day 1 schedule: French IT press tour in the Silicon Valley

I have been invited to tour the Silicon Valley with a selection of French journalists from the IT press. During this tour I will represent Orange Business and will report in near real-time from the San Jose area about all the startups and high tech companies that we will be able to meet with.


schedule for day one of our press tour in the Silicon Valley

May 31, 2010 is memorial day and therefore we'll have time and to spare in order to make visits to the San Jose technology museum, but we'll make up for time lost on the following days with the visits of a few technology providers which I will describe as I go along, time permitting. Here is the schedule for day one of this press tour of some of the most advanced technology companies in the world:



1.     Our first visit will be to Zoho, an alternative provider of online office services and software. The visit will be led by Mr. Raju Vegesna who is Zoho evangelist and also an outstanding blogger at http://blogs.zoho.com. I am particularly looking forward to this session, as I have tried Zoho already and have a vested interest in knowing more about the cloud computing landscape in which we are also involved as a company and a telco,

2.       Fusion-io will be next on the agenda. You might not know about Fusion IO as a company, let alone as a company dedicated to solid state storage technology (i.e. this new breed hard drives, which tend to replace mechanical disks on modern laptops and breathe life into our laptop batteries) but I'm certain the name of the firm's chief scientist will ring a bell to a few Apple enthusiasts as I am talking about Steve Wozniak. Steve will unfortunately not - barring last minute changes - be with us on Tuesday but we will be lucky enough to be able to meet with Neil Carson, who is a former Dell exec and is now chief technology officer at Fusion-io,

3.       We'll then leave San Jose in order to reach Mountain View, and pay a visit to our friends from Nexenta, a firm specialised in open source enterprise class storage. As a matter of fact they were one of the first to bring such products to market way back mid 2008. We will be greeted by Brad Stone, VP of System Management and Services, a veteran of both start-ups and well known brands such as HP and Symbol,

4.       Day one will be nearing to an end when we'll reach our last appointment for the day, Coraid, a leader in storage over Ethernet (dubbed EtherDrive), enabling storage virtualisation and simplicity. This solution has already been deployed by 1,100+ customers worldwide. Amongst the board of directors, it is worthy of note that Mr. Jean-Louis Gassée, a renowned French born entrepreneur who headed Apple in France and companies like 3com and Logitech, will be one of our hosts at Coraid. Coraid is based on Redwood Shores.


I will report in real time from the Silicon Valley on all these companies, so please stay in touch with us through our virtual presence on this blog and also our posterous blog at http://orangebusiness.posterous.com as well as our webTV http://orange-business.tv on which I will post the video clips of the interviews I am able to conduct over there. Our Twitter account @orangebusiness will help you keep track of the feeds as they are being published. French users will be provided a French translation of these reports on an on-going basis via http://blogs.orange-business.com/live-france.