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Quelles sociétés protègent le mieux vos données ? Les moyens de sécurité par société

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Les moyens de sécurité par société
Inutile de préciser une fois encore à quel point la protection des données utilisateurs est importante tant les cybervols sont fréquents. Si chaque utilisateur peut, dans une certaine manière, contribuer à leur protection, chaque société se doit de mettre en place une sécurité digne de ce nom. Petit état des lieux concernant les plus grandes entreprises IT.
Eu égard aux récentes affaires d’espionnage, et à toutes celles dont ne nous ne sommes pas au courant, il convient de prendre le problème de la sécurité – que ce soit face aux « simples hackers » ou aux institutions gouvernementales comme la NSA – à bras le corps. Heureusement, les technologies actuelles permettent de mettre de nombreux bâtons dans les roues à quiconque souhaiteraient voler des données.
Cette étude en réunit cinq, parmi les plus importantes, et a tenté d’apprécier leur mise en place chez les plus grandes sociétés du Web. Tout le monde connaît le HTTPS, ce protocole sécurisé utilisé pour les transactions bancaires par exemple. Le HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) permet, lui, de remettre les points sur les i à l’utilisateur, en lui déclarant expressément de communiquer de manière sécurisée (HTTPS par exemple).
Des communications cryptées avec les serveurs, c’est bien, mais si les différents serveurs ne communiquent pas entre eux de manière sécurisée, tout cela est bien inutile. Il s’agit ici de la première colonne du tableau – crypter tout échange interne entre les divers éléments de l’infrastructure -.
STARTTLS permet notamment de crypter un type d’échange bien particulier, et très courant sur le Net, les communications par email. Pour fonctionner, il faut cela dit que les deux fournisseurs de service de messagerie l’implémentent. Sinon, la communication ne sera pas cryptée. Autrement dit, plus nombreux seront les fournisseurs à l’utiliser, plus nos emails seront à l’abri des yeux indiscrets.
Dernière mesure, la confidentialité persistante (forward secrecy ou perfect forward secrecy, PFS) qui garantit que la découverte par un adversaire de la clé privée d’un correspondant (secret à long terme) ne compromet pas la confidentialité des communications passées.
Et à ce petit jeu, on note 5 excellents élèves: Dropbox, Google, SpiderOak (stockage de fichiers dans le cloud) and Sonic.net (FAI). D’autres travaillent à implémenter certaines de ces cinq mesures, on pense par exemple à twitter et Yahoo!. Espérons en tout cas que les grandes sociétés du Web s’y intéressent pour éviter que nos données soient accessibles sans notre consentement à des yeux indiscrets.
Le tableau dans son intégralité

Using the Eisenhower Matrix

Une infographie géante pour lister les morts dans Game of Thrones Game of Thrones

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Game of Thrones
Tandis que la plupart attend patiemment le lancement de la nouvelle saison de la série TV Game of Thrones, voici qu’a été publiée sur la toile une infographie listant toutes les morts intervenues « grâce » au sadisme de George R. R. Martin.
L’autre jour, nous vous avions fait partager ce cliché, publié sur le fil twitter d’une librairie, qui s’est amusé à comptabiliser les morts au sein des livres Game of Thrones. A chaque page où une mort était recensée, un post-it était placé. Le résultat était plutôt parlant, et l’initiative a sans doute du coûter cher en post-it.
Ceux qui connaissent la licence le savent : Game of Thrones est de ces séries dans lesquelles il ne faut pas s’attacher aux personnages, sous peine de déprimer pour des semaines. Tiens d’ailleurs, vous n’avez sans doute pas oublié le 9ème épisode de la saison 3 de la série, diffusé il y a quelques mois de cela, et qui avait fait hurler bon nombre des fans. Succulentes furent leurs réactions filmées, ceci dit. Oui, c’est sadique, mais sans doute moins que George R. R. Martin, qui comme vous pouvez le voir a dû passer un contrat avec la faucheuse lorsqu’il a écrit Game of Thrones.
Attention, l’infographie qui suit pourrait bien vous spoiler si vous n’avez pas lu tous les ouvrages de la licence. Pour la consulter dans une résolution confortable, suivez ce lien.

Let’s Go To This Island, The Island of Cats

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Everyone wants to take the time off from modernization and spend some quality time in nature; how about an island where fat cats roam freely as if they are people? These shots are from Japanese Island of Tashirojima, where the cats who roam from boat to boat call home. My suitcase is packaged and I know what my next destination is! [via atypique] Cat Island 1
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Cat Island 22

Dive !

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Chaque année, aux Etats-Unis, 43 milliards de kilos de nourriture sont jetés à la poubelle. Ce documentaire multi-primé suit le réalisateur Jeremy Seifert et ses amis, alors qu’ils plongent littéralement dans les poubelles des supermarchés de Los Angeles en recherche de nourriture comestible.
Dans ce film engagé qui navigue entre divertissement, journalisme de guérilla et appel à l’action, ces jeunes révoltés « sauvent » pour des centaines de milliers de dollars de nourriture propre à la consommation, se confrontant pertinemment à un système particulièrement ubuesque. Une « plongée » piquante avec les glaneurs.
Face au vertige de l’information en continu, les documentaires imposent cette distance nécessaire pour une nouvelle expérience du réel.
Ainsi, l’écriture documentaire vient indispensablement renforcer les moyens d’expression et de connaissance proposés à l’antenne à travers les journaux, les magazines et autres débats.

