Ice cream for everyone

My 2011

2012-01-01T19:14:00.004Z

I had an absolutely fantastic 2011. I started traveling, leaving in February this is what I've done:

You can view the whole list of places I've been here. I've been wanting to go on a trip like this for a very long time and I'm loving it so much it's not over.

Here's a list of some cool things I accomplished in 2011, in bullet points and no order:

I visited 7 countries in Asia and altogether traveled a pretty impressive 22,845 miles (36,765km), a lot of it overland in Southeast Asia
I caught up with one of my very best friends I hadn't seen in 4 years
I grew a beard for the first time. Then shaved it
I spent time with my lovely baby niece, my little brother and his girlfriend in Laos
I learned to scuba dive and fell in love with it
I did nothing, for hours on end. Watching life go by and observing people in different countries
I helped sort out a pretty important family crisis early in the year
I started officially working for myself while traveling
I kickstarted the first Beersphere planner meetup in Singapore
I joined the Heather's team to crunch numbers for the annual Planner Survey
I started taking care of my health, for several things that were overdue
I lost 16 kilos (2.5 stone) though of course regained a bit while staying with my parents
I met some truly amazing people on the way and made new friends
I read a bunch of books
I hitch-hiked for the first time since I was like 16 years old
I got myself in a fight for the third time of my life
I partied!
I had some fantastic food
I spent time with my parents and my family in France
I started a pretty ambitious plan of organising an event it's still work in progress
I became a digital nomad.

2011 was such a great year. So much fun, so many new experiences.

2012 is looking good too, I'm soon going to start traveling again. First catching up with more friends and family in Europe and then more travels in Asia. My first faraway stop should be to visit my older brother in the Maldives, which I'm really looking forward to. I can't wait to see what awaits this year.

My kind of planning

2011-10-05T14:50:00.000+01:00

There is always a lot of talk around the Plannersphere town about different types of planning and new types of planning, I guess it's a part of our trade to discuss and define what we do and how we're doing it, which on one side is cool, always interesting thoughts brought to the table, and another side I sometimes find the overuse of often ill defined or even meaningless jargon as well as rehashed conversation themes somewhat tedious.

Now don't get me wrong, I love a good conversation and I think it's a juicy topic for planners, I get into these and I also use quite a bit of jargon, I think it's inevitable. I typically use lots of jargon as an easy or lazy way out of explaining what I actually mean, to impress in a meeting and/or because we talk so much BS most days that no one will question another jargon word in a meeting and nod as if it makes complete sense. Or they'll counter BS with another bunch of jargon words. Until the meeting is over and no one is really clear what it was all about or what the next steps are. And of course, I'm exaggerating to make my point, I'm sure you get it.

Regarding planning there's account planning, brand planning, comms planning, digital planning, PR planning, creative planning, etc. More recently I've seen agile planning, micro planning, real time planning, engagement planning, social media planning, innovation planning planning by doing, etc. Then to make things more interesting there's the conversations about strategy and the difference with planning, if there is one. On top, you can also apply all the previous varieties of planning to strategy, so we get digital strategy, social media strategy, etc. Then we can also blend in order to get strategic planning, or even digital strategic planning, agile strategic planning, etc. I could go on, but you probably get the idea.

However interesting I've found many blog posts, articles or presentations on these topics the more terms of the kind I read, the less sense they make at all. And let's remind ourselves that planning is nebulous for most people to start with, I find adding more varieties and different definitions doesn't necessarily help.

In a rare attempt at a relatively thoughtful post, I'm now going to go against what I just said and I'll add a new piece jargon to our ever growing collection of fancy vocabulary. I'm going to tell you what kind of planning I enjoy, give it a name, and tell you what it is. It's already been said in several other ways by other planners and thinkers out there so it's not ground breaking or rocket science, it's just a variation on a theme.

Over the past few years, I've been asked a few times what kind of planner I am and just saying I'm a planner doesn't seem sufficient. The voice of reason and convention says I'm a digital planner because that's the kind of projects I have the most professional experience with and I enjoy them, but then I also tend to go into a lengthy explanation about the fact that I consider myself a planner and that the digital part of the title is just because some people understand better, or think they do, with that point specified.

I'm now ready to answer this question about what kind of planner I am, and as I previously mentioned I'm lazy so I'm going to give it a jargon name and if people adopt it, then I won't have to explain anymore, and I'll save myself a few minutes for every meeting or conversation where I should have explained it otherwise, which would be fantastic.

I call it Making Shit Happen Planning.

Using it as an acronym will also allow everyone to save precious tiny bits of time, avoid potential awkward usage of an excretion type word as well as add to the general nebulous nature of planning altogether, and lastly so other people don't ask questions in fear of being caught not knowing the latest jargon out there.

You guessed it, now we have MSH Planning. That's my kind of planning.

So what is MSH Planning?

Excellent question, thanks for asking.

I work in the sort of general marketing and communications industry and sometimes clients need stuff to happen. They tell me what they need happening (or if you're in an agency sometimes the account manager type people come up and tell the planner what the client said they wanted happening; a meeting might be taking place) and then I ask them some questions about what they need happening, to make sure I really understand what they want / need. I usually find that the more questions I can think of asking them and the more answers I can get, then the better I am at MSH Planning.

The stuff clients need happening of course often involves making sales happen, but the stuff in question can also be extremely varied and different; anything from figuring out what their new brand should be to posting the right kind of content on Twitter (Yes, those two are totally related). I think that's where all the different types of planning come into play, but let's put them aside for now. Once I'm happy I understand well enough what the client needs happening, or the client gets bored of my questions - whichever comes first, I go away - and this is the tricky part, pay attention - I develop a plan for how the stuff needed by the client is going to happen.

For a quick reminder I just checked planning with my trusty Google Dictionary:

I think in our case, we're more interested in 1.

There are of course a lot of questions involved in developing this plan, but whatever the job is, they can be summed up of a combination of these, in no particular order:

What?
Who?
How?
Where?
When?

Once I'm confident I have a good plan that is going to make that shit the client wants actually happen, I can go back and present it. Some negotiations may be involved at this stage, in order to come to an agreement on the plan. Then the plan goes ahead and if the shit intended happens, it was a good plan.

That's pretty much it. I'll recap:

A client wants something to happen
I ask a few questions to make sure I understand what they want
I go and develop a plan to make the something happen
We agree on the plan
Plan goes ahead
Results

The something intended happened, the plan was successful
The something intended did not happen, the plan unsuccessful

These steps can take place over any length of time, long or short, repeated or not, it doesn't really matter as the steps are basically the same (That's where I think we're into Agile / real time / micro planning, which could be discussions about the timeline and repetition or lack thereof of these steps - I'll also leave that aside for now). The steps are also very simple though not necessarily easy and there is a lot to learn within each, but we'll keep it here for now.

That's MSH Planning. I really like it, and now I'm developing my own little business and tend to work with small to medium clients that appreciate planning but don't have that much time or cash for much BS, so it's good to keep it simple even though the plan itself may be complicated by the end. And given I'm often in the novel position if implementing and executing some parts of the plan in addition to developing it, I'm discovering that the more freedom and trust I have from the client, the better able I am to do good MSH Planning.

I'm also realising how really frustrated I was while working at an agency that most of the plans I would develop would not go ahead at all, typically staying stuck forever in phase 4. 'We agree on the plan' or simply canceled altogether. I also know this happens in the industry, though I think it doesn't have to be this way as often as I've seen or heard.

To finish this off, MSH Planning doesn't just apply to marketing and communications, you can use these steps in all sorts of other areas. Plus making shit happen will make you happy and fulfilled. It's often challenging and it's also really worth it.

I you haven't before, I highly recommend you try MSH Planning. I also dare you to use the term in a meeting. If you do, I want to hear about it.

Return of Beersphere - in London!

2011-09-27T05:41:00.004+01:00

Hello London planners! It turns out I am unexpectedly coming back to Europe for a few months, and just before leaving I will be meeting with a bunch of Singapore planners for a Beersphere (the first official Beersphere Singapore, I believe) the week before coming to London, so I thought it would be fun to follow it straight away with a Beersphere London and catch up with my planner friends there!

I am hoping to make a sort of soft launch announcement for the very exciting secret project I have been working on these past few weeks at Beersphere Singapore, and will be talking about it some more at Beersphere London as well if all goes to plan. I'm also thinking of a cool way to bring word of the Singapore planners directly in the hands of the London planners (ideas welcome!).

In the usual fashion of Beersphere, it will be a casual meetup of planners over a few drinks - and given I've been in Asia so long and missing fine British ales, I've for now decided on having it at The Harp in Covent Garden - hoping the weather won't be too bad as it's a small pub and most people usually end up hanging out on the sidewalk, we'll see how it is weather wise and how many people can make it, if needed we can always change the location.

So if you're free, join us for a few beers from 6:30pm!

The Harp:
47 Chandos Place, Covent Garden
London, WC2N 4HS

Please RSVP for the event on
Facebook
Twtvite / Twitter

Beersphere Strikes Back - in Singapore!

2011-09-18T06:38:00.002+01:00

In the grandest of Beersphere traditions initiated by Faris, come and meet other Singapore planners for a drink or three on Friday 7th October at Mulligan's in Clarke Quay, Singapore! We'll be discussing plannery type stuff, having fun, and of course it's an opportunity for close ethnographic observation of the Clarke Quay fauna (credits to Sushobhan for the expression).

Beersphere is an event very close to my heart, it's at a Christmas Beersphere in London that I made my first forays into officially becoming a planner, Neil and Faris are the first planners I met there, had cool conversations with them and they accepted me as one of them. After that, I was definitely a planner, even though I hadn't found a job as one just yet. I also enjoy beer and chatting with interesting people, so that's a big plus for the event.

If you're a planner in Singapore, I hope to see at Mulligan's in Clarke Quay that evening and count on you to spread the news - I don't know that many planners there myself! Let's make it a big one!

Event details:
Facebook
Twtvite

See you there, I'm looking forward to it!

The importance of Multilingual SEO - or lack thereof

2011-09-15T04:12:00.001+01:00

This is the second email I receive from this gentleman, here is his email and my reply. Just one question, am I being unnecessarily mean? Or is it relatively measured?

To: willem
Subject: http://www.willemvdh.com/ - Did you receive this email sent to you last week ?
Date: Thu, 15 Sep 2011 00:46:35 +0300
From: martin

Did you receive the e-mail which we sent to you recently (copied here-below)?
Please confirm since I have had problems lately with emails intercepted by spam-filters set too high.

Cordially,

Martin, Ph.D.

I am Dr. Martin and I work for Multilingual Search Engine Optimization Inc. in Washington DC (Tel:) - I would like to speak with the person in charge of your international clientele. Who is my contact? Who should I speak to??
In fact, after visiting http://www.willemvdh.com/ , I have noticed that your website cannot be found on foreign search engines (I tested it on Hispanic search engines, German search engines, Asian search engines, etc.) Our company is specialized in multilingual search engine promotions in 28 languages . From the Japanese Google to the German Yahoo, from the AOL in Spanish to the MSN in Chinese, we can show you how to develop a true international online presence by promoting your website on foreign search engines.

Let us show you how to develop a presence on the multilingual web without having to translate your website: It is not necessary to translate your website in order to submit to foreign search engines, however, you need to have at least 1 page in Japanese optimized with Japanese keywords and meta tags in order to submit to Japanese search engines, at least 1 page in Spanish optimized with Spanish keywords in order to submit to Hispanic search engines and so on...

I strongly suggest that you watch our online presentation which explains clearly how to get top rankings on foreign search engines with only 1 entry page per language (click on the following link or copy-paste it into your web browser): http://www.languageseo.net/demoFrom the Japanese Google to the German Yahoo, from the AOL in Spanish to the MSN in Chinese, get users to find your website when searching with YOUR KEYWORDS in their Native language.

Please call me at xx or email me and let's work on giving your website the true international exposure which it deserves to have with foreign native online users!!

Regards,

Martin, Ph.D.
------------------------------
From: willem
To: martin
Subject: RE: http://www.willemvdh.com/ - Did you receive this email sent to you last week ?
Date: Thu, 15 Sep 2011 03:05:21 +0000

Dear Doctor,

I did indeed receive your email last week.

I had started writing a reply but stopped myself because it wouldn't have added any value, I thought it was probably a spam-bot email and it would have wasted my time, which I couldn't afford to do last week as I was very busy. You should probably have left it at that, but you're being insistent now so here I am. You caught me when I was just looking for some content for a new blog post and I can afford to waste a few minutes.

Given you've sent another email, I'm now thinking you are actually serious in what you're talking about which to me is fairly unbelievable, being a marketing and digital communications professional myself. If you are a real doctor, I'm going to go on a wild guess here and say your Ph.D had nothing to do with the Internet because you don't sound like you know what you are talking about.

As you've correctly identified, I have a personal url, it's my personal and sometimes also business blog. It doesn't have that many visitors and I don't really need them either.

It is written - in English - so why would anyone searching the web in another language want to come across it? And why would I bother spending time, effort and I suspect cash to make my site 'SEO friendly in other languages' when I'm writing in english, it doesn't make sense. And if I was searching in another language I may well be looking for content in my own language rather than having a blog written in English show up in my search results. I personally happen to be bilingual in French as well as pretty good with Spanish, if I really wanted to focus on reaching a French or Spanish speaking audience, guess what? I'd write in French or Spanish and then my blog would magically be optimized for French or Spanish search terms.

Moreover it is extremely easy to translate my whole blog for free at the click of a button, you should try Google Translate: http://translate.google.com/. I tried using the link you provided for your presentation and it is broken, though I still found the demo via another journey of clicks on the site.

That demo is preposterous by the way, and definitely contains erroneous information. I'd like to quote this:

'With the Foreign Web, a Japanese user will have a better incentive to type in keywords using his native Japanese characters in a search engine' - Oh my god, who would have thought!?

I imagine and really hope you are a good person just trying to run a good business here, but please realise the concept is just too silly for me to take seriously, I'm sorry.

Kind regards,

Willem

PS: Spam-filters aren't set too high, I found your email in my junk box. You use quite a lot of spam like terms in your email and the filters get it's a very 'salesy' email. I won't give you a recommendation on how to make your emails better, though I would advise focusing your business in a different direction altogether.

Top Secret Project

2011-09-12T10:06:00.000+01:00

It has a been a pretty intense week for me, a lot has happened and I think it's all turning out for the best.

In no particular order:

I have finished two pieces of work I'm pretty happy with; after 7 months traveling (5 of those with no working whatsoever) I had forgotten the kind of intensity and frenzy sometimes involved in finishing work to a deadline when everything suddenly goes wrong. Like those times when you are working on a pitch (plus all your normal work load) and whoever is leading - sometimes yourself - declares 24 or 48h before the pitch presentation that everything is wrong and that the whole thing needs to go back to the drawing board. Don't we all love those moments! And wouldn't you [secretly] agree that some of your best work was born in that weird natural high that takes hold of you beyond exhaustion, when your mind and body are pumped full of adrenalin, serotonin, dopamin, and all sorts of other hormones? This week was a bit like that for me.

You guessed it, I can't sleep. It has never happened to me like this before. I've been operating on an average of 1-3 hours sleep for the past 5 nights or so. it's really weird, I'm alternating between moments of intense inspired creativity / productivity, and moments of total exhaustion. I am slightly worried about my health, I know it's not a good thing to not sleep and I usually love sleeping, though I also think I'm OK and there's something going on demanding I give it attention (more on that further down). Today I felt I'd reached my physical limits, I had a really hard time concentrating on the deck I was writing and progress was very slow. Fortunately the topic was very familiar so I was wrote a lot from instinct, and triple checking everything I wrote. I finally finished the deck at 8pm, had a quick bite to eat as I hadn't eaten since the muffin in the morning. I was in bed before 9pm, feeling like I was ready to sleep all night. I woke up [good sign] certain I must have slept several hours, and it was 10pm. I stayed in a bed a while, then decided to get back up and write this.

My friend JB and I have known each other since we were 6 years old, a long friendship indeed. Him and his wife Marion have asked me to be the godfather of their newborn son Marcus, very exciting stuff and I'm really looking forward to meeting him. Nothing religious about it in case you're wondering (and interestingly the word in French is 'parrain' derived from the latin word patruus meaning paternal uncle, so the etymology itself isn't directly related to god; unlike the English word), I'm an atheist and they aren't particularly religious. I don't have godparents so it's a brand new experience and I know my friends see it as an important responsibility in their family as a different adult figure to the parents for their son. I was honoured to have been asked and I've of course accepted.

I've had a great time in Kuala Lumpur this week, I find it a city that really grows on you if you give it a bit of patience. It's really not pretty, that's true. On the other hand, the food is just phenomenal and as I'm meeting local friends it only gets better because they know the best places to eat. The people here are unbelievably friendly - I seriously can't get over it. You know the long face syndrome in the tube / bus / metro in all sorts of capital cities? Totally non-existent here. People smile, say hi, strike conversation randomly, with no ulterior motives than being curious and friendly. That's another reason I'm really loving spending time in Malaysia and I'm in no hurry to leave. And KL is also a big modern place with wifi everywhere which makes my life as a laptop hobo easier.

I've had this crazy day helping my friend out with changing her flights. Still not exactly over, though she's got back home in Paris as planned and Qatar Airways contacted her. I'll update the blog separately when I have a conclusion to report about it.

I discovered a great band playing in a bar close by. Travel in Southeast Asia long enough and good live bands quickly become very noteworthy as there aren't many and the majority of people around the region prefer going to dance to some cheesy popular club classics than live bands. I've posted a few songs on Audioboo if you want to check them out.

I thank the reader who has had the patience to come to this point and must by now be wondering what is so top secret when I'm basically laying out my life on my public blog.

Well, here's the top secret part: I'm pretty sure I now know the main reason I can't sleep. I have a new project I'm extremely excited and terribly inspired about. I just started working on it and I'm keeping under top secret wraps until it is ready to be properly revealed. I'm hoping for the reveal to take place as fast as possible, realistically probably in a month's time, around early to mid October. In any case I will announce the date of the official reveal as soon as possible. Until then, as my photographer friend Vish knows well, Shh!

P.S.

As I am writing this late at night in Kuala Lumpur and it is already September 12th; so it is early afternoon on 9/11 in New York and memorials of the 10th anniversary must be taking place as I'm writing this. I've decided to publish this post tomorrow, I just wanted to write it now as I can't sleep. I remember 9/11. I was a designer at the time, in a small agency in the suburbs west of Paris. I was shocked beyond belief; actually I hadn't really thought about it in a long time and my eyes are watering with emotion at the memory.

My elder brother Björn who is a chef was supposed to open his first restaurant in Mid-town New York that day and he told me this story. He had been working in the kitchen from really early morning getting everything ready for his opening. His food suppliers weren't showing up. He's stressing out, this is his big day. He picks up the phone and starts shouting at his fish supplier, who says something along the lines of 'You're not going to get your fucking fish today, man. Haven't you seen? Go to your roof!' My brother runs up to the roof of the mid-town Manhattan building, drops the phone to the floor when he sees the giant column of smoke. The first plane had just hit the tower minutes before.

I remember, and my thoughts go to all New Yorkers and Americans on this day.

PPS: After I finished writing this post during the night I was able to sleep again so it's all good. I'm now finishing to amend this post from a super luxury VIP bus on my way from Kuala Lumpur to Singapore. I'm the only passenger! It has super comfy huge seats, electricity for my laptop, onboard wifi, had a breakfast, personal video screens, it's unbelievable!! So I'm working from my bus.

I love my life, I'm the king of the laptop hobos!

Qatar Airways Fail - A friend's unfortunate quest to change her flights

2011-09-07T15:20:00.002+01:00

UPDATE (8th September 2011): The E-marketing manager for Qatar Airways just contacted me directly by email and is going to take care of contacting my friend in order to resolve her complaint. I'm very happy about that and will update again once it's all done with news.

I haven't blogged in a while and never have I gone to such lengths to publicize a company's customer service failings but this is what has been happening to a friend I have just been helping out and I find it so ridiculously outrageous that my friend and I feel the need to spread the news.

If you happen to read this and feel the same way, please spread and share these news far and wide, I'm sure this kind of experiences happen to a lot of people and I'm also pretty sure not everyone complains about it or receives satisfaction from their complaint(s). As a spoiler for anyone looking for real excitement, go watch a movie or something, this isn't anything to do with horror, thriller or action genres. That said, I do believe it's interesting and valuable.

