Some songs struck us so intensely they became part of who we are. “All flowers in time bend towards the sun” is one of those songs. One song I can listen to over and over. Not just because it’s beautiful, but because behind the song, there is a story I have watched, in time.

To tell you this story, I have to go back to my early fifteens and to Cocteau Twins, the band that alongside New Order and the Smiths, established themselves as one of the three main pillars of British alternative music.

I have a vivid memory of the day I bought the album “Victorialand,” in vinyl, at the first “Radio Popular” store mixed with all sorts of 80s hits like Top Jackpot compilation, Tarzan Boy, Duran Duran, etc..

Because of earlier unusual names like Nick Cave’s Birthday Party and Bauhaus’ debut, I was already fascinated with 4AD, the label behind Cocteau Twins, founded by Ivo Watts Russell, originally an imprint of Beggars Banquet.

With vinyl, there was also this romantic feeling about buying music by being seduced by the sleeve art. And I have been slowly seduced by the art of the 4AD Vinyl sleeves handled by 23 Envelope, the graphic design name given to the partnership of Vaughan Oliver (graphic designer), and Nigel Grierson (photographer/filmmaker).

The art and music of ethereal 4AD bands like Cocteau Twins, led by the vocals of Elizabeth Frazer and the guitars of her husband Rubin Guthrie, This Mortal Coil, a collective led by Ivo, and the beautiful soundscapes of Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry “Dead, Can Dance”, enriched my teenage years by giving me a sense of poetry and art perception.

I remember like if it was today (33 years later) the moment I first listened to “lazy calm,” the first track from Cocteau Twins “Victorialand.” I remember thinking that if I were not an atheist, I would believe this would be the closest to a soundscape from heaven, and I totally understood why while some critics swooned over Elizabeth Frase’s otherworldly and often incomprehensible vocals, one described her singing – to her embarrassment – as “the voice of God.”

After reading an interview with Ivo, I found that the man behind the label with the most beautiful voices I ever known, rated the best two voices ever as that of Billie Holiday and Tim Buckley.

So I rediscovered Billie Holiday (Cocteau Twins made a very odd cover of the extraordinary “Strange fruits”) and because of Ivo statement of being the best male voice ever, I discovered Tim Buckley, finding that he was the creator of “Song to the Siren”, a beautiful song I met first by the voice of Elizabeth Frazer, this time under the name of “This Mortal Coil”.

“Song to the Siren” was mesmerizing in both original and cover versions. But was the cover that I found first and that felt like this uncannily haunting ballad and its images of the sea, doomed romance and drowning alluding to what Ivo calls “the inevitable damage that loves causes.”

David Lynch loved “Song to the Siren” so much that he became obsessed with using it on a pivotal scene in his Blue Velvet. Because he couldn’t pay the rights at the time he had, very grudgingly, to make his own “Song to the Siren”, writing some lyrics and task his newly drafted composer, Angelo Badalamenti, with crafting a reasonable soundalike (this how “Mysteries of Love”, sang by Julie Cruise was born).

By Lynch’s own admission, “Mysteries of Love” ended up being “pretty perfect” for Blue Velvet — but it still wasn’t as good as “Song to the Siren.” In fact, Lynch would never stop chasing it, until he finally got it into 1997’s Lost Highway.

What all this has to do with “all flowers in time bend towards the sun”?

It’s a long preamble, but everything!

Tim Buckley’s son Jeff Buckley (considered by Rolling Stone, the 39th greatest singer of all times), wrote to Elizabeth Frazer when he heard the This Mortal Coil cover. They struck up an intense relationship after they became infatuated with each other’s voices.

Emotion produced music. A sublime duet called “All Flowers in Time Bend Towards the Sun.”

The song, floating around the Internet, was never officially released. On Fraser’s words, after being told the song is wonderful, she said: “But it’s unfinished, you see. I don’t want it to be heard.” There’s a pause. “Maybe I won’t always think that.”

Buckley died in 1997 (almost at the same age is dad died) by which time they had lost touch – Fraser had grown frustrated with his constant touring.

The news that Buckley had died – he drowned, swimming in the Wolf River in Memphis – came while Fraser was recording Teardrop with Massive Attack, another band on my history.
She remembers that moment as weird since she’d got letters out and was thinking about him. Teardrop is, in Frazer words, about Buckley. At least that’s how she feels.

