The Demographics of Cool

Last week Harward Business Review had an article titled "The Demographics of Cool". It talks well about the waves that really make some products to become cool and how the message is distributed. Basically the question is about the fact that no longer can advertising lecture or dictate to customers; marketing to the group conversation must be seamlessly incorporated. Basically social media enhances the fact that once in the hands of the tastemakers, consumers gravitates en masse to the seller's offerings. Below is a video with more about this in the form of an interview.



This demographics of cool is a devolution away from segmentation of smart cross-cultural or multicultural marketing strategy. As a society, the western cultures are more and more melted culturally, and the meaningful identity is changing according to the situation you are at the moment. The categories are not relevant anymore and the identity is evermore complex.

Still, the demographics of cool is more than just trying to define a new meaning for demographics. Steve Stoute is arguing that out of hip-hop, a new culture has emerged, one "shared mental complexion" that no demographics can capture. Age, race and income don't matter. Only the mind-set matters. 34-old Indian bluecollar worker, 16-year old high school kid from the UK and 45-year old whitecollar from Japan worker are all the same demographics. In the modern world, urban has nothing to with place or race and everything to with attitude.



These consumers, choose what becomes cool and, more crucially, decide when something isn't cool anymore. Remember the champage Cristal's fall from grace, just because Jay-Z said so? When the importance is the psychologic, the demographic data and quantitative research become meaningless. Because when you define a market by how people in it think, not by who's in it, the definition process is far mor complex and expensive.

Just think of the Apple iPod's now-iconic silhouetted hipsters sporting white earbuds, striking poses. You can't tell if those silhouettes are 18 or 34 years old, rich or poor, black, white or asian, from Helsinki or from Tokyo. All you know for sure is that they're cool!

Christmas Calendar is Here!

Publishzer is going to publish a Christmas calendar for this festive season 2011. The calendar will be in finnish, as it is a testbed for some advertising features and the results will be published on January. I strongly believe that this kind of advertising will be highly valuable, as part of the content.

In the calendar, you'll find a magazine for each day leading to Christmas eve. There will be videos, photos, christmasrecipes and gift ideas. So go and check it out AND please follow the calendar facebook page.

Below is embedded the latest calendar, updated daily:

Are kids more tech savvy than parents?

Most, meaning 90%, of the parents think that they are more internet-savvy than their kids. But are they? In this video Lydia Leavitt and Leila Makki went out to find out.

Think About Your Metadata

This time I wanted to get a bit more relaxed from all the deep thoughts on the change of the digital media. I thought to give a little update on what we worked on lately. This category feature on Publishzer is not much obviously, but I would recommend thinking about categories and other metadata from early on.

Why? Metadata (metacontent) is traditionally found in the card catalogs of libraries. As information has become increasingly digital, metadata is also used to describe digital data using metadata standards specific to a particular discipline. By describing the contents and context of data files, the quality of the original data/files is greatly increased. That's why!

This sunday was another hackday for our team. We decided to focus on category feature. Now you can categorize your mags, which helps others to find them when we get all the social elements ready. Go creating some mags and register at publishzer.com




...and you can also define the magazine into subcategories. Helping readers to find it even better.





Happy Publishzing!

Social Curation and Evening at REVS Fashion Mag Launch Party

Yesterday I spent an nice evening first at BonnierDevCamp talking about Social Curation. There is more about it in this blog, but I thought to share the slides I used. My focus was five points to cover the current change in the media industry and what opportunities social curation brings. I'm happy that the 30min talk turned into a discussion with active interaction with the hackers. I all up for you guys hacking the media into the digital future.

The five points were:
1. Media is under digital revolution and will follow the fate of music.
2. Social Curation's value is in filtering out noise to focus on niche interestgroups.
3. Enabling readers to use their own voice has huge advertising opportunities.
4. Through these bloggers have opportunity to become a shaping force in the media industry.
5. Mobile is the most personal device and therefore very good for media consumption.

