ilicon Valley. He was also
a "facilitator" between the U.S. and Europe. Jacques was among
the first to buy a Palm Pilot in March 1996, and wrote about it
in his free online newsletter. As a side remark, he remembered
in July 1999: "In 1996 I published a few issues of a free
English newsletter on the internet. It had about ten readers
per issue until the day when the electronic version of Wired
Magazine created a link to it. In one week I got about 100
emails, some from French readers of my book "La vallee du
risque - Silicon Valley" [The Valley of Risk - Silicon Valley,
published by Plon, Paris, in 1990], who were happy to find me
again." He added: "All my clients now are internet companies.
All my working tools (my mobile phone, my PDA and my PC) are or
will soon be linked to the internet."

Palm stayed the leader, despite fierce competition, with 23
million Palm Pilots sold between 1996 and 2002. In 2002, 36.8%
of all PDAs available on the market were Palm Pilots. Its main
competitor was Microsoft's Pocket PC. The main platforms were
Palm OS (for 55% of PDAs) and Pocket PC (for 25,7%). In 2004,
prices began to drop. The leaders were the PDAs of Palm, Sony,
and Hewlett-Packard, followed by Handspring, Toshiba, and
Casio.

= Phones and reading devices

The first smartphone was Nokia 9210, launched as early as 2001.
It was followed by Nokia Series 60, Sony Ericsson P800, and the
smartphones of Motorola and Siemens. Smartphones took off
quickly. In February 2005, Sony stopped selling PDAs.
Smartphones represented 3,7% of all cellphones sold in 2004,
and 9% of all cellphones sold in 2006, with 90 million
smartphones sold for one billion cellphones.

Many people read ebooks on their PDAs, cellphones and
smartphones. The favorite readers (software) were Mobipocket
Reader (available in March 2000), Microsoft Reader (available
in April 2000), Palm Reader (available in March 2001), Acrobat
Reader (available in May 2001 for Palm Pilot, and in December
2001 for Pocket PC), and Adobe Reader (available in May 2003 to
replace Acrobat Reader).

For cellphones, smartphones and dedicated reading devices, LCD
screens have been replaced by screens using the technology
developed by E Ink. As explained on the company's website:
"Electronic ink is a proprietary material that is processed
into a film for integration into electronic displays. Although
revolutionary in concept, electronic ink is a straightforward
fusion of chemist