La science confirme que les personnes âgées ont vraiment une odeur Vieux

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VieuxIl suffit de remonter dans nos souvenirs pour se rappeler qu’en entrant dans la maison de nos grands-parents, nous discernions… Une odeur, une odeur toute particulière. Il s’avère que ce n’était pas seulement dans notre tête
Le gérontologue, Docteur Eric Shapira, explique qu’il est difficile de déterminer la cause de cette odeur, ou même l’une des principales raisons. Seul fait tangible, elle est due au processus de vieillissement. De nombreuses études montrent que la chimie du corps évolue avec le temps jusqu’à produire un certain parfum. Certains peuvent le décrire comme moisi. Certains optent pour vicié. D’aucuns, médicinal.
Plus surprenant. Certes nos grands-parents sentent « le vieux », mais toutefois, ils ne sentent pas mauvais. Selon une récente étude, des chercheurs ont testé les odeurs des aisselles d’adultes d’âge moyen et de personnes âgées.
Des t-shirts ont été mis par des bénévoles de tout âge pendant cinq nuits consécutives, pendant qu’ils dormaient. Les vêtements n’ont pas été portés, et conservés dans des sacs plastique scellés la journée. Le but était de savoir si, un, l’odeur été agréable et deux, de savoir s’il était possible d’estimer l’âge du porteur juste avec son odeur.

Le résultat ?

Ce sont les hommes d’âge moyen qui sentent le plus mauvais selon les personnes interrogées. Grand-père a gagné la seconde marche du podium juste derrière les femmes d’âge moyen  sur la liste des odeurs corporelles les plus agréables. Les volontaires ont également été obligés d’utiliser des savons et des shampoings inodores au cours de l’expérience, pour ne pas en fausser les résultats.
Les témoins ont été en mesure d’identifier les personnes âgées dans la plupart des cas, sans pour autant donner d’âge précis. En revanche, bien qu’ils aient été capables de distinguer un jeune d’une personne d’âge moyen, l’occurrence s’est faite beaucoup plus rare.

Pourquoi ?

Il y a beaucoup de facteurs impliqués. Un des facteurs, selon le médecin précité, Eric Shapira, est simplement la déshydratation. Les personnes âgées ont tendance à avoir moins soif, et sont donc plus déshydratées, ce qui engendre une peau plus sèche et des cellules mortes qui peuvent créer une odeur « rance ».
Une approche plus scientifique a été mise en branle par une équipe chinoise en 2000. Ils ont découvert que les personnes de plus de 70 ans étaient dotées de jusqu’à trois fois plus d’un produit chimique, le 2-nonénal, une substance odorante trouvée dans la sueur. Ce surplus proviendrait de la plus forte répartition des acides gras oméga-7 sur notre peau l’âge venant.
L’environnement peut également être un facteur déterminant, songez aux vieux livres, draps qui ornent les maisons de nos grands-parents.
En fin de compte, les parfums sont une drôle de chose. Nous humons une bouffée de parfum en marchant dans un centre commercial et elle peut nous ramener à un ex du collège. L’odeur de feuilles brûlées ou de grillades cuites aux souvenirs de bons moments avec des amis. L’odeur d’une personne âgée, nous laisse avec un point d’interrogation invisible suspendu au-dessus de notre tête. Sans doute parce que nous n’en sommes pas encore passés par là, quoi qu’il en soit,

Un type a pris des photos toute une journée dans un aéroport ,ça a donné ça

Vivre ensemble, entre richesse et pauvreté


La posture nouvelle du chef d'entrprise

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Quelle doit être la posture nouvelle du chef d'entrprise à l'égard de ses salariés et de la société en général? En quoi une politique de la diversité au sein de l'entreprise est un gage de réussite et d'efficacité sur le long terme?

Chritsian Nibourel est Président d’Accenture France. Membre du Conseil Exécutif du MEDEF. et Vice Président de la Commission nationale des Services, nommé par Arnaud Montebourg.Il est à l’initiative en 2012 du Collectif Empreintes sociales ; une quinzaine de chefs d’entreprises qui affirment l’impact des politiques sociales d’une entreprise sur ses employés et sur l’ensemble de la société.

Il publie : Ecoutons le monde de demain. Entretien avec Alain Louyot. Préface de Jean-Paul Delevoye. Editions L'Express. 95 pages

Trois types d’empreintes sont fondamentales selon lui : une empreinte économique (= la rentabilité) ; l'empreinte environnementale (l' action d l'entreprise sur la biodiversité) et l'empreinte sociale (l'impact sur son ecosystème humain). L’empreinte sociale  d'une entreprise, c’est sa volonté d'agir sur l’emploi, l’employabilité, la diversité et le comportement citoyen.



Ecoutons le monde de demain - Pour de nouvelles synergues entre les acteurs de l'économie

En initiant le Collectif des chefs d'entreprise autour de l'Empreinte sociale, Christian Nibourel, président d'Accenture France, exprimait la conviction que la performance ne pouvait plus se limiter à sa seule dimension économique et financière. Car la création de valeur doit désormais se concevoir dans une démarche de long terme bénéficiant à l'ensemble de l'écosystème de l'entreprise, telle que l'employabilité de ses salariés.

Aujourd'hui, il entend aller plus loin car les attentes des citoyens, des organisations sociales et du pouvoir politique sont immenses. Dans cet ouvrage, il appelle à une réinvention du rôle du chef d'entreprise dans la société civile, nationale et mondiale et explique comment celui-ci peut mettre son dynamisme, sa capacité d'anticipation, son pragmatisme au service de notre devenir collectif. Balayant l'image patriarcale du patron d'hier, Christian Nibourel nous convainc au fil de cet entretien qui l'heure où tout bouge, les décideurs ont un rôle de premier plan à jouer.

