The computing world was different in the 1960′s. Computers were massive, expensive, and required full-time staff just to keep them running. Product cycles were scheduled in years not months. Tasks modern programming tools do in seconds took weeks. And whenever a new computer model was developed, the operating system and all applications had to be developed from scratch.
Perhaps the most significant difference, however, was that despite the tremendous complexity of building computer systems in this manner, customers insisted that these systems work correctly. Today, software vendors have conditioned us to believe that bugs are an inevitable part of software, but in the 1960′s a buggy operating system was properly considered to be a defective product. Customers do not pay for defective products. These software defects were costing IBM a great deal of money, and something had to be done. Management noticed that certain software testers were 10 to 20 percent better at finding defects than their peers. By putting these people on the same team, they reasoned, they could form a group that would be 10 or 20 percent more effective and then put the team to work testing the most critical system components.It didn’t turn out that way.
The individuals who made up the team were not exceptionally intelligent or talented, but they all enjoyed testing software and were better than average at it. When these like minded individuals were assembled, they they spent their working hours, lunches and sometimes free time collaborating on how to better find software defects.
Soon the members of team were twice and then dozens of times more effective than their peers, and they began to view their jobs not as testing software, but as breaking software. Team members took a well-deserved pride in their abilities and began to cultivate an image of villainous destroyers. As a group, they began coming to work dressed in black and took to calling themselves “The Black Team.”
Now, IBM in the 60s was not exactly known fostering creativity in the workplace. Corporate identity was bound up in dark-blue suits and starched white shirts. Management, however, not only tolerated what was happening, but loved it. Perhaps they felt some admiration for a group so passionate and dedicated, but the bottom line was that software quality was improving at a rapid rate.
Things soon began to get a little crazy. Team members began to affect loud maniacal laughter whenever they discovered software defects. Some individuals even grew long mustaches which they would twirl with melodramatic flair as they savaged a programmer’s code. And the things they did to software went beyond all bounds of rational use testing and were more akin to software torture. The crazier things got, the more effective the team became.
To be clear, the Black Team took all of this quite seriously, and there was nothing akin to camaraderie with the rest of the development team. Programmers had a certain amount of respect for the Black Team, but by and large, they feared them. A member of the Black Team was the last person a programmer wanted to see walking towards him, and more than one programmer was reduced to tears while having his code evaluated by the Black Team.
As much as the Black team was feared, engineers aspired to membership. When one member left, the team itself would select another to replace him, and so team stayed in existence and retained much of its character and effectiveness long after all of the original members had departed.
The story: Justin loves Evony so much he checks it when he gets in from school and when he gets up in the morning. The plus side is he’s got 50k prestige points and is revered by responsible adults, but the minus is he no longer does his guitar practice, forgets to help with chores and has an average of 3 out of 20 in history.
His mother wants to do something about it but she’s worried he might have a similar reaction to the kid in this video if she cancels his account…
The idea: An application that allows access to Evony (or Facebook, or any other MMORPG) only if a third party (physical or application) allows it. For example Justin comes in from school and logs onto FB, the gate asks for a certificate that he’s done his half hour guitar practice. Once he’s practiced, his mom simply sends the certificate via a simple button on the her mobile app. Same for homework. The app can be integrated to any other website, meaning for instance that Justin’s dad can ‘make’ him do half an hour of online history tests in order to obtain access to Facebook or whatever.
The Story: If the consumer’s brain can be compared to a whiteboard, then back in the 70′s, advertisers had relatively clean ones to doodle on, which can only have improved the impact of marketing campaigns. The Coca-Cola Hilltop campaign was produced at a time when it was still possible to lend very noble qualities to a mass consumer product without running the risk of seeming pedantic or worse, insincere. Not because people lived in a ‘rosier’ world; Vietnam was the first mediatized war and the US saw inflation rise 10% between ’72 and ’74. There was however a definite purity in the flow of communication from seller to buyer simply because, there were fewer messages, less recuperation, and buzz was just a noise that bees made.
