Just to briefly introduce myself and present my story
Born in France in 1971, I met “new” technologies pretty soon, as my uncle bought me a pong game when I was 5 !
My first contact with a computer was in 1983, when I was in 8th grade, and a computer romm open in my junior high school with a TI 99-4A. We were only 3 persons interested in the whole school, and this room soon started to be our meeting point during lunch.
So I becane very quickly the owner of the state of the art at the moment, a Sinclair ZX-81 (ok, kidding), with less than a kilobyte of memory. The kind of computer that forces you to dig deep very quick, as in Z80 assembler, if you want to do something more than basic BASIC.
It’s around this time (I was around 12-13 yo) that I decided that it will be my grown up work. An Amstrad CPC then several evolutions of Intel processors (8086, 486DX, Pentium 2, etc..) later, and here I am, with a Master in CS from the Université Paul Sabatier (Toulouse).
Then one year in the army (it was still mandatory back then) where I developed a process to scan some documents, then OCR, then insert into the database, leading a 20 civilian team, in the BCAAM (Central Administrative Army Archive).
Out mid-96. At a moment where CS jobs were hard to find, and with ridiculous salaries. So after several monthes of searching, I decided to meet with 3 friends and started G-SoftS.
Our first project (a voice email program) didn’t take off (too advanced for France) even if we sold some licences to CEGID.
Our second project (a tool for real estate, to show their houses on a through glass touchscreen) was a total failure. Too soon for France again. At this time, those people thought that computer was only for Excel or Word. for the record, the next summer in Denmark I found the equivalent, which was active (and pretty ugly compared to what we had done). France…
But at the end of 1997, when remaining money was (very) low, I had an opportunity with french main (and only at the time) telecom company France Télécom (former name of Orange). They were promoting their new ISP system, but in their showroom, the first day it opened, they found all the computers crashed or on other application than Internet Explorer. I presented to a guy the possibility to access through a touchscreen and a virtual keyboard, and he was thrilled, so asked for a demo.
Got back to the office, announcing to staff that we have to find a way to do that, and quick because we’ll have a demo soon ! Big stress, commando mode, but eventualy we made the demo and got the deal ! We presented Touch & Surf, the first of the name, which is still active (on a moder form) almost 20 years later.
With that, we participated with France Télécom to the first Street Internet Access Point in France (and maybe in Europe, we couldn’t have the information at the time). Acces was done with a phone card (they had a chip in France), 3 touchscreen for anyone to test the Internet. Then we installed some for lots of other clients.
At that time, in the Internet first bubble, we started our web development activity, and our hosting products, which are still what we do now.
For example, I installed an HA architecture for a french retailer company (Centrakor, more than 350 brick and mortar shops in France), a secured official documents scan and store system for homeless people for the Fondation Abbé Pierre, kiosk network for universities…
On the personal side, I’m married with 2 kids (twins). I actualy living in the French West Indies, on the Guadeloupe island.
Photo credit : me.