LES INSURGÉS DE LA TERRE

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LES INSURGÉS DE LA TERRE - TEASERpar Dissidents-WoodsTV

Ce film est une immersion dans le monde underground des militants écologistes radicaux, qui, pour gagner leur combat pour protéger la planète, sont prêts à tout, y compris à passer dans l'illégalité et la violence.
Pour les autorités, ce ne sont pas des idéalistes, mais des terroristes. De nombreux pays ont pris des mesures de plus en plus répressives à leur encontre. Le FBI les classe comme la seconde grande menace à la sécurité des Etats-Unis, après Al Qaeda.
Qui sont-ils? Comment justifient-ils leurs actions? Comment ont-ils franchi la ligne de la résistance passive et la protestation pacifique à la violence?
« Les Insurgés de la terre » entraîne le spectateur derrière la ligne de front. Notre intention n'est pas de défendre ou d'excuser leurs actions, mais de tenter de comprendre leurs motivations et leur logique, de partager en direct leurs vies à la marge de la société.

Un film de Philippe Borrel
Woods TV / Arte France 2010

Cercle du leadership

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La vocation du Cercle du leadership est de réunir des dirigeants de grandes entreprises désireux de promouvoir une vision et des actions innovantes en matière de management et de leadership.

Il s’appuie sur des partenaires : grandes entreprises industrielles, de service ou de prestations intellectuelles, qui ont la volonté de s’y engager en y apportant leur notoriété et leur expérience. Ces entreprises ont en commun la conviction que les avantages concurrentiels durables résultent aujourd’hui principalement des capacités à mobiliser les talents dans des organisations et des environnements complexes.

Il s’adresse aux dirigeants qui souhaitent adhérer au Cercle pour stimuler leur réflexion et leurs échanges sur ce thème et bénéficier ainsi d’un éclairage global sur une question essentielle pour la réussite de leur entreprise .

Il se différencie de la plupart des Clubs ou des Cercles existants en ce qu’il a pour ambition de réunir des dirigeants venant de toutes les fonctions de l’entreprise, membres du Codir en général, (DG, CFO, Dircom, DRH, Directeur de marketing, de production etc…) pour les amener à réfléchir à un sujet unique, le leadership et pour mener des expériences concrètes de leadership en s’engageant dans la Société.

Il organise un certain nombre d’événements chaque année :
  • des conférences et des débats  axés sur la réflexion, la confrontation d’idées, le partage des expériences, l’innovation et le développement personnel,
  • des visites in situ, dans un but de partage des pratiques et des expériences et de découverte de nouvelles perspectives,
  • des publications, pour garder en mémoire ses travaux, étendre son influence, valoriser ses réflexions aux yeux des tiers.   
Le Cercle fonde son fonctionnement sur la force des idées, l’esprit de générosité et l’intelligence collective entre ses partenaires et ses adhérents. Il est indépendant de toute obédience de quelque nature qu’elle soit et se vante de réunir en son sein une diversité de pensées et d’opinions qui font sa force.

La Fondation Abbé Pierre

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La Fondation Abbé Pierre a hérité de son fondateur sa conviction que le combat qu'elle mène se gagnerait grâce à la prise de conscience et la mobilisation. C'est la raison pour laquelle elle prend la parole au travers d'une campagne.

Hier soir, elle a obtenu la reconnaissance ultime, celle des Français, qui ont désigné cette affiche comme la meilleure des 40 dernières années (Merci à BDDP&Fils pour cette création unique...).

Une occasion de plus de dénoncer l'inacceptable. Merci à tous pour votre soutien indéfectible !

Le grand rendez-vous avec Laurent Berger

Hewlett-Packard beats Street estimates

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SAN FRANCISCO — Hewlett-Packard narrowly topped profit estimates on revenue that beat Wall Street's expectations, prodding shares higher in after-hours trading.
The computing giant on Tuesday reported fourth-quarter net income of $2 billion on $29.1 billion in sales.
The Street had forecast HP to report net income of $1.94 billion on $27.9 billion in sales, according to a survey of estimates from Thomson Reuters. Excluding expenses, HP was expected to earn $1 per share. On that basis, it reported $1.01 per share.
CEO Meg Whitman said the earnings results indicate that HP's turnaround strategy is on track.
Shares of HP rose 8%, to $27.10 in after-hours trading following the report.
The 74-year-old HP has been stung by shifting consumer preferences for mobile computing devices, resulting in declines across the PC industry.
"There are very few old-school PC manufacturers that have been able to make the jump to tablets," says IDC analyst Crawford Del Prete.
Worldwide personal computer shipments plummeted 8.6% in the third quarter from a year ago, with back-to-school PCs moving at the lowest level since 2008, according to researcher Gartner. HP shipped 13.7 million PCs in the quarter, compared with 13.5 million in same period a year prior.
Those declines come as worldwide smartphone shipments are forecast to surge nearly 40% to more than 1 billion units this year, according to IDC.
Even Apple, whose iPad has eaten into the PC market, saw its fourth-quarter Mac sales slide to 4.6 million units, compared with 4.9 million a year ago.
Lacking popular smartphones and tablets, HP has seen not only its PC sales struggle, but its printers, services and hardware, as well.
"We've had good quarters and not-so-good quarters (during an extended turnaround plan). This was a good one," Whitman told USA TODAY in a phone interview. She said the company's tablet strategy could yield exciting commercial results when the company unveils new models next year. "The innovation engine is alive and well; that is an untold story here."
HP has struggled for years to pivot from a low-margin PC business into faster-growing and more profitable services sectors.
HP's turnaround plan under Whitman has so far shown few signs of returning growth to the beleaguered company. Analysts say HP needs to better articulate its cloud-computing and storage strategy, among other areas, to reverse course.
In May of last year, HP announced plans to lay off 27,000 employees, or 8% of its workforce, by October of 2014. HP's cutbacks — equal to nearly the entire population of Menlo Park, Calif. — are a bid to save $3 billion to $3.5 billion a year once layoffs are completed.
"They are managing the business with really tight expense controls," says Del Prete.
Analysts were expecting HP's sales in the quarter to plummet nearly 7% from a year ago, leaving fiscal year sales down almost 8% at $111.1 billion. Sales were down just 3% in the quarter from a year ago.
"This is just another chapter in the HP turnaround story," says Del Prete.

