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Philippe Stark on design

What inspiration and fun Philippe Stark can be! There's more than meets the eye in what he says in this presentation...

Inspiration of the day

Impossible is sometimes an excuse for not trying enough different ways for reaching a goal. Many thanks to Anne (Institut Ressources), Sylviane and JH (Media4) for letting me have this gift today.

Are You Going To Finish Strong? Awesome video! If you watch only one video today make sure it is this one! Nick Vujicic has no limbs but he leads an incredible life!

Roubini confirms deep crisis: how will you shield your business?

Nouriel Roubini’s (RGE – Wikipedia –  Page at NYU Stern) interview on Bloomberg is something you ought to listen carefully (podcast at the end of this post) if you’re a business founder, a manager or an asset owner. It’s not exactly the sort of content that will boost your morale, but I don’t believe the Coué method is the right way to go because it’s much more than a mere crisis of confidence. On the other hand neither denial, nor pessimism are going to take us anywhere.

Rather a pragmatic take on the situation is an essential first step if you’re serious about adapting and being in a position to fully benefit from an eventually recovering economy. This is only one of the reasons why it’s worth getting down to some of the implications of this analysis for business. Today helping business people deal with anxiety and make sense of this chaos is part of my work in different industries, from commodities to tech-innovative sectors, in different areas of Europe. So what does a pragmatic analysis of the situation mean for business? Read on and listen to the podcast.

Widenoise just released by WideTag

Even the longest journey starts with the first step… As WideTag releases WideNoise I feel this is the best way to describe the event because WideTag’s stated destination is to be a leading player when the Internet of Things becomes reality.

As WideTag’s CTO often says, there is a still a hell of a lot of stuff missing from the real world for the Internet of Things to happen, but one ought to start with what we’ve got, include new stuff that is coming up and build whatever is missing.

WideNoise, designed by a beautiful team released yesterday as an iPhone application that allows you to socially share data about the noise level at a specific location, is very much the result of this very pragmatic approach: use an existing networked device that has at least one sensor embedded to offer a first application of a “spime”. What’s a spime? It’s a device capable of recording and transmitting location coordinates as well as information about its immediate surrounding, e.g. temperature, carbon dioxide concentration… Now, spimes are likely to play a prominent role in the Internet of Things. Although it’s quite geeky as a concept (if you’re interested read this), there are three reasons why it’s noteworthy:

1. spimes will be (already are) all over the place in a matter of a few years using technologies (RFID, GSM, GPRS, GPS, GoogleMaps…) that only need assembling
2. with the environmental crisis we need to measure our “physical” world in order to make smarter (micro-)decisions from whether to use a car to how to manage the powergrid dynamically
3. the flow of data that will be captured will in part BELONG TO YOU so you don’t want it taken from you without your consent or in a way that is so proprietary you can’t control it, which is one of the reasons why WideTag seeks to make things open, something it started doing with OpenSpime, an initiative aimed at offering open protocols and technologies to the world for building and operating the spimes of the future

In fact, Widenoise is also a bridge between the “pure vision” of the Internet of Things (where objects are supposed to exchange information and form self-configuring networks for relaying the data) and today’s reality of applied technology becoming increasingly “social” and hybrid in that it mixes hardware, software and people to create value for participants. So has WideTag managed to make noise social as a very nice post of this morning claims?

Congratulations Nimbuzz!

Almost a year and a half ago on I covered Nimbuzz on this blog because I felt they had a pretty cool and promising proposition. Since, their team has been able to progress even more and get to the point of receiving the prestigious Red Herring Global 100 award.
As always, I am thrilled to see entrepreneurial ventures find their way and reach new heights, so congrats to the team of Nimbuzz for beautifully pursuing an entrepreneurial quest that creates value.

Awesome innovation at WideTag and sr labs

One thing is certain: my current trip to Milan is most interesting. That's mainly because I had working sessions and discussions with three exceptional persons, the founders of WideTag, Leandro Agrò (blog - profile - a conference he co-founded - idearium and leading designed at sr labs until a couple of years back), Roberto Ostinelli (profile - a multi-talented individual who's a beautiful artist as well as an accomplished technologist and business person) and David Orban (blog - profile). The achievements of that little bunch of determined persons have been very significant indeed over the course of the past 10 months and they create a foundation on which to create more.
As a coincidence of sorts I also got a great opportunity to learn about a fascinating Italian company called sr labs and to actually try their amazing i-able product which makes it possible to control and command a computer solely with one's eyes. It's quite an extraordinary experience because of the incredible precision of the device, its ease of use and the speed at which one gets acquainted with the way the product works. Aside from obvious applications to help disabled people access and control a computer, there is a range of other fields in which the eye tracking technology could be applied. Definitely worth a closer look...   