Below is a copy of the email sent by my friend to Qatar Airways feedback and customer service email address, I just wish to add that the intention is not to accuse any one individual employee of Qatar Airways, nor to have anything bad happen to them, rather it is an official complaint to be lodged with the airline company as a whole. My friend had to run to the airport to catch their flight so I'm helping spread the news.

Qatar Airways claims to be 'the World's Best Airline'. My friend and I certainly don't feel this claim to be true right now. I am interested in corporations and organisations providing excellent customer service and what I've experienced today is probably the furthest from excellence I've ever seen.

The way I see it, they have messed up with one of their customers and now have the chance to make it up to them. If they're fast they have several hours to meet them for their layover in Doha in a few hours, or perhaps more realistically they hopefully contact my friend as soon as possible. We'll see.

Dear Sir / Madam,

I am writing this email today in order to register an official complaint to Qatar Airways as I am extremely disappointed so far with the level of service you have provided me as a paying customer with a problem to solve. As a global airline company wishing to promote world class service I would expect much better, particularly as I see that you are advertising yourself as ‘the world’s best airline’ on this site (http://www.qatarairwaysmelbourne.com) and have won several prizes I can see listed here: http://www.qatarairways.com/global/en/newsroom/archive/PressRelease1_22June11.html.

Unfortunately I haven’t found anyone who could help me directly and I find myself feeling forced to not only write you this email, but also to copy and send it to all the relevant people and organisations whom I feel may either be able to help me or would be interested in hearing about my current situation.

I will start at the beginning and explain to you the series of circumstances I have been faced with and the troubles I have had to deal with as a result of them, both on financial and emotional Ievels.

I booked a flight from Paris to Kuala Lumpur for my summer holidays, departing the 31^st July 2011.

My return was planned for the 21^st of August, and I decided to postpone my flight and extend my holidays which is where you presented a first barrier to me: the cost to change my booking was 433 RM which could only be paid via a Malaysian bank account or an international bank transfer, no major credit cards accepted whatsoever. I did not have time to process an International bank transfer and being a French tourist on holidays, I obviously do not have a Malaysian bank account. Fortunately, I managed to ask a Malaysian friend to help me with the transfer; my friend was forced to take time out of their working day to visit the Kuala Lumpur Qatar Airways office in order to pay for my flight change fees and of this I am extremely grateful to them, a new friend in Malaysia had already been ten times more helpful than Qatar Airways to whom I had already paid 1,100 Euros for my original flight, plus the flight change fees.

At this point, I am not even mentioning the 25 phone calls and time on the phone and emails looking to reach the Kuala Lumpur Qatar Airways office in order to organise this flight change, which is already unbelievable for an international company of the size of Qatar Airways.

Unfortunately for me, the National holiday celebrations in Malaysia on the weekend of the 3^rd of September meant that I have had to change my flight again because I found myself unable to get to Kuala Lumpur in time for my flight. Again, I had to call the Qatar Airways Kuala Lumpur office over 20 times and send three emails to change my flight as well as find another Malaysian friend who would be able to help me transfer the new 435RM flight change fee. My understanding was that my flight had been changed for the 7^th September and I arrived here in Kuala Lumpur yesterday morning on the 6^th September.

I checked my emails upon arriving in order to make sure the new booking was confirmed, though having no news I managed to reach the Kuala Lumpur office by phone and found out that my booking had been cancelled and that the only flight now available to me would be on Sunday 11^th September. At that point, I really want to you to understand that I literally broke down in tears on the telephone.

The stress I’ve been under over the weekend knowing I wouldn’t be able to make my flight on the 5^th was already taxing enough, meaning 2 days of unpaid leave from work. The fact that my booking had been cancelled even though the flight change fee had been paid 3 days before for the 7^th September meant that because of Qatar Airways’ poor service and/or mistakes, I would have to call back my employer and explain to them that I would have to take an additional 4 days of unpaid leave.

I spent Tuesday afternoon calling the Kuala Lumpur office pleading them to find the bank transfer that had been made and confirm my flight for Sunday 11^th September given that still hadn’t been done yet, again more tears and fear of not being able to return to Paris even as late as the 11^th. I had to give my Malaysian friend’s number to the Qatar office so they could ask my friend to send the bank transfer confirmation, even though I had already provided all the required banking transfer information several days ago. I don’t even know what words to write now for you to really understand the pain I’ve been through to do something as seemingly simple as changing a flight booking. For me to say it’s completely outrageous is an understatement.

This morning, still having had no confirmation that my flight was booked for Sunday 11^th I called again and went to the Kuala Lumpur office in person and after having waited 2 hours, found out it still hadn’t been done. I confirmed the ticket in person, asked again if there was any way to be on an earlier flight with no success and asked to speak to the manager in order to lodge an official complaint.

The first thing that upset me even more if that’s even possible is that the manager told me almost immediately that he could contact headquarters and find an earlier flight for me, and after a few minutes confirmed I could in fact be on a flight to Paris tonight, with an 8 hours layover in Doha. Why this wasn’t possible for the past two days I spent calling and emailing the office I have no idea.

I then asked the manager to register an official complaint with Qatar Airways for all the trouble I had to go through to get the flight changed, to which he told me there is nothing they could do and that my sole recourse was to send an email to tell-us@my.qatarairways.com.

I am extremely upset about this whole situation; I am relieved to finally leave for Paris in a few hours even though I will not be looking forward to spending 8 hours in Doha airport. I will finish this email by saying that I unfortunately do not feel I have the luxury of waiting for a reply from the customer service department so I have decided to try and make this as widely known as possible, sending copies of this complaint to the people and organisations listed below.

I am landing in Doha for my layover at __:__ local time with the flight from Kuala Lumpur and will be hoping that a Qatar Airways representative will be waiting for me so my complaint can be solved to my satisfaction.

My name is G. M. and my flight booking reference is ______.

Kind regards,
G. M.

This complaint is copied and sent to:

Regional Marketing Manager Europe Qatar Airways
via Linkedin Inmail

VP Commercial Europe Qatar Airways
via Linkedin Inmail

Manager - Brand Communications Qatar Airways
via Linkedin Inmail

Head of Corporate Communications Qatar Airways
via Linkedin Inmail

Brand Republic
Marketing Magazine
Business Week
Strategies

Several blogs

Consumer organisations in France:
·      ASSECO-CFDT (Association études et consommation)
·      FNAUT (Fédération nationale des associations d’usagers des transports)
·      ORGECO (Organisation générale des consommateurs)
·      UFC-Que Choisir (Union fédérale des consommateurs-Que Choisir)

Foursquare Specials in Kuala Lumpur

2011-07-04T11:42:00.000+01:00

While I was in Kuala Lumpur a few weeks ago, I had wifi connection and thought I'd fire up Foursquare and check in. I was slightly surprised to see the Specials yellow icon show up with 15 Specials in my area, though I checked it out as I usually do, out of curiosity for how location owners are promoting their services via Foursquare.

I have no idea how many people use Foursquare in Malaysia, I'm guessing not that many, and the amount of people using a phone with a Foursquare application (Android or iPhone - even though, yes I know one can use Foursquare via any old phone, but that requires more commitment than I suspect the average user has). The interesting thing is that's it was the first time I see pretty luxury brands / companies advertising on Foursquare.

In London I'd see either chains of eateries (Domino's, Pho, Pret, etc) or independent small businesses (local pub or sandwich shop). In Kuala Lumpur, it's the Sheraton. I may have missed the fact that Sheraton has signed some sort of deal to advertise on Foursquare worldwide, though I thought it's an interesting point. What kind of advertisers to do see Foursquare Specials from in your area?

Youth in Kunming

2011-06-24T04:49:00.001+01:00

I've caught occasional glimpses into youth in the different countries I've visited and as I know it's often a fascinating group of people to many brands and marketers, so here are a few observations that may be useful and/or interesting. I was thinking of writing a post about several countries and observations at once, but after thought that would be way too long and would probably lose focus. In many ways, some of the things I noticed or thought about while traveling have been like looking through a keyhole without getting the full picture, and that's often where I find the most interesting pieces of insight, even if sometimes I don't know what it all means, I have more of an idea where to look next if I'd like to find out more about a topic.

As for the previous post, we are still in Kunming, City of Eternal Spring and capital of Yunnan Province, in Southwestern China, a few months ago. For a bit more background, Kunming is a lovely city, not very large by Chinese standards with about 5 million inhabitants. Similarly to many Chinese cities, the old town has mostly been destroyed to make way for modern roads and buildings, though it seems to have been done particularly well, giving the centre of town an airy and agreeable feel. The people seem rather laid-back and friendly, not moving at the same kind of frenetic pace one can notice towards the large urban areas of the eastern side of the country.

While walking around on a sunny Saturday afternoon, I came across several fairly large groups of young people and teenagers practicing their hip hop dance moves and routines on one side of a pedestrian square, and some dancing to more dance / vaguely electronic music on another (Mostly girls, with what seemed to me like emo or gothic looks, though they probably weren't at all - different references).

Check here for a quick Audioboo sound snippet of the scene (embed didn't seem to work, weirdly).

It was nice to see them express themselves and be quite at ease with dancing or singing in front of all their peers as well as passing strangers, if you think about it, it's not usual characteristics one would associate with teens. The classic stereotypes would probably include being self-conscious, worrying what others think of you and wanting to be part of the right kind of group. I'm not saying they don't have these concerns though they didn't seem to have them as I was observing so perhaps they show up differently.

The closest scene I could imagine elsewhere, and mostly coming from hearsay or movies rather than personal experience, is in the US, kids gathering close to outdoors basketball courts with the boom boxes or car stereos, hanging out and some dancing. It's completely cliché, but that's how this scene in Kunming felt. I wonder if that's where these kids got their cues from to start gathering like that..?

Another thought is about the fact that concepts of personal space or privacy are also completely different in China (perhaps Asia) than they are in the west (I'm generalising). This point alone can easily be the main focus of an all nighter conversation with friends, alongside some wine and/or drinks so I'm not going to go much into it aside from saying that people all over China practice dancing, tai chi and various other physical activities in large groups everyday, interior spaces are often crowded so the streets and public areas are naturally places where people meet and hang out so perhaps what these teens are going it all normal and nothing to do with American culture - apart from the music itself perhaps.

To finish on a different note about Kunming, a few days later I visited a trendy bar / club type of place and noticed this poster in the entrance:

Is it a party for white people? Do white blond girls on the poster attract more Chinese customers? Or the promise of white blond girls? Is it a party where are you are supposed to come dressed in white?

I'm still not sure what this one is about, though fascinating and rather funny I think, happy to get ideas and suggestions about it.

Farewell - The Old Yunnan Hotel!

2011-06-21T11:43:00.001+01:00

While walking in Kunming a few months ago, this wall struck me as quite interesting and made me think of a few things on how we view new, old and how these qualities are associated with traditions. Generally the way we see things in Europe, a building, monument, more or less any architectural structure is old and merits the respect due to tradition if it has been there for a very long time. Several hundreds of years at least. That sounds extremely obvious, although most of European civilisations have been building of stone that can last a very long time.

Stonehenge or similar stone structures in Britanny are amongst the oldest left, believed to have been built around 2,500 BC or so. They are landmarks to early cultures and extremely important to us. They are authentic because they are old and because they have been left unchanged over time. At the same time, no other structures or buildings are left from that time and if we were to rebuild an ancient gallic or British village it would be considered an interesting and possibly educational theme park, and not treated with the same respect given to the real thing.

This is something that struck me the first time I visited China about 4 years ago and this time seeing it proudly written on a wall, I had to snap a few photos and scribble a couple of notes. Last time I visited China, I climbed the 3,000 high Holy Buddhist Mountain of Emei. The mountain has been holy for thousands of years, as you probably know China is steeped in ancient history and extremely proud of their traditions and heritage. The mountain has been sculpted over years, steps all the way to the summit, several large monasteries built on the way, entire murals of intricately sculpted characters in the face of the mountain along certain paths. It was a gorgeous walk and a brilliant experience.

Still, arriving at the summit was somewhat of a disappointment for us occidentals. We had heard of the statue of the buddha at the summit and were expecting a lot from it. It was, though it was also obviously brand new, wooden or something alike, with ugly yellow-gold plating.

Immediately we see fake and it kills everything - well for me at least. The Chinese on the other hand see thousands of years of sacred history and tradition. They know it has been rebuilt recently, but that doesn't matter. I imagine it's the idea of it having being built so long ago in the first place and it being rebuilt anew for new generations to enjoy that matters most. Also, the main material used is wood, which doesn't last as long as stone so tradition, new and old are necessarily seen in different ways for Occidental and Chinese people (possibly Asian, but I haven't seen everywhere, tell me if you have any other thoughts).

Same for the Yunnan Hotel, which at the time I saw it was a pile of rubble of the old hotel. When it is rebuilt, it will be over 1,000 years old AND brand new at the same time for Chinese people visiting. The pride of the history for the building is there, as well as being able to enjoy all sorts of clean and modern amenities I imagine. For me that's a paradox, for Chinese people it may well be completely natural.

These are my own observations, I might be completely wrong. Does anyone else have similar experiences about new and old in China or in Asia?

Asian questions

2011-06-20T06:22:00.000+01:00

Image Courtesy

Now that I've pretty much finished on the 'reporting' part of my travels in my blog, I am up picking on a few random notes I made while on the road with half baked thoughts about my experiences; the countries, people and cultures I traveled in. That is going to give me content for a few blog posts at least, though I also thought I would open up the playing field and see if anyone out there may have questions for me as well. Things I haven't necessarily thought but that might be interesting. Of course, none of my answers will be anything close to proper market research, though you never know when the next interesting piece of insight may come from.

We all know Asia is booming in many ways, even just spending a few days in China was awe-inspiring considering how it was when I had visited about 4 years before and how fast things are changing. It is also mind-boggling as one thing I'm sure of is that for anything new I discover while in China I also know I'm not even scratching the surface. Things are moving so fast and based in cultures so different from occidental / Judeo-christian points of views that everything is fascinating and I doubt there is a single straightforward answer to any questions someone doing business in Asia may have about their market and audience.

At the same time for all the differences, everything seems to be moving towards 'Occidentalising' Asia if that makes any sense - the same fashion brands, giant shopping malls, Hollywood cinema, fast food joints, etc. Though I believe assuming these things make Asian cultures and occidental ones the same (or soon to be the same) is a mistake, as the context they are coming from is completely different.

As I said, I only have my own glimpses and experiences, though I'm certain it's a worthwhile topic and I'm sure I can learn from others as well as some may be able to learn from my experiences out here.

Here are the countries I have visited so far and about which I may be able to share stories, experiences and insights:

China
Hong Kong (technically part of China, though still sort of independent)
Vietnam
Laos
Thailand
Malaysia

Any questions?

Perhentian Paradise

2011-06-16T05:11:00.000+01:00

After having enough of a few days of rainy weather in Georgetown, I decided to try my luck on the eastern side of the Malaysian peninsula and took the bus over to The Perhentian Islands. I thought I would probably stay 3 or 4 days enjoying the beach before heading on to the jungle of the Taman Negara National Park.

I did enjoy lovely Long Beach for about 4 days, but then the rest of my plans were thwarted in a very good way as I decided to pass my Open Water diving certification, in the end staying over two more weeks on Perhentian Kecil, the small island of the Perhentians. I really loved it there, started making new friends and discovering scuba diving is probably the best highlight of my whole trip. I fell in love with diving straight away, only wondering why I hadn't tried it before (well, I do know about the two last years, my ears were slightly damaged after a small flight over the Andes so I couldn't really be under water. I realised they were all fine by now after some snorkeling, so I decided it was time for scuba).

I'm still not even certain what I like the most about diving; fish have never been a particular passion of mine, though of course I started learning to recognise the most obvious usual suspects after a few dives (angel fish, butterfly fish, barracudas, puffer fish, clown fish, anemone fish, trigger fish, parrot fish, etc).

I think I really the sensations of being underwater, discovering a whole new world where we're not naturally geared up to be wandering around as human beings, I enjoyed learning new things about diving safety procedures and equipment, I appreciate the calm silence interrupted by the weird quality of underwater sounds, I love the freedom of movement as well as learning to use my body in new ways (Such as using my lungs and breathing to manage buoyancy and which level I stay at under water, or sparing my arm and leg movements to save air). It is magical in many ways and I definitely want to keep diving in the future.

I ended up also passing my Advanced Open Water certification, in which I tried out different types of dives which was a lot of fun: a deep dive where we went down to 29m depth; a navigation dive practicing with the compass underwater; a search & recovery dive learning basic techniques to look for and recover lost objects under water; a wreck dive spotting and writing down points of hazard and interest on the wreck of a fairly large cargo ship; and finally a night dive which was weird, eerie and wonderful.

Eating Indian in Georgetown

2011-06-09T09:22:00.000+01:00

After a whole day in sweltering sun begging bewildered Malaysian car drivers to take us just a couple of kilometres to the next junction (and them invariably wanting to drive us to a bus station), we finally covered the 150km or so from the jetty landing of Kuala Perlis to George Town in Penang.

Hitch hiking that day was a lot of fun, it was great to have many random conversations with Malaysian people about their country and culture. For some reason several of the people who picked us up were university professors, so very well spoken in English. I explained to them I was hitch hiking to find out more about Malaysian people and for the fun of the experience (that made no sense to them at all).

We checked in a cheap guesthouse which seemed to be an old travellers hangout, for some reason the average age seemed over 50. Apparently the younger backpacker crowds stayed on newly renovated fancy chic hostels further down the street.

I hadn't mentioned Jean-Roch doesn't drink so I thought it would be good for me to start my month no drinking while hanging out with him (and alcohol is pretty expensive in Malaysia, beer in particular).

I like Georgetown, it was a nice place to relax after the travel rush in Thailand, and there is Little India. We found ourselves our little Indian canteen and proceeded to eat there at least once or twice a day. Cheap and delicious, I was surprised how much I don't get bored of Indian food!

We met Andrea and Franzi again, two German girls on holidays we had met in Langkawi. We had a fantastic evening visiting a few 5 star hotels, crashing a Chinese wedding, and singing cheesy karaoke songs on the revolving top floor restaurant with nice views of the city.

The weather wasn't that great, I was glad to rest for a few days, walk around town, read and eat Indian food. Then it felt like time to move on. We did have one lovely morning before I left though and walked over to the Chinese Clan Jetties, which had great views of the bay and the city.

Duty free Langkawi

2011-06-09T09:02:00.000+01:00

On the 9th May 2011, I spent the day travelling with a couple of buses from Ko Lanta South to Satun via Trang. I spent the night in Satun (which I wouldn't particularly recommend doing unless you have to, though the night market is pretty good) and caught the first ferry to the duty free island of Langkawi in Malaysia the following morning.

Langkawi is a pretty large island (it means 'strong eagle' in Malay, the eagle is the island symbol) on the Adaman Sea, pretty developed, though with several protected areas of nature as well.

I stayed at the Gecko Guesthouse on Pantai Cenang, probably one of the cheapest options for backpackers and was glad to like the atmosphere immediately as well as the other people staying there.

The beach seemed nice enough, though again pretty developed: resorts, paragliding, water scooters, banana boats, etc.

Unfortunately the weather started turning bad just after I arrived, skies clouding over around noon and raining soon afterwards. I tried cycling to the cable car one day with Crystal, a girl I met at the guesthouse, we almost got there but it was really overcast, couldn't see the top of the hill anymore and it started raining heavily so we gave up and hitched a ride back to Cenang beach.

On the plus side, we had a good party the night before. It was Bobby's birthday, one of the staff from the guesthouse, so we partied at the guesthouse first, then at the Babylon Beach bar, and ended at the only bar club sort of place, The Sumba. A fun night.

I then met Jean-Roch, a cool French traveler who usually hitch-hikes everywhere. He was heading to Georgetown, Penang in the morning. Given the weather was bad and he sold me the fun of hitch hiking, I joined him for the ride.

South Thailand

2011-06-08T13:58:00.000+01:00

I spent most of a lovely day in the train heading South to Surat Thani, watching the world go by out of the window. I had thought the train line would get extremely close to the shore according to the map and I was glad to see I was right, rewarded with views of the Gulf of Thailand rolling a couple of hundred yards away at some point during the journey.