I’m fascinated by the stories behind everything and by connecting the dots. “All flowers in time bend towards the sun” has this mystic of compacting in one song part of my own experiences and emotions. Emotions that have followed me from adolescence to the present day.

Sharing the story behind this song is sharing a piece of me! So, listen and enjoy!

Please listen to:

Article Playlist (made for you!):

Youtube – All flowers in time bend towards the sun

Or Spotify (without the main song ):

And the albums:

Grace – by Jeff Buckley

Victorialand – by Cocteau Twins

Treasure – by Cocteau Twins

I always supported the idea that creativity is not more than the ability to remember, analyze, and recognize patterns limited to our own perception, which can be interpreted as good or bad “taste”.

And this pattern learning and recognition not being exclusive to humans, they are the perfect domain of computers, machine learning, and AI.

Well, if you doubt this, let me show 2 incredible examples:

AIVA – Artificial Intelligence Virtual Artist

Short explanation: AIVA creators made an AI that learned more than 30000 great compositions from the greatest masters (Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, etc.) and they made it learn what are the music patterns of this same masters that make a great classic music composition. The same process has been done to rock music, jazz, and other genres.

See the TED talk and some other examples:

 
AIVA – 1hour music collection:

AIVA – Different genre (rock):

ANNIE – Comes the Fiery Night

After creating EMI and Emily Howell, 2 AI that also compose music, David Cope, an American author, composer, scientist, and former professor of music created Annie, an AI that learns how to learn and besides music also writes poetry.

Comes the Fiery Night is a Haiku book written partially by Annie. The challenge in the book is to understand what was written by humans or by the machine (note: most of the Haiku experts fail miserably on the challenge).

To offer a preview, here are three Haiku poems. One is human and the other two from Annie (Cope wouldn’t tell who wrote what):

Cannot the fervor
Over the river’s ending
Be postponed to now?

Water snakes writhe,
Water splashes in their wake,
A frog heads for home

The fire crackles loud
In the morning air as I
Wander on the path

Which haiku are human writing and which are from a group of bits?

Reality check

The idea that humans will always have a unique ability beyond the reach of non-conscious algorithms is just wishful thinking.

Remember the fate of the horses during the industrial Revolution. They could smell, love, recognize faces, jump over fences and do a thousand of other things far better than a Model T Ford or a million-dollar Lamborghini and a Tesla!

So, the discussion should not be if computers can replace humans in the near future. They can! What we should discuss is what should be our future relation with computers and how should we regulate bad use of it.

The risks are not only on AI but in innovation in general. No doubts that Uber-like innovations will always threat Taxi like established businesses.

But it’s also true that we, humans, have shown from history a high capacity to adapt to changes. And these changes and consequent adaptation always resulted in evolution. Is it good for everybody? Was Sapiens evolution good for the Neandertal? Of course not. But still, it’s evolution.

And we should be afraid. Being afraid is, in fact, good! It was the going out of the cave and being fearful about the wilderness that made us become problem solvers and evolve. So, let’s just keep being fearful. Let’s keep doing it!

The phone in your pocket has more computing power than the computers we used to send a person to the moon.

Robots and AI are experimenting insanely wild developments.

Healthcare and current developments in personal genomics and personalized medicine speak for themselves.

AR/VR are finally becoming a reality that may change education and collaboration (I’m more sceptic to entertainment use cases).

And I could keep going on…

But what truly amazes me are the opportunities that technology is creating to democratize knowledge and empower people.

To prove my point, let me start by a not so new example, fallowed by a second, that reinforces that we are in fact in a time of empower and Inspiration.

1. Jack Andraka
Jack Andraka is *just* a kid. A kid that at the age of 15 *just* invented a new test for pancreatic cancer.

2. Labster
Labster is a VR project that aims to disrupt the way we teach students about lab work in the hope of ‘empowering the next generation of scientists to save the world’.

Just imagine the future if we can empower and inspire all the Jack Andraka’s in the world with all this new tools and possibilities! We may actually save the world!

As any normal person, I like to talk about ideas, exchanging creative thoughts and thinking about the future. When the ideias are good, it’s inspiring.

But in this new Fashionable Entrepreneur world, I feel that we are praising the wrong kind of principles and values.

To create a startup and “be” an entrepreneur, it’s not enough to have an ideia. Not even “the” big ideia. It’s all about execution! It’s all about converting these ideas into reality. And when these ideas are new, disruptive and creative and they are converted to reality, we call it innovation.