Could Sorell's greater online engagement help push for WPP digital leadership?

Excerpts from a BusinessWeek article with some fairly interesting info about the goals and obstacles faced by WPP as it tries to transform itself into a next generation marketing agency. Interestingly Martin Sorell, its CEO is pushing employees and Board Directors alike to adopt new practices from video, to Facebook, to Twitter and other social tools. And that's the right way to go for this sort of transition from yesterday to tomorrow, an endeavor only very few companies managed to achieve in business history.

Now, since I believe that coherence, alignment and consistency are essential ingredients of success as the US presidential super-campaign amply demonstrated, I wanted to check whether Sorell, the staunch promoter of WPP's diitization, has done anything for himself to be more present, more digital, more of a "social networker" I looked for his profile on LinkedIn and the result was, I quote, "0 results for Martin Sorell". Same thing on Naymz and Plaxo, while on Facebook there's only one entry without pictures and with one friend called Mélanie Pineau. So let me get this: we're about to have the first awesomely digital US President in Barack Obama (present on all sorts of online platforms from Facebook to LinkedIn to Twitter to a YouTube channel and with fans forming Plaxo groups like this one), and the head of tomorrow's would-be leading agency is nowhere to be seen? When is Sorell going to assemble a small team of WPP wiz kids to build his own onine presence? That would go a long way to making his push with employees and close co-workers much more compelling IMHO.

clipped from www.businessweek.com

strategy to make the $15 billion agency a leader in the emerging world of digital communications

At an Oct. 20 board meeting in Palo Alto, Calif., Sorrell had all the directors—including himself—learn how to upload video and create their own Facebook pages

chairman of interactive marketing company OgilvyOne, figures he pays 15% to 30% more to hire young people with one-third less experience than those versed in traditional advertising channels

Sorrell also is pushing for greater cooperation among WPP companies to incorporate TV, video, print, mobile technology, and social networking into every campaign

WPP recently won a hefty portion of a Johnson & Johnson

widely reported to be worth more than $100 million

WPP staged a science fair-style presentation inside JWT's New York office, where representatives from 20 WPP units sat in different booths, showing off displays such as a WPP-designed social network promoting a prescription drug and an interactive Web site to inform doctors

Inspiration from The Last Lecture

Today's inspiration from me. Dr Pausch's presentation contains a message for those of my customers who complain when I tell them what they need to know instead of what they'd like to hear: "your critics are the ones telling you they love you and care... when you're doing a bad job and nobody points it out to you, that's when they've given up on you". Enjoy.

The full lecture given at Carnegie Mellon University is below. Be sure to take the hour and a quarter needed to watch it because it's worth it. Every slice of it.

Done!

Well, I guess it's done in the fullest sense of the word: the scrum master training is over and it's been an exciting couple of days with Jeff Sutherland and great participants. There was theory, there were facts (many) and there was also practice, where I got an opportunity to play with nice fun people like Nicolas and to benefit from the creative ideas of Denis, two team mates in a practice sequence that we blew away. One of the missions was to build a four story house of cards (that's where Denis creative use of post-its came in). Great fun. Here are the pictures.

The team's achievement (OK, the fourth level of the house is minimalistic, but on the other hand that was the description of the requirement in the story point, so why go beyond and take the risk of send everything crumbling down?) with Denis trying to hide behind a bottle of water ;-)

Nicolas, who's given us a great tip to properly achieve estimates: make sure you are absolutely clear about what "done" means... and that makes a world of difference both in terms of quality of estimates and in terms of making the interaction between team members really productive and uplifting:

The team's achievement with Laurent at the right hand side in the background. Laurent works for CRP Henri Tudor, Luxembourg's public research center, which means that Luxembourg had some serious proportion of the audience in this session of scrum master (there were 4 people from Vanksen Group, Laurent and myself - I count at least 50% from Luxembourg given the amount of time I spend there!).

