Santa Cruz

Since San Francisco is a cold city, we decided to go to Santa Cruz a city supposed to have a typical Californian beach and have some farenheit extra degrees.

We left at 12 because the night before was my roommates’s birthday party, the trip was supposed to be easy and last about 2 hours.

but of course, as always, we got lost. We still don’t know why but I suggest that it is because of the bad quality of my copilots’ advices. We spent something like 2 hours before reaching what looked like the t.d.c. of California. and two more hours to get to Santa Cruz. Anyway it was fun.

There we wen to the beach which was not impressive at all and walked to find what was up there, finally we did’nt find anything. Only hundreds of latin american people enjoying the sun and the wind. The water was almost frozen.

Then we spent some time downtown eating an ice cream cone and enjoying the cabrio.

• The trip

all together in SF

Last week end we decided to meet the other EPFL guys around here, we met at Dinu’s (again) . We were 7 guys: Dinu, Marcelo, Daniel, Aris, the swiss german, abel and me (the two girls where missing) and after a small discussion about who is doing what and what are the differences between USA and Europe, we decided to go out and find something to eat. We went to Chinatown where Marcelo will move soon, it is a great place full of restaurants, bars, clubs and nigthclubs. The food was not excellent but the evening was nice, nice talks and motivation! Then we moved to Marina which is the area close to the sea, full of restaurants and american bars where people use to go to be seen.

There, the proportion of girls was extremely high and the bar was full of MTV’s dismissed kind of drunked girls. Bad music, TV screnns diffusing baseball and huge blond american style guys. I didn’t like the place too much but it was good to try.

got a car!!!!!!

well, I was happy to find a nice room but I was not so happy to spend 1h30 to go working. Thus I took the decision to buy a car.

So when I was at Dinu’s, I found a post on craigslist (which is the most amazing place to sell or buy things. The guy was selling his car because he was going back to Switzerland!!!!

I called him immediately and this guy happened to come from Yverdon and after a 6 month internship he was going back home. The car was ok the guy was great so the deal is done

got a room !!

If you are part of the 15 people reading this blog you proably have remarqued that a quite important delay exists between the articles posted and the time when they happened. It is because after two weeks here I have been very busy due to my job. Anyway this article was supposed to be posted two weeks ago.

Yes I found a room, this is not very impressive now but two weeks ago after having walked all around SF looking for a room at that moment it was.

I live in a very typical victorian house 5 blocks away from the place where the hippie movement started back in the sixties (haight & ashbury). I share the house with a guy (Alexis) who is 26 too. The place is great, calm enough but close to the Golden Gate Park and the restaurants area. What is very cool is that here there is no problem to find a parking place!!!… pictures will follow.

Berkeley

The highest nobel prize density per surface: the campus of the campus of the California University is amazing.

Huge buildings with real dinosaurs inside is a small example of the life sciences faculty. Everything is huge and beautiful, lots of people around, the Berkeley

university of California seems very dynamic. What else could be with something

like 30.000 students. The city around the campus seems to have been designed for the students life, lots of restaurants, bars and stores around the BART (c’est le métro local) station and nice small houses full of

students or university members. Nightlife here is something I must try!

Start of a new life

well after a painful 15 hours trip, I finally am in SF, more precisely in Emeryville which is one bridge away SF (not the golden). This is the land of many start-ups and big companies like Pixar, Kodak or (guess what) Novartis have offices here.

Everything is clean, nice (I even don’t miss MY switzerland) and on the streets there you can only see cars.

Since i can stay at the hotel (which is great by the way) only until sunday I started a very active phase of rooms hunting.

SF is a great city big buildings, nice coffees and restaurants, strange people everywhere. After my first day I have probably walked more than the last six months but it was a nice way to discover the city and visit some apartments.

NATIW @ geneva

As announced the first NATIW Seminar will take place on April 20th in the International Conference Center in Geneva.

The principal guests are Jessee James Garret (adaptive path), Jeffrey Huang (I&C, EPFL) and Alexander Ntoko (Chief e-Strategies, ITU, Geneva).

They will talk about the different decisional changes the Web 2.0 brought to companies and about the future of management.

Special prices for motivated students are available.

The workshops about Dojo and RubyOnRails will take place from April 23th to 27th.

• More details: www.natiw.ch

Swiss Web Community

As everywhere else, the Web community gets organized in the french part of Switzerland!

Banks, high technology, universities, big international companies and organisations, location in central Europe and people’s motivation makes this place very special and well fitted for developping web-based ideas.

Different events will take place in the very next weeks:

• The Swiss Web 2.0 in Geneva (March 20th) organized by Sandrine Szabo (check her blog) which was an informal meeting of active people in the french swiss part. You can find a video with everybody’s presentation.

• The NATIW (for Nomades Advanced Technologies of Information Workshops) seminars will start on April 20th :Ateliers Nomades organize this event for managers and web professionals. The goal is to discuss about strategic changes taking place in the management and the relation with the Web: How to take advantage of new Web technologies and people’s habits to improve management decisions. People from ITU, EPFL, CERN and many other will participate and animate this seminar. (check NATIW description )

• Finally, the Pionner’s Club 3rd event: “Web: a key of success” is a sharing experience meeting where people with a HighTech background (Phds with business ideas) meet people with a consolidated experience in entrepreneurship. This event will take place on May 1st at Hotel Movenpick at Lausanne and is a very good opportunity to meet future CEOs.

Orb Networks, Inc

Brief description of Orb, since I will spend most of my time working with them.

Orb is a startup based in Emeryville, CA they launched a product called MyCast which basically allows sharing media from your personal pc to any communication device connected throug the internet (phone, laptop, wii, playstation,…) honestly it is quite cool. You can see how it works here.

My job is not yet very well defined but what I am sure is that I’ll work as hell.

sorry for my english…

sorry for my english…

will be the beginning of all my sentences for the next 2 months.