Jack of all trades...

New house

2008-05-27T00:35:00.002+02:00

My blog has moved to www.gchicco.com, please come an visit! I won't longer be updating this one (I migrated all the contents to the other one).

On simplicity and Italian (phone) services

2008-05-22T00:02:00.000+02:00

I'm not famous for my love towards Italian services, in particular mobile phone services and specifically TIM (Telecom Italia Mobile).

Since mid February 2008 I've been trying to take my mobile number out from the company I used to work before (with their consent, as this was my first Italian mobile and I have it since 2001, long before I worked with them). It was very simple to add a "consumer" number to a business contract, but now it seems almost impossible to become consumer again. Several faxes (I guess that now more than 30 pages have been printed, hand filled and faxed), calls (at least 10 to the TIM guy that follows the company's account, at least other 5 to their business call center) and emails have been unsuccessfully exchanged.

They gave contradictory indications, the wrong forms a couple of times (and now that I probably sent the right one, they are asking for a formal fax where I cancel all the previous forms) and they even blamed me for sending the wrong stuff.

I'm talking of what should be a routine procedure. Why do I have to spend so much energy and keep paying for this service? Why can't I fill online the right form, print it, sign it and... sigh... yes, fax it (it has something to do with the law) and just have the situation solved? I would save a lot of time, they would save a lot of money on the transaction (yeah, maybe they are making more money retaining me against my will) and I would surely be recommending the service to some friend (for a commodity as mobile service, this details are important).

Please, why make stuff complicated when it could be so SIMPLE?
... and as soon as I'll be consumer again, I WILL CHANGE to another company, that's a fact!

Italy plays Tibet

2008-04-29T20:28:00.000+02:00

In this strange period of "pre-sabbatical", I'm doing a lot of interesting things... Last weekend, national holiday in Italy, we made a videoclip with an italian band (Ottavo Richter) that plays the Tibetan anthem. This is part of the "friends of Pangea Day Milano" initiative I'm part of, in which a country plays the anthem of another (eg. UK plays Argentina).

What a more intimate thing than the anthem of a country? Pangea Day wants to unite people, through film but not only.

The video was made with the Pangea Day Milano team (MGM Digital Communication, Maria Grazia, Cristinaand me), Stalker Video (Francesco and Daniele), Macchinazioni Teatrali (Franco and Barbara), Regia (Tommi), AiEP (Claudio), Benedetta and Andrea.

watch the video:

Pangea Day Milano - 10 maggio 2008!

2008-04-09T11:33:00.000+02:00

So, this post is intended mainly for italian speakers...

Finalmente si è confermata l'edizione milanese del Pangea Day: Pangea Day Milano!!

Prima di entrare nel dettaglio, alcuni di voi vi chiederete cosa c'entro. Ebbene, prima di partire per il mio sabbatico in Giappone, sono stato coinvolto in questo bellissimo progetto non-profit.

Volete partecipare?
Potete dare una mano? (in particolare qualche esperto di WordPress per sistemare il sito!)
Avete il modo di diffondere la notizia?
Vi piacerebbe collaborare attivamente?

mandatemi un'email a gianfranco(punto)chicco(at)gmail(punto)com

Riguardo all'evento, segue una mini descrizione:

Il 10 maggio 2008 milioni di persone in tutto il mondo vivranno una straordinaria esperienza mediatica condivisa, in contemporanea, collegati fra loro.

Pangea Day sarà composto di 4 ore di live broadcasting e collaborazioni locali mirate alla creazione di una nuova società globale attraverso filmati stimolanti, relatori visionari e musiche ispiratrici che raggiungeranno il pubblico attraverso decine di network televisivi, internet, cinema, cellulari e performance dal vivo.

L’ idea è quella di suscitare la prima riflessione collettiva sui diritti umani, facendo leva sul potere delle immagini e lo scambio delle idee per creare una migliore conoscenza tra le persone e formare una comunità globale per un futuro migliore.

Attraverso Pangea Day Milano, la città diventerà un nodo importante dello scenario mondiale, abbracciando l’idea di raduno telematico globale e contribuendo con contenuti originali a far vivere un’esperienza innovativa con un format che coniuga alla perfezione spettacolo, partecipazione e responsabilità sociale.

- sito pangea day milano www.pangeadaymilano.it
- sito ufficiale www.pangeaday.org
- gruppo su facebook www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=10495094236
- notizie su Twitter http://twitter.com/pangeadaymilano
- video su YouTube www.youtube.com/pangeaday

Mr. Wiggles on Social Networking :-)

2008-03-10T11:42:00.000+01:00

www.mrwiggleslovesyou.com

Brad Jefferson & Animoto.com - The end of slideshows!

2008-03-09T14:41:00.000+01:00

(note: the italian version of this article is available on 7th Floor online magazine)

The web of the late 90's was pretty different from what we are now living online. I recall that, at the startup I used to work for, new features were developed only taking into account the product (surely of high quality) and people were just a marginal aspect. The value proposition was centered in offering our customers the best contents of a certain type, and this should have been enough to be successful. Tom Friedman defines this as the capability of "downloading", that is, to have access to the information. But always according to Friedman, the real internet revolution has begun when people had the opportunity of "uploading" their own contents to the web.

Today's websites focus their energy on the uploading factor. Take Amazon.com as an example, they have made their mayor strength through their customer's opinions. We are navigating in the river of new sites that have been called the Web 2.0, many of whom are just copies of each other.

I met Brad Jefferson, co-founder and CEO of Animoto.com, one of this new uploading sites that declares "the end of slideshows".

Animoto was born a bit by chance (see the garage story) and with a very definite dream. Says Brad: "Our passion is automating the creative process for creating video content that has the type of production value you'd expect to see in film or television. Simply put, when users upload their images and music to Animoto our technology should be able to infer the best way to put it all together into a video - all with a click of a button. We want anyone to be able to make professional looking videos, not just super technical people who own and know sophisticated editing software".