Upgrading my "software"

One of the things that I most love about being a freelance professional is the freedom to choose how I go about upgrading my skills, the software that I have installed between my ears if you will. In fact, following trainings that can help me better coach and help my customers is a priority. That's one criterion for choosing and that's what led me to participate to a two-day training session organized by Xebia with Jeff Sutherland (who I find very impressive with his great combination of expertise, experience and common sense - highly recommended!) on scrum a method that he's helped invent. Scrum does seem to be the kind of methodology that truly binds agile practices of software development teams to agile product management, i.e.exactly what one needs to help customers in fast paced and high-growth business contexts. For more about Scrum this is a good link. No nonsense approach to projects, smart implementation of lessons from complex adaptive systems and action orientation are the characteristics I most appreciate in the approach. I will definitely be looking for projects and environments where to apply this stuff...

A contrarian's view

If we are serious about dealing with durable (human) development and the type of world we will leave to future generations (not only in the economically developed world), it is worth listening to well documented views from contrarians like Bjorn Lomborg, whose book Cool It I strongly recommend. Worth considering on this Blog Action Day I think. His presentation at TED Talks can be viewed at the end of this post.

What I like about what he develops is that:

1. he makes the case for immediate action on stuff that matters today and has consequences tomorrow, possibly preparing people and nations to better deal with threats that we cannot possibly fathom
2. his approach involves considering the issues of the human condition in an integral manner, not looking at matters in isolation
3. he considers the limited nature of current resources and outlines a path for a rational use of those resources to achieve the goal of a wealthier and more balanced world
4. taking an integral approach forces us to confront the contradictions of our current ways with barely conceivable imbalances between endeavours of different types and merits
5. considering costs and benefits and focusing on currently achievable steps while keeping an end goal in mind is precisely what will break the loosing game of the prisonner's dilema as outlined in a recent article of The Economist

A convenient Nobel Peace Prize: challenges ahead remain

Thrilled is probably the best way to describe how I feel at the news that the Nobel Peace Price is to be shared between the scientific community represented by the IPCC and Al Gore. At a time when Exxon is going out of its way to influence public opinions and governments against taking radical action about climate change and when Fox is doing everything it possibly can (serving which masters, I wonder?) to exploit imperfections in An Inconvenient Truth, the Nobel Prize is exactly what is needed to further tip the balance in favor of immediate action. I suspect it is also a great moment for a very special production company called Participate, which I covered on this blog over a year ago.
The challenge is huge especially when one factors into what needs to be done about climate change the following:

1. China's explosive growth that is by no means environmentally friendly (see excerpt from Gore's documentary below)
2. the fact that the growth of the other BRIC countries is not necessariy more sustainable than China's
3. US indifference to Kyoto and hostility to accepting limitations and binding measures to curb emissions and move towards a cleaner and more sustainable economic model, which presumably cannot continue to be based on unchecked mass consumption of goods engineered for a limited useful life (programmed obsolescence is the technical word for it)
4. the ethical conundrum that we all find ourselves trapped into in the sense that the developed world reached its current level of welfare by using natural resources without consideration for their limited nature and therefore is not in a moral position to force less-developed nations to subject their growth to an overarching goal of durable development
5. the dynamics that are currently in place worldwide and which were very well described in a recent article of The Economist (covered here) arguing that game theory could be used to actually bring the world out of the current deadlock

Impressions from Ad:Tech London

This is a short interview given by Emmanuel Vivier, one of the founders of Vanksen Group (a customer I advise in matters of strategy, growth management, organization, structuring and corporate governance) at Ad:Tech in London. Emmanuel gives some pretty interesting assessments of the readiness of the market for new marketing approaches. It does seem that marketing decision makers are increasingly aware and willing to deploy integrated online-offline campaigns and to exploit capabilities of the Information Age for communicating. However, there are quite a few new challenges that they may not be familiar with, starting with the issues of brand management and brand protection in an open environment like the Internet. And since we are getting closer to 15-OCT (blog action day), I will simply put out the questions: how relevant is it to be marketing in ever cleverer ways if that does not contribute to better consumption instead of merely more consumption? how can new marketing support more sustainable economic models that do not require more natural resources than can be afforded by the one planet we have? Probably something to be considered as part of strategy formulation at Vanksen Group.