GuillaumeB (Guillaume Belfiore) My name is Guillaume, I am French and was born in 1979. I have a bachelor in Anglo-Saxon Literature and Civilization. I am currently working as an Educator in highschool and middle school and am studying to be an English Teacher.
I am actively following the web landscape. Back in 2003, I started testing for Microsoft. I was especially interested in the internet branch of the company (MSN). That year, I spent a lot of time posting in private newsgroups. At first I was a simple beta tester then I was awarded MSN Beta MVP [1]. For the MSN Explorer 9 beta program, Microsoft gathered 45,000 testers (one of the biggest beta actually). I had been selected among the 5 most active testers and then became a MSN Beta Mentor [2]. The following year I became a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional [3] for the MSN Client (2004-05-06).
![[1]](http://guillaumeb.com/MVPbetaAward.JPG){kind=link}
![[2]](http://guillaumeb.com/mentoraward2.gif){kind=link}
![[3]](http://guillaumeb.com/MVPAwardCert.JPG){kind=link}
I gradually changed my horizons and looked back on the internet with a different eye. One company, Yahoo! had always caught my attention. I set up Inside Yahoo! a place where I would gather news and reviews. Even though the popularity of the website grew up very fast I to give it up. Inside Yahoo was actually seen by many Yahoos as a reference, but in my opinion it became more a source of news than a place of constructive reviews.I still own and manage the Yahoo! Mail Group [4] and the Yahoo! Photos Group [5]. Nevertheless, this experience was good for me as I met several interesting people at Yahoo! and was even invited by the Yahoo! France team. Today, I want to focus on what "really" interests me without feeling presure of any kind on my shoulders. This is the reason why I have set up a more personal weblog, Guillaumeb.com [6].
Also I used to write at Techcrunch France, a place following the activity taking place in the new web generation. With Ouriel Ohayon I was translating Michael Arrington’s articles from English to French. However amazing the web 2.0 sphere may be, I felt like I was not discovering any new after a while. I used to run Windows XP Pro SP2. Right now i have a dual boot with Ubuntu Linux+Beryl .