I’m not a big sport fan. Actually thinking about it, I’m no fan at all. My circle of interest is limited to family, faith, technology and very little time left for other distractions.

One of my guilty pleasures is watching movies during long flights. Mostly for its soporific agent. Very rarely can my body stay alert until the very end word.

Invictus is one of those movies. A movie transcending actors into players, script into documentary.

Clint Eastwood directed the movie – maybe I should have started with this. Gran Torino is undoubtedly among best movies of the decade.

Short pitch: Morgan Freeman plays is Nelson Mandela. The story focuses on the end of apartheid in South Africa and how rugby helped in reunifying the country together. Mandela had the perception sport could bring blacks and whites into one homogenized group of supporters. He was right; sport is not about race, religion, skin color but about performance.

Captain of South Africa’s rugby team played by Matt Damon comes from a family of white pro-apartheid activists that slowly understood the need to change. The movie gives a short glimpse of what was the process of re-unification after the apartheid. Clint Eastwood left the violence aside to focus on 1995 victory of South Africa during World Rugby Cup.

France had its Mandela moment after they won 1998 World Football Cup. I remember that night on Champs-Elysées when people were kissing, hugging and cheering all together. La France Black-Blanc-Beur literally Black, White and Arab was born.

My first visit to Johannesburg was in 1982 as a kid, it was a disturbing experience. I was horrified. Years later I came back in 1990 and things seemed even worse. Hopefully my last trip there in 2001 was a much different experience although poverty and discrimination are still dominant.

Movie has been out for a while. A must-see.

“I’m the master of my fate, I’m the captain of my soul” says Mandela. Food for thoughts.

In french we have a nice expression “l’arbre qui cache la foret” literal translation ‘”the tree that hides the forest’. Icelandic volcano is a big tree planted right in front our eyes to hide a much larger problem: airlines gigantic losses.

Earlier today Air France made an announcement claiming a 35M Euro loss per day due to the ash cloud. Share lost 5% on french sotck market – enough to call for a bail out by European Commission.

Bunch of crap. Of course there was an eruption, and safety should prevail. Extreme weather conditions is a cause of force majeure and does not oblige airlines to reimburse any of their customers. Their only obligation is to re-schedule flights. So when they say losses- they mean loss of income. Quite different.

But here is the biggest issue. Air France will shortly publish their figures for 2009 and guess what? A 1.3 billion Euro loss roughly $1.8 billions. Yes a mere $5M burned each day…ashes to ashes.

Volcano is to airlines what the mad cow disease was to meat producers. A savior.

Air France is poorly managed and like in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s they seek for Government monies. How convenient.

Public bail out means us – tax payers. Expect to see a ‘volcano tax’ very soon on EU airfare. After all they have it all figured out – 20 euros per ticket and they break-even.

Bummer!

Back in August I predicted Facebook will take #1 rank away from Google in traffic before the end of the year. December results are not out yet but there is a high probability I am right. As I was looking for data on the subject – a new question arise.

Is traffic a sign of popularity?

So I went on writing down numbers on a scrapbook. My primary goal was to search brand names and the number of search associated with that brand. To do so I used the Top 100 brand by Millward Brown [PDF].
Surprisingly Facebook, Twitter, iPhone, My Space are not listed by the research institute. Even in a brick and mortar world, Facebook should be in top 5 most known brands.

Below are results found using Google.com [US English page as of December 30, 2009].

Few basic observations: Google and Facebook together are more popular than Web. US takes the lead with over 23 billions search results. USA and War all together are less popular than Yahoo!

Behind those figures I see two conclusions. First, top brands -as described in the study published by Millward Brown- are yet far behind in terms of web image. Their online presence is a failure for 95% of them. This should give hope to all online viral social media jungle marketing agencies out there. The second conclusion is sadder: traffic doesn’t mean revenue. Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, MySpace and Hotmail generating over 5.3 billion of search results have an estimated global revenue of $1.3 billion for 2009 representing 0,003% of Wal-Mart’s 2009 revenue.

It brings us back to valuation calculation- should we continue to use online popularity or traffic to rate online businesses?

What do you think?

tags: 200 days traveling, 95 flights, kids, family, work, hypertension, headaches, joy, tears, love, hypocrisy, memories.

2009 had many ups and many downs. Hoping 2010 will be more peaceful.

This is an incredible news to revive a saturating industry. ICANN has decided -after 40 years- to open domain names to non-English web addresses. Briefly, it means you will soon be able to register www.été.com or www.שלום.com. Registrars around the planet must be ecstatic about the news. Same for hosting companies. Brands, individuals are obviously less happy to have to spend few more dollars to increase domain name protection. Not sure how search engines will react but it sure adds a lot of work for them. Indexing, ranking international non english domain names is looking like a real challenge.

“We’re confident that it works because we’ve been testing it now for a couple of years,” he said. “And so we’re really ready to start rolling it out.”

Of the 1.6 billion Internet users worldwide, Beckstrom – a former chief of U.S. cybersecurity – said that more than half use languages that have scripts based on alphabets other than Latin.

“So this change is very much necessary for not only half the world’s Internet users today, but more than half of probably the future users as the use of the Internet continues to spread,” he said.

Read more here:

International Domain Names: Internet Set To Add Non-English Web Addresses

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We all have ours. Being French-Israeli residing in the US expose me to all sorts of comments I cannot stand anymore. Here are 5 annoying one:

-       Oh you live in Miami? Spring break all year long isn’t it?

NO – people don’t party all year long in Miami, we WORK in South Florida. In fact there is a vivid economy for startups nicely represented during our tweetups, Mobile Mondays or Bar Camp.

-       So you’re French – how is Carla?

-       Isn’t it too hard in Israel with bombs falling everywhere?

-       You fly so much, are you not afraid one day your plane might crash?

-       Hmm you fly business, you must be rich or stupid!

What clichés don’t you want to hear anymore?

Last Friday mailman was looking for a signature. He had important certified mail to deliver.

Surprisingly it was a request for cash. One of our employees had a terrible accident in Lagos, Nigeria. Yeah…one of our employees we never had…was traveling to Nigeria…got hurt during a safari [lol], contacted a fellow American for help and now we should send an urgent Western Union to pay for a return ticket. Can’t stop laughing…

Ok, now – who can fall for this? Who would actually send $750 via Western Union to Nigeria for an unknown/inexisting employee?! One other thing I still don’t get – certified mail costs more than an email. Why would they ‘invest’ in a hopeless scam?

Beats me. I posted the actual scans because they are a real piece of [scam] art.

From President Obama:

And Happy Rosh Hashanah to all my friends and family around the world.