Jean-Francois’ posterous

Jean-Francois’ posterous

Jean-Francois Amadei  //  大家好！

My name is Jean-François Amadei, I'm a 24 years old guy living between Hong Kong and Taipei. I'm a former Technology Evangelist at Toro-Asia.com and Digital Media Strategist at Ogilvy Digital Influence HK. I'm currently working on a new Taipei based venture in the mobile application business.

Nov 4 / 12:22am

The Ikea house

Last Saturday I spent 1/4 of my salary in a place I really hate: Ikea. It's crowded, it's huge (you have to walk hours) it stinks and you basically fuck up your whole Saturday afternoon (and night, as you are exhausted after a 5km walk within the maze) but let's be honest, the result is often nice. However, the apartment is not fully furnished yet, still need to buy bed and mattress (I use futon for now) for the bedroom, plants, retro style armchair and chairs for the bar and another sofa, armchair, rug for the home cinema & computer room.

     
Click here to download:
The_Ikea_house.zip (832 KB)

Filed under  //  house   ikea  

Comments (1)

Nov 2 / 8:57pm

Mao - A Chinese Histoire

You always find strange stuff in Taiwan (the best and the worst) and I saw one last night in NCCU. Before showing you the picture, I must mention that NCCU (國立政治大學) is a university (where I was a student once) located in Taipei and mainly ruled by "blue" (KMT) people following the "blue" guideline, thus seeing stuff related to mainland china (such as mainland newspapers, teachers and even students) is quite common. But this was quite awkward :

Not because there is a DVD about Mao edited in Taiwan (that could have been awkward a few years ago, now...) but because the title is written in French ("Mao Une Histoire Chinoise") as well as the whole movie (with chinese subtitles of course), now you have to tell me what is the relationship between Mainland China, Taiwan, Mao and the French languages :)

I haven't see the DVD yet (still reading Mao - The Unknown Story for the second time, not that I love the guys but the book is quite complicated with a lot of names and situations) but it'll be interesting to see it as France and some French people (my dad's family for instance, who were fierce communists in that time) has always been a great support to Mao's regime (The General De Gaulle was among the first western leader to recognize the new Beijing government) and ideology (a lot of current (but old) french politicians claimed to be "Maoist" during their youth) and I guess it'll certainly be felt during the film.

Update : This movie is actually a french/german production for the french/german TV channel ARTE. Amazon says that it contains archives that has never been shown before.
Filed under  //  arte   China   communist   france   germany   mao   movie   nccu   taiwan  

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Oct 29 / 12:40am

Leaving PBWorks for FOSWiki

The creation and development of any projects (mobile applications & video-games here) need method and rigor in order to quickly move forward and not get lost along the way. To manage our projects, team as well as external contractors I have been advised to create a Wiki and so far, it was a very good piece of advice! I like the fact that I can start a page (ideas, scenarios...) and that everyone (that I accepted) can edit and enhance it...etc.

I chosen to use PBWorks' Wiki service because I used to have an account on the Ogilvy 360's Wiki (hosted on PBWorks) and I just loved it. It's simple, clean, powerful with tons of options and so far I'm still very satisfied even though our organization its way smaller than Ogilvy's. Now that the team is growing (7 people now, certainly more quite soon) and with the appearance of freelance, the free version will soon be not enough (in term of security and confidentiality, particularly) so we decided to subscribe to a premium plan.

In France we say that any work deserve a salary (it's not always respected I know...) and we're happy to support services (Checkvist, 16bugs and Balsamiq for instance) that makes our life easier, but for that the pricing plan must be "fair" to everyone, which PBWorks' one isn't. Indeed, the Standard plan (that suits our needs) cost 8$/m (which is OK) per users (which is absolutely not). 8$/m per user?! How is possibly sane to create a Wiki and base your pricing plan on the number of users?! Can you imagine that it will cost me 672 fucking dollars per annum for the whole team and that only for a Wiki?!

Honestly what are the difference of cost of 5, 10 or 15 people writing few kb of data (our Wiki are only composed texts after all)? Very few indeed, but I'll quickly know the answer because this morning I start to save all our pages and start to set-up a FOSWiki on our server. Cost so far ? 0$. Nevertheless, I'm still very frustrated because I'm really not sure that FOSWiki's services is as good as PBWorks' one, but time will tell.