And this is how new business models, startups and impressive things get invented.

So, when great ideas come up, they are not what counts! What matters is the ability to find realistic ways to execute them!

An idea that is properly communicated becomes a vision. A great vision is much more than a great idea. And a vision can be pretty powerful!

A vision can inspire and bring motivation to those who will try to execute it or even buy into it (e.g.: customers, partners, consumers, etc).

Nevertheless, never forget that a Vision without Execution is just Hallucination!

Everything else may block or delay but it’s part of the journey.

I call this fear “FoBO” or “Fear of Being Overtaken”.

The “Innovator’s Dilemma”, a book that was first published in 1997 and that any wannabe entrepreneur must read, suggests that successful companies can put too much emphasis on customers’ current needs and fail to adopt new technology or business models that will meet their customers’ future needs. And such companies will eventually fall behind.

Although this is true, nowadays it’s not even enough to adopt new technologies or business models. At the pace innovation happens, this is becoming a world where winners are the only survivors.

Nowadays, for a successful business to fail it’s not enough to avoid do anything wrong. The world changes so fast that it’s only a matter of being surpassed by any business disruption that some other business, no matter if small or big, can follow.

The main message is: to lose and to fail you don’t have to do anything wrong, as long as your competitors catch the wave and do it right.

The “Innovators’ Dilemma” points several examples of big companies that fail for being overtaken by innovation disruptions (ex.: like Kodak and digital photography).

My “FoBO” or “innovator’s dilemma 2.0” is not about failing to seeing the wave, it’s about failing catch it.

Who would imagine ten years ago that Nokia would be gone? Ten years ago the iPhone was not even born!

Nokia was a respectable company. They didn’t do anything wrong in their business, however, the world changed too fast.

In the press conference in which they announced that NOKIA was being acquired by Microsoft, Nokia’s CEO ended his speech by saying this: “we didn’t do anything wrong, but somehow, we lost”. Once he said that, his entire management team, himself included, teared sadly.

Taxi drivers are now concerned about UBER. How about self-driving cars?

Any advantage you have yesterday, will be replaced by the trends of tomorrow!

So, to change and to improve is to give yourself a second chance.

Nowadays we got technology for granted. We don’t think anymore about who invented what and how. We know digital is binary and that mobile uses waves but, I would say that’s pretty much it.

Well, the person responsible for starting the personal computer era, Wesley A. Clark, died last week at his home in Brooklyn. He was 88.

His work on the personal computer began in May 1961, when he led a team of M.I.T. engineers in developing the Laboratory Instrument Computer, or LINC.

The LINC represented a break from what at the time was a growing consensus in the computing world that the resources of computers should be shared. That design approach, known as “time-sharing,” connected multiple users to a single computer by rapidly switching the resources of the processor from user to user.

A LINC sold for about $43,000 — a bargain at the time — and Digital Equipment, the first minicomputer company, ultimately built them commercially, producing 50 of the original design.

	1.4 billion Want to guess how many new subscribers there have been in the five years between 2010 and 2015? 1.4 billion subscribers were added. For some perspective, that’s almost three times the population of Europe in 2015
	7.3 billion No wonder people describe it as a connected world – there are now 7.3 billion mobile connections.
	1 billion The need for speed is moving faster every year, as the number of 4G connections doubled last year and now reaches one billion connections.
	1 in 3 4G subscriptions are on track to reach one-third of all mobile connections by 2020.
	$3.1 trillion There’s definitely money in mobile (in case you had any doubts)– the mobile industry contributed $3.1 trillion to the world economy last year – that’s the equivalent of 4.2 percent of global GDP
	45% We’ve come a long way since the first iPhone was launched – smartphones accounted for 45 percent of mobile connections in 2015, up from just 8 percent in 2010.
	+600% The amount of mobile data traffic will increase by six times between 2015 and 2020. Six!
	$430 billion The mobile industry supported (directly or indirectly) 32 million jobs in 2015 and contributed $430 billion to public funding in various forms of taxes.

Article originally published on Amdocs Voices.

The attendees and speakers at SaaStr Annual 2016 bring Startup L Jackson’s brilliant lyrics to life! L Startup lesson.

So whenever I hear that something is ending, at least as we know it, I think: so what?