Also after the break you find a nice picture of REVS magazine launch party. It a rather artistic magazine coming out from few of my friends. Nice picture and all, but I see them having hard time making this into a business...well it is very artistic.

Social Curation and Mobile

View more presentations from Teppo Hudson.

Bonnier Lounge


Revs visuals

Moomins 3D

Searching the soul of

Last week, me and Helene have been touring the Golden Triangle area of India. This means basically the cities of Delhi, Agra and Jaipur. These are the monumental and historical part of the old Mughal empire and Rajastan Maharajas. Words cannot describe the awesomeness of grand buildings like Taj Mahal or the colors and tastes of Jaipur's local markets.

(photo by Helene Auramo)

However, the trip has made me think a lot about the essence our actions. Ayurveda treatments been part of our trip with both purchasing natural food supplements and having an insanely great Ayurveda massage that still after two days is energising my body. India overall is so much about balance in yourself and the surroundng ecosystems.

As well as looking for personal balance, the same balance is important for companies. Publishzer is all about high ambitions and willingness to change the world. Still this has to come with balanced methods, respecting especially the blogging communities. We have pinpointed the principles to the following ones:

- Empathy, the intimate connection with the feelings of the users and customers. We want know their feelings better than anyone else

- Halo, the signals that the company emits. People form opinions from the first moments, and therefore designs has to be perfect.

- Focus, we must concentrate the limited resources to the businesses we are best of, and eliminate unimportant opportunities. Learn to say no.

With these principles, nothing is impossible.

Publishzer about to launch

We are finalizing the first release of Publishzer.com - I am just embedding a couple of magazines here, but if you wish to read more about it go for the Publishzer Story.

Magazines are losing the publishing war to bloggers

Digitalisation hit first on the music publishing business. Currently similar impact is happening in the magazine publishing industry. The main reason for a distruptive change is that consumer are receiving and subsequently increasingly expecting to have content for free. For example, many bloggers do write and publish content online that include faster and even more relevant info than most printed magazines. My personal interest is in how can these bloggers get paid and be brilliant. Is there an answer to this in the disruptive changes on the markets?



The internet is a double sided sword, well, is if you look at it from the traditional publishing point of view. It has never been easier to reach large numbers of readers, but these readers have never felt more entitled to be informed and entertained for free. The market for books is continually shifting beneath our feet, and nobody knows what the business of publishing will look like a decade from now. Still many authors and publishers are still pretending that the Internet doesn’t exist. Some will surely see their careers suffer as a result. One fact now seems undeniable: The future of the written word is (mostly or entirely) digital.

I'm not a businessman, I'm the business, man! (Jay-Z)

Still, consuming blog content is more popular than ever. For example fashion blogs gather followers like fireflies, most of the are still run by individuals, not media companies. If added the average 5€ each click through is of value to eCommerce stores, the average 10.000 readers a mid-range blogger has, in a month, could earn substantial income for him/her. There however, are no polished processes and most of income is of low-engagement banner ads and endorsements. Beside a gallup involving 17.000 social media users concluded that "brand-sponsored social media initiatives have very little impact on consumer decision making. Nor do they drive prospective customers to consider trying a brand or recommending a brand to others in their social network".

Digital publishing is gathering some success in small printing of €1.99 stories, something similar as selling single songs rather than a full album. However, these third party objectives are gathering much less engagement than subjective blog posts where the blogger is the objective. The amount of engagement bloggers drive is about 10-20 times higher than advertising, based on the same gallup above.

So my argument is that rather than relying on producing magazines and hit ebooks (which thou are interesting from content point of view, but not from business point of view), magazine publishing should enable bloggers to earn revenue from issues that they are passionate about. Revenue could come from brands that wish to be included in this passionate conversation by providing content to reference, analyse or just do some shout-out. Results would be much more focused and much higher engangement, and would result in a better service for readers. Afterall, we all loath banner ads, right?