I moved on straight to Krabi afterwards, nice little town. Enough travellers to meet people around a meal at the night market, but not so crowded with tourists. I spent the following day at Ralay Beach, and booked to go on a sea kayaking tour the day after - both were really lovely, and the sea kayaking was good exercise as well. Not really that much to add, it was all pretty fast, no particular encounters, more nice people travelling and sharing opinions about where they've been and where to go next...

After Krabi, I decided to head to Ko Lanta on the recommendations of several people I met along the way as well as my brother Morgan and my friend Susie. I stayed on Long Beach for the first night and had a nice sunset with views of Ko Phi Phi in the distance. Aside from that Ko Lanta was extremely quiet, too much so for me traveling on my own. I did meet a few people after I moved to Khlong Khong beach the following day and had a nice day motorcycling around the island, but then it was time to start making my way to the Malaysian border.

Briefly in Bangkok

2011-06-08T13:40:00.000+01:00

I haven't seen The Hangover II yet, though I'll wager that my 2 days in Bangkok were pretty different: a couple of beers at most, no ping-pong shows, no seedy bars or brothels, no Sikh fortune tellers, walked down Khao San Rd just once.

I spent most of the day travelling from Ayutthaya (80km away, don't ask) and was going to meet Rene, a guy from Cameroon I could couchsurf with, a contact I got via Brian in Khon Kaen.

Very nice guy, he lived fairly close to Sukhumvit and told me of a couple of crazy stories in which he literally picked crying tourists off the street after a party night where they'd lost everything, being drugged and robbed around the trendy bars and clubs of the area.

So we went to the cinema instead, saw Thor. Pretty good in a bad and cheesy way, or something like that. The weirdest part was to stand up during the 2 min film to the glory of the king of Thailand before the movie.

Being far from the main tourist sights, I decided to move closer the following morning. Took the river bus, found a cheap hostel a couple of streets away from Khao San, walked around ChinaTown, Little India, to the train station to buy my onward ticket and walked back, visited Wat Pho and the big (really big!) laying Buddha statue before it closed for the day. I found a nice little quiet bar playing live jazz for the evening which was perfect.

I visited the Grand Palace the following morning, really loved the murals in the temple, that's really what I spent most time looking at. The Palace itself looks nice, though I'm pretty sure it served as inspiration for Disneyland - I think the entrance of Disneyland Paris looks extremely similar.

I then walked over to the Vinmanmek mansion, I think that was my favourite sight, gorgeous all wooden mansion. No photos allowed as well, so I really paid attention and wanted to remember as much as I could.

Then on the way back to the hostel, I was pulling my iPod Touch out of my pocket to check the time, someone bumped into me at the same time. The iPod fell to the ground in slo mo. Screen shattered.

That was Bangkok.

I left early to get my train to Surat Thani the following morning.

Rushing through Thailand

2011-06-08T13:21:00.001+01:00

After 6 weeks spent in Laos, taking my time, enjoying the relaxed Lao way of life as well as having a fantastic time with my baby niece, my brother and his wife, it was high time to move on to Thailand, just like it's high time to post on this blog. I left on Wednesday 27th April 2011.

I thought I would get a 30 day visa at the border, but it turned out to be only 15 days so I was already changing travel plans having barely left Vientiane. I cut out a few places I thought I would visit and essentially decided to rush it down South to the Malaysian border.

I stopped in Khon Kaen and met Brian there, a couchsurfing host who showed me around town. It's a nice relaxed university city with no tourists whatsoever, and for me a gentle re-introduction to modern Asian cities (7/11, fast food joints, road traffic, etc) after 6 weeks in Laos.

A train the following morning took me to Ayutthaya, the ancient capital of Siam that had been sacked by the Burmese.

I met several interesting people there, including two funky French truck drivers there who were completely in love with Thailand, it was their 4th time in the country and they told me lots about the history of the country and about Thai culture. They also told me about diving in the Similan Islands.

I also met a Dutch surreal artist on his way back from painting a mural in a bar; he has like 9 cats and loves them so much he created cat towers for them he then also sold as useful art, I guess. I saw him again randomly in Bangkok a few days later. I have to find the links to his portfolio website.

There was also super-connector Josh, a cool Ozzie guy who made a point of introducing himself to and then inviting every person in the bar in order to make one big table of happy travellers.

And to finish, the reason we were all there was for Mr Noi, blues rock singer and guitar player extraordinaire. An awesome voice.

Sure, I also cycled around some of the main ruins around Ayutthaya, which was nice but certainly not as interesting as the people I met there.

Laos - Simply beautiful

2011-04-08T08:01:00.000+01:00

Out of sheer laziness, I'm titling this blog post using the line from the Lao Tourism Board, I've been seeing it used on quite a few posters. I also agree with the statement / copy line, so after all why not?

I've been in Laos for close to a month now, including two weeks in Vientiane with my brother Morgan. I had planned to update the blog with a post ideas I've jotted down along the way while I have an internet access in Vientiane but have been too busy playing with my baby niece, cycling around and reading for that (plus the connection is pretty slow).

I've been having an amazing time out here so far, the country is gorgeous, it has been hot, mostly very sunny and people are generally pretty nice. It's the time of year when the Lao have a lot of parties and weddings prior to Pimai, the Lao New Year so I've also been invited to a few random parties in villages and on Don Det, one of the 4,000 Islands where I stayed for a week.

From Savannakhet I headed over to Pakse and Champasak, a lovely small town on the Mekong. It's quite touristy in a low key fashion and the main thing to go visit are the pre-Angkorian ruins of Vat Phou, which I went cycling to with some Spanish people who arrived at the same time as I did.

Tomorrow we are heading North of Laos, to Luang Prabang and then hopefully by boat to Niong Khiaw and Muang Ngoi.

The Mekong viewed from the guesthouse terrace in Champasak

The ruins of Vat Phou

I was invited for my first shot of Lao Lao (the local rice alcohol) by this fine gentleman. Language barriers made for limited conversation, we coped by drinking shots, sharing cigarettes, smiling, laughing and basic sign language

Beautiful views of the 4,000 Islands from my hammock

My little niece Anahi eating some yogurt - and using it as a hair conditioner at the same time ;)

Slow down, it's Laos

2011-03-15T13:24:00.000Z

I'm very glad of my choice to move on to Laos, I arrived in Savannakhet on Sunday evening after a fairly long bus ride from Hue in Vietnam. As soon as we passed the Vietnamese border, the sky started clearing, the temperature rising, and the roads cleared as well - there are just much fewer people in Laos.

I loved it straight away. I got to a nice guesthouse recommended in the guide, joined by Tatsuro, a cool Japanese guy at the beginning of a 2 year round the world trip. The guesthouse is pretty close to the Mekong so we just had time to drop our bags and go enjoy the sunset with a BeerLao with the locals at one the food & drink stalls set up there in the evenings. Funny to think I had just crossed the whole width of both Vietnam and Laos in a day to find myself right across the river from Thailand.

I like Savannakhet, there isn't really much to do but I guess that's just what I wanted after being on the move all the time since I left Kunming. Yesterday was full sun and over 35 degrees - perfect to just walk around in the sun and have a nap in the afternoon, followed by beer & sunset time.

I rented a motorbike today to go out for a wander in the countryside, saw the closeby Budddhist stupa of That Ing Hang which apparently is an important pilgrimage site in February when thousands of people visit. I also went to a few villages out on dirt tracks, as well as a couple of lakes, there to irrigate the rice paddies in the dry season such as now. Lovely weather, a few clouds showed up so it was hot buy I didn't get burned in the sun.

Considering I can't drive (don't have my license) and hadn't been on a scooter in about 15 years this was pretty adventurous for me and glad I did it. That said, going on a loop biking for several days on dirt tracks feels slightly out of reach just now - I'll probably need some more practice. Next time I think I might just go back to normal cycling, it's easier to enjoy the scenery like that as well.

I rounded the day off with a traditional Lao massage. Lots of stretching and pressure points - good stuff. I'm now back at the iLounge Cafe for a drink and dinner. Good company, cold drinks, good Thai & Lao food and free wifi!

Tomorrow I'll be moving South to Pakse, then on to Champasak to see the Pre-Angkorian ruins of Wat Phou. After that I'll be heading to Si Phan Don, or 4,000 Islands, where the Mekong stretches out to a width of about 14km before Cambodia.

Not sure I'll get a lot of Internet access down there, most places don't have electricity apparently. A few days on a hammock watching the Mekong flow by sounds great though!

Good bye Vietnam

2011-03-12T11:38:00.000Z

I have spent just about 10 days in Vietnam, travelled from the very far North where I arrived in Lao Cai to where I am now in Hue, about half way through the country. I've certainly had good times but unfortunately no sun, since I arrived I've been in or under a huge grey mass of clouds and haze, which I find makes the whole experience less enjoyable. Altogether I'm not enjoying the country that much, I have been changing my plans almost every day since I got here, chasing sunnier / warmer climes as well as trying to escape from very busy and ultra touristy areas, with all the fairly aggressive touts and scammers that come with them.

I have probably covered 1,000 km in Vietnam so far and the only grace weather-wise was a clearing of clouds for some sun and blue skies a couple of hours this morning. Anyways, I decided to give up on Vietnam and move on to Laos tomorrow morning. I am taking a bus early in the morning for Savannakhet.

I have some nice photos, met some cool people to chat with as well as spend a day or evening with, so it was all good but I also won't be missing Vietnam very much, nor am I in a massive hurry to come back. I guess it's a spoiled traveler's issue, but I much prefer China - I'd recommend going to Szechuan or Yunnan over Vietnam any day.

I certainly don't want to just sound sour, so here are a few highlights of my time here, with a few photos.

Now you see what I mean when I said Sa Pa was in the clouds and had bad visibility.

I wasn't sure I liked Hanoi much at first though As I met a few people who lived there on the 2nd day, I started to warm up to the busy atmosphere. I think it would be a great city to live in, and it was certainly nice to walk around for a couple of days. I'd say the city has a lot of charm, though not necessarily many beautiful sights for a tourist. I didn't find the food amazing either, good but not great. Maybe I didn't go to the right places, but you may know I can also be a condescending snob about that (well that and probably some other things come to think of it ;).

I decided to give Halong Bay a miss. They closed the site to most tourists the day before for fog reasons and most of the people I talked to who had just come back from it said it was not worth it given the bad weather. It was also a considerable expense for my budget, I decided to keep that money for some other attraction another day.

Busy traffic in the Old Quarter of Hanoi

The Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum

I played around with reflections in the photos

I met some cool people to have dinner and drinks with, including Ralph, World Traveller - his business card says so.

I went to Ninh Binh instead, with Tam Coc close by and many karstic rock formations considered to be an inland Halong Bay (actually these sort of rocks cover most of the country a I saw during my train ride later on). I spent a nice day cycling around with a Danish chef who showed up - which was good because I think I might've gotten bored by myself and he is a cool guy. I was going to go to Cuc Phuong National Park but the weather still wasn't great so I headed south on the train the following day.

Nice views of the rock formations, though limited by weather.

The long train ride was one of the highlights of Vietnam for me, I enjoyed just watching rice paddies, banana trees, rock formations and occasional trees go by while listening to music and reading for 8 hours.

It doesn't look amazing but it was a bit difficult to take good photos on the train. And it didn't actually look that great either. I enjoyed the train ride nonetheless and had an awesome book to read.

After a short and random stop in Dong Hoi for a night, I decided on a whim to stop earlier than planned on the train, in Hue rather than Danang and Hoi An as I originally planned. I might have wasted about $5 changing train tickets and destinations, so not a huge deal.

Still cloudy weather yesterday in Hue, I spent a nice afternoon with some English people walking around the Perfume river and the remains of the old imperial palace. Had nice food for lunch, local sort of roll'em yourself spring rolls with a good peanut sauce.

In the old Imperial palace of Hue.

I'm catching up on some writing today, here and i wrote two letters, so that's four letters in Vietnam - still enjoying writing them very much. I think that'll be it for now, folks!

10 days on the road

2011-03-05T06:45:00.000Z

As I wrote it in a letter to someone yesterday (I'm enjoying this letter writing by the way, 6 sent so far ;), I've only really been on the road for 10 days (not counting Hong Kong) and it already feels like a month at least. I'm not even necessarily doing that much; it's a lot of new experiences, thoughts and conversations in a short amount of time - presumably as the environment is so different I'm looking at everything differently as well. In any case, whatever you want to call it, it's certainly one of things I enjoy most about traveling. If you haven't done that in a while, I recommend you book a ticket for some strange and new destination, try it out. I"m always surprised at how much changing the context / environment can open my mind to new thoughts, ideas and observations. It's not providing any particular answers to the meaning of life - as far as I can gather it's still 42 - but it's a pleasure nonetheless.

I'm having a really good time and extremely happy with the choices I've made for this year to come and explore the region around here. Given I can't easily access Facebook to upload photos, I'll sum up the trip so far with a few choice pics here.

I took a train from Hong Kong to Guangzhou on Thursday 24th Feb, hoping to catch another one directly to Kunming. I hwaited a few hours there. When people told me the station at Guangzhou is very busy they weren't kidding.

After a 26h train ride (on a hard seat, they only had those tickets left) I arrived in Kunming and spent a lovely few days there. I just walked around town, and also visited Qiongzhu Si, the Bamboo Temple.

I met some great people in Kunming and had some excellent food. Here, we are in a Dai restaurant, they are a minority people from Xishuangbanna, in Southern Yunnan - delicious spicy food. Next to me on the pic is Mike, a cool Canadian dude who has been cycling from home all the way to China across Europe and central Asia.

After a few days, it was time to head over to Vietnam as I only managed to get a 10 day visa for China this time, I stopped first in Tonghai and visited the lovely mountain park of Xiu Shan, so many gorgeous flowering bonsai, all blooming.

I don't know why, but I can't seem to add any more photos to this blog post. Anyways, after Tonghai, I stopped in Jianshui the following day which has a large part of the old town left and I visited the Zhu Clan['s house and gardens, a nice place to while away the afternoon and write a letter. Then I took another bus to Vietnam and ended in Sa Pa on Thursday evening. I've been in a cloud pretty much since then. It's supposed to be amazing views of the valley all sculpted in rice paddy terraces, but unfortunately there is nothing to see right now. I met some nice people anyways and walked around a village in the mist yesterday. I'm cutting my stay here slightly short and heading down to Hanoi this evening given it's just cold and damp all the time. Maybe some other time.

I'm splitting the way I share my travels in a few different ways and enjoying it, of course on this blog, then you may have heard some of my audio snippets via Facebook or Twitter thanks to Audioboo, and as I said above, I've started writing letters as well.

Wandering planner

2011-02-22T14:01:00.000Z

As I said in my previous post, I had a lot on my mind once I got back from Tanzania in December last year. You may know this already, I've made some pretty radical choices for this year and I'm very happy about it.

I decided to resign from my job at iris in London and go travel for a while, which is something I've wanted to do for a very long time. As my friend Adam told me, traveling is one of the few topics I get visibly very excited about when it comes in conversations. I really hesitated as it certainly wasn't the reasonable thing to do but those who know me also know I enjoy being unreasonable and I usually do things putting 100% in or not do them at all. I'd given up my previous flat in London and was going to look for another one while staying at my brother's place for a few months, I have a little bit of money on the side, I'm single and my wanderlust only grew stronger after the trip to Africa. Anyways, all of it put together it's a great time to take a plunge and go ahead with travel plans.

I only had a short few weeks in January to sort out everything in London and flew to Hong Kong on the 2nd February where I'm writing this from. One of other best friends, James, lives here and I hadn't seen him for several years. I have been organising a loose itinerary traveling in Southeast Asia and taking care of my visas for China, Vietnam and Laos. My little brother Morgan recently moved to Laos so the first leg of the journey is to make my way from here to Vientiane overland, via China and Vietnam. In a few months, probably during the summer depending on how the budget goes, I'll be looking for a new job somewhere in the region.

I've also decided to write letters and post cards while on the way so send over your address if ever you wish to receive one (I'll prioritise people I know, but happy to send something even if I don't know you). I received a letter from my sister who recently moved back to France in December and I'd forgotten how cool it is to receive and read a letter. I also like the idea of writing something for one person rather than broadcasting online on places such as this blog. I tend to be completely oblivious to the magic of email and online stuff; I'm looking forward to be a bit disconnected while traveling (at least not have 24/7 access as I'm used to).

I had a break from the Internet and computers while in Africa and it was very refreshing. I also forget that emails or even SMS are asynchronous methods of communication. There is a lot of talk about real time these days and my usual expectation if I send an email or an SMS is that I should get a reply very soon if not immediately - when you think about it, it's pretty silly given the other person isn't there waiting for you even though that's how I and others I've seen behave. Anyways, the surprise of someone I write to getting a letter in the mail while they're waiting for people to reply to important emails and text messages makes me smile. So there.

I also just finished reading Chief Culture Officer by Grant McCracken; a really good book and it's giving me interesting ideas for things to look out for while traveling as well as what and how I'd like to share those noticings. That's why (sort of) I can happily announce that if you're a hardcore Gourmet Burger Kitchen fan wandering around Lan Kwai Fong in Hong Kong, you can sample the wares of Gourmet Burger Union (Disclaimer: I didn't eat there so no idea how their burgers are, I just liked the extreme similarity with the GBK logo). This in itself is a whole mine of inspiration for thoughts / a blog post about brand copycats of which there are all around in Hong Kong and China.

I'll add just one last thing matching back with some of the ideas Grant put forward in CCO, if you have a brand and you don't follow what's going on with your customers and in culture generally, you might have copycats take your brand and likely do more inspired things with it than your brand book will ever allow (Again, the thought doesn't necessarily apply to GBK vs. GBU though if someone who tried both wants to comment, they're more welcome).

So if you want to follow some of my travel experiences; check out this blog, my Twitter stream, my Audioboo (which will also post to Twitter / Facebook), Facebook if we're friends there, Flickr, or if I have your address make sure you check your mail box regularly ;)

Back from Africa

2010-12-03T22:14:00.000Z

February 2011 update: I took about 3 months to finish this draft, a few more things have happened since.

I had an absolutely fantastic trip to Tanzania with The Great Football Giveaway in November 2010, you can follow the events during the trip here. By now I can safely say it has been a life changing experience for me. I gave up on the draft in December partly out of simply being lazy, partly busy at work, partly because it was such a rich experience I didn't know what to write about it exactly. Altogether the photo above illustrates pretty well how overwhelming it was - in a good way.

We were nine people on Neil's team (who has done an awesome job with kick-starting the whole project and leading the team) joined by our three amazing drivers: Sebastian, David and Josef. We got along like a house on fire for the ten days of the Football Giveaway: as much banter and piss-taking as well as more serious conversations and sharing personal stories. They are all people I now hold dear in my heart, with whom I shared this unique experience. You can find everyone's names on our JustGiving page, and you can also still make donations for more balls to be given to children on future trips.

I was lucky enough to have more holiday time, so while the others flew back home I spent two more weeks in Tanzania; a few days on a safari in the Selous and a week on the beach in Zanzibar.

A lot comes to mind in wanting to describe the whole experience, about Africa and Tanzania, the children, infrastructures in the country or lack thereof, charity vs. gifts, education, play, the development of tourism and who benefits from it, large charity organisations / NGOs, animal conservation and hunting, the amazing people I met there, smiles on so many children's faces, and probably a lot more I forget right now.

I can talk about any of these points at length but the best way I can sum it up for now, even though these simple words don't do justice to the experience, is that life is too short not to do things I really enjoy doing. I don't mean that I particularly deprived myself of that before, on the contrary if you now me you know I'm rather bon vivant. It's just that this is what's present when thinking of the trip. I'm extremely privileged to have a lot of choice in the way I lead my life and I want to make sure I take advantage of that, both for myself and to make a difference for others.

More specifically about my trip, you can check out some photos on my Flickr and we are in the process of editing all the videos we have from the Football Giveaway. If you ever fancy a safari in Tanzania, I highly recommend going to Selous and staying at the Selous River Camp. Owned and managed by Kenny and Kate, I loved their blog and was right to go there; they made me feel very welcome and I had an awesome time at their camp discovering the Selous and generally relaxing relaxing by the river.

To finish off, you can get that a lot was bubbling away in my head in December, I'll write about that in my next post.

London fundraising event

2010-11-02T13:59:00.004Z

We held an excellent fundraising evening last week in London, on Wednesday 27th October. Everyone had a brilliant time and it was great for several of us going on the trip to Tanzania to meet up as well as meet with Paul and Sarah of The Great Football Giveaway.

