RemyA's

La semaine prochaine, je participerai en tant que mentor au Mini-Seedcamp Paris. Le but de cette manifestation est de permettre à des porteurs de projets plus ou moins avancés de rencontrer des gens d'expérience dans différents domaines afin de répondre à leurs questions (voir plus si affinités).

Pour ma part, j'apprécie grandement la possibilité de voir des idées nouvelles et d'apporter ma pierre pour leur permettre d'avancer, et de favoriser ce cette manière l'esprit d'entreprendre.

C'est la même motivation qui m'a fait accepter d'aider les étudiants qui suivent le parcours CECA à l'INP de Grenoble. Même si il paraît difficile pour ces étudiants de se lancer dans la création d'entreprise dès la fin de cette année, cela leur sera d'une grande utilité et leur montrera que l'entrepreunariat est à leur portée.

After a black Saturday for Google, the bug showing to any webmaster not already aware how much of its traffic depends on the big G (see ADUF newsletter for interesting questions to ask about that event), the omnipresent (if not omnipotent) company is making the news again on Wednesday last week with Latitude. The reactions to that news are naturally important because of the privacy concern it raises but also because Location Based Systems (LBS) are revenue oriented for most phone companies. See the post on GigaOM.

I hope that Latitude will be open to developers, through a Google API in the near future, because it can be the source of a lot of great applications, not only social oriented, but also business oriented. The simple fact that a system or people know where you are will make your life a lot easier on a personal or professional basis. Just think about the number of phone calls or SMS that you received asking simply where you were at the moment.

Is there really a privacy issue ? As always, it depends on the awareness of people about the consequences of their actions. Naturally, if you browse Facebook or MySpace pages, you can think that the awareness in question is not that great. Or you can imagine that people think that the mob will allow them to hide among its numbers. As for professional usage, it means simply that companies will have to deliver higher phone terminals to their employees they want to be followed by a LBS application. It is then up to the employee to negociate how many benefits he can have in exchange of the loss of its location privacy during "office" hours.

Edit : I completely forgot about Yahoo FireEagle, that provides an API and has also a lot of applications available. So, what's the difference between the two services ? It looks like Latitude is a bit more private than FireEagle, allowing to filter who is really accessing your location. But this can be added very easily by adding an application layer over FireEagle that will be the only one allowed to access your location and that you could trust to deliver that information only to people you trust. Some applications are already doing that: for instance, FootPrintHistory can filter using your Facebook friends.