The Idea: Rehabilitating utopic imagery.
Today, the ‘average’ consumer possesses a much deeper knowledge of marketing. The consumer knows that he is being manipulated, and often knows how. Even so, some ad campaigns still have a huge impact. This suggests that a) when the product is desirable, the ad has little effect, the consumer will buy it anyway, but also b) the consumer is sometimes willing to suspend disbelief when faced with a particularly attractive idea.
So why not strive to model society by altering the mirror in which it sees its reflexion?
Audiovisual media function as proactive mirrors of society. And like real mirrors, they are never completely objective. Advertising can choose to be positively subjective or negatively subjective. I believe that they have, to a certain extent, a responsibility to inspire, and that the positive subjectivity of advertising should be inversely proportional to the negativity of the media that vehicles it.
A lot of communicators today would have qualms about using an idea like the Hilltop, but if the media world refuses to use utopia as a creative reference from time to time, then we run the risk of falling into a quagmire of self-referring, second-degree irony.
Of course, it’s easier said than done as proved by Coca-Cola themselves when they tried to recreate the Hilltop success to boost sales of Diet-Coke with a remake that didn’t fly…
Which adds weight to my favourite quote of the moment, by the artist Mondrian:
The Story: Every year we start afresh, reboot our intentions and wish happiness, success and good health to those around us. The positive things that can happen to us are however often things of chance, that enter our lives arbitrarily – Deus ex machina – unless we are able to provoke them in some way.
The Idea: Imagining the best of our future.
“It is a poor memory that only works backwards.” Lewis Carroll
The beauty of imagination is that it’s a powerful tool. The more we imagine and visualize what we desire, the more our actions lead us there…
Imagine delivering an eloquent keynote.
Imagine leaving someone who hurts you.
Imagine getting a job.
Imagine kissing for ten minutes non-stop.
Imagine going back to college.
Imagine dancing all night long.
Imagine swimming with dolphins.
Imagine making your children laugh like drains.
Imagine growing old gracefully.
Imagine winning.
Imagine whatever makes you happy, and never stop imagining it.
So for 2011, I can think of nothing better to wish you than a wonderfully fertile imagination…
I recently started climbing a mountain called Mt. Entrepreneurship. It’s a funny old mountain because the higher one climbs, the further the top seems.
Mt. Entrepreneurship
However I am surprised to note that despite the adversity of the task at hand, I am but more and more passionate about my project as the days pass. My frozen body might be found one day stuck to the side of the rock, but at least it’ll have a smile on its face.
What is it about my project that is capable of putting me in a maintained state of juvenile excitation? The answer I believe lies in in the very nature of the project at hand.
Mapenda is a web startup and web startups are more like dancing and less like screenplays. Let me explain.
I’ve already had two careers, in dancing and screenwriting. As a dancer, one is required to learn a choreography and execute that same choreography night after night. The finished show however is a living entity. Things can be tweaked. Dancers can make their battements higher with practise, costumes can be emroidered and even the music can be changed. The show remains essentially the same, but the audience always gets the best version of it.
With screenplays however, there comes a time in the production process, when the script is shot, the dialogue acted and the editing finished. The work is done, the process is finite. The customer will always get the same version.
Once a web application is launched one doesn’t send all the devs home and cross one’s fingers in the hope of getting the most hits before someone else releases their application with a bigger marketing budget. In this sense the web startup ressembles dance more than it does film; which is what excites me so.
Of course the plan is to release the best version possible to the public first-off, but I delight in the knowledge that the initial version will – can – should – only get better as time passes. As long as the business model holds its own, then Mapenda should be able to offer its customers improved versions, with new and creative solutions to purvey the best experience possible.
The show remains essentially the same, but the audience always gets the best version of it…
The story: When Steve makes love to his girlfriend, she vocalises. A lot. At the beginning of their relationship, her cries of pleasure were appealing to Steve who found them rather exhilarating; but now, after three years of regular sex the sound of his girlfriend’s groans and squeals has become rather repetitive, nay, mundane.