We started the evening programme by showing the short and very inspiring Football Giveaway video, then Neil told us about how this project started for him, and Paul talked about how the overall initiative started about 5 years ago.

Hugh came up front after that to tell us about an interesting and fun project to design an application based on one's feelings of guilt and which would allow people to alleviate that guilt by quickly making small donations to different charities based on personal choices and feelings. To top it off in true Radio 1 fashion, Hugh shared his personal Top Ten guilts!

And last but not least, Neil from UsTwo was kind enough to join us and share a really interesting project they have been up with another charity, The Kids Company, who take care of children in inner city areas of the UK. The kids participated in creating designs for a MouthOff iPhone application released today, the proceeds of which will all go directly to the charity (minus the 30% Apple keeps for the transaction).

Thank you again to everyone who attended and donated, it was a brilliant evening. I only have two more days to go until flying to Tanzania, can't wait!

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Giving away footballs in Tanzania

2010-09-15T11:32:00.002+01:00

In the very exciting news category, I'm going away on a fabulous adventure to Tanzania in November this year with The Great Football Giveaway.

If you haven't heard about them before, I wrote about it a while ago, they are a small organisation whose belief is that "no kid should be denied the chance to kick a ball about. It's one of life's most simple pleasures." I don't particularly care that much for football in general, and certainly not for the giant cash industry it has become but I really care about making a difference, helping put a smile on a kid's face and playing games. That and also traveling, as I've never been to Africa.

The principle is very simple: £10 donated = 1 football going to kids in Africa in places they don't have any to play with. It might not change the world, but regardless. Playing with a brand new ball and kicking it about will change the experience of life for a kid, even if only a moment.

Do you remember how excited you were as a kid when playing and kicking a ball around? That or whatever else you enjoyed playing with. We're going to give lots of balls around to kids in Tanzania, as well as meet up with NGOs and charities out there working with kids and who could use a few brand new footballs.

Neil, through whom I also found out The Great Football Giveaway in the first place, wrote a post a couple of weeks ago announcing he was pulling a team together to raise funds. Sounded very exciting. After consideration and checking that such a trip was pretty unreasonable given I a few other things going on, I chucked out the reasons not to go ahead out of the way and committed.

Now we have a team of eight talented and smart people from the advertising and media industry joining up for this amazing adventure. We are starting to organise the whole thing and will be actively raising funds for the trip as well as making contacts both with potential sponsors for balls and organisations operating out in Tanzania we could meet up with.

The plan at this stage is to go from Dar Es Salaam (Departing from London on Thursday 4th Nevember) to the Southeast of Tanzania which apparently is off the tourist trail, has the most undeveloped and poorest parts of the country. We will choose a town as a base somewhere and spider out from there on 4x4s to go and give out footballs.

We have just set up a JustGiving Page so you go ahead and start donating:

http://www.justgiving.com/Tanzania2010

Our target is to raise £13,500 for 1,350 footballs.

We are also looking at organising a fundraising event in London mid October; more news on that very soon. If you have any contacts for potential sponsors or NGOs / Charities / peopl in Tanzania, please keep in touch.

My favourite brands continued - Skittles

2010-08-17T16:30:00.006+01:00

I thought I'd pick up on a theme I wrote a few posts for when I started blogging, you probably guessed by now, about my favourite brands and why I like them.

So let's talk about Skittles.

To start with, and that's pretty obvious, I like the product. They're definitely amongst my all time favourite candy. I love the flavour and sorting them out by colour as I pull them out of the pack to choose which I feel like eating first (keeping reds for last, or until I have three to eat at once is a traditional strategy of mine). I love the sour Skittles as well. I had as a small kid in the States but while growing up in France, Skittles were few and far between. They were hard to find so it made more special than say, Haribo. Which by the way, I still don't understand why I can't find Tagada Strawberries in the UK - what's up with that Haribo?

They started out in the UK in 1974 and were subsequently released in the US in 1979, produced and marketed by Wrigley which also is a division of Mars Inc.

I also love pretty much everything they've been doing for marketing and advertising in the past few years. They've become well known for creating completely weird adverts in the past few years which seems to have really taken off in 2006 but I'm not exactly sure.

I found a few older ads; in the 80's Skittles was definitely traditional in the advertising:

The weirdness was creeping in beginning of the 90's with their 'Is that real?'

Then we have the string of silly, to full blown weird, to plain creepy ads, I love most of them:

And the famous 'Skittles touch'

The title of this ad brilliantly allows me to smoothly segue to the reasons why I love them so much. As you can see, this last ad was uploaded on Youtube titled: Worst Skittles Commercial Ever! I like to say the best kind of advertising is polarising, and these definitely are.

Brands can't be everything to everyone, particularly not FMCG brands that can hardly differentiate from their competitors. After all the competitors in the category are basically bits of sugar with flavouring so the brand itself and the way people remember it or not makes all the difference. If your brand or at least your communications are polarising, it gives something for people to talk about (or argue about).

I've read here and there blog posts from people comparing these ads to branded pieces of content such as Glass and Half Full Productions from Cadburys and wondering whether they were relevant, but I think there is a significant difference: where Cadbury's have created content with no relation whatsoever to chocolate, Skittles ads always feature the product. Moreover, the fact they feature the product in these weird settings forces people watching to think, even for the briefest of instants, whether they like the way the candy is being represented because it's not how candy is usually shown in ads. And that's brilliant.

They've also bravely been experimenting in the social media scene. They were slammed and criticised by many people a couple of years ago for their website that was basically a bunch links to live and real time social media sites (kind of a copy of the Modernista! agency site at the time, one of the reasons they were criticised in the industry). It turned into a mob lynching as people quickly realised anything tagged #Skittles was shown live on the website.

Skittles stuck with it. They didn't shut down their website. Everybody argued about whether it was brave or plain stupid. I liked it. There are a lot of other posts about it so I won't linger on that right now - the gist of my thinking is that many people were talking about a PR and social media / community failure when this was a website redesign and the way the brand represented itself to people rather than interacting with them. Essentially they gave the brand over to people to represent them for the time the site was live, and people responded in all their brutal beauty and ugliness combined.

Their Facebook Page is one of the most popular brand pages on the social network, over 8.5 million people subscribed and one of the only ones I appreciate the updates of, for the same reason I like the ads: they're complete nonsense and when I catch one on my news feed, it makes me smile.

The latest project / campaign they ran via Facebook a few months ago was genius: Mob the Rainbow. Raising cash for someone nobody thinks about, in its last iteration to fulfil someone's dream. As opposed to what we can often see on charity sites or generic brand campaigns, the dream here isn't grandiose, doesn't involve giant mansions or white sandy beaches. This guy's dream is to own a bowling alley and he needs a scolarship to help go through bowling management studies. Completely weird but also completely real and engaging for their community on Facebook.

As far as I know, Skittles also never changed their tagline: Taste the Rainbow. The rainbow has always been with them, they've only evolved the expression of the rainbow over time.

Loads of people create content online about Skittles and own the brand, whether it be people creating fake weird ads, flavoured vodka shots, or people arguing about the ads.

So there you go, I love Skittles. I might even buy some on my way home.

Put dot io

2010-08-02T13:54:00.005+01:00

I hadn't heard about Put.io yet, so I thought you might not have either. Kai and Kalam told me about it last week and said it the fastest service they've come across. I've tested it this weekend and it's seriously fast. Incredibly fast. And probably a taste of what the future of computing might look like as well.

So what is it?

Imagine the unholy offspring of a cloud storage service like Dropbox, mixed with a media sharing community such as Vuze, and P2P file sharing in a variety of ways (BitTorrent, RapidShare, directly with friends, etc). Add in some radioactive electrically charged weird mix of chemicals to give the creature super-speed and there you have Put dot io.

Apparently they're based in Turkey and they have the fastest possible Internet connection in the country. Basically users register for an account, are given an amount of disk space on their servers and a monthly data streaming allocation, as an example the normal subscription I just got for $9.99 / month includes 50Gb of space and 50Gb of data streaming.

Once your account activated, you can either upload files to the server, or ask the server to download any files from anywhere. I tried it and it did about 1.5Gb worth of downloads in barely a minute. Something like the latest Yes Men documentary released on P2P would probably take less than a minute for the Put.io servers to download.

From there you can either watch it streamed from their servers or download it to your computer, share it directly with friends on the network. You can also use it as cloud based hard drive for any files and it's browser based so accessible from anywhere.

It reminded me again of the excellent Kevin Kelly TED talk about the next 5,000 days of the web, where he describes all our connected devices as different windows into one same entity, the web. As servers increase in speed and capacity, the need for hard drives on computing machines disappears, although it also raises interesting questions about perceived ownership and privacy.

With digital media having brought the costs of copying or even owning anything close to zero some considerations we used to have are no longer relevant, like background thoughts of being careful which photos I shoot with my camera because it's my only roll of film left. Now we have hundreds of photos from various occasions stored on our computers. I'm wondering if there is some feeling of comfort at knowing that even though those photos aren't tangibly present, they are all stored in a physical object, the hard drive in the computer.

Even if I don't understand exactly how it works I can touch and feel the object containing my photos, which may create an illusion of control or comfort. With everything going cloud based, we are going further away from physical, tangible things. We are already doing this with cards and money.

I'm not really sure what it means, but it's definitely interesting.

Try out Put dot io, definitely worth it!

Foursquare, location based services and all that jazz

2010-07-29T15:59:00.009+01:00

Foursquare and location based services are all the rage in marketing town these days, and a few interesting articles were just released about it. Notably Forrester pleased me in advising marketers that only a tiny portion of people in the US (1% of online adults) were currently using LBS and who are mostly male, so most brands should probably experiment without committing too much resource.

I ran an interesting qualitative research group on Facebook recently with a group of 10 UK 18-24 young adults, heavy Internet users. Only one had an Foursquare account, had already stopped using it and the others either hadn't heard of it or thought it was stupid. I know it's not large numbers but their remarks were very interesting.

A response article on Adage says how important it is for brands to get on the bandwagon now because even though the user base is small, they are very influential.

I was in the middle of a pompous and boring write-up about my thoughts on the topic and decided to delete it all when I came across this fantastic image from Gamefan84 on BoingBoing:

Speechless now, eh?

Basically the gist of it was please stop answering vague marketing problems by shouting out the latest popular thing, as so:

Q: How can I sell more of my product to this age group?

A: Foursquare / Twitter / Facebook / Whatever's next

However many users they have and however cool their technology is (Don't get me wrong, I love all this stuff), none of these platforms, or even channels to a wider extent, are the answers. Just like a poster concept isn't the answer either. Everything is connected now, so answering the problem requires a wider view of the media landscape and coming up with a good idea before getting in the nitty-gritty of channels and platforms.

May the vengeful giant mutant squirrel riding Chewbacca come after your asses if you keep at it.

You know who you are.

Frantic

2010-07-28T10:29:00.004+01:00

I had quite a lot of things going on lately but blogging has not been one of them so time to stop lazing around on that front. The two or three faithful readers I have left will certainly be interested in being kept up to date about my ever so exciting life.

I remember sitting with my little brother Morgan in his garden, basking in the Bolivian summer night late on New year's Eve 2009, talking about the past year. I felt a bit jealous: a year before that he'd just got back from a few months in New York and we spent Christmas with our family in Toulouse. Right after he moved in with his girlfriend in Paris, the following month they moved together to Bolivia and he started a completely new job as an assistant teacher there. A couple of months later she was pregnant; now they had a beautiful little baby girl. So much had changed for him in 2009.

My year seemed meaningless in comparison - regardless of the fact I had a good year: moved to central London to be in walking distance to work, went to SXSWi, went out a lot more, attended many social media / marketing / planning type events / drinks, made new friends, worked on some fairly big and challenging projects at work (Unfortunately the largest went bust), had just hiked the Inca Trail, and spent time on Lake Titicaca and in the Bolivian jungle.

So anyhoo, some change seems to be coming my way this year.

About a month ago my flatmate announced he was leaving to move in with his girlfriend, I decided to move too. The awesome flat by the river I wanted didn't work out so I'm moving in my brother's spare room for a little while. Fortunately, I'll still be in walking distance from work.

iris announced a major restructure to merge the main agency and the digital side amongst a few other changes to make the whole agency leaner, more digitally and strategically focused. Unfortunately, quite a few people will be made redundant and we are in the middle of the process which will last until mid-August. Following a big pitch and my Birthday on Monday, I had news about that Tuesday and Friday last week.

A few weeks ago I was at old family friends non-wedding celebration in Portugal, which was amazing. It was also great to catch up with a bunch of friends from France I hadn't seen in a long time. It's going to be six years I've been in London next month and I'm starting to think it might be soon time to move back to France. No hurries, but it's on my mind now.

All in all I'm glad to be living in interesting times and I'll keep you updated more often.

PS: Not sure the poster of Frantic is the really most appropriate for the post, my life is not as dramatic as that, but it's still an awesome movie. Check it out if you've never seen it.

Stop to smell the roses!

2010-02-25T22:43:00.007Z

Contrary to vastly exaggerated rumours of kidnapping in South America or even death, I am actually very much still alive and kicking; I just haven't been doing that much here. Nor on Twitter, not so much on Facebook or Foursquare either. I'm still following these to an extent, adding the odd comment and replying to people but not as actively as before my holidays in December.

I was lucky to spend the whole month of December in Peru and Bolivia, I took this photo on the last day of the Inca trail, a magnificent view overlooking the Urubamba river from the top of Inca farming terraces. I obviously wasn't stuck to a computer screen all the time over there as I usually am in London and didn't get any painful withdrawal symptoms. I still don't miss it that much either. I've been getting back up to date into the advertising / digital / tech / planning news and back into day to day work, and haven't been feeling any massive urge to broadcast online. I've also been thinking about a few different projects, such as writing more fiction, which I have been doing a little bit of, and making stuff but I don't know what yet.

I'm not really sure what is behind having kept a bit quiet on the various social sites lately, but what occurs to me right now is that as much as I love the Internet, you just can't beat reality.

Exchanging a few tweets is fun, but never as great as having a proper conversation around a table with a few beers or a bottle of wine.

I love reading my favourite planning type blogs, but it's never as good as exchanging ideas and talking with their authors over lunch.

The photo I posted above looks great, but only the reality of sitting on that ledge with the whole valley at your feet might actually take your breath away.

Amongst a few other things that happened lately and are probably influencing this post, my aunt passed away last week and I was in Holland for the funeral on Friday. It was quite unexpected. It was a great family weekend and we celebrated my aunt Anneke's memory with many stories, sadness, tears, laughter, excellent food and too much drinking. I hadn't seen my aunt in over two years, only talked to her a few times on the phone, and the last interaction we ever had was actually through Facebook given she recently registered. Maybe that'll be completely normal one of these days, but in the meantime it feels pretty weird to me.

I was reading this article earlier today, extraordinarily featuring my friends Kai and Michael which also made me wonder some more about this.

Everything is moving so fast in this digital age where we are consuming and compiling plenty of stuff from plenty of places, but are we really appreciating and enjoying them?

As awesome as technology and the Internet are, they're a means, not an end. And whether you choose to stop from time to time and smell the roses or not, at the end you'll really just be dead all the same.

Are you stopping to smell the roses..?

Twitter is the new TV [but a lot smaller]

2009-11-28T10:43:00.028Z

Image courtesy

To some extent, I think this little scenario may be familiar for most of us: I opened my email this morning and had another 5 emails from my dad.

A funny image attached (Here, of course it's kinda NSFW)
A video of a funny ad for Bud Light attached (This one).
A Powerpoint slideshow attached with misspelled notes from parents to teachers
Another Powerpoint attachment with an illustrated joke in about 12 slides
A written joke in the body of the email

I generally receive one of those a day. No written text in the body of the email most of the time, my dad might just modify the sender / receiver list. Depending on whether the jokes are in French or in English I can gather a guess to which of his networks it's coming from: the US/UK old work crew, or the French/Swiss massive. And that's not counting his Dutch or German family and mates - I can't speak those languages that well so he doesn't send me those.

This reminded me that when it comes to using digital stuff I live in a bubble with a very small number of people. Nothing dramatically new here in terms of idea, but when you hang out with the same people all the time, you tend to start behaving like that's how everyone is.

Even though I know intellectually that Twitter has a tiny user base in proportion to Facebook, I don't really think very often about the fact that it's also tiny compared to MySpace. Yes, just because I don't use it anymore doesn't mean no one is using it. And the real shocker is that Twitter is microscopic compared to email.

Apparently there are about 27.3M tweets sent every day. Considering 30% of the approximately 11M registered Twitter users make up 97.4% of the total activity, that's like having 3.3M people out there that like chatting together. A lot. Nothing wrong with that, but now if we compare it with the 63 billion emails being sent everyday (Excluding the 70% of spam - in total it's about 210 billion), Twitter is just ridiculously small. About 7,692 times smaller.

On the other hand, the talk about Twitter is huge. Just to give a little impression I searched for a few terms on Google News and Google Blogs:
A hefty 362,000 news articles in English and a whopping 225M blog posts about it in just a few years. As a side note, it's interesting to note that the level of news mentioning Twitter has halved and I just read a couple of posts about Twitter traffic stagnating in the US.

I compared that with a few other search terms, here Myspace:

Twitter had almost the same amount of news mentions in about half the time, and apparently bloggers have never been as fascinated with the social network as they are with Twitter.

Facebook:
Definitely more news mentions than Twitter, but nowhere near proportional to how bigger Facebook is. I'm not saying that it should be; I have no idea, but it still seems interesting.

Email:
Not sure this one tells us that much given email is a commonly used word now, but in terms of sheer numbers, the amount of blog posts mentioning email isn't that much more than Twitter.

So here are a few points:

If you're a business or someone who advises businesses on these matters, please take a serious look at how clean your email database is and how your business is communicating via email (everywhere: internally, marketing, customer service, suppliers, etc) before getting all excited about Twitter.
If you're some kind of writer in media (news, journalist, reporter, bloggers) and want to distinguish yourself from the competition, you might want to write about something else than Twitter. I obviously don't follow my own advice.
If you work in PR, apparently the writer types like hearing about Twitter stuff, so keep going I guess - the trick there is probably going to be about segmenting the twitter information depending on associations (eg. Twitter + celebrity endorsement, Twitter + new product launch; etc)
If you're a celebrity I doubt you're reading this, but thanks anyway. It's mainly your fault if these people in the points above can't stop talking about Twitter [And assume it's important. And also assume everyone is interested in hearing about it].
If you're about to get on your high horse and start huffing and puffing about the good differences businesses or crowds have made with Twitter (Like raising cash for Twestival, awareness of news and events like the Iran Election, Dell selling more computers, etc), I already know about them but I'm not talking about that here. There are plenty of articles and posts about that elsewhere.

Twitter is making so much noise because its nature lends itself to it. Facebook, Myspace, and even email aren't originally built as broadcasting tools. But Twitter is made for broadcast. Just like TV or radio. It wasn't built for people to interact as they do on it now (Check Evan Williams' talk at TED). People just find ways to communicate and interact with one another because that's what we do.

I think that's why the media, PR, marketing, advertising industries like Twitter so much. It's easy to understand and you have simple visible numbers of people who receive the message you broadcast. Using it at that simple level doesn't really demand any behavior change from businesses or marketing departments. They're still talking at people as they used to, not with them.

I'll finish by certainly preaching to the converted but I don't think businesses should bother talking with people that much anyway. They should concentrate on making shit worth buying and they'll sell more of it. Or they should concentrate on making shit people are interested in, worth talking about, and they'll sell more of it. Or they should hire a good advertising partner if they have nothing new to talk about.

What do you think about all this?

My Dungeons & Dragons CV

2009-11-18T21:19:00.006Z

I saw a post from Gavin today about Sean McNally who designed a Dungeons & Dragons CV which definitely looks pretty cool. Given I did the same with a different design of AD&D character sheet years ago, back when I used to be a designer, I thought it might be a cool idea to bring it back and share it along with the similar themed business cards.

I have all the files so if someone fancies making this into an editable PDF or something like that, just tell me and I can send it over. It's all in French but what's written isn't that fascinating anyway. And I think I look stupid on that picture but hey - and yes, in France it's normal to have a photo on your CV, or at least it used to be.

Back in the day, geek wasn't so fashionably mainstream and everyone said my CV was insane and I would never get a job with something like that. I got concerned, didn't hear anything back from the places I'd sent it at and changed it - sadly.