Why Silicon Valley Funds Instagrams, Not Hyperloops

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This week Elon Musk announcedplansforhisnewHyperlooptransportationsystem. If you haven’t seen it in the news: it’s basically a giant tube that you sit inside of while you’re propelled hundreds of miles an hour to your destination. It’s sort of like the tube you put your checks in at the bank drive-thru… but instead of checks, it’s people.
It’s really cool, and it could easily disrupt airline and rail travel as we know it.


A SIMPLE QUESTION

As an entrepreneur, I began to wonder, “Why hasn’t anyone proposed this already?” It’s a great idea, but… Elon Musk can’t be the first person to think of it.
In doing some research online I found out that other American inventors have had similar designs and proposals for a decade. However, none of them were able to get taken seriously or obtain funding.
Why did that happen?
I want to tell you my answer.

MY THESIS

My thesis is simple. We haven’t seen Silicon Valley develop a company like Hyperloop — even though the plans have been out there for over a decade — because there’s a systemic failure in the startup ecosystem. In short, Silicon Valley has killed major innovation.
Has the Valley become a bunch of sheep?
Has the Valley become a bunch of sheep?
In all of the hype around companies like Facebook and Instagram — what really are just glorified websites — we’ve lost sight of some real innovation opportunities, most of which occur in the offline world.
The entire culture of Silicon Valley, and entrepreneurship around the globe, has taken on a groupthink that prevents truly novel inventions, like the Hyperloop, from reaching the market.
The result is a major loss. It’s a loss to our society. It’s a loss to our capital markets. It’s a loss to private investors. And it’s a loss to entrepreneurs.

THIS IS A REALLY IMPORTANT QUESTION

The title of this article is, “Why silicon valley funds Instagrams, not Hyperloops.” Note the plural. I’m not necessarily talking about Instagram in particular, or the Hyperloop in particular.
No, I’m asking a question: Why are we funding these really silly internet companies and not major life changing innovations? Why is it that all of my peers are inventing little dinky iPhone apps instead of planes, trains, and automobiles?
I feel like this is a really important question. Because, if as a country, America is going to continue to lead in innovation, we can’t be spending our time developing toys. We have to innovate innovation itself. In fact, I’m actually not the first person to bring this up. There are a lot of thinkers surrounding the entrepreneurial space who have been asking this same question: Why are so many startups today creating such meaningless products?
I’m going to present nine theories as to why we’re funding Instagrams but not Hyperloops. By no means is this an exhaustive list. It’s just a place to start a conversation. Here we go:

THEORY 1: THE IPO MARKET SUCKS

We have an undesirable IPO market right now. It’s a bad time to take a company public.
A company like Hyperloop is too large to be an M&A exit. It’s an IPO exit. So if you are going to make the Hyperloop, an investor’s going to ask, “How are we going to exit this investment?” The answer is, “An IPO.” And, right there, a lot of investors lose interest. To many, it would seem that making the Hyperloop might be easier than having a successful IPO!
In parallel commentary to this, please read Mark Cuban’s post on the stock market. It really got me thinking:
The stock market, ca. 1940
The stock market, ca. 1940
The stock market used to be a place where entrepreneurs went and raised money for their companies. That’s what the stock market used to be. Today the stock market is a place where hedge fund managers and quant traders are shaving fractions of a penny off benign movements in price and volume. One of the byproducts of going from an entrepreneurial stock market to a hyper-traded stock market is that new companies can’t survive unless they have a market cap of at least $10 billion dollars. Don’t even bother going public with less than that. It’s not worth the time, or the money, or the effort.
Furthermore, the stock market isn’t influenced by value today like it was thirty years ago. Whenever I bring this conversation up, I always ask people, “If AOL comes out with a phenomenal new product, is the stock price guaranteed to go up?” No, of course not. “If Kaiser Permanente releases a drug that cures all cancers, is the stock price guaranteed to go up?” No, of course not. The stock price goes up or down based on supply and demand. It only responds to human action. And, therefore, the price of a stock is solely determined by how people think about the price of a stock. There’s nothing that forces a company’s actual business value to drive the ticker price.
So when an investor says, “I don’t like investing in companies that have an IPO track,” he’s not crazy. It’s actually a very reasonable thing today — as a investor or an entrepreneur — to say, “I want to make a company that’s going to get acquired.” That’s really the most intelligent and reasonable strategy.
The stock market, ca. 2010
The stock market, ca. 2010
But without a public equities market to which investors can exit early-stage investments, and where retail investors can buy stock in new companies that will continue to grow, inventions like the Hyperloop can’t go public. And if it can’t go public, it’s not exiting; and if it’s not exiting, no one is going to invest. Under these circumstances, the only way that the Hyperloop is ever developed is if someone like Elon Musk has enough capital of his own to finance it.
And that’s really a shame for America. We really need to look into that. We need to figure out how we’re going to make the IPO market better, because if we want to have innovative products, we have to repair the process of going public and make it appealing again. Right now, the only sane choice is to aim for an acquisition. But mergers and acquisitions are on average $100 million a piece. There’s no way to have a company as large as Hyperloop acquired because it’s a multi billion-dollar company. You just can’t do it. So, how are you going to exit? You can’t. And that’s one reason why it won’t get funded.

