Statement sent to the BOCC:

Nicolas Cynober

MSc in Web Technologies

Oxford Brookes University

Object: Statement for BOCC

Mrs Parker,

This document present my background, my goals for this year, and my projects for future. So you'll get a good idea of who I am and why I'm here.

I discovered computer science in SUPINFO, a private school in Paris. I've learnt for four years as mush as possible to choose the best way, which fitted the most with my personality. Since two years I've specialized in web technologies, learning by myself advanced java (JSP, Struts), advanced php (PHP5, Prado framework) and dot.net 2. Moreover I update my technical work with the latest innovations, e.g. : AJAX. So the Msc in Web Technologies seems to be a good way to increase my technical knowledge.

So I discovered the Web by his technical side, but nowadays, it is not the point that makes me loving what I do. As you know, since few years internet has been transformed. Internet 1.0 is dead and its new version is much more interesting. The version 2.0 is more social and cheaper to build.

The social aspect fit to my personality, I liked the concept that the people rules the information. With old medias (TV, Radio, Web 1.0) information was unilateral, one to many, and it's changing to many-to-many communications. Actually a business on the web can't be unaware of his community and have to let the community talking and exchanging.

The other side of web 2.0 that fit me very well is the building cost of a new service. Actually opening a business on the web is ten times cheaper than five years ago. So it's the good time to think about new web services and maybe open his own business.

I already tried to start my own business one year ago (kestudy.com), a kind of french version of myspace. In fact kestudy.com brought much more services to students. We've got courses on a wiki, we used google map API to show where were our users, we've got blogs, photos and much more ... Unfortunately we (me and two associates) were too busy to work at full time on the project, so one year later we decided to stop this trip. I've learnt a lot thanks to kestudy, and now I look at the web 2.0 differently. Definitely I think there are a lot of things to make around web communities.

In my disseration I would like to research what is the best way to give informations to communities. Myspace , facebook , orkut , friendster are the best examples of web communities but the user interface and their services are not really impressive. They don't care about individualities, everyone has same functionalities, same informations. And if you want to build your own portal, you'll be in the mess. Netvibes, Google, Pageflakes and Live.com make possible to build his own page but it's still difficult to use. For me the real "killer application" will be a mashup between this two kinds of sites: a sort of custumizable social web site.

This year in Oxford is a good opportunity to work on this project and I plan to rebuild a new version of the Kestudy web site, as a web 2.0 student portal.

I hope you'll be interested in my candidature.

Best regards.

Nicolas Cynober