So the next time that you'll come back from a trip (or other event) full of digital photos, why don't you upload the best of them to flickr and then, with a song that reminds you of that experience, you make a video and share it with your friends? It won't be just a normal video, check out this one:

garage story
Animoto was founded by four 30-year-old buddies which went together to high school and three of them to college too. Their common link has always been that they're all incredibly passionate people who love to work hard and inspire each other. Brad specialized in enterprise software at company called Onyx Software, while the other three found themselves working in film, television and music.

"The idea for Animoto came from Stevie Clifton, our CTO, while he was doing documentary work for ABC. As a motion graphics artist, Stevie was responsible for the special effects and motion design that was incorporated into various ABC documentaries. Yet, Stevie is also a software engineer so he was always inventing ways to make his motion graphics job easier by automating certain aspects of his daily grind. One night at a NY hole-in-the-wall sake bar Stevie started drawing up some of his job automation ideas on a dirty napkin for Jason Hsiao, our President. After hearing the idea Jason basically said, "Stevie, that's great that you've come up with a way to automate your job but if we could implement this technology through the Internet so anyone could access it that would be something really special." Jason shared the business idea with me and I was hooked. We then pulled in Stevie's brother, Tom Clifton, our Creative Director, to round out our founding team".

business model
Animoto is based on the freemium (free + premium) model. Registered users can create 30 second Animoto videos for free. Creating a full-length video costs $3 USD or $30 USD for an annual all-access pass that allows for the creation of unlimited full-length videos. "We've also been experimenting with opt-in advertising that we call 'Distractions.' We've found that there's lots of commercial demand for our technology so expect to see some interesting developments on that front in 2008".

funding
Brad explains their starting funding: "We bootstrapped our first six months to create the Animoto.com alpha release. We launched the alpha site to friends and family in March 2007 and the feedback was very positive (albeit, it was from our loved ones). While we were thrilled that our alpha testers were loving Animoto.com, our stomachs sank a bit as we started our budget number crunching".

It takes a lot of processor power to render each unique video creation with a high quality production value, not to mention the bandwidth and storage needs.

"If our site was to become as popular as we had hoped the cost to run the infrastructure was going to mean that we'd require a fairly substantial infusion of cash which is something we wanted to avoid in order to maintain our ownership. We spent a lot of time planning for success so instead of rushing to launch Animoto.com publicly we took a step back and decided to completely re-architect our technical infrastructure on Amazon Web Services (AWS)".

They decided to sacrifice nearly four months to move Animoto.com to AWS, but they knew it was the right thing to do. During that period they continued to improve everything about the site and, more importantly, that extra time gave Brad enough time to find the right investors for Animoto. "With the new technical infrastructure our capital requirements were smaller. In fact, our capital requirements were so small that I was able to look no further than our family and friends to raise sufficient funds to complete our Series A private placement".

the launch
The site was launched as a private alpha in March 2007 and the private beta in July 2007. "Once we felt the private beta was solid we picked August 14, 2007, as our public launch date and a couple weeks before launch we invited a bunch a tech bloggers to take a sneak peak". Tech bloggers loved the service and wrote favorably about Animoto and August 14th was the D-day for the press release which made them public.

"In hindsight, we probably should have focused less on the tech circles and more on mainstream audiences; that's where our marketing focus is now".

relationships
Animoto allows users to retrieve photos from sites like Picasa, Flickr, Facebook and SmugMug to create videos and during 2008 the team will concentrate in strengthening the links with these and other communities.

"We see social platforms like OpenSocial and Facebook as great ways to get more people familiar with Animoto. The very nature - and brilliance - of a social platform, however, means that social networks like those from Google and Facebook can benefit from the value of apps like ours without needing to acquire companies like us".

In any case, during the first months of Animoto's life, several companies have expressed their interest in what these guys are cooking. "It was pretty cool to hear from Google and be invited to their campus to join their OpenSocial initiative just a few weeks after our public launch".

advice for entrepreneurs

There's nothing better than working with people you really trust, admire and are inspired by
Prove the feasibility of your idea as early as possible
Plan for success; failure means you simply move on to the next idea
Always take more investment than you think you need if it's available

Animoto in brief
- birthdate: Aug 2006
- employees / age range: 7 full-time & 4 part-time / 23-32 yrs old
- target audience: anyone who has access to digital images
- pc, mac, linux or who cares as long as it does the job? "I use a PC for my business function but all of our engineers and designers use Macs. Our entire web infrastructure is on Linux".
- success: in the first four months since launching, Animoto video creations have been viewed more than 10 million times.

"We thought Animoto videos from MySpace bands would account for a large percentage of these views since Animoto is the perfect music video creator but it's been amazing and inspiring to see the different types of videos our users are creating with Animoto: snowboarders touting their latest insanities, Facebook-fanatics crafting their latest "who-am-I" video profiles, football teams reliving their big Friday night win, animal-lovers that can't stop sending us videos of their pets, online daters trying to score just one date with a normal person, DJ's recreating that last night of Burning Man, models and actors working on their portfolio submissions, jazz quartets experimenting with live performance visuals, bikers bragging about the latest mountain they've conquered with evidence of bruises and blood, nature photographers showcasing their latest spread, real estate brokers looking to get top dollar for their listings, third-grade students surprising their teachers with their class presentations, illustrators discovering how to inject their art with even more life, conference speakers needing to kick-start their sleepy audiences, party organizers promoting the next hot bar scene, car enthusiasts boasting their new rims, brides creating the perfect wedding videos, aspiring film writers producing clever comedy shorts, memorabilia collectors showing off their collections, new parents proudly announcing the arrival of their new one, and even families keeping in touch with their sons and daughters serving in Iraq".

On Brad

Brad is 32 years old, married with a daughter who was born January 13, 2008. He was born in California and grew up outside of Seattle. Attended Dartmouth College and played American football all four years ("we went 10-0 and won the Ivy League my Jr. year").