THEORY 2: CONTEMPORARY PORTFOLIO STRATEGY FAVORS LAYUPS AND DISCOURAGES 3-POINTERS

Try to hit as many startups as possible
Try to hit as many startups as possible
There is a portfolio strategy in place by investors and incubators that promotes a shotgun approach as opposed to a sniper rifle approach. What does this mean? It means that early stage funds, super angels, and micro VC’s are primarily interested in investing $50,000 a piece in hundreds of different startups instead of investing $4,000,000 a piece in a select few. The shotgun portfolio strategy speculates that a few startups will be successful, and will pay for all of the losers. When the smoke clears, there’s some cream on top, and that’s your investment return.
This isn’t always how it used to be. From the early days of venture capital through the 90’s, there was a sniper rifle approach. Investors were more thoughtful, plotting. They picked a couple winners that they really believed in.
But in the same way that our nation’s politics is driven by a belief system, so is our leading investment strategy. And the prime belief behind the shotgun approach is that, “You can’t pick winners. Picking winners is a fool’s errand.” And, therefore, the only sane approach is to weed out the losers and invest in as many potential winners as possible. Incubators like Y-Combinator and Dream It have perfected this approach.
I’m not saying it’s necessarily a bad approach. But I want to point out the sniper rifle approach also works. It got us companies like HP, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Hyundai.
Try to hit as few startups as possible
Try to hit as few startups as possible
Why does this matter for our discussion about Hyperloop? A shotgun approach is predicated on a lot of small investments by angels. Instead of an angel writing a $5 million check, an angel writes a $50,000 check. Well, a company like Hyperloop is going to take a first round from angels of at least $20 million just to produce a limited engineering proof-of-concept. If angels are investing on a shotgun approach, the size of the check isn’t there, plain and simple. A company like Hyperloop is too big — because when you’re investing with a shotgun method, you don’t want to get involved in big companies. You want to get involved in companies where $50,000 gets you pretty far. And those tend to be companies where the product is code. So for any investor that has a shotgun portfolio strategy, which is most, Hyperloop would be a horrible investment — totally outside of your investment parameters.
Entrepreneurs today — and maybe even Elon Musk twenty years ago, before Paypal,  Tesla, and SpaceX — cannot get an angel to invest the necessary seed funds for a large company. It won’t happen, and the reason it won’t happen is because people are writing small checks.
Shotgun investors also do not spend all of their time on any one company. A venture that seems too crazy, or too big, must be brushed aside simply because the investor is operating on a volume investing system, not a value investing system. Hyperloop would take up quite a lot of an investor’s time. If you’re on a sniper rifle approach, you have that time. It’s simply a part of your investing methodology. But on a shotgun approach, your investing methodology is bulk. Therefore, it would be hard to even get taken seriously enough to schedule a meeting with a shotgun angel investor if you were presenting a company like Hyperloop. You’re going against the predominant portfolio strategy too much.

THEORY 3: “WE DON’T FUND IDEAS”

The next theory is one that — not just for Hyperloop, but for lots of other inventions — is stifling innovation. As I said earlier, in the same way that beliefs shape our political system, beliefs shape our entrepreneurial system.
A very prominent belief today is: “We don’t fund ideas. We don’t fund teams. We don’t fund pitch decks. We don’t fund business plans. So unless you’ve got a business with users , we’re not funding it.” It’s become this statement of pride, inside of investors and entrepreneurs, that all of the charlatans who are just running their mouths had better scram: “You’re not wanted here. This is for real entrepreneurs, who have an MVP and traction!”
"He asked us to fund his idea for a tube mass transit system!"
“He asked us to fund his idea for a tube mass transit system!”
The problem is that you’re leaving out everyone who has a company that requires capital before they can build anything. And there are those companies. In the case of Hyperloop, there is nothing that you would be able to do without initial funding. It’s simply too big of a project to make any sort of meaningful headway without cash. And so if you went to a Venture Capitalist, or an angel, or a high net worth individual who shares this belief that “we don’t fund ideas,” they would look at you and say, “All you have is an idea.”
The result? An inventor who has the idea for Hyperloop can’t get funding. He gets dismissed. It’s not because the idea is without merit. It’s not because he doesn’t have evidence and scientific proof stating that it’s possible. It’s not that he doesn’t have the infrastructure worked out. No. It’s because there is a dogmatic single-mindedness that writing a check based on an idea is a bad investment.
In fact, it’s not. It can be a bad investment. It can raise your risk. But it’s not always a bad investment.
And that leads us into the next theory, which addresses what I call “MVP Obsession.”

