Orange Silicon Valley

The French telecommunication company established a beachhead in the heart of Silicon Valley to keep tabs on industry innovations. Within its San Francisco office were dozens of analysts, engineers, and business professionals examining trends such as cloud computing, gigabit internet, startup investing, and more.

One of my biggest accomplishments as the Strategy and Research Content Lead was the production of OrangeSV.com, the inaugural public-facing website for Orange Silicon Valley. My responsibilities include overseeing the discovery process, managing the development process from start to finish, handling the copywriting, and ensuring the website’s successful launch.

Additionally, I managed the compilation of a weekly email newsletter highlighting relevant telecommunication and technology news.

Ideation and Creation of OrangeSV.com

Objective: To showcase Orange Silicon Valley’s capabilities and opportunities in a way that differentiates itself from the more well-known Orange Fab startup accelerator.

After discussions with OSV’s vice president of knowledge transfer, I crafted the functional specification document. It outlined the intent, behavior, and workflow of the website. I then composed a Request for Proposal (RFP) and submitted it to design and development agencies. Ultimately, I selected Kanopi Studios to complete the project.

Over a few months, I collaborated with the vendor on wireframing and identifying user personas. We also focused on key features, prototyping, and reviewing layouts for the overall build-out. The site successfully launched in November 2014, meeting the deadline and a budget of nearly $25,000.

Throughout my tenure, I collaborated with analysts to secure bylines for our blog, ensured the freshness and relevance of photos and event listings, and regularly posted PDF copies of the latest published reports to maintain the site.

Managing the ‘Gazette,’ an Orange Silicon Valley Newsletter

I was also the editor-in-chief of the “Gazette,” a weekly email delivering a summary of relevant technology news to Orange executives and other stakeholders. Each issue featured an average of 40 stories, with succinct reporting on each article accompanied by an opinion from an OSV analyst.

The “Gazette” included content categories that impacted Orange’s business, including:

In addition to sourcing news for OSV analysts to review, I edited their work, frequently contributed my analysis, formatted each edition appropriately, and worked to gain approval from our office CEO before distributing the emails.

For years, the “Gaz” production process was tedious and quite manual. Analyst contributions were gathered via email, requiring some programming experience and the use of a text editor for newsletter compilation. Instead of utilizing a commercial email delivery platform, OSV preferred an internal mechanism developed by Orange’s “skunkworks” team. This process typically requires five to 10 hours per week.

Collaborating with a developer, I designed a cloud-based system to streamline the process. Analysts accessed a web portal with a form for their contributions. Submitted information was stored in a database for easy export. Editors could then conveniently review all contributions on the web before finalizing the week’s edition.

When the “Gaz” was ready for delivery, a simple button click transmitted the coded information to the internal OSV email platform and sent it to recipients.