His interests include anything that involves physical activity but favorites include football, mountain biking, running, skiing, snowboarding. His latest hobbies include photography and home improvement.

check out his LinkedIn profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/bradjefferson

- Past experience that was useful for launching Animoto: "At Onyx Software, I managed various teams and was always involved in the selling and implementing of our software. I use my sales and management skills everyday at Animoto. Near the end of my tenure at Onyx I managed the team that provided a lot of the reports to our Board of Directors. At the time, Onyx was a publicly traded company on the NASDAQ. I've found the skills of being able to analyze a company from a top-down and bottom-up perspective essential".

- What digital app/site/service has changed your working experience for good? "the iPhone"

- Digital entrepreneurs you admire? "All who give back in an philanthropic way".

Digital photography is ruining our skin tones?

2008-02-26T23:13:00.000+01:00

I read in the last number of (my favorite general news) magazine, Monocle, about the struggle of film photography, the people that are trying to save it for their art and hobbies (by even stocking it in the freezer) and the advantages that it still holds against the stampeding digital alternative.

While I resurrected my passion for photography some years ago thanks to the progress of digital single-lens-reflex (D-SLR) cameras (my beloved Nikon D70 has been recently replaced by a gorgeous D300), I have recently learned to appreciate the pleasure of analog photography. I never was patient enough to learn dark room techniques, but film photography has some characteristics that might be the seeds to its survival:

- the extra dedication on composition and "thinking" of the shot. It's just too costly (plus you don't have immediate feedback) to shoot as if your camera were and Uzi machine gun, so you have to carefully compose and snap when you think you've got it
- polaroids (It has recently been announced that Polaroid will be discontinuing instant film): these pics are not only unique but also instantaneously touchable, and digital can't just match that.
- grain: in digital it can be imitated, but it lacks the randomness of the real one.
- from the snobbish point of view, now everyone does digital, so going back to analog is a way of differentiating and has a particular "charm".
- hardware reliability: my Nikon F3 can work with almost no energy consumption (and Nikon's fully mechanical cameras of the F2 series can be used in the desert or in the freezing pole with no battery at all). Besides, after several decades the camera is just as valid as it was when it was first launched. Can you imagine using your present digicam in 5 years time?
- the expectancy to see the results obtained: this is not necessarily an advantage, but when I go to the lab to retrieve my developed negatives/prints, there's that mix of anxiety and curiosity to see how did they come.

The first article that confronts digital/analog photography is "Save our skintones" by Tyler Brûlé - Monocle's founder and editor in chief. Mr. Brûlé complains mainly about the difference there is in color quality between the two technologies, specially if compared printed stuff.

"In the pages of Vogue and InStyle leading boys and breakthrough girls appear as if they might have liver conditions judging by their skin tones" writes Mr. Brûlé

In my amateur photographic experience and professional printing experience (of high quality brochures, mags, etc) I found that the gap can be easily closed if several measures are taken:

Printing quality: first of all, to compare the two outputs, you cannot use standard/pro printed film and a digital photo printed using a home printer. You require a professional print from digital, which impacts heavily on the quality of paper and most importantly on the quality of inks/pigments and the color gamut they allow to reproduce.
Color correction: it is done in analog too. If you see well reproduced skin tones in a film photo print, it means that the photographer has worked on it. You must use the right film to balance the available light (tungsten, daylight) in order to reproduce the color temperature correctly. If you make use of flash/strobes you sometimes need to apply gels for the same reason. This is necessary only in color photography of course, as black&white does not suffer of this. Equivalently, in digital photography you have to select the right white balance to meet the present light. The advantage of digital is that if you shoot in raw format, you can do this after the pic has been taken, but you must remember to do it!
Screen color calibration: the screens of our computers don't reproduce colors correctly unless you calibrate them using dedicated hardware & software. Calibration is connected to the output source too (type of printer, technology, etc).
When you consider the printing process of a magazine, some other technical factors must be considered. From the printing machines used (roto-offsett or flat) to the color adjustments, the constancy of them and the types/amounts of inks used (from the 4 CYMK to even 10 or more dedicated pantone inks).
Apart from these technical aspects, I think that some fashion models look sick anyway and this is more of a trend than a printing problem!

Due to the acceleration brought by digital photography, it's easy that you might forget to carefully work on these aspects during the workflow that will produce the printed version of your capture. But only once all these aspects have been taken care of you can try to compare a digital and an analog print... and at this point you'll see that differences -if any- are almost not present. There's one aspect that digital cannot reproduce, or at least not with the same philosophy, and it is grain. In film, grain is produced by the chemical interaction of different substances that produce a unique result with a random disposition of its particles. Digital grain instead is the product of a software algorithm which produces only "artificial" randomness.

So the conclusion is that to get those superb skin tones that you find in [well treated] analog photography, you must be just as careful when producing prints from digital. Conceptually the points to take care of are the same, in practice they require some different abilities that are not always present even in professional outputs.

Polaroid instant photo taken during my last visit to Berlin

I'll discuss about how could analog photography be saved from oblivion in a future post. I think that an important change must be applied on the business model and supply chain (shift to cooperation and partnership of film producers).

Been busy... new projects are rising

2008-02-15T20:35:00.001+01:00

I've been pretty busy during the past two months. I took a short break for new year and 2008 started with a lot of strong, interesting and promising changes. I'm happy and you'll be reading new posts soon. I'm sorry for having you there waiting.

New projects are rising....

cheers!

gian

Moo cards, or how to reinvent a business through design and co-creation

2007-12-27T01:02:00.001+01:00

Personalization, co-creation and uniqueness have been amongst the strongest design trends in the last 6-7 years. It’s not enough to have a signed garment but it also has to be unique. It once happened only with haute couture or expensive cars and recently it has expanded to consumer products and “normal stuff” and it’s mostly about turning usual things to limited and personal editions. Think of the limited editions of Uniqlo T-shirts, Oki-ni apparel and Freitag bags, or the possibilities to change your Mac, refrigerator or wall by using Shalgo's Mozaikit: all of these let you distinguish yourself, become unique, at an (almost always) affordable price.