Digital is either Global or Hyperlocal

(This is an excerpt from an essay for the Community Media Expert Meeting's whitelabel)

Filtering is not a new phenomenon as news agencies have done this since the beginning of media. The difference is that now “we all can be small news agencies” and curate the most intersting content we find. Content is global and there is infinite amount of it, enabling easy cross-referencing and such.

This development requires media to look at their operations as global. National level is diminishing and readers are increasingly gaining influences from the global community through the networked societies. This will obviously be a long transition, but when national borders used to regulate the flow of cultural phenomenoms, today’s flow of information has no borders. Therefore cultures are most likely going to go global, and media will as well as an important mediator of it.

However, as the media will go global beyond national borders, it is fragmenting into niches. As the post modern society tends to categories everything in order to be functional, so will the cultural interests be categoriest. For example teenagers will listen a certain kind of music of their niche, not just from the national level, but from the certain niche on the global level. The media that will be able to focus on these niches will gain most viewerships from the fans. More than from the general focused media, because of the stronger community ties, feeling of belonging and enjoyment through sharing of similar ideas.

Beside cultural, this feeling of belonging on communities can be seen in the idea of hyperlocal. Media that focuses on cities, on the neighbourhoods or on the certain streets, will most likely gain interest of the locals regardles of their cultural interest. Locals are a part a community that is not bound by culture, but by physical location. News of what happens on your street is always interesting.

So, media organisations will face options to choose global niches, where viewers are bound by cultural interests, or hyperlocal communities, where viewers are bound by interest of their physical location. Communities, cultural or physical, are the most important aspect as no viewer will be interested of information on which they cannot relate to.

Eric Ries & The Greatest Book Launch Ever?

Eric Ries is going to have a busy one next week as he launches his book, The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation To Create Radically Successful Businesses. The book is brilliant I believe (haven't read it yet), not just for the content is contains, but also for the incredibly innovative way it has been launched. Eris is giving away great stuff to people who buy the book, stuff that the people that are likely to read it will really like. If that works, it will hit the Amazon and other best seller lists and this will mean it will be bought by people who wouldn’t normally know about it.

Because of the launch promotion bonuses, minimum tier one gets $246 (retail) worth of bonuses for a $14.50 book. And it piles up the more you order. Pretty nice. This bundle is 100% stuff I think you will really use. No phony discounts. No free trials.

This really is genius in two way. a) The more books you buy, the more valuable the rewards and b) it is restricted to one week to boost the sales to the bestseller list, which if achieved will push the sales even further. Oh, and the time limit is from 12th September through 19th September.

Go Eric! Love your thoughs and would love to see your book go bestseller. Below is a video we shot when Eric Ries visited Helsinki in 2009. Most likely the content of the book is similar to this.

Customer Development is everything thinks Steve Blank

Business

Watch Top Gun. And you understand how it feels to run a startup. I really loved this analogue by Steve Blank during his lecture today.

Think how the fighter pilot operates in the cockpit: OODA loop. OODA stands for Observe, Orient, Decide and Act. This concept is basically a strategic level mindset in military operations, and can easily be applied to understand startup leadership. It is a rather complex system of decision making and imagine you have to do all those decision while flying mach 2.1, and you have only split seconds to react. That's how it feels.



The quest for a business model

In a scalable startup (for more on different type of startups here), the founding team is in a search for a repeatable and scalable business model. That is very different from actual execution in a company. The main difference with startups and corporations are that, in the latter one, the executive management already knows the business model because it has already been found. The startup phase should be temporary during the project's transformation into a company, and the sole purpose should be to understand the metrix needed to make reliable decisions.

Unlike in a corporation, the only accounting needed in a startup are a) burnrate and b) how much is left at the bank. Nothing else. Profitability or such do not matter until the startup team has verified the business model. When the model is verified, the company will actually deliver a valid value proposition for the their customer segments.



