Notre Dame de Paris by night

Notre-Dame, Hotel de Ville, Pont Neuf, down the quay, to Concorde and Madeleine (with window-shopping of the best shops in rue Faubourg St.Honore).It is far till Christmas, but the spirit is already there – the decor, the lighting.

Paris, Place de Concorde by night

The Christmas Village at Champs-Elyssees is inviting you, luring you, enchanting you… it is actually dark, but you stand there, feeling it is a late afternoon… This time of year I especially adore the smell of burned chestnuts.

Night....Paris

One person, very close to me, once said that time does not pass, it is just there. We change… The Paris is still the same.. with its stones, lights, smells, vintage shops down the quay, gardens and parks.. and Eiffel Tower. It is still there, standing, waiting patiently… for me…. to come back… for good. It is calling me with its flashing lights.

Eiffel Tower from the Seine

Every time I go to Paris, I feel like a virgin about to lose her sacred virginity… too scared, yet too willing.

Paris charms you no matter what time of the year, regardless the season… with its fallen leaves, wind or sun or snow or heat… there are couples in love, kissing under the trees by the river; there are children running around in the park; there are elder couples with sticks, barely walking, yet with smiles on their faces and holding hands; there are busy-bees in their suits eating their kebab on the run to the Metro; there are fashionistas admiring and showing off their new jewelry or shoes….

Yes, there is traffic, yes it’s constantly busy and on the move, but walking down the Seine it all fades away with the realisation of how actually small, nay tiny and insignificant you are, compared to the monumentality of the Louvre or Palais Royal.

There is no ending to this post, at least no logical “THE END” kinda ending… there is a “TO BE CONTINUED…” ending.. I feel like my love-hate relationship with Paris is not over yet… It has just begun, it has so much to offer to me, and to take away from me….

Music: Empire State of Mind….

It has always been you....

“Israel, a start-up nation

Came back from Israel, where the France-Israel foundation led by Nicole Guedj, the ex-minister and state secretary, had invited a delegation of bloggers and journalists in order to discover and meet the key actors of the local digital economy.

A 4 days program turned into a running marathon, with a very tight organisation, offered us a broader vision, without taboos and prejudice, of this 7.4 million people country that seems to concentrate a whole world within itself.

Impressions from the trip

For the travelers who have never set foot on Israeli soil (like yours truly), the first surprise came right upon exiting the Ben Gurion airport in Tel-Aviv. Anyone expecting to find an Oriental style city will be disappointed: as soon as you pass the suburbs you are met by the complex road infrastructure and massive skyscrapers with a “skyline” resembling more to a Western or Asian megapolises – the likes  of Los Angeles or Singapore, then to a Middle-Eastern city. The same notion is seen in Jerusalem, where, apart from the old city and the religious (and tourism) sites of the Wailing Wall, the city is a tangle of freeways and latest generation tram lines, full with pedestrian streets and new fully refurbished shopping malls, lining up restaurants, trendy bars and designer outlets more reminiscent to any European city. Truly a Global Village.

Global Village

Another impression emerges, this time after meeting with many start-ups and local entrepreneurs; that of a big village where everybody seems to know everyone. The impression definitely reinforced by a limited size of the territory and its population. In fact, the variety of landscapes (cities alongside desert), the topography (arid plains and fertile slopes), mixed population (immigrants from around the world, large Arab community of 1.4 million people), and neighboring of traditional economy and high-tech, Israel resembles an embodiment of the famous Global Village. Add to this the climate and you will have a colorful vivid picture resembling that of California (the other country of start-ups).

At the heart of the future

The main goal of this trip was to get to know better the innovation “Israeli style”. For high-tech bloggers and journalists that made up the delegation the fact that Israel is an innovative country did not come as a surprise or a discovery, we all already had an opportunity to comment on or to cover repeatedly on the web-services, start-ups and applications developed by Israeli companies. It was also the case on Presse-Citron, here or among others. We also all know the stories of french start-ups (like Jérémy Berrebi or Ouriel Ohayon, for example), who, each in their own style and manner, embody the hundreds of entrepreneurs who kicked-off their careers in their country of birth and made a deliberate choice to move to Israeli Silicon Valley (or in close proximity) in order to be in the heart of all action.