Richard Moross (RM) has applied a similar transformation to business cards, which must be something like 300 years old!

Richard is the founder and CEO of MOO.com, an online service that “prints nice things” like:

MiniCards
Postcards
Sticker Books
Greeting Cards

and other cute paper things.

I had the opportunity to catch RM on the phone for an interview on the origin and idea behind MOO before he left for his next trip, as this guy loves traveling (and photography as I later discovered).

GC> So let’s start with the 101, what’s the origin of the business and the name MOO?
RM> The company is 3.5 years old, but the name MOO came in the last 18 months. The original idea was all around pleasure cards, an alternative to business cards. So it was mostly about design, and we created our social network. The first version of the “business card business” was named “Joker”, but it was kind of controversial, and it was never going to be bought by kids.

He decided to take the business to the next level and get investment, so he needed a new name, short, usable in any language, compatible with the url and easy to remember:

RM> MOO was something I picked because it was sort of sweet and onomatopoeic... it was sort of charming and once I picked it I fell in love with it.

GC> But were you thinking about a cow?
RM> Funny enough it was originally “mu”. Having two Os in an internet brand had been lucky in part... you know, Google, so that is how it came back.

As they started rolling out the cards, people really loved them, but they just didn’t get the social network thing. “There were other far better social networks kind of appearing. It was early 2005 and Friendster was almost at its peak. Others like Flickr had already launched, and it was clear that ours was not going to be as good as the other stars”.

Moross dropped the social service and concentrated in loading their product into other communities. It accelerated the growth of the business and it was at that time that they changed the name. “We raised some money with Index Venture (a UK based venture capitalist firm) amd that’s when we became MOO and the company went from 1 employee to 5-6 people”.

From the business point of view, RM went against what marketing books preach: He was trying to develop his own social networking community, created the cards for them but realized that the cards were the real innovation, so he discarded the social engine and jumped into other existing communities.

RM> Flickr was the first channel we got involved in, and it happened for a number of reasons. First, our CTO was friends with Cal Henderson, which is Flickr’s CTO, so there was a personal connection and we got to know those guys very well personally... and we were all kind of fans and users of flickr.

The second thing that enabled that deal to happen the way it did was that flickr has world-class APIs that we were allowed to build on before the deal. We were enabled to first build the service and then take it and say “Well look, this is ready to go... if you guys want it you can just switch it on”. We actually built everything before the deal, and being able to show someone a working product in a working format was really helpful.

This was their first opportunity to work on integration and they learnt how to plug MOO into other communities and allowed them to propose it to different demographic and geographic regions. It followed that one you have the first agreement closed it was easier to present themselves to others. “It is one small step, and then you can take much longer strides”.

But it was not only the fact of presenting the mini-cards through a number one website that made the job, as it followed that the viral mechanism that spontaneously started inside the flickr groups (Malcolm Gladwell would call it the Tipping Point) was what took MOO to stardom.

They offered for a limited time 10 free minicards to try the service. You could upload 10 different photos from your flickr collection (or from your favs), crop them online and add several lines of personalized text in the back, plus your flick avatar (and the flickr logo). I personally discovered MOO this way, and it propagated like wildfire across several flickr groups worldwide.

RM> Flickr is a community with a fantastic, diverse, creative audience. By giving our product for free to that community we tapped on fantastic evangelists, very passionate and interested people. They are happy and empowered to communicate if they really liked it (and they did! ndr)... so it’s exactly the right place if you have a product that you think is good. It was a wonderful start. We thought mini-cards would be a personal card only, but actually there’s people that use it as their primary business card and others have both. That’s great for us, the combined use if very powerful.

I think that the innovation that RM made is not that he invented a new product, instead he challenged the paradigm of business cards. Take as an example Italy, one of MOO’s strongest markets: italians are very keen on tradition for certain things, and business cards are one of them. The highest standard would be having them printed by a traditional shop like Pineider in Milan, and in the end they are boring, lack of originality. MOO breaks a taboo, and it allows you to make the work by yourself, become the designer that choses from different images (your own or from others) and makes them unique. Each time I give one of my cards to someone I take out several and say “Choose the one you like” and we end up talking about how can you produce your own. It’s definitely VERY viral.

RM> It’s a product that enriches people’s life and makes the experience of giving a card better or more fun, or helps make it stand out. The customer is our salesperson, presenting it to new people that can become new customers. We don’t have above the line advertising. Most digital businesses save the creativity for afterwards. What they do is they create products that they think would appeal to a wide customer base and then employ an advertising agency to have great ideas: soundtracks, quick digital, beautiful people, and they put all their best ideas in the end. What we are trying to do is put all the best ideas in the beginning, in the product development, user interface, copyright thing, the photography on the site, product design, hidden messages, the emails... as many exciting ideas. The kind of stuff most companies ignore. We constantly think on how to challenge something that is boring.

GC> People never put much thought on business cards
RM> It’s something you need, not something you want and I think what we really made is make it something you want to buy.

GC> You have the website, blog, a flickr group and there are other sites and groups created by your users. How do you keep in contact with your customers?
RM> That’s the big challenge for us. We have lots of customers and are very much spread across the different network relationships we have with communities like flickr, bebo, facebook. The first challenge is that you have to get your message to all, but keeping your customer service in one place. It’s like friendship or human relationships: it’s hard to keep in contact with a lot of friends. The trick to do it is consistency, and being honest, and being personal and open. And we try to do that across all those different channels.

GC> The “poke” thing, right?
RM> That’s the great thing about these new generation of social media. The world is more frequented and everyone is connected through email, skype or whatever. What I love about things like twitter or facebook is that they help us to keep in touch, without having to stay long time on the phone, even though they are no substitute for the real thing. You still need to meet people, shake hands, etc.

Richard runs a kind of family business as he works with his brother Dan Moross, who has been there since the beginning, first helping packing boxes and now as operations manager.