Do the customer development

Please, do not waste time on business plans. No business plan will ever stand the test of an initial customer encounter. This is often the first fatal flaw. The second flaw is to think all the imaginable features should be in the product. Learn to go lean and have just minimal viable feature set to test your assumptions. If your assumptions are correct, you should have no problems to add revenue to pay for the future development. If not, it is time to go back to the drawing board and tweak the model a bit.

Steve Blank thinks that many startups fail because they found no customers. Not because they could not deliver what the technical feature set failed. The startups just ended up building "a house where nobody wanted to live". So like the fighter pilots in "Top Gun", the startup founders have to move fast with limited resources. They have to do decision calls with limited amount of data. Essentially the thrills come through those decisions made blindly, with gut feelings. Just remember, your gut feeling will only emerge by talking to the customers and developing from there.

Most importantly, remember to find and document "what have we learned about customers and what is our story". That is what makes headlines.

Flow Festival 2011 feeling

I went to Flow Festival 2011, this came out. Just one on the series, more of which can be found at Stadi.TV

Rush only to have a great product

Business

"What are you waiting for?" That is something many pro-entrepreneur individuals say when you have an idea or would like something to be better. I completely agree, that yea "What are you waiting for!". Just do it. After that, everybody starts talking you should go lean, fail fast and learn while doing it. This way there might be better chance to find a fit for the market and start collecting those dimes worth more than variable costs per unit sold.

Therefore, just as an idea: When you start your business, there is an immense rush to get stuff done. It stresses you out in the nights, gets you a positive rush the next and anxiety the day you look into the business' bank account. And the latter one is the one you are rushing for.



Be the first in the market...er...not

Be the first in what you do? Well, I don't think so. You might have heard the praises for blue ocean strategy. In blue oceans, demand is created rather than fought over. There is ample opportunity for growth that is both profitable and rapid. In blue oceans, competition is irrelevant because the rules of the game are waiting to be set. Blue ocean as a strategy is correct, but it often is mixed with the idea of being the first.

It is true that you have many advantages if you execute an blue ocean strategy. But the advantage does not come from being the first.

The gold rush

So, what is the key when you go out and start your business? I would argue that is it the rush to have a great product. You are definitely in a rush, especially every time you look into your bank account. Eric Ries argues that an entrepreneur’s greatest advantage is their obscurity. If your first product sucks, at least not too many people will know about it. But that is the best time to make mistakes, as long as you learn from them to make the product better.

Therefore, the rush is to have a great product that creates a blue ocean before you run out of money.

Freedom is... the ability to choose

Philosophy

"I'm not afraid. I'm standing on top of this building, watching the storm approaching. I am not scared, taking on any weather it takes, cold or warm. We walk this world together afterall".

Filmmaker Pedro de la Fuente @pfuente, a good friend of mine, is currently working on to make people think what is freedom? I would start asking what is the value of freedom. To start, lets say loyalty has an important aspect. Loyalty to believe and to trust that the other will or can go out to do what is decided. When you trust, you can propose freedom.


This summer I've had the freedom to go fishing at 11pm

Loyalty and freedom

The key to understanding freedom is to recognize and respect that people are deeply loyal to themselves and those they love, but not to products, brands and governments (as society could be understood). They are loyal to their own values and the (relatively few) people and causes they truly believe in. What looks and feels like loyalty to a government, product, brand, company, etc. is driven by what that product, service, brand says about who we are and what we value.

If I buy from you, with money or by action, it’s not because I like you but because I like myself


This summer I've had the freedom to enjoy time in the park with my girl

Value of freedom

I also discussed this in a study on branding (pdf here). The value of freedom can be understood through an idea of post-modernism: the need to order the world into easily identifiable ranks and categories. Categories are society's way to interpret, to contrast and compare objects. The values signify the person's identity and leads to an active enjoyment of the specific object. The value of freedom is, therefore, the emotional interaction in a world of free choices. In a post-modern society, the citizen freely collects signs that signify the self.