Also I was on Caramail back in the day, that was one of the first email addresses I'd opened and was completely addicted to their chat rooms. It was the most popular webmail / community sites in France. Obviously there is no Wikipedia entry in English, but there is one in French. My fellow compatriots will probably remember.

And the business card:

The quote reads:

"The imagination paints,
The mind compares,
The taste chooses,
The talent executes."

I just uploaded the images to Flickr as well. Hope you enjoy.

AR in a banner with BK

2009-10-22T09:11:00.005+01:00

It doesn't happen very often but yesterday I came across a pretty cool MPU while browsing the Internet (So not from a link or a blog about advertising ;). It's an ad I spotted on College Humor, (While showing this video to someone; it's really good check it out) so it's probably still playing on some pages if you want to try it out - refresh to cycle through the ads served.

I haven't checked yet but I imagine most certainly this is CP+B at work here for Burker King who as far as I know about created the first augmented reality feature in an online ad. And while you could argue how useful it is; what's most interesting is that the symbol used for the AR to display is something most people [in the USA] would have in their pocket: a $1 bill.

Now whether anyone outside of complete geekiness and/or who works in advertising would wait and play with the AR and go shuffle in his pockets to find a $1 bill is also arguable, but you don't need many people to start showing others how neat this little feature is (I'm also guessing you need a good bandwidth)

RockArt Brewery vs. Corporate BS

2009-10-14T23:09:00.004+01:00

Matt Nadeau of RockArt Brewery is facing the bullying of a much larger corporation. Seriously check out the video and hopefully choose to boycott Monster Energy drinks after that - there are plenty of other energy drinks to choose from aren't bullying a 7 man company making specialty great craft beers.

Even better, write a complaint to Monster on their:
Website contact form
Twitter account (no response from them so far there or there; not trending yet but spreading fast)
Facebook page (A big one, there will be some work there)
Youtube channel

You can use #BoycottMonster as a hashtag, seems to be the most popular at the moment.

For a bit of background, I've been appreciating small craft beers and ales more and more recently; I'm also against corporate bullying in general and that seems to be exactly what they're victims of. To finish, if ever this works and Monster gives up, I would have been a playing part in a worthwhile experiment and I quite like the idea of that too.

Update (26/10/2009): I just received an email from the Hansen Beverage Company who manufactures Monster Energy Drink, apparently they have settled for a happy agreement with RockArt Brewery, so I'm also happy. Also glad the beverage company followed up my email and responded to it, congrats to them for that.

Hansen Beverage Company and Rock Art Brewery
Reach Trademark Agreement

October 26, 2009

Hansen Beverage Company and Rock Art Brewery today issued the following statement in connection with a recent trademark issue:

Hansen Beverage Company and Rock Art Brewery have reached an amicable agreement under which both companies' respective products will be protected - Hansen's Monster Energy® line of energy drinks and Rock Art's Vermonster beer products.

> Rodney Sacks, Hansen's chief executive officer, said: "We are pleased that we were able to resolve this matter expeditiously and put the concerns that had arisen behind us so that both parties can concentrate on their day-to-day businesses, selling their respective high-quality products. Our intent in this matter was simply to protect Hansen's trademarks and prevent any likelihood of confusion arising in the future through potential product extensions and was not to prevent Rock Art Brewery from selling their Vermonster beer."

> Matt Nadeau, owner of Rock Art Brewery, said: "Once Rodney and I were able to talk to each other we quickly appreciated each other's points of view and he acted reasonably, which allowed us to rapidly come to an agreement we are both happy with and allows both of us to move forward positively."

Do little breaks make a big difference..?

2009-10-12T23:59:00.004+01:00

You may have seen the Eurostar's advertising campaign called 'Little breaks make a big difference'. Beyond the posters I've seen in the tube, activities are being run across experiential, social and digital media (Created by Fallon, Vizeum and We Are Social). I was lucky enough to be invited for one of these little breaks mentioned in the tag line and went off to Paris on Saturday, along with about 43 other men and women in total for a romantic singles day out in the City of Lights.

Before we go any further, I'd like to point out I'm completely biased here given I love Paris and I love the Eurostar already and have been an advocate of both for a long time.

I lived most of my life in and around Paris, and am really Parisian more than anything - which is where my charming arrogance comes from; in case you ever wondered. It was quite funny going back for a day and with a group doing touristy stuff.

The Eurostar is simply awesome for a variety of reasons:

It's a train. Traveling by train is much more sophisticated and relaxed than the plane - unless you have your own private jet (Of course your own private train would be even better).
It goes from city centre to city centre, without going through the airport outside of town and several hours of humiliating security checks
This is an important one that tends to be taken for granted: It travels by way of a tunnel under the sea. Sure, managing to have a few tons of metal carcass crammed with people flying is a feat human beings can be proud of, but building an underwater tunnel is definitely badass [technical term].
it's fast and comfortable - now just about 2h20min from London to Paris
Great food served with champagne in first class
Did I mention it crossed a tunnel going under the sea?

I've been thinking about experiences a lot lately, it's interesting to note that advertising in the traditional sense cannot generate an experience, but that an experience can cause advertising.

At best, traditional advertising can generate an emotional response [Oh that's cute / clever / funny / etc], a thought [Sounds like a good idea], which might lead to an intention [Maybe I should try that out], and in an ideal world end in an action [buy something]. Nothing wrong with that and it does a great job for awareness and such like, but no experience there.

Now I think taking a similar scenario and adding your money where your mouth is by providing people with an experience demonstrating what the brand is claiming on the adverts can enhance all those marketing efforts.

The tagline for the Eurostar campaign is Little breaks, big difference. I saw the posters of laughing couples on a Parisian café terrace in the tube over the summer with that line and thought it seemed nice. The line would make sense to anyone, though not necessarily Eurostar specific (A little break flying to Barcelona or driving to the Cotwolds can also make a big difference). It doesn't matter that much because as far as I know in terms of positioning nobody had used the line before so they have a good chance owning that idea.

Now I think what really anchors that position is the experience.

So the cycle becomes something like:
See the advert > These people look happy > Think it's a good idea > Get a real life experience consistent with that idea. Now if I share that with other people, it's not conceptual, it's real. And people relate to real experiences more than they do with lines we all know were written up to sell more stuff.

I had a brilliant day out in Paris so I talked about it. With the cab driver on the way to St Pancras in the morning who told me he was going to check out prices because he was just thinking of going on a weekend away. To the cab driver on the way back home, to five different friends yesterday, to about 10 colleagues already this morning, and now I'm writing about it in my blog. Sure, I'm not a TV channel and I don't have an audience in the millions but I provided Eurostar with personalised brand interactions of at least a couple of minutes with each of those people.

Unless you go all #6weeks over it, difficult to say what it's all worth specifically; but I would say it's worth going through the effort of proving that your brand can deliver on the advert tagline or slogan in reality.

It was a brilliant day out and got to meet with a great bunch of people, though I have to say one disappointment was that we stayed indoors doing speed dating for almost the whole afternoon.

We had good fun but when I realised at least a couple of people had never been to Paris in their life I thought it was a missed opportunity. Speed dating is something you can do in London and we were already spending the whole day together and getting to know each other so it wasn't really needed; we could have gone walking somewhere, visit a museum, whatever something more Parisian - and speed dating is kind of the opposite of romantic. But then the tourist bus ride (courtesy of myself talking complete nonsense at the mic in front of the bus as we drove through town) and the boat ride were really cool and relaxed.

And on the romance front I hear you ask? Well there seemed to be at least one couple getting together, several dates scheduled and definitely some phone numbers exchanged so that sounds pretty successful too.

All in all probably the longest post I've written to answer yes to a question. Little breaks do make a big difference and good on Eurostar for being a brand demonstrating what they stand for rather than just telling us.

Update: The video edit is now on Youtube

FourSquare in London - the new thing I might annoy you with

2009-10-08T21:01:00.005+01:00

I got really excited this morning. I arrived in the office a little early and the first thing I saw in my inbox was a message from FourSquare announcing that London was open to the service!

I had been waiting for a while to be able to experience it on this side of the Pond. It first started from the few people I follow on Twitter in the US. A few random tweets announcing they were in this bar / club / pub / venue with a link back to FourSquare. It seemed pretty intriguing and of course given I try to be all over anything catching online to make sure I stay one of the cool people in the know [read as something like, so hopelessly beyond geekness that it comes out as utterly cool on the other side of the spectrum].

In short, I'd say FourSquare is part Qype / Yelp / Tipped like reviews, part social network (and/or integrated in other social networks), part location based service and all wrapped up in a gaming / playful context. Of course, give it that last note along with some booze given the whole concept is about showing off where the party's at; and I'm all over it.

In the space of 45 minutes I had a bunch of friends signing up and over a few hours over 30. I don't know how many people are already signed up for London in total but it must be quite a few as they need a certain critical mass before starting the service in a given city.

Check it out, it's fun and you get points for going out and being at places out and about in town. All for bragging rights at the moment but as the number of users grows they intend to create other value out of those points.

Maybe think of a Top Table and the way they are now operating a stranglehold over the restaurant business - get points for booking through Top Table and more points if you post reviews afterwards. After a certain number of points, you can receive gifts. Sounds like a brilliant idea altogether though Björn, my chef brother, hates them because every restaurant has to pay to be registered on the site and moreover the site regularly almost forces restaurants to provide special deals for the site's users.

Anyhoo, I'm getting off the point. It's fun, there's no advertising, it's spreading like wildfire (in my world anyway) and I'm loving it. And now you can know everything I'm doing online with Eyebrowse, so can you know everything out there offline with FourSquare.

We'll worry about business models later; que sera, sera.

Eyebrowse

2009-10-07T22:04:00.004+01:00

I recently started participating in an interesting experiment called Eyebrowse created by students at MIT.

In their words:

eyebrowse is an add-on for firefox that lets you easily record, visualize, and share your trails through the web in real-time.

I'm always interested in data visualisation and research tools so I installed it and have been adding a lot of sites to it over the past couple of weeks or so. It's all a bit weird but kind of exciting too. I'll admit I don't actually understand everything and I'm not sure it's always correct or what it measures or not, but given there are lots of nice colours to look at and a variety of cryptic graphs to ponder upon I'm happy with it so far.

This video offers a quick 45 seconds overview:

eyebrowse | share and compare your web trails from Brennan Moore on Vimeo.

Here are my Top 20 urls for each day of the week:

Apparently I visit more sites [recorded by Eyebrowse] on Saturday. Thursday is kind of low, but I think I had lots of meetings at work during the day for the past two Thursdays. Apparently my top three sites are Facebook, Wikiedia and Twitter. I'm not sure what the size of the boxes exactly means (time dwell or number of visits to the site?).

This one displays my top urls by time of day:

That's where it's strange because there's nothing for 10pm, 11pm, 12am, 1am. I'm pretty sure I've surfed the web at these times in the past few days. Otherwise it seems my peaks times for visiting lots of sites are 8am and 2pm.

I don't know if it keeps recording visits to the same urls when I leave the same tabs open, close my laptop and come back later... Apparently there's only four hours in the day that don't have online activity yet. It's at night so it might be all those porn sites I haven't included in Eyebrowse so far :D

This one looks pretty cool, it's my recorded online activity for the past 20 days:

Another strange one here, the note says on Sunday 27th September I spent over 16 hours on one user's Facebook profile, but I know I was out all day and not online at all. Before you go thinking I'm some kind of crazy stalker, I assure you I was out. I even have friends who can testify. I've paid them well and they have a whole cover story, including a visit of Tent London with Ume and a random lunch encounter with Darika.

I could go on, but it's pretty fascinating and I recommend joining in the fun. And it will also save time when Big Brother comes knocking, I'll just give him the url.

My first Prezi

2009-09-23T00:27:00.004+01:00

Prezi has been on my radar to try out properly for months, I'd seen the videos and read about it but hadn't yet done a whole presentation. As for a lot of other people, Umair, Twitter's Jack Dorsey being a couple of them, I think the concept is definitely awesome.

I finally got round to spending a little bit of time playing with the free version today and created my very first Prezi, check it out here. Mine is still pretty linear here, but I'm telling a really (very) simple story here as it's a first test.

I feel it's a bit disconcerting to not have tools to place objects in certain places and have very limited fonts, colours and styles but that might just be the free version.

I'm interested in trying out the pro version, I think there are more features and functions; and I need to practice. Although really simple, the interface doesn't come naturally for some reason - could be I'm too used to a complicated system to create presentations.

I'm pretty inspired right now and thinking not only about presentations but perhaps some other stuff it could be used for, one of the logical ones could be storytelling in some way. I'm thinking of a project in particular I just had the idea for, I need to get moving on it...

I would be great to be able to embed Prezis in Slideshare, I don't know if that's possible yet..?

Banner feedback on Amazon

2009-09-20T08:52:00.004+01:00

I might be slow for never having noticed, or perhaps it just proves the extent to which I generally ignore the usual online display advertising, but Amazon offers users the possibility to give feedback about the ads served on the site:

I was browsing for a few books, notably Leila Johnston's Enemy of Chaos (Leila talked about the book and read a passage of it at Interesting last week and it sounds excellent and hilarious) which is where I saw this HSBC ad.

A really simple and pretty boring flash animation in a rectangle MPU, just like countless other online ads.

Too many people still don't get that:

1. Taking a poster and turning it into an animated online display simply doesn't work. When the advertising industry started making ads on TV, they started shooting video for them. I doubt anybody thought broadcasting radio ads on TV would be a good idea. Same difference.

2. Online display advertising can be great if thought through, it really depends of the objectives of the activity. It can be as seemingly simple such as this Pringles ad that won several awards, or pretty extravagant like this Burger King ad (And it rarely happens but I saw this one and played through the game while browsing on The Onion, as opposed to seeing it on Bannerblog for example). They are rare occurrences, but these two examples are brilliant, fun, quirky, entertaining and memorable - all advertising should have at least some of those qualities.

So what does this mean? I like Amazon, have shopped with Amazon for years and will continue to do so. I'm really glad they care enough about their customers to ask their opinion about the ads served on their site when I'm visiting. They probably won't be able to do that much to improve the quality of the banner ads appearing there, but being able to send my feedback about the ad really made a difference to my shopping experience.

Result: I like Amazon even more and I'm even writing a whole post here about it. All of that because of a little 'Ad feedback' link.

But wait, who was advertising again? Oh yeah, HSBC. Could have been anyone. I didn't even get if the ad was specifically promoting something, but I assumed they would like me to open an account with them.

Well, as for a lot other banner ads out there, I would say this one was money wasted. And I'm not sure I want to entrust my money to a bank that's wasting theirs...

Advertising Panasonic TVs

2009-09-07T17:24:00.004+01:00

As I posted a few days ago, I'm judging on a panel for the Panasonic Next Generation Talent and sent back my judging form back today.

In short, here are a few opinions I have included in there:

As I pointed out in my previous post, I don't understand why all the four contestants have concentrated on displaying a range of Panasonic products rather than the TV but then again if those were selected finalists, I guess that's what was wanted.

'A Panasonic advert by Romaine Reid' was the entry I thought was closest to a finished advert telling a nice story and showing pretty clearly what is being talked about. Though it also feels like it may lack originality at the same time, I like the idea of showing the HD qualities and relationship between the different products and they work all together.

I thought 'Electronic devices coming to lights via their on lights by Daniel Childs-Clarke' was the most interesting from a creative and visual point of view, there's something original and special about the way it looks and I like that. On the other hand, I feel it doesn't say much about the TV itself, or Panasonic and might be a strange way to show HD but there might be potential there.

These are the two finalists I selected for the next round of the competition, but I just wanted to add one more note about an idea and I what I thought was a good proposition that I liked from Steffan Harrison: Little things make the big picture happen. I feel it could be a rich creative territory to explore.

Congrats again to everyone participating and I'll be curious to see who wins over the next few days.

I f*cking love One & Other

2009-09-02T23:13:00.004+01:00

Such a shame, I had heard about the Antony Gormley's One & Other project a few times before it started and then once again in July, but somehow managed to pretty much avoid it over the past two months.

I got into it today watching the live stream and reading the blog and Twitter comments; and absolutely love it. It's freaking brilliant. Moving and awesome. It's late right now so I'll write some more about it within the next couple of days. In the meantime, I leave you with Clive_L who is on the Fourth Plinth right this minute, reading some Shakespeare out loud. Clive_L also plays the spoons pretty well.

Check it out! Such a shame I missed out on the draws to get on the plinth myself...

Next Generation Talent: 09 Edition first impressions

2009-09-02T15:29:00.006+01:00

I wrote about Next Generation Talent at the end of last year, a competition organised by Panasonic where students are given a brief to create an advert for one of their products. It was set during an event as a social media panel then, and I'm participating again this year though there's no event.

The task this year was to create an advert for the G10 Viera TV and with the 'Everything Matters' strapline. Four people have been preselected as finalists with TV ads that are available to view on a dedicated Youtube channel.

I have been asked to judge those four preselected finalists and send some feedback, it would be great to have your opinions about them as well.

I'm going to embed the videos here and write my first impressions about them. For anyone reading this who doesn't know me, I'm fairly direct and straightforward so I'll be writing in a similar fashion. Doesn't mean I'll be mean but it's just so you know it's not personal if ever you're offended by anything (Which could perhaps apply to the contestants). If ever you are, apologies in advance and please tell me in the comments.

To start with, congratulations to all the students participating and well done on the finalists for getting there. I'm guessing this is all extra-curricular stuff (Or maybe not..?), so kudos for getting involved.

One general impression telling me I need to check the complete brief the students had on is that I was told in the document sent to me that the advert is for the TV, but most of the finalists created an advert for a range of Panasonic products so I feel like I'm missing something.

One more thing I'm adding. My comments could be seen as harsh but they're really just my fairly raw first impressions. Also, I realise it's pretty tough to realise a full blown video / TV ad with what likely was limited time and resources - another congrats for that.

Entry from Paul Bryant, Loughborough University

I just watched it twice and read the snippet alongside the video. I don't get the flashing / stroboscoping blackness. It hurt my eyes. I think it might be some kind of first person blinking eye, or is it a cinema reel..? The author explains this is meant to be like an opticians examination with a phoropter. I understand the thought behind the explanation once I read it rather than when I saw the ad. From my perspective, I was lost after two seconds and ultimately this isn't an artwork and the business purpose of the ad seems lost too. I feel the flashing takes away from the stop motion animation behind which I think is unfortunate because it looks really nice otherwise.

I get the idea there's an evolution, today's equipment is better than yesterday's but what does that tell me about the product itself? Or about Panasonic? It feels like any TV could be in this spot and it would be the same thing.

Entry from Romaine Reid, Ravensbourne College

Nice. Really nice animation. There's a flow and a story told visually linking all the range of HD Panasonic products (But that's also where if it is supposed to advertise the TV in particular, then I don't get it).
On the other hand, it feels sort of done before and time again. It's concentrating on the products themselves, images and colours. Every competitor in the market has been saying that at some or another.

To most people, if they look the same, are about the same size and have a similar looking image quality, one TV is the same as another TV. Sure all the ads will tell us they have nice colours and images. What's different about this one?

Entry from David Childs-Clarke, Ravensbourne College

There's definitely a very particular and artistic visual style here that I personally like, so I'd say as an interpretation that's what differentiates this ad and by association, this product. That said and again, I'm not sure that's what is intended to be conveyed here and I don't even get it's an ad for a TV at all. Or any specific product, just generally about Panasonic perhaps.

Entry from Steffan Harrison, Ravensbourne College

Now wondering even more if students were asked specifically to focus on the products. The idea of focusing on the four colours of the Freesat logo is interesting but the task seems like it was about HD and Panasonic rather than Freesat. Wasn't it..? Actually what I like most is the intent written of showing the TV as a bigger whole than the elements associated with it (the other satellite products, camera, etc)

I'll write another post with a more thought through opinion in a couple of days.

Trying to figure out...

2009-08-23T23:42:00.004+01:00

WordPress.

I've decided to move my blog and self host it on a WordPress.org platform. I've been thinking about it for a couple of weeks and thought why not.

So now I'm experimenting and figuring it out with my new travel blog:
Ice Cream for Everywhere.

I always randomly write when I go off travelling and it has been collecting dust for a while so I thought I might as well put everything online. I spent several hours yesterday looking at WP themes and the site is far from finished yet. I want to understand it a bit better, finish copying a bunch of posts from various trips and then I'll take care of moving this blog here to a different site.