THEORY 4: MVP OBSESSION

There is another belief that permeates entrepreneurship today: the sacred, holy MVP, or “minimally viable product.”
Some of this is traced back to the book The Lean Startup, which advocates that startups make a minimal viable product and measure it in the marketplace before proceeding further. It’s a way of validating a business model and assuring that there are users who are willing to pay for it, before too much money or time are invested. If you have an idea and you don’t know if people are going to pay for it, launching a minimally viable product is really important.
But the obsession over MVP’s has gotten out of control, to the point where anyone who doesn’t have one can’t get the attention of investors.
Well, here’s the kicker. There wouldn’t be a minimally viable product for Hyperloop. The Hyperloop requires hundreds of millions of dollars, perhaps billions, of upfront capital — without an MVP — before any users or revenues are gained.
This is my contention: it’s okay that we don’t have an MVP of Hyperloop, because we don’t need to speculate if people will ride Hyperloop. You only need an MVP if you’re trying to prove something. If it’s a faster mode of transportation, if it’s a safer mode of transportation, then there’s nothing to prove. It’s not a huge leap of faith — in fact it’s not a leap of faith at all — to say that if you have a safer, faster means of transportation people are going to use it. No one likes flying in airplanes. Amtrack smells like farts. Greyhound buses are slow. You clearly don’t need an MVP for Hyperloop.
But…. there is a belief in the startup culture today that if you don’t have an MVP, you’re not even worthy of a discussion. You are not worthy of the time it takes to tell you, “Get out of my office and come back when you have an MVP.”
In fact, with a company like Hyperloop: once you have the MVP, most of the work is done. From there, you just have to build more rails, more passenger cars, and scale up. Juxtapose this with a lot of other tech startups, where the MVP is just the very beginning of a long product development road ahead. Therefore, to understand the different roles that an MVP plays in different kinds of ventures is important.
"I told you to launch more quickly, and more early!"
“I told you to launch more quickly, and more early!”
Another part of the MVP-obsessed culture is that you should launch “quickly and early.” However, there is no way to launch “quickly and early” with a company like Hyperloop. It is an infrastructure project. Yet, this idea of launching “quickly and early” is so ingrained in the startup groupthink that it could singlehandedly prevent a Hyperloop startup from getting funded.
One of the favorite pastimes of MVP-ites is to: “Just take your idea and make it simpler.” I guarantee if an entrepreneur had brought Hyperloop to angel investors, they would have grilled him about how to make it simpler. “Is there some way you can take this great idea and water it down into a worthless, half-baked MVP? That way we can have a $2M seed round.”
Making the hyperloop any simpler would be a waste of time and capital.  You simply need the money to build it. You don’t need to make it simpler. And you don’t need to launch it earlier. And you don’t need an MVP.
I’ve seen some really stupid ways that investors have tried to tell entrepreneurs — sometimes, entrepreneurs with great business models — about how to scale back their project to make it more “testable” in the market. I can hear the investor at the angel networking event telling an entrepreneur, “Why don’t you just build a tube that sends mail across an office, and prove that people are willing to pay for tube transportation?”
If we want to have companies like Hyperloop, we’re going to have to get rid of the MVP dogma. We’re going to have to say, “Sometimes there is a place for companies that only have a business plan, or that only have an idea and a sketch on a napkin… and that’s not a crazy thing. It can be a reckless way of investing, but to dismiss it carte blanche means you’re dismissing companies like the Hyperloop. We’re going to have to get rid of the “launch early and launch quick” mentality for startups where it does not apply. And we’re going to have to get rid of the idea that every business needs to be scaled down to the size of a teacup before it is reasonable to fund it.
Of course, if we want more Instagrams, we can keep doing what we’re doing.

THEORY 5: THE MARKET REWARDS EXITS, NOT INNOVATION AND VALUE

Many VC's ask their startups to hang this in the office
Many VC’s ask their startups to hang this in the office
The way the capital markets operate today, investors earn profits from exits… not from revenue. If you build a VC-backed company with really solid revenue, but that can’t be sold, the company is worthless. I’m not saying this is good or bad, I’m just telling you what the market is today. It’s all about the exit.
And there’s a reason, actually, that investors invest this way. There’s a thing called time value of money. If you can sell an investment at a 10-year earnings multiple, and get out of it, you can take that money and invest in more startups. As an investor, you don’t wanna be tied up in investments that are illiquid and producing cash flow every month, because you would never be able to turn over your working capital.
The hyperloop is a business that will generate hundreds of millions of dollars a year in revenue, maybe more. It might be smarter to retain a privately held company, continue to earn cash flow, and never to take it public or have an exit event. The discounted cash flow might exceed the exit value.
Unfortunately, the market does not reward cash flow because the market does not reward value and innovation. The market rewards exits. So in a company like Hyperloop, if an entrepreneur said, “I think we can invest in this and simply return cash flow,” no VC would ever be interested. Why? There are other investment vehicles that do provide an exit.
I’m not sure what to say about this. I’m not sure if it’s good or bad. But I do know that in exit-driven market, a company like Hyperloop might not fair very well because it goes against the grain.

THEORY 6: INVESTORS ARE TOO SPECIALIZED

From 2009 to 2011, I did a lot of advertising consulting. My partners and I rebuilt a ton of corporate websites. One of the recurring jokes was how specialized some of the consultants who bid against us were. Mocking these rivals, our favorite joke was, “We specialize in websites for women-owned renewable energy companies based in the mid-atlantic.” It was ludicrous how specialized some of these niche consultants were targeting their potential customers.
The next theory of why we haven’t gotten a Hyperloop, even though we’ve had the idea for years now, is because investors got too specialized.
Since the dot-com era, everyone felt a need to find an investing niche and stick to it religiously. During the dot-com boom, a lot of people invested in a lot of businesses they didn’t understand, and the antidote seemed to be, “Let me just invest in one niche I know, and that way I’m not investing in Pets.com.”
Today you’ll see investors advertising themselves as “social media investors” or “e-commerce investors.” It’s the silliest thing ever.
"I don't care what the industry is." -- Warren Buffet
“I don’t care what the industry is.” — Warren Buffet
Here’s a piece of news: real investors don’t care what industry they invest in. Warren Buffet has invested in railroads, furniture companies, insurance companies, and hundreds more. He pays no mind to the industry. Picking an investment niche is a perfectly useless way of limiting portfolio risk. If you’re a bad investor, a bad company can happen right underneath your nose. It doesn’t matter how well or not you know the industry.
So if there’s “social media investors,” “ecommerce investors,” and other specialized niche investors, what kind of an investor would you bring Hyperloop to? There are no “new transportation infrastructure” angel investors, at least not that I’ve ever heard of. And even if there are three or four of them out in the world, it would be hard to raise money since 99% of other investors are specialized in what amounts to Instagram.
If we want to have companies like Hyperloop, investors have to start judging businesses based on their merits… not some silly niche like “social media.” A company like Hyperloop doesn’t fit into any of those neat checkboxes. We need investors who have an ability to think outside of the box, and invest outside of their comfort zone.