But beyond the number of companies and people we have met, we mainly found an absolutely amazing abundance and energy. I do not know if this energy represents the general mood prevailing in the country (we met only the entrepreneurs, so let us beware of hasty generalisation) but what we saw was pretty exciting. Like what happens in California, everything here seems a bit “easier” for anyone working in innovative fields and what to start a business in digital or web services. A “deceiving the eye” impression? Maybe. Still, with 70 different local investment funds, the Jewish state has the largest number of start-ups per capita (over 3 000) and enjoys the highest density of engineers in the world.

Concentration of IQ

The first stop of our “French Blogs Tour 2011″ took place at Technion, Israel Institute of Technology. The Technion is a pool of “big heads” (without Philippe Bouvard)* that  rivals no qualms with the prestigious American MIT, and where the super-engineers of tomorrow are trained. The ambience on the campus where the average IQ base is between 150 and infinity (but closer to the latter) is cool and your hardly learned notions of PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) look like pleasant cave art. Witness the young Yonathan who, after brilliantly graduating from the Politechnical School in Paris**, is now calmly preparing his PhD in GIP Lab (Geometric Image Processor) experimenting with image compressions. His little algorithms have led him to invent a format that would spend .jpg to prehistory, or to develop his own 3D camera matching software that independently models real-time moving images. His opinion regarding the Politechnical School?

Well, it’s the common French problem: the school creates engineers and products managers or politicians, because the research and development in the field of IT are not promoted. You do not really need to finish the Institute in order to become a CEO or a minister. Plus, I got bored…too easy.

Google and Yahoo! – the Israeli companies

Among the high-tech and web giants present here, Google and Yahoo! are inevitable and fittingly represented. Google, for example, is located in Matam, a neighborhood of Haifa, in ultra-modern premises overlooking the sea. The Israeli research division of the giant enterprise specialises in R&D in four domains: Search, Google Apps, Networking and Analytics. According to David Kadouch, product manager for search engine, the objective of this division is to

organise information and make it accessible to everyone everywhere

Thus, we learned that some famous Google services have been designed and developed here, in Israel. This is the case of Google Suggest, Priority Inbox or more Got The Wrong Bob. With 200 hundred employees, the Israeli Google office seems to enjoy considerable autonomy and is one of the largest locations of the Californian company abroad, after Zürich.

The R&D centre of Yahoo! is on the opposite sidewalk and is of the same ilk. Israeli Yahoo! Labs specialise in Search and gathering information on Internet users. In his brilliant and passionate demonstration, Yoelle Maarek, the head of research team, returned to the basics of search and explained us the process at Yahoo! were the algorithms work hard, as hard as at Google, even though Yahoo! is primarily business-content-focused. She also reminded us that Yahoo! Mail with over 600 million account users is far ahead of Gmail (and just behind Hotmail).

The Incubator of Hope

Perhaps the most “political” (in the noble sense of this term) aspect of this trip was a very inspiring visit to the NGT (New Generation Technologies) that reminded us, Europeans, sometimes a bit arrogant or ignorant as we are, that the relations between Jews and Arabs are not only those described generally as exaggerating binary in the media. In fact, and this has been confirmed several times while on site, although we know that we are not in the land of Care Bears, the reality from the inside is often more subtle than what we perceive in Western caricatures.

Located in the Arab quarter of Nazareth and directed by Nasri Said, an Arab engineer, the NGT is an incubator that brings together Jewish and Arab entrepreneurs. You should know that there are 23 incubators like this in Israel, but only NGT works in Arab district. Launched in 2002, the technology incubator is a part of a program funded by the Israeli government and contributes to the development of companies primarily involved in the biotech sector (health and medical). Why? Because historically Arabs were not allowed to work in the field of computer science due to safety issues. NGT, with a budget of $20 million, distributes seed funding of up to $7000 per start-up, 80% of that comes from Israeli government support. Since its creation, NGT has helped 20 enterprises: 11 Arab, 6 Jewish and 4 with both Arab and Jewish employees. This may be a drop in the abundance of the digital economy of the Jewish State, but i can tell you that this pearl of peace and intelligent collaboration between Arabs and Jews in the heart of the conflicting land is a sacred lesson. One of those that gives you shivers of hope and restores a little faith in humankind.