The idea : An App! Yes, an iPhone (or Windows 7 … ) application that would translate vocalisations into a beautiful animated light show projected 180 onto the walls and ceiling and everything/one in between. An algorithm similar to the iTunes visualizer (as above) would be used to receive Steve’s girlfriend’s groans via the regular mic on the smartphone which then transmits to a small video projector unit with a smartphone dock. The App could also be synced to a TV screen, or sent directly as a video file to www.watchmyorgasm.com
The story: It’s deep winter, -7 C, and you’re walking along in your woolly hat, scarf and gloves when you get a call on your iPhone. You take the ‘phone out of your pocket and see it’s your boss/husband/daughter trying to get hold of you. You have to take the call, but you can’t unless you take your glove off because the phone has a capacitive tactile screen. Result your hand freezes and you can’t get the glove back on without much fuss and the risk of a) missing a fate-defining sentence b) dropping your expensive mobile.
The idea: Silicon injection moulded finger tips that you can stick onto any of your gloves on your index finger-tip with a butterfly-pin style system like earrings. Quite small, they’d contain conductive material. Available in fluorescent colors for teenagers or standard black, brown and transparent for more reserved adults.
I’d call them Dragon Tips and I’d sell them in packs of three on mobile phone accessory stands, Claire’s Accessories and Newsagents stores for €1.99
In a lonely market, Freehands.com sell their 'Power Stretch' glove €18.23.
The Com’: An ad that takes place on a teleski with a guy desperately trying to answer his potential girlfriend’s call whilst holding on to the bar, taking his glove off with his teeth and finally losing the ‘phone in the snow…The pay-off of course being his rival just infront of him who is equipped with dragon tips and who nonchalently takes the girls next call by swiping the screen, without having to take his gloves off.
If you own a silicon polymer injection moulding factory and you like this idea, please contact me
As a web entrepreneur starting up in Paris, I’m currently meeting with numerous potential investors : business angels and VC’s alike.
The whole finance-seeking process is extremely interesting for an entrepreneur, for it is pedagogically rich; VC’s in particular have little time, so the questions they ask are pertinent and useful to analyse in-depth post-RDV.
An investor is the very first person who is going to buy your product.
If they are able to formulate their reticence and worries about your business, that is valuable information to glean. The meetings I have had so far have always left me more knowledgeable about my business plan and my product, thanks to precise queries about technical, financial or management issues.
One question that has become annoyingly repetitive however is : “Why do you not have a partner?”
The fact that I intend to start-up solo really, really bugs investors, and I only realised exactly why a week ago.
I don’t need a business associate as long as I have a well-chosen team around me to deliver the work I need doing. Also I am of an age where many of my friends are successful professionals who can offer me very sound advice, for free! Why on earth would I take the risk of hooking up with a business partner at this stage? Why would I take the risk of sharing the capital of my company with someone who might not pull their weight, or worse still throw their weight around? Someone who has no knowledge whatsoever of the genesis of the project, and who has little or no interest in me as a person?
Why would an investor want me to take that kind of risk now?
“What happens to the business if you suddenly die tomorrow?”
That was it. The unequivocal, debate ending line.
“If you die we lose our entire investment.”
Yes, but.
Dear investors. Death is not the worst thing that can happen to an entrepreneur.
Death is legally very straightforward, easy to place in hierarchy, and what’s more you can get heaps of insurance money in return for a corpse.
No, the question they should be asking is “What happens to the business if you fall in love?”
Now there’s a potential bomb; far worse than ceasing to exist. Love takes up brain-space, it renders you wildly optimistic, and clouds your capacity to analyse potentially conflictual situations. The first throes of love are passionate and all consuming – time spent drooling over the complete RSS feed of the loved one’s tweets is time not spent drooling over the company’s 3 year forecast…
So, dear investors, fear not Death, fear Love.
Are you sure they won't miss me at the product launch?
Back Story: Shana is 14 years old. Like lots of girls her age, Shana dislikes revising for schoolwork.