RM> It’s very important to have people you trust in important roles. Because MOO is growing really fast, we sometimes have to use customer service to apologize, to reassure people that the stuff is coming, etc. We have a global audience and we live in an imperfect world. I think one of the great things we’ve done is that we make sure that our customer service is very, very in tune with people. We do not just hire inexperienced people offshore, where there’s no connection between customers and the biller. My aim is to offer and exceptional world class customer service, and I’m delighted that my brother is doing that. I trust him. I think it’s kind of farming and free range. You get much better eggs and chicken if you give them room to breath, if you give them a proper job and if they know you like them and they have a great connection with the rest of the business. It’s about giving them the right tools too and one of the decisions we made early on was to try to give people the best environment and working technology (big screens, new computers, etc) to do the job (ndr: most of them use a Mac).

On MOO
Born: 18 months ago
People: 20 full time + 8 during the Xmas rush. They have tripled in the last year.
Age range: from 30s to 40s
Funding: they raised £ 2.75 million of venture capital
Market: they sell to 140 different countries

55% North America
35% Europe (strongest: Italy and Germany)
10% Asia (strongest: Japan)

Offices: 2 in London
Prints: millions a year!

On Richard Moross
Age: 30
Studies: graduated in Politics in 2000
Working: for the past 7 years.

GC> An experience that helped you to launch MOO?
RM> I started working in a small internet startup in 2000, and it was terribly flawed. They had a great idea, very rich in terms of contact, very poor on sales. Over a period of time of 18 months, I had a great opportunity to learn how to do everything (doing a website, writing an email, going to a meeting, doing a cold call). I was one of the cheaper employees, I was the person that could do all the jobs: I even turned off the lights and shut the door. It was a great experience on what to try to avoid.

GC> Online apps and services that have changed your life?
RM> Business: linkedin for our HR. Netvibes is useful to monitor our business, our competitors and keep informed on marketing, technology, etc. Wordpress for blogging. Personal: I’m completely addicted to flickr. It costs me a fortune ‘cos each year I have to buy a new camera to take better pics! I use facebook and twitter to stay in touch. Yahoo’s upcoming and dopplr for events and other info when I visit other countries. For example my parents know where I am on the world, they can follow me on dopplr, they can see my pictures, read the blog. Sometimes people need a bit of reassurance of where you are, what you’re doing, be sure you’re alright. The web is really amazing for this.

Check out this cool interview to Richard on Intruders TV
Check out the flickr Moo group for more images.

Do the green thing!

2007-12-18T18:20:00.000+01:00

Next time you need to buy something, buy an old thing!

(if you don't know the "green thing", you can discover it here: www.dothegreenthing.com)

Media with no originality

2007-12-15T00:55:00.000+01:00

Last monday I was at a MilanIN event talking with my french super-PR friend Axelle on the state of pr and media relations in Italy. We work in this market from different sectors and with different approaches (she has her own PR company, I do marketing and work with the most important business media in Italy to promote HSM's management events) but the conclusions were more or less the same:

Many (if not most) bad or non-professional-enough journalists
Printed media with no original identity (copycats)
No transparency

Let's dig into it:

1. Research is disappearing as a characteristic of journalists. Very few of them make it a priority to do research prior to writing an article, talking about a product or making an interview. Just shallow reproductions of what is said everywhere, wikipedia stuff. Even fewer prepare themselves before an important interview. My company organizes events with well-know guys like Henry Kissinger, Jack Welch, Michael Porter, Malcolm Gladwell, and in some cases it has been pretty embarrassing to have the guy arriving and asking me what had these people done in their past, and even which questions to ask or what did certain concepts mean. Moreover, I assisted as translator/facilitator in some (english knowledge is another huge handicap of local journalists) and when I read the published stuff, it had little or nothing to do with what was actually said.

I find many bloggers (professional and non) to be much more original and trustworthy sources of information that normal journalists.

It's a well known practice to send products to journalists to allow them to "try" it and maybe write an article (someone said bribery? oh c'mon, don't be childish :-) ) And I would consider it good manners to receive an answer saying "thanks, I got your product" and sometimes a feedback like "I really like it" or "It actually is not what I expected". It shouldn't be a taboo to say that you don't like a product. It's all about courtesy of course, and during our discussion it came out that it seldom happens that you receive any kind of answer (even the "don't send me any more stuff please"). In fact, some times the guys told me they never got the stuff, and that it was normal that bumpy packages got "lost" at the registration desk.

I understand journalists point of view, that they cannot answer to all the things they get, so this is something to work out. I'm not talking about unsolicited stuff, but when you anticipate the guy that you're sending something, you never get a "no, don't bother to send me things". Chris Anderson recently published on his blog the list of pr people he was blacklisting because they were spamming him... and it provoked quite some reactions. I agree with him that unsolicited emails are an everyday problem, and that commercial "contact lists" suck. Maybe it's time for someone to create a new social networking site for helping journalists and pr/marketing people to exchange information, etc.

For the record: I've met some very professional journalists, charismatic, great researchers and with strong language capabilities. But they are the exception, not the rule.

2. In the past, Italian media had a very strong identity but with competition and the loss of some emblematic journalists (e.g. Indro Montanelli) and charismatic editors/directors, they have all tended to the same image and content. This is happening worldwide, and there are only a few of them which have maintained a differential factor (be it quality of contents, seriousness, etc) and some newborn (mainly magazines) that present new ideas. When a product is not selling well, or is losing market share, the usual solution is a graphic restyling, but the insides remain the same.

What I don't get -or unfortunately I have some hints- is why do advertisers still invest so much money in them. The idea I have is that it is because of lack of courage to make something different. If you advertise in the printed editions of Corriere, Repubblica and/or Sole (depends on your target of course, but now I'm talking about a generic business product/service), and your product/service fails, you can always raise it as a shield: "It's not my fault if it didn't sell, I advertised on the most important Italian media". Also when presenting mediaplans to your board, it's easier to make them pass through if you have these power-names in.

