This Saturday, I went to San Francisco (aka The City) with Stephane, that I had previously met and Nicolas’s birthday. He introduced me to some of his friends, and we went to a 5-star hotel’s bar that looked very nice. Most people were there for dating, music was loud, and the bar was noisy, so it wasn’t all that good for networking.
After having analyzed the market, Intalio’s customer base and its competitors, I have come up with a positioning strategy. Intalio must be positioned as the best choice for difficult, complex, tough processes. Intalio’s business model relies on many renewing service contracts who happen to be coming from mission critical processes that have the common trait of involving thousands of tasks. They are complex.
I presented this to Ismael Monday afternoon (at Gordon Biersch), along with my idea of hosting the server remotely on EC2 to simplify the starting process, and he was very impressed. Later that day, he offered me a longer term internship with possibility of attending a bay area university in lieu of ESC Lille.
We worked briefly together trying to agree on a tag line, but we have different views on which is best.
Time to prepare the rest of the marketing material: the website needs to change and reflect this, and our blog posts and press releases and all the noise we make must be aligned to convey the same message, Intalio is for difficult processes. Noise to signal.
This past weekend I caught up on a lot of sleep (time zone difference with Dallas – 2 hours – and staying late at the office), and visited the surrounding area (Menlo Park, Stanford shopping centre and every geeks’ Toys R Us: Fry’s). Late Saturday evening I ran into Stephane, a French speaking Korean I met last week. We talked a bit and exchanged phone numbers. He might take me out next Friday.
Ismael came back on Sunday, and we agreed that I would give him a presentation on how I think Intalio should position itself, and how we could simplify the install process.
I was granted access to Intalio’s Google Analytics account, and I started inspecting where the clicks were going. I changed the Sidebar accordingly, but to come to think of it, there are so many things to change, maybe the site needs some sort of facelift.
I kept on working on the landing pages ; one idea was to reverse engineer the manufacturing page, the other to use Orbeons Forms as an example. Both have merits, I’m doing them parallel.
Finally, I started the process of making Press reports. So I asked for the contacts’ phone number, I’d rather call them then send an email. That way I can get a good feel to steer the conversation in whatever direction I deem of significance.
When I sat down this morning, I decided to get things done, and proceeded to fix all of Intalio’s broken links using Xenu, a robot that has a tendency to break our internet connexion with a plethora of threads.
That took me all morning, and ended up in a report I sent to Ismael for reference purposes (and also so that he would fix the links I pointed to in his ITRedux blog, that merges with Intalio.com).
Then we went for lunch, I answered emails, read attached documents, and left at 6:00 PM to eat Barbecue at Alex Boisvert’s place in San Francisco (called the City around here). All the devs were there, excluding Hugues. It was freezing cold but nice.
I hadn’t slept much, but I nevertheless got up at 7:00 AM and went to work. Today we had what was my first eStaff meeting, which is a meeting between all Intalio staff. Alex, Matthieu and Assaf came from San Francisco. We has Rick and Don over the phone. Jacques and Ismael had left over the week end for training in Japan.
I had a long talk with both Rick and Don after that, about calling some of their clients to pick their brains, and they were very defensive. I am not sure what is going to come out of this.
This weekend I registered landing-pages.org in an effort to create an intermediary between companies in creating common landing pages. I also played around with the Mac OS X Tiger Operating system, installed renowned TextMate and Locomotive for Ruby on rails development.
Saturday night I was invited to Nicolas’ 30 year birthday party, in 02. What is 02? Well once upon a time there were two houses one in front of the other, inhabited by mostly French speaking denizens. One was 01, the other, 02. A community grew out of their partying, and many long lasting friendships were born. Ismael was one of the French speaking members, and this is where he met his wife May.
Sunday I went to the Gay Pride parade in San Francisco, but I missed the Caltrain on the way back (last one is not midnight, but 9:00 PM on Sundays) so I had to wait 1:00 AM for the SamTrans bus to Palo Alto, and arrived very late at home.
I accumulated piles of work on Friday, that I’ll have to do this weekend, and called Alessandro Vernet, a smart guy from Orbeon (they make and provide services for their XForms PresentationServer). We talked a bit about the common landing pages, and we agreed that I would get back to him, and that we would have Dinner some time.
Later that evening, I went out with Antoine, one of the Devs, and his girlfriend. We ate Indian, then some Frozen yogurt.
Say hello to my little friend: his name is Steve. Steve is a MacBook Pro, a rare 2.4 gHz version with Matte screen.
After arriving at work at 8:00, I worked until 10:00, at which point I went out to the Apple Store. It took some time, both to get a US student to give his id, and to call my bank to change the credit limit (Intalio will refund the purchase), but I had it done soon enough. Plus, I got a free iPod (red one) and free scanner-printer from hp. I met a developer from Yahoo! there, we talked a bit, and he showed me what he was working on, Yahoo! Pipes, which is amazing. Maybe I can figure out a use for Intalio. Then I went back to the office with what felt like Santa’s Christmas bag.
I unpacked it just to see if it worked, but didn’t play around with it too long in order to get back to work. I skipped lunch to catch up.
On work, wrote a weeks worth of daily blogs, including tomorrow, Friday. There’s a few more to do though. I also have to try to get a Press Release done for Tuesday, but that seems hard.
Ismael explained how the website works today, using DabbleDB and WordPress, so I’ll be able to write some Press releases, blog entries, update some other things as early as today.
Today:
I then took the rest of the day of to get some non-work related things done: