English Exam

Link to MyGroovyPod

Example of a live concert : Live Concert

Login : artungprod
Password : 108419

Link to Bob's Song

Police and Internet

Music by Arlo Guthrie... Look at the video of the song Alice's Restaurant or choose to look at the short video clip of this song.

Time is running! History of e-culture...

1642. Pascal's calculator.
1674. Leibniz's machine.
1835. Morse. Invented by Samuel Morse.
1837. Telegraph.
1876. Bell's telephone.
1889. Hollerith's tabulating machine.
1911. IBM. Tabulating Machine Company of the US becomes International Business Machines.
1926. Television by John Logie Baird
1947. Transistor.
1948. The first computer, the Manchester Mark I, is installed at Manchester University.
1954. FORTRAN. The first high level programming language, FORTRAN.
1958. ARPA
1960. The first e-mail programme called Mailbox is installed on a time-sharing computer at MIT
1960. Satellite telephone
1969. E-mail
1975. Portable Computer
1984. Domain Name Server (DNS) introduced.
1984. Apple Macintosh. Apple introduces the Macintosh with mouse and window interface.
1984. CD-ROM.
1984. "Cyberspace" . William Gibson publishes Neuromancer, in which he coins the word cyberspace.
1991. World-Wide Web (WWW) released by CERN; Tim Berners-Lee.
1991. E-commerce.
2001. I-Pod. Apple launched a portable media players called iPod

Radio Video Blog : Internet, Myspace and the Arctic Monkeys!

Arctic Monkeys

Don't forget! Do not hesitate to share "Je veux être une viking" with your friends!
Art'ung Bijou

Do you know my best friend Tom? Yes Tom the founder of Myspace!

Have you ever seen this picture?



Probabily! It's Tom the founder of Myspace.
One of the biggest success storie in the past few years has been MySpace. It's a social networking website offering an interactive network of photos, blogs, user profiles, groups, and an internal e-mail system.

The history : Tom Anderson wanted to create an online service unlike anything on the Web. He proposed the idea to Chris DeWolfe current 2003.
It would, he said, be the ultimate social hub: part Friendster, part Blogger, part MP3.com, part craigslist. "The idea was that if it was a cool thing to do online, you should be able to do it on MySpace," he says.
They talked about this project to eUniverse which agreed to provide startup capital in exchange for majority interest. They began to work on this project with 5 programmers.
At first it was a small community of artists and musicians, many from the LA area. Quickly, the website exploded and millions of people signed up on Myspace.

In 2005 Myspace was bought by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp for $580 million. Tom's done a very good operation!

In an interview with Forbes in January 2006, the MySpace founders, Anderson and DeWolfe talked about their marketing strategy:

How do you get 46 million people to find out about your product without buying advertising?

DeWolfe: It was really key to create a set of functions that were compelling to our users and an efficient way to use them. Users socialize to figure out what they're going to do on the weekend. They use MySpace to discover new music and post events. Musicians upload their music. People use it for entertainment purposes or to sell goods in the classified area. MySpace makes what they do in the offline world

a) more efficient or

b) more interesting.

Anderson: We didn't do traditional marketing, but we did try to find photographers and creative people because we thought that would make the site more interesting. In the beginning, it was all Los Angeles--actors, photographers and musicians. That made for an interesting community, and brought in a lot of people. A lot of the early growth, however, had to do with the features and what our competitors were not allowing people to do.

Music has become particularly important to MySpace. How did you attract over 660,000 artists and bands to the site?

DeWolfe: Tom has a deep passion and understanding for what emerging musicians go through. He understands the frustration. I understood the macro trends of the music business. Labels were signing fewer acts, giving them less time to prove themselves and spending less money on marketing. We saw a need to develop a community for artists to get their music out to the masses. With MySpace, when they went out on tour, they could actually tour nationally. The band might have 20,000 friends on their list and send out a bulletin saying, “I’m going to be in Austin on Tuesday night. Come see our show.” It has allowed bands to make money on music without having a deal.

You can create a professional-sounding CD, sell merchandise and get your touring revenue in and make a living. It gives those artists a longer period of time to develop themselves before they get signed, or make a living without getting signed at all.

In the early days, there were a lot of bands signing up. They told us that they’d like to post their lyrics and tour dates. Users told us what they wanted to see, and we just built it. That’s how we do a lot of our updates. We catalog what people tell us that they want. It’s not super-complicated.

Myspace is not the only success story. Youtube, Facebook, Dailymotion and so on are websites very famous which creators have made huge fortune.