Something similar tends to happen with TV, the most budget absorbing media in Italy (but I don't have much experience with it). With a small percentage (say 15%) of what you spend in paper-media, you could do a "disaster" working with online and non-traditional media... but as it's all pretty new (or not so much really, the internet has been around for 10 years now), the experience on these is not so well consolidated, the offer is much more vast, and guys with a real knowledge of this sector are just a bunch. Age is an important factor, though not the best excuse. I met many 30 year olds that saw internet as a divertisment and not as a real tool.

Newspapers: read into Corriere della Sera and La Repubblica and tell me what's the difference between them. Even Il Sole 24 Ore, which traditionally was a financial newspaper has been turning more horizontal in the last 4 years. The reasons to pick one or the other are mostly based on which one your parents used to read or because you like one of the editors (or senior journalist).

In particular business magazines in Italy are converging to the following model:

"best of the world" or luxury products section. But none like Tyler Brule's Monocle.
who is going where. nominees are usually published with several MONTHS of delay, making it not an useful work-tool.
who is who ranking. But none like Time's ones.
local gossip. But as they are weekly or monthly, they're usually no longer fresh news (blogs have taken pole position in this)
dedicated geographical reports or dossiers. But none like The Economists world reviews
some finance
some local and world economy
some collaboration with foreign magazine. Usually not the most interesting stuff.
tech section (on gadgets or other technological products). But none of them has a Walt Mossberg.

The balance between these sections is not always well equilibrated, and in most cases they aren't even adapted through an original local view, but are pale copies of the original sources.

They all seem to privilege volume (number of pages) as opposed to quality and briefness of content. We are all exposed to several mags so who can (or wants) to go through 100+ pages n times? Furthermore, almost all of these business magazines have no real web activities (apart from publishing the cover, the magazine's index, and making some sales-newsletter).

I "have" to follow a series of papers and mags (from 10 to 20) because of my job, which requires me to keep under control what's happening and what media says is happening in the country/world. But most of the times I fin that I just read across titles and dedicate the extra time to dig into some "authors" that I consider valid. But most of the time, for those people I'm really interested in, it's easier to go to their blogs (most of them have one, personal or collective) and read them through my newsfeeder.

So if publications and in particular weekly or monthly ones don't longer offer fresh news, you can read special reports and insight analysis online, why buy the paper thing? Prestige. Here in Italy it is mainly about that. Being published on the paper object is still regarded as much more prestigious, authoritative and... real.

3. On transparency, this is more related to pr and advertising activity. It's difficult to get media-plans in advance to make some programming on when to place and advertisement (you only get this info if you have good account managers inside the media advertising bureaus). Statistics on publications are also confusing. The other thing is that there's no direct line with the people who write the news. It's us here and them there, and nothing in the middle. How about who's investing where? Why can't we know about it? Special sections, based on collaborations, are also tricky. They are not official "Special Advertisement Sections", but they act as that. And the last thing... the "redazionali", articles written by the media's staff. So many times I have been offered space for an article if I invested in advertising. So in the end, they talk about you if you pay... and some mags are all about redazionali. And people know it, and content loses its value. But these mags still live!

Follows a list of media (mainly magazines) that I consider have a strong personality (in no particular order):

Monocle (and Tyler Brule is surely an expert on giving personality to a publication. This mag was born 1 year ago and it's already a bestsellers)

Wired (I seldom buy the paper edition, as it's crammed with advertising and I find the info online anyway. They do have a strong personality, and the quality of the paper and print is great, and they do cool cover design too).

7th Floor (the first Italian free s-corporate press. Very original and with a great online integration through the blog).

International Herald Tribune (European version, a classic. not too thick, just the basics and half a page of comic strips!).

Time Magazine (another classic!).

The Economist (someone said classic?).

L'Internazionale (It's based on the french Courrier International. It seems paradoxical that it has its own personality, as L'Internazionale groups the best articles published during the last week all around the world. It's all about the editor's capacity to find, select and translate relevant worldwide articles).

Nòva24 (Innovation supplement of the Thursday edition of Il Sole 24 Ore).

La Gazzetta dello Sport (I don't read it, except when I find it in a bar. But it still has a strong personality, starting from the pink colored pages).

Wallpaper* (Started by the guy from Monocle I mentioned above. Still a classic though it has lost some of its edge in the last years).

So tell me, which are your favourite (paper) media and those you think that have a strong personality?

Philippe Starck on design (at TED)

2007-12-10T00:21:00.000+01:00

He feels useless... but he has some interesting stuff to say. He's fun, fascinating and inspiring at the same time.

Talking about mutants, poetry, genius and... well yes, design.

"nobody is obliged to be a genius, but everyone is obliged to participate".

"God is a trap. God is the answer when... we don't know the answer".

Just 18 minutes you shouldn't miss. enjoy!

World Business Forum Milano 2007

2007-11-28T12:11:00.001+01:00

WBF 2007 seen through Animoto.com!

Digital Entrepreneurs - Jay Bhatti of Spock.com

2007-11-25T22:42:00.000+01:00

Digital Entrepreneurs are those entrepreneurs that embrace an idea and make it real using digital resources. Some of them create a new search engine, which lives only in a world of bits and bytes (eg. Google and Yahoo), others jump from a digital platform to the "real" world (like Amazon, etc). Nowadays no one argues about the capacity of these entrepreneurs of creating real business (money!).

Let me introduce you to Jay Bhatti, co-founder of Spock.com. I met Jay just by chance, as I was registered to Spock and he contacted me to ask for suggestions on how to improve the website (he contacted all the power users). We did this interview for the Italian business magazine 7th Floor.

Even if it might seem obvious, the name of this "people" search engine has no relation whatsoever with Star Trek. When Jay and Jaideep Singh (co-founder of Spock with Jay) came up with the idea, Spock was supposed to mean "Single Point of Contact by Keyword" - which is the foundation of Spock today, the ability to search for anyone by keywords (tags).