Also like lots of girls her age, she likes to meet her friends at McDonalds.
Shana will gladly wait in a queue for at least ten minutes to be served. And she’s receptive to marketing ops that allow her to get a free small drink, an ice-cream, or a reduction on a meal.
However if Shana doesn’t get good grades then most likely she’ll be working at McDonalds – as a cleaner- the cashier jobs are for university graduates…
The Idea : A Young style ‘soft’ meritocracy by MacDonalds that rewards Intelligence and Effort.
As Shana enters, she pulls a ticket that has a question on it relating to the junior high syllabus. Below the question are three scratch-card type boxes.
If Shana answers the general knowledge question correctly she can use the card to get immediate discount on her order.
If she gets it wrong, she can still win a discount, provided she goes to the McDonalds brand new McSmart page on their website, to find out what the correct reply is…
"I told you 1 isn't a prime number. You owe me a McFlurry"
Long gone are the days when any French person would look at you blankly and mutter “eet eez er problemme pour moi speek ze english”. The French Y Gen are digital natives. They don’t remember the linguistic monopoly of videotapes; DVD unleashed a great learning potential and YouTube gave them the real accents of their favourite celebrities. Now they’re learning Chinese.
They travel (outside of France).
For years the French would repeat proudly that France is such a beautiful (true) and varied (also true) country that there really is no need to search beyond its frontiers to have a fulfilling holiday.
Online booking, and shorter working weeks changed that; and the wealth of practical information via internet has taken the fear factor out of leaving french soil. It’s also enabled young graduates to envisage leaving the nest for even farther fields.
They’ve embraced geekiness.
The current Wikio #1 Marketing blog in France is called le Publigeekaire. It’s run by @MathieuFlex on Twitter who defines himself as a member of the Y generation in his bio.
There’s one thing the French Y gen loves more than tech, gadgets and marketing, and that’s talking about tech, gadgets and marketing. On Facebook, on Twitter, on blogs. In barcamps, demo evenings, forums, seed dating, aperitweets, and the list goes on. From an entrepreneur’s point of view (currently mine), Paris is positively buzzing.
They know exercise won’t kill their intellect.
They still smoke, but a lot less, and no longer in restaurants. They go to the gym. They play indoor football. They adore yoga. They do african dance. They jog. Seriously.
They’re the first generation in decades that doesn’t fantasize about being born in the US.
They consider the US far more pragmatically than their elders, they approach it like they would someone on a 10th date . The desire is still there, but the fantasy is dampened. What the French Y gen want from the States is professional credibility, experience, and the opportunity to offer their wares to a vast market that remains, for the moment, more accessible to them than China.
The story : Paul has Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and MySpace accounts and every day he receives lots of music posts from his friends and acquaintances. Paul however simply does not have the time to recover each track, and even less to listen to them at work. How frustrating it is for Paul to make the hour’s drive home from work with the poor choice between Boring FM and NoMusicalTaste FM knowing fully well that his various networks contain plenty of wonderful, handpicked tunes. If only he could listen to the musical links like a veritable ‘made to measure’ radio station…
The idea : A mobile App that would not only centralise all the music posted to Paul, but also manage a radio style broadcast programmation by streaming the tracks randomly. An automotised voice of one’s choice (ex.Yoda) would introduce each track like a radio DJ, and say who it was dedicated by.
” And now, Instant Karma by John Lennon offered to you by @FredFarid is”
And of course, the possibility to also read your radio stream like a regular playlist.
There’d be a free version with targeted commercials, and a paying version without.
The Story : Once upon a time a woman called June had a little girl. As in many parent/child relationships, as the years passed, the occasions for bonding decreased and inversely, misunderstandings increased. Each telephone conversation had potential for discord and this tension made both mother and daughter want to forget communication entirely and recreate the Stone-Age.