This way, I'll be writing about my South American travels directly on that other blog in December. That's right, I'm going to Peru and Bolivia and really looking forward to it! My little brother's little baby daughter should also be born by then so I'll have the privilege of meeting my new niece. ;)

I f*cking hate Pizza Express

2009-08-22T11:17:00.004+01:00

I f*cking hate Pizza Express. You may have already figured that out from the title. Most of my friends or people I tell don't get it and I think they're insane. It's insipid, their food is bland, really expensive, the portions are tiny, and they're overtaking everything at a Starbucks speed (Which I don't like that much but as much as I hate Pizza Express).

It's not that surprising given their size they can keep throwing 241 vouchers at all the affiliate sites possible and imaginable so people keep coming. Incentives and e-marketing 101. But then again, nothing wrong with that I guess.

Apart from the fact that I've been in a bit of an angry mood lately, I've just learned Pizza Express launched a ridiculous new product lately and it's as good an opportunity as any to share my distaste for the brand. I'm sure the 241 afficionados will be soon be all over it like a rash: The leggera pizza (it means light in Italian, call it a diet pizza). A pizza with a hole in the middle and salad in the hole. So like half a pizza.

Eat a salad if you're worrying about your diet. The worst thing is this kind of minute segmentation will probably work; specially created for the diet conscious who want to look good in front of their friends, feel good about themselves and can't make up their minds on whether to have a pizza or a salad. Now they can have both. I'm so relieved.

Curious, I checked the menu found out a classic Margherita costs £5.90. A light Margherita costs £7.95. I guess the fresh tomatoes in the latter are perhaps more expensive..? Still outrageous. Otherwise, the rest of their pizzas cost a fortune, ridiculousy overpriced.

Their ice cream isn't very good either. I don't understand how so many people love it. Apparently they have over 13,000 fans on their Facebook page. But I'm not one for random hate and I'm glad a good reason for you to boycott Pizza Express if you're up for it. Check out this Facebook group about Pizza Express employees.

Now there are problems with managing tips for the whole restaurant industry but still: Pizza Express takes 8% from whatever the service charge is for admin fees. Service charge in the UK is not obligatory, customers don't have to pay it, but usually do with the understanding that this money is tips for the staff. That's rarely the case and here a good example of Pizza Express taking money from their low paid employees.

Pizza Express employees protested against this in 2007 and a restaurant manager who supported the employees claims got sacked.

I'm also glad I found a few other people who don't like it, such as Pete Cashmore from 'Une Annee sans Pizza', the blog of a pizza lover who didn't eat any for a whole year.

And it's not just Pizza Express, it's every single standardised eatery and baverage chains. All the same lame decorations, overpriced offering, same bland flavours, paint by numbers school of cooking, etc. It's all killing the small restaurants and originality.

To finish on a positive note, because I'm not all hatred, I absolutely love good pizza. For some really good pizza and Italian food check out these places in London:

Bar Italia in Soho, a London institution open since 1949. If you haven't tried their pizzas yet, have one. They're not the best in the world but very good and beat a Pizza Express any time.
Ripe Tomato, close to Portobello Road.
Centonove, on Westbourne Park Road.

What are your favourite pizza places? I'd love to know.

Rant done. One day I may talk about Fire & Stone, possibly the only pizza place I hate more than Pizza Express ;) Have a great weekend.

PS: You probably noticed, but no link love for Pizza Express.

Avatar Day

2009-08-21T17:02:00.003+01:00

I was invited last minute to go see the 15 minutes of clips from Avatar at the IMAX in London for Avatar Day. It's the new James Cameron movie that will be released in December this year and has been talked about for months already - if not a year or two.

For a movie building up so much expectations I think it's a pretty good idea to offer to see 15 minutes of clips months before the release date to get fans buy-in and build even more anticipation. Of course it's also gambling on the fact that most people will like those 15 minutes, but so far it seems to be paying off according to Avatar mentions on Twitter, although District 9 and Inglorious Basterds are both in the top 10 trends right now and Avatar isn't.

Apparently Cameron spent over $300M on this production, so I'm glad to say at the very least it looks good. Even stunning, in fact. A giant full fledged 3D animated fest of special effects for sure, but a visually beautiful universe. So it has that going, and it's pretty certain I'll go see it - I would advise an IMAX cinema for something at this scale.

Now the scenario may have some kind of twist but it seems unlikely and the storyline looks extremely basic. I had only read one article about Avatar and I think having created a whole brand new science-fiction universe, they are hoping to rival with something like Star Wars for a new generation of movie goers. So far as I said it looks beautiful and maybe even memorable - but only for so long.

Interestingly, Titanic was another giant super-production from Cameron and people haven't forgotten it but I don't think it has a cult status or following either (Does it?). Avatar might end up in the same category, but we'll see.

The other thing I'm not convinced about is the 3D glasses. I don't get the renewed 3D trend at the moment. I think it's still sort of blurry (Or not blurry, at least has a strange quality), the glasses are annoying and I don't find the little bit of depth perception adds much to the movie experience...

But I'll say one last time that it looks amazingly beautiful and that should definitely be worth it.

Trailer here.

Rubbish

2009-08-19T00:50:00.002+01:00

Remember SMEBS..? The Social Media Burnout Syndrome? Sure you must remember, back in February Marcus Brown came over to London and did a brilliant Garden of Tweetdom evening, including a piece about people suffering from terrible social media addictions.

SMEBS Watch - Meet Andrew from Marcus Brown on Vimeo.

More information on SMEBS watch.

So the new news is that Sony VAIO launched a campaign, apparently created by Nascom in Belgium and basically ripped the concept off completely. That makes the Kaiser angry. And the Hippo too (Why not, and people should know not to fuck with hippos, they kill more people in Africa than any other animal apparently).

As Marcus says in this post, just ask for god's sake. We all know there's stealing, sopying and plagiarism in the advertising industry, but when it's so blatant have the decency of asking.

What I actually find even weirder is that I don't like the campaign at all. I don't understand what the hell it has to do with Sony VAIO and doesn't seem to portray VAIO owners in a good light. Sure, one easy way to view it is that VAIOs are so good that you can't your hands off them.

Another interpretation is that Twitter / Facebook / etc are so addictive it has nothing to do with the computer.

Yet another one, and what I thought immediately was that VAIO users were obviously a bunch of worthless, sad weak willed junkies - so the computer can't be worth that much either.

I wonder how much Sony really wants to be directly associated with addictive behaviours, actually drugs and support Anonymous type groups..?

I would be interested in having more of other people's opinions about this, both about the plagiarism and thoughts about the campaign.

And actually, one more thing to finish. It just occured to me that I usually say that for any communications to be successful and generate conversations, they need to be polarising. And this one is. I don't like it and am campaigning about it.

That actually sounds like a pretty good job in my book.

2012

2009-08-18T08:45:00.005+01:00

You've probably heard of the new Roland Emmerich cataclysmic fest of a movie coming out soon, 2012. The movie is based on the Mayan calendar stopping in 2012 and predicting the Earth will be destroyed (I haven't checked up on the legend and history so I won't elaborate) If you haven't seen the trailer, check it out but Bud pointed us out (via Twitter) to this excellent trailer remake inspired by 70's disaster movies with an awesome groovy tune:

Last weekend I was working on a few personal projects (Notably thinking of moving this blog to self hosted WordPress and registered another domain name for all the travel writing I have taking up dust in a folder, so look out for Ice Cream for Everywhere coming out soon).

Anyhoo, given I was looking at a few WP sites I ended up visiting Big Spaceship again and browsing around I saw they created a website for The IHC, The Institute for Human Continuity. An organisation dedicated to the noble cause of saving a few select humans by blasting them out in outer space while the planet will be destroyed in 2012 (Which by the way looks like a WP as well, isn't it?).

Nice way to promote the movie. But then also realised this was part of a larger ARG type experience and so I registered to the Lottery to be saved before the apocalypse, you should check it out if you want to have a chance to get of here in, ironically, a big spaceship. So now I have an optimistic Dr. Soren Ulfert PhD, Communications Director of the IHC emailing me with news and next actions in the preparation for our species survival.

But not everyone believes in the righteous actions of the IHC: I found out Charlie Frost, broadcasting live from his Winnebago out in the middle of nowhere, USA, does not believe anyone will survive 2012 and makes it his mission to tell whoever will listen in his website - This is the End.

He also has is own Youtube channel and answers audience questions about the apocalypse:
(You may notice he strangely resembles Woody Harrelson ;)

Charlie Frost is also on Twitter, as is The IHC. They are also on a bunch of other sites, links are on peppered on the main sites.

I don't really know where this is going but I'm finding it quite entertaining for now and expect it to perhaps be better than the movie so I wanted to share it with you.

On this note I will leave you and go submit my application to become the Post-2012 Glorious Leader of Humanity. Vote Willem!

Nom Nom Nom winners!

2009-07-15T17:55:00.009+01:00

To our complete surprise, Kai and I won the Nom Nom Nom competition last Sund ay!! We are not the proud owners of the NomNomNom09 trophies, Kitchen Aid blenders, and a few more goodies. All the nice photos of the day are here.

Now the online vote just started and we're going to ask for your support! Please vote for The French Connection, the name of our team

This was the three course meal we prepared:

A salmon tartare to start with. We were originally going to make it with tuna but one of the criteria of the competition was sustainability so we thought salmon was a bit better. The fresh salmon is marinated in lemon for an hours or two and then incorporated to a mix of finely chopped tomatoes, onions, chives and a bit of fromage blanc on a bed of thinly sliced cucumber. Thank you very much to Epicurean.com for the recipe and Kai completely mastered the preparation of it.

For the main, we cooked duck breast with spiced apple chutney and a side of salad. The duck is marinated in fresh orange juice, soy sauce and a pinch of chillli powder for a couple of hours before being seared on a frying pan. The apple chutney is slowly cooked with cardamom, cumin, cinnamon, and a few more spices. Pretty easy to do though the balance of spices can be depending on taste to get right. We were told it was a bit overpowering (the judges should have tried the one I made the day before on our practice run, that was intensely flavourful!).

Now surprisingly our star dish seemed to have been the dessert. I'm not a big fan of cooking desserts and even less baking. The recipe was suggested by Hazel, my flatmates girlfriend and thank you again for that! I had never cooked it the day before and hadn't made a meringue in about ten years (and had failed) so we were close to changing the dessert but kept to it and it seems it paid off! A meringue base cooked with chopped pecans, topped with mascarpone, double cream, raspberries and dark chocolate shavings - delicately roll the whol thing up, et Voila! It's not actually that difficult, give me a shout if you want the recipe!

Nom Nom Nom 09

2009-07-11T11:31:00.003+01:00

I'm going to be cooking for the Nom Nom Nom competition tomorrow with Kai. We're going to be documenting the day and there will be an online vote based on photos and videos of the day so there will be a more complete post coming up and I'll be asking everyone I know to please vote for our team ;)

We didn't practice together yet and still thinking about changing the dishes we planned on cooking but in any case I have taken a bit of time to practice during this past week. Here's a picture of the main course practice run: Duck breast with apple chutney. It was delicious, though the dish is not dressed properly at all on this photo - the plan is for this to look a lot more attractive on the day (Though I must say it was already delicious ;)

Lots of random stuff

2009-06-04T10:25:00.005+01:00

Dusting off the cobwebs around here so here's a bunch of stuff from the past month:

Today's Venn diagram:

Prototype is a video game that has been mucho hyped months ago and is now coming out on Xbox 360, the site is pretty cool because as far as I know they are the first to integrate Facebook Connect in a really smart way so that in just one click from the user half your life is mixed in te game's trailer, really good stuff.

My brother Bjorn's new restaurant opened a few weeks ago, called Eastside Inn. It's absolutely awesome (Sure, I'd say that - but it really is ;) and deserves a post of its own, but in the meantime here are some reviews: Evening Standard. London Paper. Come and join us on the Facebook page, if you make it to the restaurant you can write a note or a review about it directly there.

I also liked the Lacoste Colour DNA website, I'm sure you'll be glad to know I'm a Firelight. Nice idea, colour / personality intepretations have been around for a while but it's the first time I see a brand take advantage of it online. They also have a Twitter accou nt for the campaign.

Also in family news, my little brother Morgan who recently moved to Bolivia with his girlfriend is going to be a daddy, so I'm going to be an uncle once again. I'm planning to go visit Peru and Bolivia at the end of the year.

My best mate James started participating in an online mag called Bai Cai Mag and I'm going to write a piece in it - though I'm already late with that...

On the work side of things, pretty busy on a bunch of stuff, and among them summer activities for VW vans / campervans under the VW Escape title. We are managing some social media presence with Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and Youtube. We wraped some vans with illustrations and will be at several events, first of which at the Blackheath Bike and Kite festival in a couple of weeks which looks like it's going to be pretty cool.

Sure, a lot more has been going on in the past month, but let's just finish with some randomness - it's Pet Fashion Week, which also reminded me of the My Little Pony movie characters:

Coraline

2009-05-05T10:40:00.003+01:00

If you remember, I mentioned before I was really looking forward to seeing Coraline - the new movie by Henry Selick and Laika studio based on a Neil Gaiman book. I was lucky enough to go to a screening last week invited by Melinda and Cristiano.

As mentioned before, the whole movie is made in stop motion animation and every single thing in it was hand crafted. On top of that, the movie is shown in 3D in certain cinemas, so it gives it an additional strange 3D animation quality even though everything is in stop motion.

The result is a stunningly beautiful animated movie and I highly recommend it - particularly if you like strange and dreamy universes - and Neil Gaiman. The storyline itself is not extremely original, but thinking of it as a children's fairytale it doesn't matter that much. The characters are really original, weird and quirky. The whole movie is visually beautiful. I don't really have much more to say right now, just go see it (Melinda also wrote a pretty comprehensive review here).

Absolut Kindness

2009-04-21T15:24:00.005+01:00

I don't talk about work we do at iris Digital that often here, but here's a little piece we are running at the moment that I'd like to mention so I'm doing some blatant self-promotion.

Asbolut Vodka are running a campaign in London this week within the idea 'In an Absolut World, kindness would be currency'. We created this website (You'll notice it's in WordPress, all the rage at the moment ;) and a Twitter account to engage with people with questions such as 'If kindness were currency, who do you think the millionaires would be?' informing of the events taking place in London throughout the week organised by the team over at iris Experience. For example, it started Sunday at the Clapham Picture House and at Screen on the Green in Angel. Kai made it to the cinema in Angel and took some pictures.

It all happened extremely fast so unfortunately we didn't have time to engage that much with people before the events started, but starting work on the Twitter account over the weekend was a great experience already. I find it quite exhilarating to represent 'the face of a brand' and getting to practice what I talk about on a regular basis. (Luis has been leading on the project, I was mostly just helping over the weekend)

"Can I haz Kindness?' We are also working alongside We are Social, spreading the #kindness all over the Internets and telling people about the campaign and the events happening in london.

There are more events taking place tomorrow, Thursday and Friday - check the Twitter stream if you're going to be around Soho or Shoreditch!

PS: Luis just got back from lunch as I finished this, just have to add it in. #Kindness everywhere, he found a purse by the Tate Modern and called the owner's to return it - Without stealing anything! You just can't make that stuff up ;o)

We're all Slideshare RockStars!!

2009-04-01T13:41:00.005+01:00

There are a bunch of April Fool's day pranks going round today (I liked this Guardian article), obviously but so far respect for Slideshare for theirs!

I received this email - as did a lot of other people:

Hi Willemvdh,

We've noticed that your slideshow on SlideShare has been getting a LOT of views in the last 24 hours. Great job ... you must be doing something right. ;-)

Why don't you tweet or blog this? Use the hashtag #bestofslideshare so we can track the conversation.

Congratulations,
-SlideShare Team

I checked my Slideshare and the only presentation I have on there suddenly has over 30,000 views! I think they added an extra 00 or something to everyone's numbers and sent that Slideshare RockStar email! RickStars, more like ;)

It's already trending on Twitter as the number 4 topic. Really simple and elegant idea, lots of buzz and conversation created from it. Brilliant. And it plays with people's egos, so all the more reason to talk about it, they probably also saw a big surge in visits to their site. They must be LTAO ;o)

Earth Hour

2009-03-25T09:28:00.002Z

It's that time of the year again! WWF are calling to everyone on the planet to turn their lights off for an hour on Saturday 28th March at 8:30pm GMT.

All you have to do to participate is turn your lights off. Get some candles. I participated last year (Reminded last minute by Google that changed their homepage for the occasion ;). You can also sign up here to show your support, it'll only take you a couple of minutes and it's for a good cause.

There are a bunch of resources here for your blog, banners, etc - but what's pretty cool is they also created a highly fashionable augmented reality 'Earth in your hands' thing - if you never saw 3D augmented reality, the concept is that you print out a specific design handed out and then show that to your webcam on the site, and voila! A 3D design appears in your hands. Pretty nifty, heh?

Even the pandas are doing, so why not you? Crazy pandas...

McDonalds Ad..? Or am I being cynical?

2009-03-23T23:39:00.006Z

I received this email chain from a friend. I hadn't received any in so long, I'm just thinking it's a McDonald's marketing campaign ;) Touching story I guess, though a bit too much God in it.

Do you think God eats at McDonald's?

Don't get me wrong I'd gladly sacrifice 10 friends on Facebook to give a Whopper to a hungry/homeless person, I just don't think God, McDonald's and this email will help them that much.

My friend Adam said I wasn't being too cynical, just too French. I don't know what he means..?

PS: On this note, I'm making a donation to Crisis and I encourage you to do the same, it will make more of a difference than forwarding this email around!

A Return is Requested....You'll see why.

Breakfast at McDonald's

This is a good story and is true, please read it all the way through until the end! (After the story, there are some very interesting facts!):

I am a mother of three (ages 14, 12, 3) and have recently completed my college degree.

The last class I had to take was Sociology.

The teacher was absolutely inspiring with the qualities that I wish every human being had been graced with.

Her last project of the term was called, 'Smile.'

The class was asked to go out and smile at three people and document their reactions.

I am a very friendly person and always smile at everyone and say hello anyway. So, I thought this would be a piece of cake, literally.

Soon after we were assigned the project, my husband, youngest son, and I went out to McDonald's one crisp March morning.

It was just our way of sharing special playtime with our son.

We were standing in line, waiting to be served, when all of a sudden everyone around us began to back away, and then even my husband did.

I did not move an inch... an overwhelming feeling of panic welled up inside of me as I turned to see why they had moved.

As I turned around I smelled a horrible 'dirty body' smell, and there standing behind me were two poor homeless men.

As I looked down at the short gentleman, close to me, he was 'smiling'

His beautiful sky blue eyes were full of God's Light as he searched for acceptance.

He said, 'Good day' as he counted the few coins he had been clutching.

The second man fumbled with his hands as he stood behind his friend. I realized the second man was mentally challenged and the blue-eyed gentleman was his salvation.

I held my tears as I stood there with them.

The young lady at the counter asked him what they wanted.

He said, 'Coffee is all Miss' because that was all they could afford. (If they wanted to sit in the restaurant and warm up, they had to buy something. He just wanted to be warm).

Then I really felt it - the compulsion was so great I almost reached out and embraced the little man with the blue eyes.

That is when I noticed all eyes in the
restaurant were set on me, judging my every action.

I smiled and asked the young lady behind the counter to give me two more breakfast meals on a separate tray.

I then walked around the corner to the table that the men had chosen as a resting spot. I put the tray on the table and laid my hand on the blue-eyed gentleman's cold hand.

He looked up at me, with tears in his eyes, and said, 'Thank you.'

I leaned over, began to pat his hand and said, 'I did not do this for you. God is here working through me to give you hope.'

I started to cry as I walked away to join my husband and son. When I sat down my husband smiled at me and said, 'That is why God gave you to me, Honey, to give me hope..'

We held hands for a moment and at that time, we knew that only because of the Grace that we had been given were we able to give.

We are not church goers, but we are believers.
That day showed me the pure Light of God's sweet love.

I returned to college, on the last evening of class, with this story in hand.
I turned in 'my project' and the instructor read it.
Then she looked up at me and said, 'Can I share this?'
I slowly nodded as she got the attention of the class.

She began to read and that is when I knew that we as human beings and being part of God share this need to heal people and to be healed.

In my own way I had touched the people at McDonald's, my son,the instructor, and every soul that shared the classroom on the last night I spent as a college student.

I graduated with one of the biggest lessons I would ever learn:

UNCONDITIONAL ACCEPTANCE.