The value of an object is the ability to create emotional loyalty, which emerges from the signification of the self. Hence the value of freedom is about the option to choose.


This summer I've had the freedom to enjoy a cup of tea with magazines.

6 business opportunities with social media overload

Business


Mashable here has a great article about "Sharepocalypse", or how social media overload will generate an expanse of new problems. However, this will generate a new opportunity for social assistance — a new category of software and services — and therefore, a ripe environment for startups.

Social Relationship Management (SRM): : Services that help people create, organize and manage sets of social network relationships — for example, sets of people to follow and/or share with on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, etc.

Social Awareness: Services that help people keep up with their social networks, especially among a user’s friends.

Social Curation: Services that help people organize and make sense of their streams and messages.

Social Personalization: Services that help people sift through the network noise for information most relevant to their particular needs and interests.

Social Analytics: Services that help to measure online social behavior and trends, optimize engagement, monitor activity and communicate more appropriately.

Social Automation: Services that help to automate activity in social networks, like automatically updating your status, helping to increase your influence, suggesting what to share, matchmaking, alerting, and using bots to intelligently interact with and assist users.

Because social assistance will become so necessary, both vertical and horizontal social assistance could mean interesting opportunities for startups. Ventures that provide vertical social assistance for particular networks, like Google+ and Facebook are going to be early build versus buy acquisition targets. These are rapid innovation opportunities for individual developers or small teams.

Louis Vuitton S/S 2012 for men looks

Style

I really do enjoy Louis Vuitton style and here is a nice look at the latest style for their S/S 2012 men's collection.

Manifesto to End Digital Divide - by FACT Liverpool

Philosophy

Posting an manifesto I was given a week ago at Liverpool. It gives you a nice overview of of challenges societies see regarding the growing digital divide and how to tackle it. This is super important for societies in Europe, and rest of the world as well.

Tackling the Digital Divide

1. Give older people access to enter the digital world - Residential care homes, sheltered accomodation, clubs for the elderly and care centres should be digital hubs - providing mental stimulation and opportnities to explore and learn new creative media skills. Digital technology can help older people get socially connected, with lessons in how to surf, blog, make short films or even DJ. 

2. Let's open the doors to the online Town Hall - Community activity is increasingly happening online via forums and websites for the local population. Democratic debate and participation is thriving o the internet. Older people should have greater access to the tools and skills needed to participate in their online neightbourhood. 

3. Online Freedom Passes for over 65's - The internet is now the primary source for public service information. From collecting pensionsto legal advice, everything is going digital. To ensure pensioners can make the most of the opportunities available, the Government and Internet Service Providers should provide over 65s with subsidised internet access, and make access to super-fast broadband for the most vulnerable a priority.

4. End digital illiteracy - 10 million people in the UK lacking basc digital skills os a social injustice ans an economic liability. The government should set a target for eliminating digital illiteracy by 2013 and established Government's national youth service where young people "buddy-up" with the elderly online.

5. Social networking across the ages - Conversations between the generations are fundamental to a well-functioning, happy society - and the Internet is the perfect place for those conversations to take place. From webinars which bring older people into the classrooms to online Q&A's, the young and the old should meet in the digital ether - actively promoted by Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

Putting Power in the Hands of Citizens in the Digital Age

Business

I am attending and speaking at The Finnish Institute in London organised Community TV Expert Meeting, held at FACT Liverpool. This is a roundtable event trying to promote cooperation and best practises of Community media.



One idea forwarded during the day is to look back at community media of 70s and 80s. Curation and social identity through pirate media stations gained traction in these centuries. So we argue that, putting power in the hands of citizens will be one of the first choice for curators and media.

Community television is a throwback to a time when cable technology was new and the web was not yet born. It allowed anyone to create a program that could be seen on cable. Community television was the youtube of its day; but things have changed. Downloading and streaming have precipitated a complicated restructuring of the television industry, brought on in part by new viewing habits. Traditional TV now seems to be on the wane. But there are some things that are harder for the internet to replace.