Saul Singer, the start-ups storyteller

After visiting Jerusalem, the only “tourist pause” of this expedition; a meeting with Yigal Palmor, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokes person (who gave us a nice tackle pressing the issues of European media, especially the AFP); and a polite listening of the opening keynote of the Facing Tomorrow conference with Tony Blair (invigorating) Amos Oz (hustling) and Bernard-Henry Lévy (soothing), we had an early breakfast with Saul Singer, the co-author of the Start-up Nation, the best-seller that tells and explains how and why Israel, the country with only 7 million people became the country with the most start-ups in the world, along with the USA, and how, after USA, Israel is the country most strongly represented in the companies quoted on the NASDAQ. His creed?

In most countries, there are two stages in life – school and professional life. In Israel, there is a third, intermediate stage – the army. This required military passage is an integral part of the entrepreneurial culture of the country because it instills in young people and future students an idea of mission needed to be accomplished, something to succeed at all costs regardless of the conditions, difficulties and adversity.

An interesting approach, although perhaps a little idealistic, because, as pointed out somewhat ironically by a young entrepreneur, if you are a cook in the army, the notion of tasks at hand are somewhat relative.

However, this view was a sort of common thread throughout all our meetings: we do not imagine how much the military is important for the economy and to the “start-up state of mind” of Israel. This is where the innovation is probably the most lively and its from the army’s research laboratories that the most advanced technologies in the world arise. A driving force of the country’s companies, where the military matter is not perceived as a war machine, but as a kind of continuous innovation campus where the best minds “release their juice” without the pressures of the markets, and draw the future.

Start-Ups and big Israeli companies, work in progress 

Very well: Israel is not only the country of oranges and drones. It also plays a great part in the future of digital economy and innovation. In a more high-tech version then in social media, actually. The great minds here seem more interested in technology than in networking, though beautiful pearls do exist in almost all areas. We met with and/or visited dozens of start-ups, entrepreneurs and bloggers, too many to list in this article already too long, and this, therefore will remain the subject of the next post.

The digital Israel players, at least those we have met, have one thing in common: enthusiasm, but also a need for attention that surprised me. French high-tech blogging friends, I can tell you that the Israeli entrepreneurs, not just the French-speaking ones, are reading your posts diligently and express a refreshing recognition when by chance you have covered their business in your columns.

All this is probably a symptom of a will to end the clichés through technology and maybe to show that Israeli society is actually quite far from certain commonplaces conveyed by others.”

* This is a reference to a French TV host who presented a show for years called “les grosses têtes” (literally: the “big heads”). A “grosse tête” in French, means someone of superior intelligence and knowledge, but in the case of this show, it was ironic…

**The best school (University level) for engineers in France.

My “Thank You” to Jessical Cohen who agreed to proofread and spellcheck this translation!

It is both funny and sad, rough and gentle… I recommend to read it, but be aware of the language, sometimes brutal and aggressive. It tells a story of an Arab boy, son of a prostitute, brought up by a Jewish ex-prostitute and how he copes with the world, with the daily life, and how there are no differences in religions, no matter if you are Arab, Jew or Afro-american, “in shit all are equal”

бутылочкой вина, которое наливает в бокал не менее сногсшибательная, сидящая напротив очень знакомая, но в тоже время неизведанная

девушка…за её спиной садится солнце

оно светит тебе в глаза…

какбы прощается, машет последним лучиком В далеке несколько лодок. За соседним столиком шепчутся молодые олигархи (или выпендривающиеся мажорные мальчики, стремящиеся стать оными)

а тебе всё равно

в твоей руке – бокал прохладного, нежно пьянящего вина, в твоей голове – ни мысли…день подходит к концу

но жизнь только начинается…”

Вино я пошла пить всё равно одна….

Same conversation, same place…3 different guys!!!
Is it me…or the world?