Update : This post has been deleted by...I don't know whom (not me anyway), so there is a repost. 
Filed under  //  16bugs   balsamiq   checkvist   FOSWiki   Ogilvy   pbworks  

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Oct 23 / 8:17pm

Taipei Tech Club Meetup Next Friday

It's been a while since we've had a Taipei Tech Club meetup so here's the info for next Friday's gathering at the Taiwan Beer Factory.  If you haven't been before, it's a large venue with food, music, geeks and of course plenty of Taiwan Beer to go around. 

Time: Friday, October 30th at 7:00pm 
Location: Taiwan Beer Factory (aka Taiwan Beer Garden, Taiwan Beer Bar)  
Address: 85, BaDe Road, Sec.2, Taipei, 台北市中山區八德路二段85號‎  02-2771-9131
Directions: Google Map

Our events are always open invite so please feel free to pass the message to others that might be interested.  

Look forward to catching up with you next Friday evening at the Taiwan Beer Factory.  

Cheers, 

Filed under  //  Taipei   taiwan   techclub  

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Oct 21 / 1:33am

Have a nice day...

Well...I do :)

I took advantage that I had some private stuff to do in Singapore to
pass two days an Indonesian's resorts based on Bintan Island.

As we're in the middle of the week, the island is half empty (at
most)...so are the prices (at least)

Filed under  //  bintan   indonesia   singapore  

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Oct 13 / 1:23am

One more piece has been added to our shrine

Soon the incenses and the 拜拜 will come ;-)

Filed under  //  apple  

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Oct 12 / 7:01am

hands cupping is back

When viruses help old practice to be hip again

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Oct 7 / 4:49am

Beware of Hentai!

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Sep 30 / 11:13pm

Facebook "Magazine" available in Taiwan

I have to say that I was surprised when I first saw this magazine in a 7-11 store (I was searching for the Taiwanese edition of Milk Magazine). It's obviously not edited (nor endorsed IMO) by Facebook Inc. and it seems to be more focused on the casuals games (huge market over here, people are just crazy about Restaurant City or Happy Farmers) available on the platform than the social aspect.

However, this little discovery is quite interesting. When I was working at Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence, I had to conduct numerous research on social medias in Asia and when it came about Taiwan and Social Networks, Wretch.cc always came first in term of number of users and pages view. If Wretch.cc is still (I need to check) the first social network on the island, it shows how in a really short period of time (I recall that in January 2008 none of my Taiwanese friends ever heard of Facebook) Facebook took over the Taiwanese and Hong Kongese users in such extent that some people think that the edition of a magazine would be a valuable opportunity. I think it's Bernard Leong that first talk about that, Facebook really need to open an Asia HQ.

Some people might say that Facebook is still struggling in China (less than 500k users...), Korea and Japan where Renren (Ex Xiaonei), Cyworld and Mixi and practically ubiquitous and that it's useless to dig further in these markets. But nowadays we're living in a world where people travel, study abroad and interact a lot each other, thus when a Chinese has friends in Europe, US and wants to keep in touch with them, which social network do you think they would use?

Filed under  //  asia   casual games   China   cyworld   facebook   japan   korea   milk   mixi   renren   social networks   taiwan   wretch.cc  

Comments (4)

Sep 11 / 4:14am

We live in Asia so we stink

When I see that some supposed smart and educated people are able to edict such laws, I keep telling myself that I want more of these guys as competitors, one day or another. I've always been a P2P (or more generally illegal download) addict for more than 10 years, I have no shame to say that as beside I keep buying a lot of stuff (music, videos, softs...etc) that worth to be bought. Lately, I've gradually stopped to download music as some services such as Deezer, Jiwa and the excellent Spotify came out, the quality, the choice and the software (for Spotify) were excellent, thus there was no point for me to keep hanging around P2P stuff. But lately I received two mail, one from Jiwa and one from Spotify both roughly saying the same stuff :

We're writing to you in regards to your Spotify account which up
until now you've been using free of charge. While we are really
happy that you are enthusiastically using Spotify, we are
unfortunately going to have to restrict access to your free
account.

Spotify is currently available in six countries: Sweden, Norway,
Finland, Spain, France and the UK. We never intended to allow
use of our service outside of those countries and we do not run
any adverts on your account like we do in the launch countries.
For this reason we have to restrict your account, you will be
able to log in to Spotify and view music and playlists but not
listen to any music.


Full of stupidity isn't it ? (check the "Free The Music" on Jiwa...)

Don't get me wrong, I'm not angry at Spotify or Deezer, their service is still quite amazing and they are only victims of some totally insane copyright laws. If they forbid me to listen music with legals ways, I have no choice to go back using Demonoid or Baidu which both are radically less restrictive on whom listen what and where... 

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