Most television takes more than one person to make. The internet cannot replace the studio space, hands-on training and possibilities for in-person collaboration and mentorship that community television allowed for. It won't replace the sense of place provided by a community production studio; a space where people can gather, work, learn and create together.

We are at a critical moment when traditional media ownership is more concentrated than ever, and yet we have perhaps the most participatory medium in history at our fingertips. As such, citizens need access to media literacy, knowledge and media production skills more than ever before. Community media centres--modeled on the idea of recreation centres and local libraries--may be a crucial piece of the digital divide puzzle

Finally an nice overlook of Liverpool from the rooftop of FACT.

The Restaurant Day in Helsinki

Style

A week ago me and Helene had the pleasure to attend as guests the community led Restaurant Day. We went to the Restaurant "ViiniTV" As it is, from the link at Visit Helsinki site you will find more info.

I do not really have any opinion on the current state of food and beverage industry, but in my opinion such actions are amazing to boost activity within Helsinki Region. Not in commercial way per se, but think about the new connections people ended up having during that evening last saturday. Just myself happened to gain 3 new contacts that evening, some might even end up being business friends. And thanks for the 1976 Port guys!



Food and drinks are one common issue we all have and there is nothing better than Michelin-grade dinner, served in 3 room apartment with 14 smily faces around you. I myself hope the next such day will be held on August as it is planned. See the meal photos below, taken by Helene Auramo

Breads


Starter


Main Course


Dessert

Value of Curation

Business


(source)

Why is curation so important for the future of web content publishers? I believe the content curator is the next emerging disruptive role in the content creation and distribution chain. With increasing amount of information shared, curation is tremendously valuable service to anyone looking for quality information online: a subjective and qualified selection of the best and most relevant content and resources on a very specific topic or theme.

I could argue that a content curator is someone "who continually finds, organizes and shares the best and most relevant content on a specific issue online". The most important component of this job is the word "continually."In the real-time world of the Internet, this is critical.

The idea of curation goes back to the art world, where galleries have for decades used professional curators to shape the experience of the visitor. This is the key element. As a curator, one has to think about the gallery visitors. The individual experience from the accessibility to the end thoughts about the art pieces are extremely important. And as the possibilities are endless, curation brings a lot of value to the experience. Afterall, I very much enjoy the explanations about the gallery's arts, on which I can build my own view.


(source)

When we go back to online media, the value gained is not any different. Mastering how to create niche-targeted compilations of content is indeed one of the key lifesaving strategies that online publishers can adopt to offer greater value, even at a price, to those interested in it.

We live in a world where attention has become so scarce to become as valuable as currency. The ability to organize, select, compile and edit the most valuable information on anyone topic is ever needed.

Hence, I am well underway on working on a solution for this. :)

Helsinki Trivia on Stadi.TV

ON Stadi.TV, the service that focuses on local Helsinki region issues, you'll find these amazing Helsinki Trivia videos. Go check out how much you know about Helsinki

Analysis of Business Ecosystems

Business

Yesterday I was at a TIVIT next media event, listening to for example Burton Lee from Stanford University. However the most interesting keynote came from Saku Mäkinen, a PhD and Tampere University of Technology professor. And it was about Ecosystems.



Ecosystem Properties

Ecosystems in the nature are about energy flow. Similar idea should be applied to to the business ecosystems, where the energy flows through all the organizations and aims to add value to the end user, argues Mr. Mäkinen. Ususally ecosystems are extremely messy systems (note that these are still organised systems!) and works best if the players are striving towards similar value adding goals. Disruptions, both innovations or market cycles, often break the value adding chain and requires heavy adaptation from each organisation involved, expecially the so called keystone or dominator organisations.