Change and innovation don’t usually happen in a blitz! Usually they are a result of a combination of variables at the right moment with creativity or, sometimes, just a sense of opportunity. But it’s rarely the end of something.

The end of Facebook? We heard some voices about it a few years ago. The end of vinyl? Yep, people talked about it more than 20 years ago. Oh, by the way, remember Google Wave? Yes, and the end of email! Uber and the end of Taxis! And of course, Internet privacy, tracking, cookies and the end of Internet Marketing (or advertising)!

So, the end of Internet Marketing (as we know it)? What does it mean?

Jumping to the conclusion: Absolutely nothing!

Several studies, reports and articles made from respected Internet “authorities” (I will not name them for obvious reasons) lead to the conclusion that people don’t want intrusive, distracting or irrelevant ads loading on their devices. As a conclusion, this reports states that consumers are in charge and demand a more mutually beneficial relationship with online advertisers.

Of course these reports always talk about adblockers, cookies and tracking issues.

This kind of “expert” subject development is like talking about the conflict in the middle east just to say that war is dangerous and that it can kill a lot of people.

Let me try to split the discussion and start with the basics.

Cookies
Cookies are not a “technology” made for evil spammers/advertisers to track all of our actions on websites.

Yes, cookies are used for tracking but they are also used for good and important things such as preserving user preferences on a web page and to help brands provide better,personalized services.

And… let’s be realistic: blocking and cleaning cookies will not stop evil uses. There will be always a solution for smart advertisers.

For example: HTML5 local storage, Google AdID, Microsoft’s own tracking or Apple IFDA to track users on iPhone and iPad.

Complementary reading:
USA Today: Google may ditch ‘cookies’ as online ad tracker
Business Insider – Microsoft, Google And Apple Now All Want The Cookie To Die

Bottom line: Cookies are not evil!

AdBlockers
AdBlockers are not new. The first Adblock extension was written in 2002, almost 15 years ago!

Yes, they block ads. But they also slow down your downloads and use up your data allocation.

And how about neutrality? Adblock plus, the most popular adblock software, lets through (by default) what it calls “acceptable” ads. And how do classify an Ad as “acceptable”? Easy. Just pay AdBlock Plus!

Tracking
Tracking and privacy should also be discussed properly.

In my opinion, there are 2 different realities: internal website tracking and external (or global), tracking.

Being against internal tracking is like demanding that nobody should look at you when you walk into a store. It’s not allowing security cameras to film you, the clerk to look at your face or ask you your name and contact when you make an order. It’s not allowing to people to understand if you are male or female, young or old.

Tracking a user within a website is natural and should never, in my opinion, be an issue. All the navigation data in the website belongs to the owner of the website. And this data should be used to improve website performance and provide the best service to all users!

External tracking is a totally different reality. Tracking a person across different websites is, in my opinion, advertising dark matter and should be properly ruled.

Disclaimer: at BySide we do onsite tracking. And we deliberately created an independent visitor entity for each of our customers’ accounts, so that one single person cannot be tracked across websites for different brands. This is our way to be faithful to our beliefs and avoid any individual temptation or mistake. Even if we wanted, we could not technically merge a visitor from different customer accounts.

Retargeting and “Retardeting”
Retargeting is (IMHO) part of this advertising dark matter. I honestly don’t like to be “followed” in different sites. I don’t like to look at a pair shoes in an e-commerce store and then see that same pair of shoes again in every website I visit, Facebook included.

And the worst part of Retargeting is that although it seems like a smart move, it immediately becomes a dumb one (I call it “Retardeting”).

The problem is that most times you look at a product, and even if you buy it, it keeps following you around! It’s like being haunted by the ad!

The end of Internet Adverting?
So, is all of this the end of Internet Advertising (as we know it)? Let’s face it, we live in the era of context. Everything demands more context. Not only businesses and advertising. Customers demand more context. Better service. More tailored to their needs.

Internet Advertising is still young. A child who is growing fast and who is perhaps highly gifted but… who’s still growing. Maybe not a baby anymore. Maybe in the adolescence but still growing and maturing.

And we must not forget that not everything is about the customer, with no cause/effect. We must not forget that many businesses we, the customers, love depend on advertising as a revenue source.

So, this “Internet Advertising” thing will keep growing and evolving. It will keep changing, which is healthy and positive.

Ending with a quote from a classic (Gone with the Wind), let’s wait for tomorrow and never forget that “After all… tomorrow is [just] another day”!