THEORY 7: MOST ANGELS AND VC’S ARE WIMPS

"I lift startups every morning, babe"
“I lift startups every morning, babe”
This brings me to the next reason why we don’t have a Hyperloop. In general it can be summed up as: angels and VC’s are wimps. Yes, that’s right: they have no cojones.
This is not to say you shouldn’t mitigate risk, and you shouldn’t manage it, and you shouldn’t choose it carefully, but the entire culture surrounding entrepreneurship has led to investors, or at least so-called investors, that aren’t willing to take leaps. Although it’s a small factor, a company like Hyperloop could singlehandedly fail from this one point. If you’re building a new major mode of transportation, you can’t do it with wimpy investors.
Look at the VC’s behind Atari. Those guys had balls. And quite simply today, no one has balls like that. And that’s why we have more Instagrams than we know what to do with.
You can always eliminate risk by having blanket risk mitigation measures in place. “We don’t fund companies without an MVP. We don’t fund companies that are just an idea. We don’t fund companies that aren’t in social media. We don’t fund companies that aren’t in ecommerce.” But when you make those rules, you tend to eliminate a lot of upswing and innovation at the same time.
One company that epitomizes the risk-adverse MVP culture is called Buffer.
They have users. So, congratulations. And actually the guy who runs it seems very smart to me. But the product is as innovative as a pile of dirt. It basically takes your tweets or facebook posts and spaces them out over the course of a day or a week, so that you don’t have to post them by hand.
Is this the kind of company, and the level of innovation, we expect of entrepreneurs today?
I think that Buffer is a perfect example of a company that is a byproduct of the startup culture I’ve outlined. Buffer has an MVP. It has users. It is an investment targeted to social media. It is a clear M&A target. And you don’t need any balls to invest in it.
Is this what we’ve come to? Spacing out our tweets?
Is this what we’ve come to? Spacing out our tweets?
Is this what we’ve come to? Spacing out our tweets?
Where is the upswing? What is this company going to do for America? What is this company going to do for the capital markets?
Is this what our brightest minds are being incentivized to do?
Until VC’s and angels stop being wimps, and start swallowing more risk, we’re not going to get innovation. We’re going to get more Buffer. And more Instagram. If we want to let another country’s economy overtake Silicon Valley, this is exactly how we should do it.

THEORY 7: CORPORATE R&D AND CORPORATE TALENT RETENTION SUCKS, SO CORPORATE M&A IS HUNGRY

The next reason that we don’t have Hyperloop, but we do have Instagram, is that Fortune 100 companies have notoriously bad in-house R&D. Therefore, acquisitions are driving most of the innovation. In turn, funding startups that aim to be acquired is consuming most of the available seed capital. For investors and entrepreneurs, M&A deals are like shooting fish in a barrel.
The most innovative decision Cisco ever made was to stop innovating and acquire startups.
The most innovative decision Cisco ever made was to stop innovating and acquire startups.
So, as many people know, almost every company that gets funded and exits today is through an acquisition. The M&A market can be characterized as a giant distributed R&D department for major corporations. Companies like Cisco are horrible at innovating, so they let entrepreneurs innovate, and when the entrepreneur has proven his innovation, they buy it. Simple as that.
There’s going to be a moment where — and I don’t know when it will be — big companies figure out that they can get the benefits of startup innovation without the $100 million price tag. And this whole game of making silly little companies and selling them for $100 million will come to an end. At that point, entrepreneurs are going to have to come up with something truly revolutionary, and not just something on par with what an R&D department 40 years ago would have created.
How does this tie into Hyperloop?
Well, the fact that large companies can’t innovate or retain talent means that acquisitions are at an all time high. Investors and entrepreneurs are responding to demand. That, in turn, is eating up a lot of the available capital and talent in the market. A lot of entrepreneurs and investors look at the merger and acquisition environment and say, “You know, we had this idea for the Hyperloop, but forget it. Yes, it’s true: that will make billions of dollars a year in revenue… but we could just spend a few years making something really simple, and we’ll sell it for $75 million guaranteed and walk away.”
Without such a hearty appetite for acquisitions, entrepreneurs and investors would have to take on riskier, larger-scale innovations.

THEORY 8: FIRST-TIME ENTREPRENEURS CAN’T BE TRUSTED

The next reason that Silicon Valley is funding Instagram and not Hyperloop is the belief that a first-time entrepreneur can’t take on a billion-dollar startup. It’s a rather odd belief, since first time entrepreneurs have founded companies like Fairchild Semiconductor, DHL, Amazon, and Google. But there is a certain nose-in-the-air quality amongst investors and entrepreneurs that unless you have a long track record you can’t take on a major startup.
Some of the very scientists that have written academic papers about a Hyperloop-type system in the last 15 years have been first-time entrepreneurs. They were panned by critics. Yet, as soon as Elon Musk talks about it, it’s the most genius idea since sliced bread. Undoubtedly, if we treated first-time entrepreneurs that same way that we treat serial entrepreneurs — and there’s no reason we shouldn’t, statistically speaking— we would already have the Hyperloop in America. But instead, we have Instagram.