Let see the message from Chad and Steeve the founders of Youtube.

The amazing success of SMS

SMS... What a strange word in our current language! SMS is the acronym of Short Message Service. It allows you to deliver short messages over the mobile networks. The aim is simple : transmit messages to and from mobiles.
SMS is mainly used for personnal messages. Typically people will use SMS for that kind of messages : "Hi Bob! See you at 9h00 AM for the e-culture english class!"
The service is developping and there are interesting and useful applications such as the following :
- Send e-mail messages from a mobile phone to any e-mail address via SMS.
- If you want to have information about the weather or the latest news, you can receive it while sending this sort of message "WEATHER" at a surcharge phone number such as 83120.
- Find your love with mobile chatting!
- Internet email alerts
- Downloading ring tones
- Play for money with a TV show. You have to send a message and wait to be selected by the TV show.

Look at this short video, it shows how to get games on your mobile while sendind an sms.



Before advertising on the mobile phone was limited to the phone companies. But these last few years we've seen that many advertising campagnes have been developped by other companies too. For example : during the rugby world cup 2007 in France, M6 (a french television) proposed a game to all of Bouygues Telecom's users which phone number ended with "66".
You could win either a car or 100 000 euros. Playing was easy : first you got a SMS from M6 telling you of your chance to win. You only had to send a SMS with the word "play". Then, you got another SMS saying "oh sorry! you lost the car, but try to win the 100 000 euros! It's simple : send an SMS with these words "..." to this phone number "..."! "
It was a good operation for M6, showing their partnership for the rugby world cup, but it was certainly not a good operation for the user! And for sure! I lost 5 euros with this game!

I think that SMS advertising can be great if you have an event to promote. For example, you want to promote a gig in Paris.You organise this gig with SFR. You could send SMS to all the SFRs users living in Paris to invite them to come to this gig!

I think SMS will develop and offer more than a simple text message. I think we will able to send messages with sound, images, little videos or animations. We can already see these applications with the Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) that allows a combination of text, sounds, images and video.

What will appear on our mobile phone in the future? I don't know but I am sure it will be surprising!

"Big MicroHard" is watching you on Facebook!

Did I hear correctly? Microsoft recently bought a tiny share of Facebook for $240 million dollars!

Microsoft really wants to know each of our movements. He wants to have our email adress, our name, dates, all our agenda, the name of our best friends, dogs, teddy bear, the jeans we wear, the name of your mother and why not your favorite kama sutra position!
And who gives all these information?? Facebook! Isn't that great!
No really, it is a good investment for Microsoft. Facebook is a gold mine. Users enter their information themselves. Microsoft doesn't need to do all the job to fidelise his customers.
They are all crazy about facebook so... this is what makes facebook databases so rich.
The fact that Microsoft bought a tiny share of Facebook for $240 million dollars is very significative of the importance of individual information.

How will this affect the Facebook community? Will there be a before and after?
For sure! We already know that Microsoft will target very precisely its audience for advertising purposes.
Microsoft already concluded an advertising agreement with facebook in the US.

Look at this video which explains very well the business of social networks.

Prosper.com or how to get money easily

Prosper.com is a website proposing great rates and help to fellow americans.
There are lenders and borrowers.
The aim is simple : if you need money, you go to the borrow section and say how much you want to borrow and set your maximum interest rate.
Then lenders can choose you and give you the money!
It's a great alternative to banks : you can have your money very quickly and the motto of Prosper is "borrowing money from people is fast, safe, and easy".

Look at the picture, it explains how it works.

Of course the main question is : how can you trust online users you don't know? Especially when you are a lender? How can you be sure to have your money back and with good interests?

First of all users can see at the bottom of the webpage that Prosper uses VeriSign services. It secures your private information using a VeriSign SSL Certificate and it confirms the identity of the website. The user can also read that ProsperMarket Place, Inc. is a valid business.

Prosper uses also the services of the website Truste. This website protects your privat information. The users have access to all the personal information they submitted at any time and can make changes if necessary... Truste has a lot in common with the french CNIL.

Users can also give rates for each Prosper user. It's like eBay or other websites. Ratings can give you information about the lender or the borrower : does he pay at time? is he a good lender? and so on...

I think that kind of webservice will develop because it's a real and good alternative to banks. The problem is the following : will that kind of website get still more people into debt? It is a known fact that the average american has more loans going than the average french person.

I think this service is great for people who needs money to buy a car or someting like that. Personnally I would probably never use this sort of webservices...but never say never!