Spock.com was thought to be a search engine for people (someone called it the Who's Who 2.0), with the aim to find any person in the world. The main difference with other search engines is that Spock acts as a "meta-engine", that supports itself on all the other existing websites, with a particular accent on social networking ones. But its main differentiating trait is that it itself becomes "social" because it allows users to add the information that characterizes a given person, and to vote on that added by others, thus judging the validity of it. So when you look up for someone, you'll find not only links to that persons profile on Wikipedia, Linkedin, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, etc, but also tags, news, relationships, photos and quotes added and voted by other visitors.

What is your dream for Spock.com?
I want Spock to become the number 1 search application in the world for People. When anyone in the world thinks of searching for people online, they should think of Spock first. When anyone wants to search even within their own network of friends for the right person, they should go first to Spock.

The business model in brief
Right now we are focused on developing the best user experience possible. Longer term, our business model is to display very rich and relevant ads and leads when people do a search on Spock. Very similar to the Google model where they capture intent based on your search.

Where did you get the money for the start-up?
Our funding came from Clearstone Venture Partners and Opus Capital. Two of the top consumer Venture Capitalists in Silicon Valley. We also have small investments from some notable people in the Valley who are advisers to Spock. I think it is very important to get experienced advisers who have done several start-ups to help you through the process.

The "garage" story behind Spock
The garage story behind Spock is that Jay and Jaideep kept complaining about how hard it was to find the right person, even within their own networks, and how searching for people was so fragmented (across social networks, your address book, web documents, etc). They both quit their jobs and spent several months with no paycheck to finalize the vision and pitch to venture capitalists. During that time, Jay lived in Jaideep's Pool house for several months. So, its more of a "pool house" story than garage story. :-)

Follows Jay's advice for digital entrepreneurs willing to launch their own start-up:

do's.
1. Move Fast - The only things we regret so far is not moving faster. Its important as a start-up to move fast. From a development, marketing, to business development standpoint, it does you no good to move slow in todays digital world.

2. Hire the Best - This is the only place I recommend you take your time. Hire the best people possible. Make sure they are smart, motivated, and have the right attitude for your Company. Nothing is worse than hiring someone who you come to realize is not a good fit for your company. And nothing is more exciting when you hire really smart people who believe in your vision and can come up with even better ways of making the vision come true.

3. Be Open - We realized that the more open and transparent we were as a company to the outside world, the better the world responded. It's important that you share your vision with users and the Press. Make sure to say it every chance you get to anyone that will listen. It's important for you to set the vision and PR for your company. Don't let anyone else start defining what you are about.

dont's.
1. Do not be afraid of doing your own start-up. We all feel fear when thinking about doing a start-up. I had it too. But once I committed to it, it was the best decision I made in my life. But make sure that whatever field you get into you absolutely love and are willing to spend your waking day doing nothing but focusing your energy on your start-up and the market you are trying to attack.

2. Dont be afraid of criticism. Doing a start-up is a very hard thing for some people to imagine. Think about what some people say "you are going to start a company with no funding that is going to try to beat Google at something!" I say that if you believe strongly enough in your vision and yourself, you should not let anyone make you believe you cant do something. Make would-be entrepreneurs have ruined great opportunities when they let the wrong people influence them.

3. Dont ignore your users. You are nothing without customers and users. Make sure you listen and treat EVERY user as if they were your only customer. I make it a point at Spock to respond to every user that same day with the proper answer to their questions. Best of all, a lot of product ideas that we implemented were the direct result of user feedback!

Mobility is in Spock's roadmap, but before taking it to mobile, they want to make the online experience amazing.

Why should I look for someone on Spock and not in, for example, Wikipedia?
Wikipedia only give you famous people. Spock will give you anyone you are looking for in the world!

As I currently live in Italy, I asked Jay about their plans and plans & expectations for the Italian market and the rest of the World.

Italian Market - We want to have language support at some point (on the drawing board) for Italy. But most importantly, I want every online user in Italy to think of Spock as the best people search site in the world, and the most open, and the most free. Global - Same thing. We plan to make language support a higher priority next year and want to make sure that Spock is a global product that everyone in the world would have a need for.

To help him in this mission, Jay has recruited ambassadors and evangelists (like Andrey Golub in Italy) from whom he expects that they keep being honest with him on how to improve the service and really working to make sure that Spock is correctly represented in their markets. Jay really enjoy working with otheir ambassadors from all round the world. Most of all, he likes the open conversations they have on how to make Spock reach the potential they all think it has.

Spock in brief
- Spock birthdate: March 23, 2006
- Employees / age range: 25 employees, average age is 27
- Actual pageviews/unique users: over 1m+ unique and 15m+ page view per month (just in the first few months of launch with limited marketing)
- Target audience: anyone in the world who wants to search for people
- Pc, mac, linux or who cares as long as it does the job? They use all of them at Spock

Jay in brief

- 34 years old, Born in Punjab India, interests outside of Spock include reading and playing sports. Check out his Spock profile: http://www.spock.com/jay

- He has no past start-up experience and he says that "Nothing can prepare you for a start-up"

- What digital apps/sites/services have changed your working experience for good? Google Docs. I think they have a real shot at beating Microsoft Office.

- Apart from Spock, which recent digital apps/sites/services would you bet on? My bet would be on kayak.com and thefind.com - both are search sites that compile data and present it in a useful manner for users. One is travel related (kayak) the other is product related (thefind)

- Digital entrepreneurs you admire? I used to work at Microsoft and still have a lot of respect for what Bill Gates did for computing and his passion to make his vision come true.

For more info, check out Jay's presentation on Web2.0 expo on intrudersTV here

Kevin Roberts on Dreams a the World Business Forum 2007

2007-11-10T19:34:00.000+01:00

What a best way of starting to populate this blog than some conclusions on Kevin Robert’s participation to the recent World Business Forum 2007 that took place in Milan 23-24 October. Why him? Well, he’s probably the most representative speaker for a marketer (though I really don’t consider myself a pure blood marketing guy, but a business developer that is lately dedicating most of his business time to something that could be tagged as marketing).