Key points:
- Ecosystems are hierarchical systems
- Ecosystem's organisations have interdependence on each others
- Ecosystems have to be goal oriented
- Ecosystems have modular approach to organize itself
- Ecosystems have to a feedback process in place to enable evolution


Evolution of Ecosystem

Ecosystems tend to organize itself around a certain technology, manufacturing or service process. Mr. Mäkinen says this core element needs to be build down the system as far as possible to make it worthwhile. However, depending on the role of the organization, it can focus on certain niches and still be a very important part of the ecosystem.

According to Mr. Mäkinen, the ecosystem have 3 possible roles: Keystone or Dominator and Niche. Great ecosystems are organic, with no added 'preservaties' or non-natural (for the ecosystem) ingredients. Growth usually evolves around certain roles.



Main role is Keystone player who acts as a source of income and energy for the rest of the ecosystem. This organization is thus usually facing the consumers and needs to have a very need knowledge of the market's needs. This main role is usually taken few big organizations within the markets. These roles are usually created in a heterogenous, fragmented and lucrative markets.

Dominators are similar to Keystone players, but do strive to control the ecosystem to a much higher degree. These organizations need to have massive resources to both create stable energy flow and to adapt on market disruptions. And they need to have even deeper knowledge of the market's needs than Keystone organisations. Usually Dominators evolve in market that are homogenous, mature and lucrative.

The bulk of the ecosystem will consist of specialized niche organization that fulfill a certain role to serve the keystone or dominator roles. The strength of niche is focus, that generates higher productivity and better quality. Therefore keystone/dominator organisations tend to work with these organisation, rather than maintaining all the required parts of the ecosystem themselves. Through innovations, niche players might evolve into keystone / dominator roles.

It is all about the end user!

Mr Mäkinen pointed out that quite often, organisations tend to forget that ecosystem's energy flows towards the end user. The aim of this energy is not to work to the end user, but for the end user. As Charlie Leadbeater has said, ecosystem, like any system, that is self-interested works to you, not for you.


Short summary:
- Ecosystem leadership is no guarantee for advantage nor profits
- Nothing last forever as innovations can disrupt everything
- End user value adding is a focal point. Remember to work for the end user.

Sometimes it is nice to buy presents

I love shopping at Louis Vuitton store. The service is exceptional and when you walk out, you know your present will make someone happy. :)

Organic Breakfast

Breakfast: organic rustic bread topped with organic garlic cheese. Goes down with Golden Needle tea.

Some Beijing Roasted Duck

Log

We have had a busy week behind, with tons of meetings, product development. Later on I am able to tell you more about them, however to celebrate this me and Helene decided to go for some Chinese. Got to love Beijing Duck aka Roasted Duck. Superb Chinese dish.

Promotion Day

Business

ArcticStartup made an article about our latest project Blog!flow. I also love the hectic feeling and excitement to see what people think about your work. Today created some buzz and a lot of new users.

My advice would be was to prepare better for the promotion. And make sure you are technically ready for the increased traffic or users. But more important is to release and prmote often. No use in creating the greatest product of all time and never releasing it. Overall a great day.

The Man in Black - CQ UK

Style

Overall, I am a big fan of "The man in black" himself, and these pictures just refresh the style I am kinda fond of. Not on this style everyday, but kinda need to get my groove on towards this gravitational force of a style.

Style the City goes London

Creativity

Our creative project Style the City is going to London. First video uploaded today and now we are already covered style from Helsinki, San Francisco and London. I am super excited about this development and hope to see more cities added in the near future.

In Style the City I am interested to understand how the style of a city forms using an artistic approach of video. Using this approach, I wish to be able to create a network of videographers to work together on this and other projects

For more go to www.stylethecity.com

Augmented reality magic in Davos by Marco Tempest

Nick Knight shoots Lady Gaga

Amazing data visualisation!

Creativity

Why is dreaming so important?

Philosophy

...because people crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones that do!
Steve Jobs, 1997