Tuesday, October 27, 2009 at 10:29AM 
A few weeks ago, we started to us Twitter. Here is the list of Lokad team members that you can follow on Twitter:
Never heard of Twitter? It's a sleek micro-blogging social network, quite handy for business purposes.
Friday, October 2, 2009 at 05:55PM For 14 months, we have been located at the startup incubator of Telecom ParisTech. Yet, at 6 people in 12m2, it was feeling a bit tight from time to time.
That's why starting from July 1st, we have moved to Place d'Italie in Paris. Our new location is much bigger, and now, much nicer too. Yet, when we arrived, it felt as if no renovation had been made for the last 3 decades.
Thus, we have spend a good part of summer 2009 with our office renovation. We did handle 100% of the renovation works on our own. Lokad is proud to be the only company where construction workers are also knowledgeable about advanced statistics, although, it's not clear how much it helps to become a true plaster master.
Yesterday, October 1st, the inauguration party for our newly renovated offices took place. Thanks a lot to all of you who've had to opportunity to come to cheer us.
Monday, September 21, 2009 at 02:32PM 
The NormaleSup crew has been competing in the Tour De France à la Voile 2009. The race goes for one month and rallying twelve cities next to the French coasts. It counts for one thousand nautical miles offshore and more than twenty short races.
Benoit Patra, PhD at Lokad, was a member of the NormaleSup crew.
The Tour De France à la Voile exists since 1978 but it was the 1st time the NormaleSup team entered the race. Although considered as a long shot at best, the crew took the 1st place among student crews for one week.
After one month of intense competition our ship finished the race at the 3rd place among student crews and 13th among all crews - which include many well-known professionals.
Supporting companies (such as Lagardere) consider this result as a brilliant success. Now the team is looking for the 2010 edition and the goal will be to reach the 1st place of the student podium.
;)
Monday, September 14, 2009 at 02:16PM 
Two weeks ago, we announced Dario Solera. Now, it's the turn of Christoph Rüegg to be announced as new member of the team.
Christoph Rüegg has been a very early Lokad contributor since he spends a couple of weeks back in 2007 working on a very alpha version of our technology.
Christoph Rüegg is a very accomplished .NET developer, with a strong focus on scientific computing. He founded Math.NET - the most widely used mathematical libraries for .NET - back in spring 2002, which isn't half bad considering that .NET 1.0 had been released 13 February 2002,
Interview with Christoph Rüegg, Developer at Lokad
Q. Why did you start working in software?
I got into computers rather early and was simply fascinated by it in every respect. This fascination never really lessened up to now. However, as I was spending a lot of time on software development in college already, I actually decided against computer science and went for electrical engineering instead, cherry-picking the most interesting CS courses on the way. Nevertheless it was just natural that the first internships and job I took indeed were in the field of software development.
Q. What did you do before joining Lokad?
I worked for a year for Microsoft in their Zürich Development Center. Our team was part of the Unified Communication group where we developed a new C#/WPF application related to Office Communication Server. Unfortunately I couldn't delay finishing my studies any longer, so I had to go back to ETH Zürich to spend the last half year on my master's thesis (on finding some VLSI optimizations in MIMO receivers).
Q. You're also the leader of community project named Math.NET. What would you consider as the most valuable skills that you've acquired while developing this project?
The Math.NET project has accompanied me for almost eight years now, so most acquired skills are in some way or another related to it. Most of these skills are especially useful when they fall together, so I'd rather not single out a most valuable one. Nevertheless, very specific to Math.NET may be some experience in how to deal with numbers in programming and computing in general, which is very different from how one usually thinks about real numbers. There are loads of pitfalls that can lead to loss of precision, and tricks on how to work around them.
Beside of all the core skills, it also turned out to be a nice opportunity to train some team organization and collaboration skills - even more as the Math.NET team contributors are all voluntarily working together.
Q. What are the aspects that are looking the most interesting in your upcoming works at Lokad?
First of all, I'm very excited to join the Lokad team. I also expect working for Lokad to be a very different experience than working for my last employer, where in the end you're one of tens of thousands of employees. For the technical aspect, I'm looking forward to work on real-world distributed and parallel computation including cloud based approaches. It will also be nice to work with mathematics from the concrete application point of view, as up to now I was almost exclusively in the role of the general-purpose framework provider.
Monday, August 31, 2009 at 01:12PM 
We started in 2007 as a tiny company. We are still small but we are growing fast. Yet, when it comes to statistical forecasting, more people does not equate better forecasts. This is why we focus on top notch profiles who have the potential to create the next generation of forecasting tools.
This week, we are very proud to announce that Dario Solera is joining the team. Dario Solera graduated from the prestigious Politecnico di Milano. While being a student, he created ScrewTurn Wiki, an impressive open source project that got a significant momentum on its own.
Interview with Dario Solera, Developer at Lokad
Q: Why did you start working in software? Good question, hard answer. I'd guess many people have made-up an answer for this one. In high school I attended a mechanics-oriented course and in the latest two years of it I started getting more and more interested in computers and especially CAD software and 3D design. The interest in computers caused me to also want to program them and then naturally led to my university studies in Computer Science Engineering at the Politecnico di Milano.
Q: What did you do before joining Lokad? I worked for an Italian engineering company. The goal was to design a web-based system for acquiring, collecting and analyzing data generated by large fleet of vehicles. Server-side is based on ASP.NET/C# and SQL Server, while data are acquired by an on-board device built around a Microchip PIC micro-controller that interfaces directly with the Electronic Control Unit of the vehicle. It's been a very challenging work mainly because of the recurring trade-offs between application performance and operation costs, especially due to the potentially enormous amounts of data it can store and process.
Q: You have also created a community project named ScrewTurn Wiki that has now become quite popular. How did it start? I was still attending university (early 2006) and I needed a simple web application that worked like a CMS to publish some stuff on the web. For the sake of learning a new framework (ASP.NET) I decided to write my own and it soon became decent enough to be released to the public. In the old days of version 1.0 the users were not many, probably a few dozens at best, but I kept working on it, releasing version 2.0 a few months later. STW now counts several hundreds users and version 3.0 is on the way.
Q: ScrewTurn Wiki has been awarded $5000 as best .NET open source project by Jeff Atwood. In your opinion what were the key factors that lead to this success? I'm still not sure, but I think that STW was something big enough and working well enough to be noticed by a sufficiently large number of users and developers. Wikis were and are being used extensively by teams of software developers and are now even entering the less-techy enterprise world of non-developers. STW is probably one of the first choices in the .NET world because there are not so many competitors in the same price range (free). The cash grant that Jeff decided to give us was really welcome, yet has been initially of little practical help for the project. I think Jon Galloway, a friend of Jeff, was right when he warned Jeff that open-source projects run on time, not money. In the end, I used the money to "hire myself" for several days of full-time work on STW. They helped a lot.
Q: What are the aspects that are looking the most interesting in your upcoming works at Lokad? Working on Windows Azure is probably the most interesting part: I believe that the cloud computing race has finally began and I want to be part of it. On a broader view, I think that working on large amounts of data is still a challenge and I can learn a lot while working at Lokad. Also, I never had the opportunity to work on so many math-focused algorithms, and this is another intriguing aspect of the work.