Much love and compassion is sent to each and every person who may read this and learn how to

LOVE PEOPLE AND USE THINGS -
NOT LOVE THINGS AND USE PEOPLE.

There is an Angel sent to watch over you.

In order for her to work, you must pass this on to the people you want watched over.

An Angel wrote:

Many people will walk in and out of your life, but only true friends will leave footprints in your heart

To handle yourself, use your head..
To handle others, use your heart.

God Gives every bird it's food, but He does not throw it into its nest.

Send it back, you'll see why !

A box of gold

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

With a secret inside that has never been told

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

This box is priceless but as I see

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

The treasure inside is precious to me

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Today I share this treasure with thee

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

It's the treasure of friendship you've given me.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

If this comes back to you then you'll have a friend for life

but, if this becomes deleted, you are not a friend.

Send this to everyone you consider a friend!

It will grant you one wish and only one wish,

that is, if you decide to send this to others. You can wish for anything.

Repeat your wish until you have stopped scrolling. Make it count!

FOR YOUR WISH TO COME TRUE YOU HAVE TO SEND IT TO:
3 PEOPLE - YOUR WISH WILL COME TRUE EVENTUALLY
5 PEOPLE - YOUR WISH WILL COME TRUE IN 3 MONTHS
10 PEOPLE - YOUR WISH WILL COME TRUE IN 5 WEEKS
15 PEOPLE - YOUR WISH WILL COME TRUE IN 1 WEEK

CAN'T WAIT A WEEK???

22 People-Your Wish Will Come True In 1 Day!

****** **********REMEMBER**************
THIS MUST BE SENT OUT THE
DAY YOU READ IT FOR
YOU TO GET YOUR WISH

First day of SXSWi

2009-03-14T04:03:00.006Z

I don't know if I'll be writing a post every day for this, but I'm not being too crazy tonight and can write so I might as well ;)

First really busy day of conferencing, and it was pretty amazing! Glad I got up early and managed to do my registration and grab my badge really quickly given the Convention Centre was pretty much empty. My hotel is a little far from downtown - not too much but enough that I can't really easily be going back and worth walking if I need to srop something off. Like the gigantic goody bag I got this morning. Hanged around the huge Austin Convention Centre for a couple of hours, came across Alex from Hide & Seek and Jeremy, and talked with a few other people as well before catching up with Katy for lunch.

Went according to plan for the first panel of the day: 'Minority Report is real' and it was very cool - exactly the kind of research and forward thinking I was expecting from coming over here. Three people on the panel, all seriously interesting people, but not exactly into interface design - this was more of a side research project they started conducting together, looking into how movies and sci-fi have influenced new technology developments and still are - or sometimes the other way round as well.

They distinguished several trends in interface design / gestural UI development, and showed us examples in movie clips and then how close or far we are from those in real life. That was very cool and beautiful, but it was really great they kept asking the questions going further about what they might be used for and whether we really need an oblong beautiful Minority Report right now, how much is it exactly used for good, etc.

Next wasn't so good, unfortunately. I was hesitating between a web design one and this one about a company doing ARG types games, I probably should have gone to the other one, but hey - it's also part of choosing between so many things, and some other people told me most of the other talks at the same time as the last time weren't very good - I chose right for the 1st one, I guess. The company in question, The Go Game, actually do really interesting stuff in terms of games for corporate / team building events but I thought they didn't really have much to say and didn't feel like they really prepared for this talk either - they probably could have done it in 10 min with the material they had but talked for an hour... Nice people and their games look definitely great but not so great at talking in a panel...

Next was one of the big talks of SXSWi with Alex Bogusky - the B in CP+B - Talking about 'Can an Ad guy bring bike sharing to America?' Having quickly found out that the answer was in fact no, the topic shifted slightly to 'The art of sticking your nose where it doesn't belong'. He introduced CP+B and talked about who they are and the kind of work they do; as you do in such a talk - I actually didn't mind given I'd never heard him talk in a conference and apart from BK these days I haven't been talking about everything they do and found about a couple of campaigns I didn't know about as well. But more importantly, he talked about a load of pretty fucked up things on this planet via a bunch of good quotes and stats (#collapsonomics) and about making a difference. At first it could seem like it's all hopeless, but going from the fact that human knowledge is growing exponentially and a few other things - basically just go out there and do something to help, anything you're passionate about. 'Poke around' Go with an idea, talk to some people, meet some people who know people who know people, stick your nose where it doesn't belong.

He essentially shared this through their project (Humana, Trek and CP+B) of bringing bike sharing to America - a similar system that exists in Paris with the Velib. All really interesting stuff and pretty inspiring!

Mr Alex Bogusky

I ended up going off to a bar from there with Alice from BBH, Nicole (whose Husband was freelancing with us at iD recently), Damiano from the RSA, Conor from the RoundHouse and a couple of other people. Originally well intended wanting to go to the first official drinks for SXSW but way too much queue and it turned out Nicole's sister is a bar manager in Austin, so we went there for drinks (I then tried going to the 2nd official event - saw the queue, turned around) and then on to a Mexican restaurant with a few other Austin peeps. Turned out, we ate close to the Hotel where I'm staying so I thought I'd go back and write this - keep the big party energy for tomorrow ;)

The Gueres Taco bar

Quick SXSW update

2009-03-13T05:37:00.004Z

I finally landed in Austin, Texas for SXSWi! Long flight (s) and some delays, but got here in the end and that's what counts! Couldn't wait to have a beer and walk around a little as I arrived at the hotel and the event already started. Loads of people were already on the flight and the hotel bar had a few people there already pre-celebrating...

Already maing some contacts, the first person I saw at Heathrow this morning at 8am is also the first person I saw arriving here and turns out to be in charge of new media at the RoundHouse in Camden - very cool Irish guy. We had a really good chat about online and music - having just completed the HERD chapter about WoM and the Arcic Monkeys, I had stuff to talk about ;0).

All looking pretty awesome!

Also met a bunch of other people, including a colourful and pretty lively couple from Tennessee - that I might just try to avoid slightly in the coming next days ;)

Very excited, though tomorrow morning is going to be a very long queue to register for the event, apparently the queues were already huge this evening for the pre-registration...

I realise I should have some kind of picture illustrating, but that will be for tomorrow.

Ice Cream Review - The Garden of Tweetdom: An evening with Marcus Brown

2009-03-10T15:01:00.010Z

May 7, 1824: Premiere night of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

According to one witness, "the public received the musical hero with the utmost respect and sympathy, listened to his wonderful, gigantic creations with the most absorbed attention and broke out in jubilant applause, often during sections, and repeatedly at the end of them."

March 9, 2009: Premiere night of Marcus Brown's Garden of Tweetdom. (Photo by Ben Terrett)

Need I say more..?

An unusual atmosphere of sheer anticipation could be felt yesterday around London Bridge, but on a Monday evening, this had nothing to do with the with the well-known bustle surrounding the famous Borough Market on Fridays and Saturdays.

No, this could only be described as an entirely different level of artistry for this evening was the first live and official Tweet Reading event to take place in London. Rumours abounded over the past few weeks amongst the eminent Twitterati of hushed discussions via Direct Messages concerning the veracity of the artist having turned down requests to speak from the Royal Academy of Arts. The choice of the Market Porter as a venue, an established and popular public house, can only be explained from the extreme proximity with the farmer's market and the glorious food sold therein. Just as food is sustenance for the body, the Tweet Reader's work and interpretation of tweets are sustenance for the mind; moreover the theme of the evening was to be of the origins of all things Twitter, just as the market is the best representation of the origins of food in the heart of a city.

The London Twitterati lucky enough to be invited gathered in the room around 7pm and Marcus Brown appeared soon after, opening the evening with his signature and unmistakable words: 'Good evening'. Those two otherwise innocuous words, carried enough weight to silence the room instantly. A certain feeling of awe was immediately palpable within the audience, clearly the sign of being in the presence of a true master. After a few more words, Marcus announced that there would only be three Tweet Readings for the evening. A slight murmur of disappointment made its way through the room, though I admit I smiled at the intrinsic audacity of the number.

3. As you all well know, a magic number for as long as the number has existed. From the Holy Trinity in Christianity to the Triforce in the Legend of Zelda, three is the first uneven prime number, one of the major forces in the Universe. Using a number of such power, Marcus sets the tone and promises us an extraordinary evening at the very least. 'But will he deliver?' I thought.

With readings of William Humphrey, John Dodds, and ended with Sam Ismail (Whom according to anonymous sources has been instrumental in enticing the artist to a live performance) the evening certainly couldn't go wrong with such prolific and extremely talented Tweet authors; and they certainly deserve the acknowledgment accompanying their readings by such an important international figure in the Twitterverse; some even call Marcus the very first Twitter Academic. The sceptics will certainly accuse Marcus of a certain lack of creativity in choosing the most obvious authors for the evening, but what truly counts is the value of the insight and of the interpretation and in this field, detractors will have a difficult time finding any flaws to Marcus' readings.

But let us also remember that Marcus is first and foremost a Renaissance Man, a Polymath recognized by the worlds of arts and sciences as the Leonardo da Vinci of the Third Millenium. Marcus shared with us his previous works: iPod Singing, The Sacrum episode with Wieden and Kennedy, Charles Stabs' Business Horoscopes, and more surprises. As I said, food for the mind, but also food for the soul. To describe the rest of the event would only destroy the surprise for other spectators and as such, I will stop revealing any more here.

There is only one way to finish this review and Marcus Brown fortunately showed me the way: Marcus Brown delivered an outstanding performance at the Market Porter yesterday and I urge you; no, I beg you, to follow his works on And As if by magic, or run to get tickets if you hear of another live event, it might just... transform your life. Thank you.

Become a Vedett

2009-03-06T11:30:00.006Z

Now here's a really nice little mix of digital and experiential for a campaign. I was talking to my sister a few days ago and she tells me she was having drinks with a few friends in a bar around Shoreditch. A guy showed up to them with a camera and asked them if he could take a picture.

They said yes, he takes the photo and disappears. He then comes back a few minutes with a beer bottle for each of them, the beer label prominently displaying the picture that was shot a few minutes ago. He explains that Vedett - the beer brand in question, is running a campaign where they will be printing pictures of people on the labels countrywide, so here's a free beer with your picture on it and go check out the website for more info about the campaign.

My sister said all of the sudden she has a completely different experience of that evening, she brought her beer bottle back home and said it's decorating her room now, it's a souvenir and she won't be drinking it for a while.

I really like that idea, very simple and even though the overall digital campaign isn't that original, having a few people roaming bars and priting picture labels makes a huge difference, all of a sudden the experience is real and personal, potentially becoming a souvenir token, or at least something to talk about at the bar with other people. And making people talk is generally awesome. I like it.

I need to try that beer now!

Here's the pic I submitted on the website. I thought having a bottle of Tsing Tao on it would be appropriate ;)

ASDA - Astroturfing Stupidly Destroys Advertising

2009-03-03T18:15:00.006Z

I saw in a Brand Republic article this morning that ASDA just launched a new campaign and a Youtube video channel: Saving You Money TV

I started out being in two minds about it. Basically the gist of it is ASDA is always being cheap and saving you money. Given the recession it's even more important than ever to all pull together like brothers and that you keep spending the little money you have at ASDA - anyways something like that.

So they created this TV channel on Youtube where everyone can share what their money saving tips are - though it's already (Just with 11 videos) turning into an any tips, advice or cooking recipe acceptable.

Sooo... I thought OK, sure could be interesting, Youtube channel design is nice, the videos on offer aren't overly interesting but could have a small audience, and more to the point some the videos shot on location in an ASDA might be shared to friends of the people appearing on there.

The whole idea works for ASDA as a brand (even though milking and choking to death the recession theme, but everyone is doing right now...) and they're making sending videos as easy as possible, which is a great point in their favour (via Youtube uploads, email, MMS, etc).

But here's the last thing, I kept looking at a couple of videos, such the definitely waaay too long cheese grating 'competition' and noticed the 2 comments. Those are highly suspicious and prety sure it's astroturfing. Could be just those two and hopefully not part of the whole campaign, but I hate that. It's wrong and it always backfires.

User 1: Nitramrallytrack - Joined Youtube in January and since then the only activity is to have subscribed to the ASDA channel and watched their videos. Highly suspicious. Basic astroturfing. Other user is katec1975 and only joined a few days ago, same story...

They write: 'Utterly random but funny as...This man should be on telly - mentle' 'What a grate idea...'

Have you seen the video? Do you just happen to specialise in bad puns or bad spelling? Who do you think ASDA customers are? All dumb and illiterate? If it's the case, it's insulting is what it is.

Maybe nobody will care about this whole thing, but hey... What goes around comes around.

Now on the other hand, a couple of real Youtube users - or rather one right now have noticed the channel and posted one of their videos, so as I said earlier it might be interesting to a few people and might get khgibbons more video views, so why not...

Skittles - probably the Nth post about it

2009-03-02T21:57:00.008Z

I'm sure there are already hundreds of posts about it out there and I read at least 2 good ones and I'm doing something else, so I'm going to over it very quickly and be really lazy and just advise to read their posts.

Without any particular argument, I personally really like it. And whatever you think about it, a LOT of people are talking about it.

Is any press good press? Good question.
Have they basically ripped off the Modernista website? Yes - but so what?

iboy compared the whole thing to a Turducken: Check his post.

David Armano also wrote about it on Logic+Emotion, check his out. Both are interesting for different reasons.

I think it's really interesting and they're a lot of attention for their new site launch

And let's remind ourselves that Skittles adverts are generally a bit bonkers anyway, I love their latest one:

And Cherry flavoured Skittle on the top, join in the fun and change your Twitter avatar to a giant Skittle!!

Hand crafted goodness

2009-02-21T13:20:00.005Z

Here's a movie I'm seriously looking forward to: Coraline. And along with it a very cool campaign to promote it! Neil Gaiman is one of my favourite authors and I seriously recommend checking out his books if you've never read him (I'd say American Gods and Neverwhere are amongst the best), Henry Selick has done amazing work in the past and Laika animations are always outstanding!

Besides the almost obvious fact that the animation looks beautiful, one particularity here is that everything in the movie has been entirely crafted by hand.

W+K was in charge of the campaign and apparently part of Laika's intention was to come up with a completely innovative way to market the movie. To start with, they created 50 different hand crafted boxes, with designs representative of the look and feel of the movie, filled them with goodies, little puzzles, clues, challenges, access to a website and specially made films; and then sent those to specifically targeted bloggers. The campaign went on with interactive store fronts (Where people could see themselves with buttons on their eyes), guerilla style posters, custom made Nike trainers, rich media online advertising, etc. All of this cultivating a theme of intrigue and mystery encouraging people to go find out more about it.

Nice stuff, really looking forward to the movie! Check out the Coraline movie website here and the video summing up the campaign here:

Where the Wild Things are

2009-01-24T17:33:00.004Z

This is my first time creating and uploading a presentation to Slideshare! I thought of this yesterday, and here it is, not necessarily ground-breaking but I hope you like it.

I'd love to know what you think of it!

Where the Wild Things are - with a modern communication twist

View more presentations or upload your own. (tags: wild marketing)

Eyebrowbics

2009-01-23T17:09:00.002Z

Eyebrowbics: All the scream with the cool kids of today.

So the new Cadbury's ad just came out, I saw it earlier today. I have to say that once again I'm not impressed by A glass and half full productions. It's vaguely interesting in a weird way and I'm sure it will be talked about a lot (I'm saying I don't like it, but I'm still writing about it...).

Given how much I disliked the Gorilla when it came out and it so successful (So I hear, at least) and well received that I'm wondering if my personal preference and opinion simply goes in opposite directions of that of the majority of people - and actually please confirm this is true only if you really want to please my ego. ;o)

This whole talk about the Gorilla and emotional marketing is sort of absurd. I watch the Eyebrowbics and I'm definitely sure it stirs emotions for the viewer - I suspect a range from amusement, laughter, slight confusion, like/dislike, etc.

But it doesn't say anything. Is there a message I'm not getting? Not really a story either... Is it enough to cause an emotion for the audience watching to associate it with your company, or does the memory prime the video content over that of. I think it's the latter. Just like any user created video, only with more money and a product depicted at the end.

Anyways, that's just one more positive tick in my mind for Lindt and Green & Black's and even though I rarely eat Cadbury's chocolate, I think I will suppress it entirely from my diet.

Ice cream for everyone

2009-01-14T15:48:00.002Z

I just came across this video and a list of reasons why social media is like ice cream, regardless of any relevance it is obviously perfect for this blog! And the video is cute too, explaining what this whole social media shenanigans is supposed with an easily understandable analogy - even though it probably could have something else than ice cream.

Why is social media like ice cream?:

1) it has tonnes of variety
2) the best is usually not mass produced
3) freshness counts
4) it's neat to mix flavours
5) it's best when shared with others
6) flavour preference is very tribal
7) it comes in different formats - cup=video, cone=audio, cake=blog
8) it sparks passion, emotion and positive thoughts - we enjoy it
9) depending on the environment, it has a long or short half life
10) it's more than just bits and bytes/bites
11) the winning brands usually have a good story
12) the worst tended to forms tend to get burned/freezer burned
13) tastes better with authentic ingredients
14) you gain incredible loyalty when users feel in control (i.e. Coldstone Creamery)
15) some people don't like it, some people gorge on it
16) it's practised and consumed differently by country
17) it's a good way to waste time and gain weight

Shamelessly plundered from here, thanks!

Another post about Twitter

2009-01-11T21:47:00.015Z

I had written a long post about Twitter, but in hindsight I think it's boring and doesn't really add much to the plethora of posts about Twitter out there already. I might revise it at some point, we'll see.

This is what matters in the meantime:

- I'm addicted to Twitter. (You can follow me @Hippowill)

- I mostly like following friends / acquaintances and people sharing interesting stuff around digital / advertising / marketing / planning.

- I use it as my main information filtering tool.

- It's interesting but I am getting bored of the amount of posts about how to best use Twitter, I'm going to stop reading most of them and use it however I like.

- I leave you with a pet of one of my favourite comic strip characters ever: Gaston Lagaffe's laughing seagull (La mouette rieuse). Here, in one of it's aggressive phases. Not sure why, but I think sometimes Twitter feels a bit like that for non-users adopting it, particularly when others around keep talking about it. ;o)

Hippo eats dwarf and meerkats using hippos

2009-01-06T21:57:00.005Z

I just came across this and just had to post it:

All right, it seems this is pretty old news after all given apparently the first time this hoax came around the internets was in 1994 with a resurgence in 2006. Good memes (also rumours or urban legends) live through some sort of web boomerang effect and I hadn't heard of it at the time, so here it is again!

It was actually published in the Pattaya Mail, and there are a bunch of mentions on sites if you Google 'Hippo eats dwarf' including pages on The Museum of Hoaxes and Snopes.com.

Well that wasn't as exciting as it first seemed when I came across the image on Google five minutes ago, so maybe I should mention something about digital marketing given it is supposedly one of the main intentions of this blog.

Now maybe hippos don't eat dwarves, even accidentally when one falls in their mouth, but sources tell us meerkats will certainly be using them as soon as they evolve and are ready to take on the human race. Casual Meerkat Manor documentaries aficionados perhaps do not realise how advanced they have become... But some Antipodean dwellers seem to have an idea of possible times to come (Be sure to read the first comment as well).

The site recently developed by one Aleksandr Orlov (Most certainly tied to the Russian maffia) and his outrageous company Compare the meerkat.com dares boasting roller-skating or knitting meerkats from all over the world to show us what they can do!

Crazy conspiracy theory you say..? Here is the undeniable proof of a meerkat playing ultimate freesbee in New York:

Now of course if you really don't care about the meerkat world domination and all you're interested in is cheap car insurance, you might as well head over to Compare the market.com...

You might have realised I really like this new campaign, really simple, very fun and memorable idea! I learned from Amelia that a creative team at VCCP are responsible for this so congratulations to them! They were looking for a way for a comparison to stand out and come front of mind for people when they start looking or using a search engine and I love the solution.

Just seeing that Aleksandr Orlov has over 3000 friends on Facebook (Update - had, looks like his personal profile has been taken off, now and over 400 fans on a 'more official' page) it seems a bunch of other people are appreciating the idea as well.