The Idea : Communicating essentially by e-mail, and obligatorily starting each e-mail with a “thank-you” paragraph relating to something specific from shared history. I had this idea six months ago and it helped June and I remember some of the gems of our past. I’m so glad I did, because she passed away unexpectedly in May.
I thank her once more, posthumously, for all her love and devotion.
The story : Gwendolyn finds it extremely hard getting up in the morning, harder even than telling new acquaintances her name. She’s tried everything from wake-up calls to biorythmic feedback; in vain. Her new boss is understanding but the other air traffic controllers are starting to find her late arrivals annoying. If only that VC would go out on a limb and invest several hundred thousand dollars in the niche narket that is the ultimate alarm clock…
The Idea : The ultimate alarm clock would be a bed. An inflatable bed that, when the chosen time arrives, deflates in a matter of seconds leaving one lying flat on the floor, which is hard, uncomfortable. Even the most begrudging waker can’t resist. There is no snooze button, and it can only be re-inflated once there is no one on top of it.
This idea is the fruit of a very silly brainstorm with my son Paolo
The Story : Gerald loved his social networks. He Tweeted before his first coffee in the morning and often liked a few Facebook posts before going to sleep. Just as Saturday morning TV reassured him as a kid, his daily routine of electronic interaction gave rhythm, nay spice, to his everyday routine. But then on his 36th birthday, Gerald got hit by a bus. He didn’t survive the impact, despite the fact his iPad provided considerable protection to his lower intestine. Even more unfortunately, his last tweet and post was: “Gerald just joind the group ‘I put Hula Hoops on my fingers before eating them”. This is what his ‘on’ and to some extent, ‘off’ line community of friends was left to ponder.
The Idea : By the Way from Beyond the Grave. An application that would publish 10 pre-posted Tweets and Posts for as many days after the ascension to the great apple in the sky. Auto marketing to the grim end and even further. Regrets, confessions, love declarations or simply words of comfort for the followers who will follow no more…
The story : Mark B is successful; he loves fashion and adores Foursquare. He checks-in to the coolest places in London 24/7. He eats at It restaurants, takes weekends to Paris and Rome and wears only designer couture like Paul Smith, Prada and Boss. However, Mark’s expendable budget isn’t infinite, and what’s more he recently learned (with great joy, evidently) that he was soon to be a father, news that he fears will cost him an arm and both legs. Mark is all too aware that it is important to make a sustained fashion effort when one becomes a dad; that it’s easily done to fall into a Zegna, then accept a Burton, and then one day, realise with horreur that you’ve just bought a Happy Meal dressed entirely in H&M.
The Idea : In order for Mark to continue his love affair with haute couture and still pay the utility bills, let’s invent a social network that would reward its most active members not with badges, but sponsoring. It would be Foursquare meets Vogue and Around Me, and Mark would become a living com’ in that his updates pinged on Twitter et al would inform everyone of which designer he’s wearing on a particular day. This geolocalised system would be an added attraction for tourists too, as they could see what a British accountant looks like in the latest Prada as he waits for his bus at Victoria Station.
The Story: I recently went to Hamburg to see John Numeier’s wonderful ballet. The next day I had some time left before my flight back to Paris, and luck had it that my Google search came up with a marvellous exhibition called ‘Dialog Im Dunkeln’, Dialog in the Dark…
The Idea : Brilliant and simple – In completely darkened rooms blind people lead small groups of visitors through an exhibition in which everyday situations are experienced altogether differently, without eyesight.
In complete dark (even phosphorescent watches aren’t allowed), daily routine becomes a new experience. For 90′, the tables are turned: sighted people are plunged into a completely alien world, and it is the blind guides who reassure them and lend them their sense of orientation. At first I was opening my eyes so wide just to try and perceive some light, some visual, anything. It was a truly edifying experience. After twenty minutes or so my other senses started to heighten and I relaxed into acceptance that I couldn’t see anything. My group of ten people all had canes to help us not bash into eachother and the guide was amazing in his capacity to a) remember everyone’s name based only on voice and b) locate us with quasi paranormal precision.
