developers tools and designers tools would in the end support peace the conflictual world of developers and designers, becoming best friends of the world. Demonstration of a very simple application made by an expert like David, playing the role of the schizophrenic nice developer and the bad designer was convincing… Real developers and real projects will have a chance to experience on Windows 8 and IE10 in October 2012, David said. (more…)