France’s Twitter Problem

Yesterday as I was scrolling through my newsfeed on Facebook, a rather intriguing status update caught my eye: Twitter lessons by Valérie Trierweiler. Shortly thereafter, I discovered that France’s first lady had done a little Twitter damage by openly supporting Olivier Falorni in the upcoming legislative elections – who is up against the French president’s ex (whom he openly supports), Ségolène Royal.

Does French Innovation Need a Few More Famous Faces?

This subject has actually been on my mind for a while, triggered by the first time I saw MC Hammer at a conference in San Francisco (pretty sure it was the AlwaysOn Standford Summit in 2008) and thought it was a total joke. The man had announced the launch of his start-up DanceJam.com and all I can remember thinking to myself, hashtags included:

#WTF is a hiphop celebrity from the 80s doing trying to mingle with the Silicon Valley crowd?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2c4L4CPfQY8]

(Watch the video and then imagine it playing in your head as you casually see him speaking on stage at a tech conference…)

l’Académie française: Has Micro-blogging Killed le Vouvoiement?

Disclaimer: this post is probably more for myself than anyone else. 🙂 Remember that terrible 80’s song by The Buggles, “Video Killed the Radio Star”? Well, if video killed the radio star, I’m pretty sure that the evolution of web 2.0 – with my figer pointing at micro-blogging in particular – has killed le vouvoiement. French 101 For […]

The Sarkophone: Thalès Téorem

Just because Sarah Palin is the only average Joe to get a call from President Sarkozy doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be interested in his mobile device. Not an iPhone, not a Blackberry. Recently all the buzz has been around Sarko’s new handset, the Téorem by Thalès. Sarkozy asked the SGDN (French National Defense) to stop using the […]