Kevin started with a strong pulse. He felt as the “meat of the sandwich” because his speech was inserted between an italian legend like Alex Zanardi and Renzo Rosso (founder and CEO of Diesel, whom he technically defined as a "fucking genious!")... "I [Kevin Roberts] am the monkey and Renzo is the organ grinder". But this feeling didn’t put him aback and he went on in his characteristic provocative way: "in the next hour I’ll try to insult you all, and if I miss you... don’t worry.. no matter what sex you are, what football team you support, whether you’re gay or straight, old or young or all of them... I WILL FIND YOU!"

Immediately after came his most mobilizing affirmation: "it is a great time to be alive in business because everything is changing”. And then came his first straight punch to the jaw of the paradigm of many managers (specially those with an MBA): "I have zero belief in strategy" (and while he was saying it he hoped Michael Porter -another WBF 2007 speaker- was not still roaming in the plenary room).

"I believe the success of a company can be measured directly in inverse proportion to the amount in time it spends on strategy"

Does he really believe that strategies are of no use? My impression is that he does not, but it serves as a provocation against a very general concept that is too often abused. And it’s precisely this abuse of strategy that he fires his guns to. “Strategy” could be applied to businesses in general and also to the micro-activities that compose a company. Roberts attacks static strategies product of too much jerking off, which try to forecast everything on paper or create weird hypotheses to consider every possible aspect (have you ever seen a dot.com Business Plan in the late 90’s? I have and...). Why are strategies useless? “Because we live in a world in constant change, where consumers are not strategic, business are not strategic and governments are not strategic” (come and teach us italians about that!).

Kudos to Kevin on a good argument.

“We used to believe in government, religion, the family. We can’t look to this institutions for leadership anymore”.

“Business is the main event, but not business as practiced today in America and the so called developed world. I am not in favor of capitalism of exclusion. The future for business is inclusive capitalism”.

To his Cambridge MBA students he teaches that “the role of business is to make the world a better place for everyone. Because only we in business can create new jobs, create choice, create self esteem. And that should their role be. It’s a hell of a challenge because until now the main focus of business was only to create shareholder value (which is pretty obvious)”.

And he showed the following video about how they handle challenge in New Zealand (Kevin’s motherland):

Everything relies on the way you set up your business. Our XXI Century society (well, not all societies but that of some European, American and Asian markets) is experiencing a steep power shift that has taken power back to consumers.

His first practical tips and probably the most important (that I hope to make mine): “Go back to your business tomorrow and wright down your dream... get rid of your vision and mision statements”.

We must give much more importance to dreams. “You have to have a dream... People want to be part of a dream, want inspiration, work for something bigger that a product, a dream is about reaching for the stars, not counting them”.

If you’re working for a company that does not have that great dream, change the dream... or change the company!

For those who have never seen Kevin Roberts live, he makes a great introduction to the Lovemark concept (he has recently published Lovemarks Effect). To better explain how a lovemark positions itself against a “normal” brand, he places them on two axis: Love and Respect.

Low Respect + Low Love: commodities. “no life here. it’s all the same, all crap”.
High Respect + Low Love: most brands are here (in particular the classic ones)
Low Respect + High Love: Brands that are fashionable now, which live a short but intense life (reality shows, tv, britney spears. “no money to be made here”).
High Respect + High Love: Lovemarks!

The following are some other short concepts I cherish from his speech:

Not “attention economy” (to bombard people to capture their attention). We live in the “attraction economy”. From interruption to engagement.
There are two kinds of ROI. The “wrong one”, Return on Investment, difficult to calculate and not always representative, and the “right one”: Return on Involvement, which concentrates on the empathic relation with people/consumers.
Move from big promises to intimate gestures... (“consumer is sick of all this promises and false claims... everybody is claiming the same stuff: bigger, faster, whiter, cleaner...”)
“You must not become marketers anymore, you must become connectors!”
Consumers don't want to be marketed... “they're too fast, too wise...”. “You must learn to connect with them... to give up control”. This reminds me of so many company blogs that don’t want to give up control, that don’t accept the rules of a medium which should have sincerity and freedom of expression as an undiscussed base. So many companies treat their blogs as an extension of their direct marketing instruments, losing the opportunity to develop a communication channel which allows them to interact with their own customers, fans, prospects and more generally, the world itself.
”Stop thinking about consumers and start thinking about people” (louder please, it’s about PEOPLE!!!)
”No btob or btoc but ptop” (people-to-people)
”Wright connectivity plans, not marketing plans!” (I swear I’ll try!!)
”Lovemarks belive in mistery, sensuality and intimacy”
“Rationality leads to conclusions. Emotions lead to action”
Big budgets do not matter. People don’t know how to spend that money anyway.

The only thing I didn’t fully understand was his joke on Al Gore, who according to Roberts got the Nobel Price on “good powerpoint use”. Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth does strongly use a powerpont-esque presentation, but it was structured like a movie, the kind of stuff Saatchi & Saatchi does in many of its spots. From my point of view, Al Gore’s work is strongly based in SiSoMo -sight, sound and motion- more than what Roberts wants to give him credit for. I’ll try to ask Kevin the next time I’ll happen to meet him (if you know me, you know that during the events that we organize I hardly have time to socialize with speakers, as I’m always working in the background, taking care that everything works the way it has to...).

This edition of the World Business Forum has also been about leadership with General Colin Powell, strategy with Michael Porter, design with Giorgetto Giugiaro and Renzo Rosso, innovation with Clayton Christensen, the experience of top CEOs like Antonio Perez (Kodak) and Bruce Chizen (Adobe), Alex Zanardi’s speech on safety and responsibility, world economics with Alan Greenspan and exploring our next 50 years with technologist and futurist Ray Kurzweil... and then so much networking, a series of conferences with more than 30 italian speakers and a great exhibition area.

This is the spot he used to close his speech

Related links:

HSM (World Business Forum’s organizers)
Kevin Roberts blog
Kevin on Saatchi & Saatchi's website
Some of the spots used by Kevin Roberts during his speech and some other interesting presentations during other events are available here