My DNA personlity type

2008-12-21T19:27:00.006Z

I came across this on Chris' blog via Twitter and had a little bit of time to kill so did it. I turns out I'm what they call a 'Free-wheeling' inventor - I actually quite like the description, I think it sounds good for someone working in planning & strategy ;o)

Nice test, I'm a bit surprised I have a low level of empathy on their scoring though... On cool sort of test basis, I'd recommend 'Now, discover your strengths' which is more about looking at your main strengths and encouraging one to develop them rather than overall personality - it's really interesting. Buy the book and do the test online.

Next generation talent

2008-12-08T23:28:00.005Z

Melanie invited me this evening to judge in a social media panel for this Next Generation Talent competition ran by Panasonic in partnership with YCN.

For the launch of the new Viera HD TV entertainment hub, Panasonic decided to run a competition for aspiring UK creative talent to create a print or TV ad for the new product. From the 60 entries, the Brand Communications Manager at Panasonic and creative agency Billington Cartmell shortlisted about 15; and this evening a social media panel of about 8 people further shortlisted the candidates down to 6. From tomorrow for 48 hours (very short time frame...) people can choose their favourite entries on the website and an ad is going to be published in the Guardian tomorrow morning to that effect.

I had a very nice evening and thought it was pretty interesting for a bunch of reasons. To start with, it was the first time I was on a panel for an advertising competition, so that was pretty cool.

Referring to Will's post here for a second, I noticed the conversation tends to go towards swiftly towards bullshit bingo. I tried to avoid some words, but they keep coming back. I guess It can't really be helped given it goes with the territory, but it's always funny to notice. We could have had printed grids, really...

More interestingly, some of the entries were really great. It was sometimes difficult to judge given a lot of effort had gone into all of them. The conversation kept coming back to what the idea was behind the execution and whether that was something that could be used for an ad, which is fine for the purpose of selecting a winner, but another point I think is more interesting is the fact they have great material for brand advocacy and sort of high level user generated content they could be promoting a lot more than for just one winner of a competition. And the fact that the voting is limited to 48 hours is a shame as well.

Here are the 6 selected by the panel this evening:

'All memories in HD' (I'd say that one was my favourite of the 6)
'Centre of attention'
'Meet your HD family'
'Boxes'
'The mess around'
'Roots'

Now a very special mention to my personal favourite: 'The beehive' or 'BeeHub'

It doesn't actually have anything to do with the brief, but it's mad and I'm going to remember that one and talk about it. It would be amazing for some sort of viral piece - or purely promoting the fact that Panasonic is actively encouraging creative talent in the UK, and not just looking for someone who do their next ad.

And even about a next ad, just think again what a drumming gorilla has to do with chocolate before you start knocking off the bees...

Referring to a great post from Paul I read this morning, the competition itself is advertising that does and that's where there is a lot of value. Rather than trying to get a 'professional' ad out of one those competition entries, keep expanding and encouraging people to do and talk about this TV and these advertising ideas and creative concepts - that's more exciting - like the bees.

PS: Neil just opened Think Tank post of the month votes, there are some really good nominations, go check them out!

Fill a plane

2008-12-06T10:46:00.004Z

A friend in China just invited to participate in this digital campaign for KLM Asia-Pacific, I thought it's a nice little idea. Register your plane and invite your friends on board to win prizes once the plane is filled up with passengers. In the meantime, have your picture on the homepage:

Apparently you can only email your friends about it, but coming soon are the Facebook applications and stickers for your blog or website - though I find it a bit strange they launched the campaign without having those ready...

Macy's Rickrolls America for Thanksgiving

2008-11-30T02:43:00.003Z

Awesome! You may have seen this by now, but if not check it out:

They managed to have Rick Astley, appear and perform the song suddenly in the middle of the Macys Thanksgiving parade, amazing ;o)

I think Rick bowed down to the power of (internet, in this case) memes!

Just like this one!

Tropfest short film festival winner

2008-11-24T00:14:00.003Z

Tropfest is the worlds largest short film festival. It already happened a couple of months ago so you may have heard of this, but this year for the first time the best film award was won by someone who shot their short entirely with a mobile phone camera.

The movie itself is beautiful, so if you have 3 minutes check it out, but it also made me think more about the way we use/consume/create media, not only has it been getting easier and easier for anyone to create and use production tools on their computer (I recently edited a video at work in a couple of hours, and it was the first time I ever opened iMovie) but all the different tools are getting mashed together in smaller and smaller devices. It's a topic that is definitely being talked about a lot these days, but I'll look at putting some of these thoughts together for a post.

I was also at the Mushrooms of the Russian Avant Garde exhibition on Saturday, I'll definitely write a post about it tomorrow once I upload the pics to Flickr - it was pretty weird and fascinating...

Global Beersphere

2008-11-20T11:28:00.003Z

Thanks to Andy for the logo!

Catching up on on my posting so this is already old news but the Global Beersphere happened last week and it was a great evening! Thanks to Faris for initiating it and to all the people in different locations around the world to take on managing the event. For those not in the know, Beersphere is a casual gathering of all sorts of planner type peeps, generally in a some cool bar or pub and guess what? Having beers/drinks and a good chat.

The lovely Rachel was our official host for the evening, and it was a pleasure to meet her again and as well as a good bunch of other always interesting people.

The event took place last Thursday 13th November, for the first time in about 9 locations around the world: New York, London, Toronto, Sydney, Melbourne, Amsterdam, Boston, Berlin and Bucharest!

Blogadi Blogada

2008-11-19T20:20:00.003Z

Image courtesy

It's being a seriously busy November over in Ice Cream land, but going to the London Bloggers meetup always inspires me to make an effort and get back to writing a few posts. Thanks again to Andy for organising the event, and also for the inimitable inspiration for naming the events - which gave me the title for this post as well!

It was nice to see some people met before (Anthony, Jaz, Andy, and others) and meet new always interesting people is as ever a great pleasure (Melanie, Hayley, and several Chris - sorry I need to find your blogs).

Melanie who writes at Fake Plastic Noodles, which for some reason I thought was Fresh plastic noodles - (Sorry I haven't had time to read it yet, but hopefully will soon) talked about some differences in the UK and US blogospheres, her experience of moving over to London and the fun it was getting working visas in order, some good talk about PR / blogger outreach good practices, and it finished with some great informal questions / conversations.

A few more drinks and good conversations and we was on my merry way home. I'll definitely try to make it to the next one. As I said, it's a great way to meet cool people and find out about all the different topics they blog about and it's really a good motivation to post regularly.

Last post before November!

2008-10-31T23:29:00.005Z

Happy Halloween everyone! I'm very proud to announce this is the 15th post this month, which for those very math astute will realise that's extremely close to a post every other day! But I'm probably the only one that cares that much...

So let's get to what I'd like to write about quickly. I was at Playful today and it was an absolutely amazing conference. Certainly the best one I've been to this year and one of the best ones I've been to full stop. I think what was really brilliant was to bring together a bunch of people passionate about whatever domain and particularly interested in play, games, interaction from different fields and talk about what they are doing. So a wider spectrum than if they had only invited hardcore game designers - more than often probably pitching the latest product they developed (nothing wrong with that by the way, but I guess not what I was looking for today).

Which brings to what I was looking for today. Nothing specific, really. But I came out of it really inspired! I learned a lot of things about hacking things, making them do stuff they weren't meant to. Theories about games, play, meaning, scores, etc. A lot of very smart people either demonstrating experiments, or talking from a slightly more abstract point of view about people, play and games.

I think one special mention for myself was to meet James Wallis from Spaaace. James opened the event with a brilliant talk about play in general, OuLiPo and a lot of other interesting things inclusing board and role playing games which I love. The best was to learn over a drink after the conference that he designed one of my favourite card games ever: Once Upon a Time. The funny thing is that I just did an internal talk about playing games last week (Which I will upload to Slideshare very soon - as soon as I find some time) and we're going to organise some sessions fro Once upon a time and a couple of other games. A lot of other talks were amazing and I will tell you as soon as they are uploaded on Vimeo and Flickr for the pics

Thanks again to Toby, Richard, and everyone else at Pixel-lab for organising the event! Thanks to all the sponsors as well - Poke, Melinda @ Miss Geeky, The people who provided lunch that I can't remember who they are right now, etc...

PS: I think I just realised James Wallis also created Nobilis, an RPG I've been wanting to try for a long time that looks amazing! And I also realised that had I simply read the details on the speakers list, I would have known all of that already, but hey...

Robocop on a Unicorn (And people stuff)

2008-10-30T00:43:00.004Z

Image courtesy

Also because from this post onwards, October will be the month with the most posts in this dramatically thought altering - NOT - ice cream blog!

And just because that's what it's all about!

If you're still wondering what the "it" is I'm talking about, call your mom. Watch Mythbusters on the Discovery Channel. Go for a drink and have a laugh. Give a call to your best friend. Check the status of the US election campaign/election. Have a drink. Update Twitter. Cook a meal. Whatever else you fancy...

Next step, pull it all together. This time the "it" being all the data, information, experience, feelings, thoughts, opinions, etc.

Analyse.

It doesn't make any sense.

For the most part, and that's just to be nice, all the sense that is there for you is what you added.

And that's people.

I love it!

PS: I was completely not going to write this originally, but there you go. It almost wrote itself. If this doesn't make any sense to you, I would estimate you're on the right track. Same if you disagree. Or even if you agree for that matter. The secret is in short sentences. Although there is no secret.

PPS: I had a nice time at the Digital Lounge - I may even have had a drink or two for those ready to believe such an astonshing statement. I'll talk about Digital Loungers later on. And by the way, Robocop on a Unicorn is a big meme that is going round the internets these days! Check it out. Do tell me if you explain why, I'm sure it will be quite entertaining.

St Mary's Hospital

2008-10-27T13:45:00.001Z

Some weird things are happening over there, apparently... Check it out!

London Meme

2008-10-25T18:05:00.002+01:00

Lolly tagged me a few days for a meme apparently going round the London blogosphere these days, I always like memes it's a nice idea and as she said it's nice to share some original bits of information about myself.

1. Top three non-work websites:

Well, I'm going to repeat Lolly here, but I spend my days and nights surfing the web for work anyway so separating work and non-work sites isn't that easy.

Nevertheless I'll go with TED.com as my first. It's my favourite website anyway even though I guess you could argue I use it for work as well. I love the interface and design, and of course love the content! I always learn something new watching TED talks, and now that I have an iPhone, I'm watching more of them than ever.

I'm tempted to go with Twitter for second position. I really started getting into it a few months ago and I really like it. I'm meeting cool people through it and I like the random glimpses I get into other people's lives I'm following.

I was hesitating to go for Netvibes for third, but I'll go with Deezer. It's a music streaming site and I often prefer it to Last.fm. Frankly since I started using it, I barely have any music on my iTunes, I mostly listen to streamed music. It's all free, and when you register you have access to almost all the music you can think of, you can also upload all you music library and access it from anywhere, create and share playlists, favourite albums and listen to them whenever you want, listen to smart radios, etc.

3. Three favourite cocktails:

Being heavily influenced by The Big Lebowski (I sad recently that The Dude was my favourite fashion icon), I'll start this with a White Russian. It's not a drink for every circumstances, but there are times when it's just the perfect drink.

A classic Long Island Ice Tea. It's a great and simple cocktail and it's where I was born! That said, I noticed that a lot of bars in London can't make a proper one - even though it's not very complicated...

To finish, not a particular cocktail, but I love "Rhums arranges" aka rum macerated with fruits or spices, they're so good! Check out my home made ones in the widget on the right hand column here.

3. Top 3 Karaoke songs:

Obviously we're going to go pretty cheesy here. I just sang some karaoke last week for our agency party, which was lots of fun! I like some old school Frank, and I think I'll go with Fly me to the Moon (or New York, New York ;o). Then back to the 70's with Sweet home Alabama from Lynyrd Skynyrd. And sometimes when I'm fairly drunk and have someone up for it with me: Fight for your right to party from the Beastie Boys!

I'll tag Will, Neil, and Sandrine next.

Sony Ericsson Bond

2008-10-24T11:37:00.004+01:00

A bit of shameless promotion, iris Digital just launched the new Sony Ericsson James Bond site for Quantum of Solace. It's a very cool Flash website with secret agent type missions, for each mission you solve you get access to a fun little mobile application - with a very cool spy cam application for the last one! I'd love to know what you think!

Check it out!

PS: I completed all the missions today and got all the mobile apps ;o)
Nice little games! It's a shame I'm not allowed to enter the competition to win the VIP trip to Monte Carlo...

Playful

2008-10-22T11:47:00.002+01:00

Cool, I'm going to Playful next week! Playful is a one day conference in London all about game design - apparently the talks are going to revolve around the nature of games as well and that's something I'm really interested in.

Funnily enough I'm doing an internal presentation here for the iris Digital team about Playing games so I'm full on into the topic - though my presentation is more about play as a concept and I'm not really going to talk about video games whereas it seems Playful will be. I'll definitely put the deck up on Slideshare afterwards.

The conference has a good speaker lineup, including Alex Fleetwood from Hide and Seek, Adrian and Dan Hon, who are sort of ARG gurus, and Iain Tait from Poke.

Smart Phones

2008-10-21T09:12:00.004+01:00

Everyone is talking about new smart phones, so far the Sony Ericsson Xperia and HTC Google phone look pretty interesting but it doesn't feel like they will be able to top the iPhone in terms of design, interface and functionalities.

On the other hand, iPhone should be worried about this newcomer on the market: The Pomegranate phone - check it out!

Really nice website showing all the new phone's features.

The site is actually part of a campaign for the Canadian province of Novascotia. Weird and original idea - and for those who don't get it, the Blackberry come from Canada (At least I think that's why they went in that direction).

Palin comparison

2008-10-17T10:50:00.004+01:00

Vic started a very cool project in the office yesterday and asked us all to draw Sarah Palin on a post-it note, the results are amazing!

Palin comparison

of course, my amazing design contribution:

Frieze Art Fair

2008-10-16T18:34:00.004+01:00

My brother invited me to the opening night of the Frieze Art Fair yesterday evening. I had never heard of it, but it's a really big show, with art galleries from all around exhibiting contemporary and modern art pieces. It was just funny being in this particular art world with all these art type people (artists, gallery people, critiques, buyers, etc).

I didn't see much that really touched me but there was one piece I thought was particularly amazing and stayed glued to it for 5 minutes or so. It was created by Attila Csörgö and his work revolves around mechanical and geometrical devices.

The piece is called Platonic Love, here is a picture from his portfolio website:

From afar, it just looks like a mess of threads moving with no rhyme or reason, but get closer and after trying to figure out where all the threads go, which is connected to which, what counter weights what - all starting from a little engine at the bottom and you're quickly just lost in contemplation. After that you realise those little twigs held by all the wires actually move in unisson to form geometrical shapes. So they go from this cube, prism and pyramid as on the pic, move away and then regroup as a pentagonic shape - amazing!

The fair is on for 3 days until Saturday evening, and it's always refreshing and thought provoking to go see some new art, so it was great for that. We also discovered a really nice little Moroccan restaurant close to Baker Street for dinner, so I'll definitely keep that address in mind! The harissa was home made and frankly one of the best I've ever had, the tagine was delicious and the people were really nice and down to earth. Recommended!

Poverty

2008-10-14T23:59:00.008+01:00

Image courtesy

I only learned about Blog Action Day yesterday from Neil, so not much time to write a very profound post - but immediately liked the idea. That said, as mentioned on the website, it is a hefty topic; particularly in view of the fact that participants are requested to keep within the topics of their blogs - which is actually forcing me to think about that too.

Rather than look at any kind of relationship between digital and poverty straight away, I'd like to stop a minute and look at what we're talking about in the first place.

Type "define poverty" in Google and this is the first result you get: the state of having little or no money and few or no material possessions. My parents didn't have much money when I grew up, it was a bit tough at times and often felt I was poor compared to other kids. It was true for a certain understood value of the meaning of poverty, and I'm going to ascertain this is the most common meaning - after all if Google says it's first, it must be true.

On the other hand, thinking about myself again, while I didn't have much money or material possessions my parents loved us (And still do), always managed to put a great meal on the table regardless of how much we had to prepare it with, my siblings and I went to school and got a good education, had access to clean water, health care, etc. Which brings me to the other main definition of poverty which relates to poverty as being a violation of basic Human Rights and Needs as defined by organisations such as ATD Fourth World.

A dollar a day have a good set of definitions for poverty on their website and point out correctly that poverty is too complex a concept to reduce to one single definition - it requires several points of view, depending on the specific issue you're looking at:

At the UN’s World Summit on Social Development, the ‘Copenhagen Declaration’ described poverty as “…a condition characterised by severe deprivation of basic human needs, including food, safe drinking water, sanitation facilities, health, shelter, education and information.” When people are unable to eat, go to school, or have any access to health care, then they can be considered to be in poverty, regardless of their income.

As I said I had all those things - so I don't consider I was poor. Maybe I was part of a statistic at some point, but that's about it.

Now I'd like to bring it back to digital and hopefully make sense. The conversations and ideas I'm generally living around are the global aspect of the internet, online communities thriving and sharing across the world to a degree that never happened before and it's all very exciting.

The digital world is extremely rich and varied; there are worlds of opportunities there I find wildly exciting. One of the reasons I love working within digital is that there will likely always be more to it that I can ever comprehend and I learn new things every day.

I generally feel like digital is very inclusive and has the potential to concern all of us to a degree or another, but actually looking at poverty I completely forget that this digital world I find so exciting has a pretty high access barrier right now. I forget that it is a privilege to own a computer with a fast internet access that allows me to participate in something like Blog Action Day. I forget that I'm part of a minority that has that access, and it often goes hand in hand with clean water, food, health care, and money. It's a luxury.

The latest statistics tell us about 22% of the world population are internet users. At what probably is the other of the spectrum, 21% of the world population lives in extreme poverty, and this is 2001 information, so out of date.

So what can digital do to bridge that sixty percent gap? Well Blog Action Day speaks for that better than I can: over 10,000 sites participating and an estimated reach of over 10 million people. I don't have a brand new insightful and creative way to end poverty - far from it - but I'd like to finish with two points if you're reading this:

1. Don't take it for granted - "it" is anything from the device you're reading this from to the sandwich you're eating at the same time.

2. Participate. It's too big a deal for one single person to have THE solution to poverty, but inside of the conversation taking place today something(s) will emerge and the more people participating the better.

Flickr

2008-10-14T18:45:00.004+01:00

I'm doing some research for an internal presentation i'm going to do about play & games, and came across this. I just love all the game based photos from Ella's dad:

And this one, one step close to appropriate given the current conditions...

Live soon

2008-10-14T16:51:00.006+01:00

I still need to finish changing my blog layout - or at least put it back in a normal sort of shape - though I have an excuse given I was moving this weekend. I moved to Rotherhithe on the river, it's definitely nice and much closer to work, but i'm already wondering if I did the right choice... Oh well.

I don't do much shameless promotion, but I will be soon as we have several pretty cool projects going live soon here at iris Digital headquarters; including a cool 3D cow, nice flashy site with slick mobile apps and a Halloween viral. More details soon, but check out this cutie in the meantime:

PS: Actually news in the press, so I could have talked about it more. In NMA Today:

Sony Ericsson is to increase its digital marketing investment significantly by allocating almost a third of its total marketing budget to online for its pre-Christmas campaign.

The mobile giant currently sets aside around 15% of its overall marketing budget for online, but is to increase this to 30% in the run-up to the critical Christmas period.

According to Nielsen Media Research, Sony Ericsson spent £865,546 on digital marketing between September 2007 and August ... this year, although this figure only relates to display.

Cathy Davies, Sony Ericsson's director of global marketing, said the company was deepening its commitment to digital as it looked to capitalise on the increasing amount of time consumers spend online. "Through our digital strategy we're really trying to communicate, not just tell people to buy our phones," she said. "We want to give them value."

As part of its increased investment, Sony Ericsson has launched a major international campaign surrounding forthcoming James Bond film Quantum of Solace, released by sister company Sony Pictures this month.

A campaign site dubbed Directive C902, developed by creative agency iris Digital, will go live in 42 countries from Monday. It features an interactive movie featuring four secret agent-style missions that showcase the Sony Ericsson C902 handset.

Visitors can download a 'spy' application to their phone that includes a fingerprint scanner and X-ray viewer and takes a series of surveillance photos.

The campaign is to be supported by a viral push from seeding specialist Unruly Media and an in-store push in flagship O2 stores.

"From our point of view, Bond is the hottest film property on the planet, so we've been working on this push for around 14 months," said Davies. "Digital can offer the full Bond experience and allows us to bring it to life, which is something you can't do with other media."