THEORY 9: THE REAL REASON IS THAT WE’RE SHEEP

I do believe there’s a underlying rhyme-and-reason behind the contributing theories I listed above. I think it strikes at the very core of what it means to be a startup in 2013.
Investing and inventing has become way too dogmatic:
  • Investors say, “We don’t fund ideas, we fund traction.”
  • Entrepreneurs say, “You never make a business plan. You only make an MVP.”
  • Investors say, “We like companies that are going to get acquired for $100M, not try to go for an IPO.”
  • Entrepreneurs say, “I’ll just aim for an acqui-hire or a small M&A deal, it’s much lower risk.”
  • Investors say, “We make a lot of small investments, instead of one or two that are potential home runs.
The underlying reason is that investors and entrepreneurs have stopped thinking, and have become victims of dogma. We have fallen into a trap: that there are hard and fast, black and white ways to build every start up. We’ve ignored the obvious: if our methods of building a startup are so great, why is the success rate 1 in 10? If you had a recipe that only produced one edible cookie at every ten you baked, you’d fire the chef.
If we want more Hyperloops, we must never say never again
If we want more Hyperloops, we must never say never again
Worst of all, we’ve started using the “N” word: “Never.” For every time that someone says “never,” a genius company is being left by the roadside and billions of dollars in value are being lost.
Instead, if we want companies like Hyperloop, we have to get over our ideas about the way things must “always” be. We must put on our thinking caps.
Sometimes, you should fund an idea. Sometimes, a description on a napkin can be the basis for a $10 million check. Sometimes, you need an MVP…. and sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you should write a business plan, and sometimes you shouldn’t. Sometimes you should aim for a merger and acquisition, and sometimes you should aim for an IPO.
But to say “never” — that is the real problem.  The burden of proof should not be on the entrepreneur to explain why he is breaking the dogma, it should be on the purveyors of the dogma to explain why he should use it.
If we want to have companies like Hyperloop in Silicon Valley, and we want to have less companies like Instagram, we have to stop building startups based on a one-size-fits-all formula. This formula produces companies like Instagram and Buffer. They hit all of the checkboxes, but entirely fail to innovate. Not to mention, they’re boring.
Companies like Hyperloop break all of these rules. There is no MVP, it’s very high risk, there is no angel who specializes in it, it’s a first-time inventor, the company wants to go public, and all the founder has is a scribble on a legal pad to explain how it’s going to work. It goes against all conventional wisdom, but that may be the best investment of our generation.
Therefore, the answer of how Silicon Valley can produce dozens of companies like Hyperloop, and get rid of all of the meaningless startups like Instagram, is to create a new dogma — a new belief system — that challenges the old one. And here is the only rule: there are no rules. Here’s the investment strategy: there is no investment strategy. Here is the kind of industries we invest in: we invest in all industries. Here’s how you should build a company: there is no one way to build a company. Here’s how much money you should raise on the first round: however much you need.
Here’s the new formula to innovation in America: we’re going to start thinking.

En quête d'Image

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Jean Marie Contreras, coiffeur-créateur, est à l'origine de la "Collection Ambition" confié par L'Oréal pour les écoles Pigier Création.
Sa passion de l'enseignement et de la pédagogie, l'a amené naturellement à assurer pour Pigier Création la direction artistique de la collection " Ambition " qu'il signe de sa création.
C'est sous son impulsion méthodique et pédagogique que cette collection, la première dans le monde de l'enseignement, prend toute sa valeur pour les jeunes qui font de ce métier leur ambition.

Marc Dugast, leadership is moving

Comment développer son Leadership? Devenir un Grand Leader ... chez Nu Skin

SFM

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Votre visage est un miroir


Notre devise : Non pas juger, mais comprendre

La Société Française de Morphopsychologie (SFM) est le premier organisme à proposer l'enseignement de la Morphopsychologie dans le monde selon la méthode du docteur Louis Corman.

Nous assurons plus de 700 jours de formation par an grâce à notre équipe pédagogique composée de 30 professeurs certifiés en Morphopsychologie. L'Ecole est la seule habilitée à dispenser la méthode : Morphopsychologie du docteur Louis Corman.


Un nouveau site d'information pour bien choisir son hôpital

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Le site internet Scope Santé permet depuis jeudi de choisir un hôpital ou une clinique «sur des critères objectifs».
Scope , un site lancé jeudi par la Haute autorité de santé (HAS), a pour ambition d'aider à comparer et choisir un hôpital ou une clinique «sur des critères objectifs».

Le site (www.scopesante.fr) répertorie plus de 5.000 établissements et structures (hôpitaux, cliniques, maternité, santé mentale, médico-social, hospitalisation à domicile), et leur note de certification, lettres et code couleur notamment pour savoir s'ils sont plus ou moins bons, par exemple sur la prise en charge de la douleur. Grâce à une carte interactive, l'internaute peut se géolocaliser et voir les établissements proches de chez lui. Il peut également saisir le nom d'une ville, d'un hôpital ou d'une clinique, ou encore un code postal pour visualiser ceux se situant dans une zone définie et faire des comparaisons.

Contrairement aux palmarès de la presse, cet outil ne désigne pas les meilleurs services pour telle ou telle opération. «Le but n'est pas d'être en compétition avec les classements des hebdomadaires», explique le professeur Jean-Luc Harousseau, du Collège de la HAS à propos de cette première version de ce site officiel basé «sur des renseignements objectifs et fiables».

La qualité des soins passée au crible

La HAS décerne une certification aux établissements d'après 88 critères dont ont été extraits certains critères pour l'usager comme l'information sur les infections nosocomiales (contractées dans un établissement de santé ou lors de soins), la bonne tenue du dossier médical du patient, essentiel à la qualité des soins et le courrier adressé au médecin traitant en moins de 8 jours, explique le Pr Harousseau.

Au-delà d'une fiche synthétique pour chaque établissement (IRM ou pas, etc.), cette première version du site propose d'approfondir sa recherche sur la «qualité des soins» incluant, entre autres, les droits et l'information du patient (intimité, confidentialité, maltraitance/bientraitance, accès au dossier médical, information sur un dommage lié aux soins) ainsi que sa sécurité (organisation du bloc, risques transfusionnels, lutte contre les infections nosocomiales, prévention de l'hémorragie du post-partum...).

Les remarques des utilisateurs seront prises en compte pour améliorer le site qui sera actualisé régulièrement.

Une version «mobile» pour smartphones et tablettes est prévue pour 2014.
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