The exhibit’s mission goes beyond pedagogy however, having created close to 6000 steady jobs for blind people in the Dialogue exhibitions; in Hamburg there are 40 blind employees, working as guides, trainers or in other roles.
It’s an absolute must-do for the price of a movie and a Coke, and an experience that will stay with you for years.
The Com’: Dialog is now present in 25 countries across Europe, Asia and America. The sleek Hamburg website is in German and English www.dialog-im-dunkeln.de
Marketing and PR : Sonja Kanemaki +49 (0) 40 309 634 – 44
The Story : Ever since kindergarten, Abejide Mtima has attended the first day of each school year filled with hope. A quite impossible hope, that of ‘blending’ into the crowd in the playground and making new friends without being stared at or feeling obliged to talk about his background…Now on the threshold of 10th Grade in a new High School, he’d like to meet teachers and friends without being immediately pigeonholed.
The Idea: Make the first month of High school a virtual one. Each student would go ‘Back To School’ from their computer, via a contained, anonymous social network. It would have various forums and networking widgets and would be administered by the teaching body. Each student would choose a neutral pseudonym, but would not have a profile. This way students could start their year working together, building the foundations of academic encounters without having to worry about being : Black/white/gay/straight/boy/girl/skinny/obese/ hot/not/physically able/handicapped.
The Com’: Two hands typing on a computer keyboard. One hand is black, the other white.
The story: Charlotte is a good girl. She only crosses on green, she’s always polite to her boss and she never parks in a disabled space; and the only grey cloud on Charlotte’s horizon is that once she’s paid her oversized Boston rent, all that remains in terms of affordable thrilling leisure is an extra spin-cycle on her washing machine.
The idea : A web-based platform allowing renters to pay some or all of their monthly rent with their preferred credit card in order to cumulate points or miles. In Charlotte’s case, if she were able to pay her 900$ rent with her Mileage Plus Visa card, she’d accumulate enough miles in six months to stay two nights at the New Yorker Hotel. After a year, she would be able to fly to Paris to visit the catacombs and drink whisky from a French art-student’s navel whilst listening to ‘Gothic Music from the Deepest Depths of Hell’. Well, they’re her miles.
The Story : Lovers in bed, fumbling. Maybe they haven’t known each other long enough, maybe too long, however the result is the same: guesswork on ice. If only they knew their partner’s specific erogenous zones!
The idea : A mobile App that could work with light wavelengths of up to 14,000nm, which would transform an iPhone into a thermal camera (infrared). Science would be guiding the lovers’ caresses, for there’s an increase in blood provision to parts of the body that are stimulated; and it would be easy to see a lover’s ‘hotspots’ (literally;-) on the thermal image.
The Ad’ : A sexy, fun film showing two lovers in bed, solely through the subjective eye of the iPhone App. Slogan – “There, yes, there. Exactly there.”
The story : Wind turbines are so efficient in producing clean energy that the U.S Dept of Energy is hoping to create enough wind-farms by 2030 to meet 20% of the country’s energy needs. The only big drawback with wind farms is the transmission of the energy produced. Often placed in isolated areas, the energy generated can only travel so far… meaning urban zones are often neglected by this clean energy.
The idea : Create ‘windy’ cities everywhere; lots of wind, night and day.
There are 136 million registered cars in the US, of which there’s obviously a higher concentration in and around towns and cities. A car is designed to drive, to move; they’re a high energy consumer, but they could also be used to generate a lot of energy, too.
By installing ‘barrels’ into the road that would look very similar to speed-humps, and attaching them just like wind-turbines, to a generator, we could create electricity day and night with each passing of a car. This way the energy generated would be directly linked up to the electric network of a building; a school, a town-hall, a public baths, a hospital… They could even serve the supplementary purpose of speed-humps to slow traffic.
The com’ : A public information campaign to prevent drivers from taking these ‘Macadam Turbines’ at anything more than 15MPH
Please excuse the cringe-worthy aesthetics of the car, if I was a better artist it would be a Maserati:-)
