(attention, long vehicle)

Anand’s article touched an explosive combination of decision+change management+money. It was inspiring indeed, and got me to write down two or three thoughts looking the M&A from inside a house. To write this piece, time popped-up by chance and bad luck in the same time. Nevermind why I found myself out of gas and battery in the beginning of my Friday evening, I really enjoyed my decision to go back to cocooning.

The decision

This is the thing about deciding to do an M&A or change, it’s not wise to be 100% sure about the best direction. (Ok, don’t skip the due diligence). A choice might be considered as good by more people and for a longer time, but if you search too long your competitor will do your A and no M for you. So you have to make it early. For normal people with no 6th sense, this means they have to deal with the effects of their choice both personally and in their team .

Why you take the decision? Probably for financial value creation, technical synergies, or to phase out potential competitors.

How you take it? Depends on the decision model of your company : single minded, organizational, political, garbage can. (insights from Strategor, 4th edition, Dunond 2005)

Once the change is there, I’ve observed two styles of dealing with it and getting others to deal with it.

The behaviors

One is that you explode and overwhelm everybody with excitement yourself included, partying hard on change. People are normally happy before they realize what has hit them. The happy tail is guaranteed to last, varies on the party. Life stats say that happiness from a good home party last about 3 days, from a football final for about a month, from Olympic games about a year.

Another approach is that you go Zen, as if nothing has happened, act naturally etc. This works if with adult-ish organizations because routines are very important for adults, etc.

In both cases you surf slower, either because you focus on partying or because you surf tai-chi style.

To keep surfing fast, Brazilians have thought of Kapoeira (training masked in partying).

Ok, this is people, what about the business?

The money factor

Change+money is a bit more tricky, because it involves more tension and more aggressive effects. Culture of money asks for more traditionalism, thoughtfulness, respect.

Mutual respect :) and money-related expectations makes M&As such showstoppers for internal rhythms and decision making (the case of M&A driven by financial value creation). In my view, if the motivation is pure value creation the results risk being lost in translation. And M&A is a showstopper.

other motivations

If it is value+product synergies, the organizations quickly recover and from change and get productive on the common focus. In that case, the initial slow-down, frames significantly the savoir-faire and prevents chaos. The focus is scaling on innovation and this can happen within a few months. And M&A is an investment on strategy.

Let’s not forget that innovative products carry this identity either because they target niches or if not, they are innovative for a specific period of time, on their way to bannalization. So when the Big Fish frames how you scale on innovation, the Small Fish start changing skin. Shouldn’t it? It is very difficult to see in retrospection, what part of product or service the Small Fish has fit in since identity integration is necessary.

Last, if motivation is gulping competition early the M&A is a showstopper by design.

the project

Beyond initial motivation for the M&A , the time to market and style to market of an M&A-ed innovative stg is very much bound to internal Big Fish culture but also to many external factors such as market dynamics.

My basket of examples include,

• Mobile payment : has travelled from developing countries to the developed ones like a financial and regulatory Benjamin Button. (TTM : ~7y, STM: sponsored by heavy banking industry to open-up consumers)
• Peer-to-peer communications : have travelled from early experimental internet to the gray napsteric zones, masked in skypish applications to land through Big Fish in the B2B space as a feature of datacenter operating systems / “branch cache” how it is called in MSFT (TTM : ~15y, STM: integration into the mosaic, identity change)
• Video semantics tracking : has travelled from academia to consumers in speed-light (less than a decade to launch project Natal) (TTM : ~10y, STM: innovation transforms the product)
• Biscuit-flavored yoghurt : Marketing innovation, where you test a few recipes and you build on on insghts that people love biscuits but are too guilty to consume them at the rhythm of yoghurts. Also have to buy the rights of a favorite biscuit brand. (TTM : ~6m, STM: act naturally )
• With this last one I want to emphasize that if software was simpler to build, simpler to adopt, and was sold in cheaper units, end users could possibly profit from and indulge in innovation faster and more naturally. This is why social-technology + M&As are a better match.

Hey I am not pocket-Gartner, so please feel free to challenge my examples.

After aaaall this analysis, I come up with a…question: We’re pretty much involved in producing innovation so it’s normal that we’re pretty demanding on change happening fast. However, how fast can an average consumer or ITpro absorb and adopt software innovation?

In virtualization for example, a lot of which passed through M&As, MSFT carries the burden of late TTM. By the time MSFT was into virtualization, it was no longer innovative. But still adoption rates by the market were loooooow and (relatively) sloooow moving. So buzz-wise TTM was late, but adoption-wise TTM was early. Crazy? just a paradox of software and friends. The attained benefit for MSFT was catching up with the buzz rhythm and also syncing with the adoption rhythm. Isn’t this a successful strategy?

Conclusion?

Overall, even though M&As slow down and phase out a lot of good stuff, technology is still a great industry for M&As because

• A lot more of fresh attitudes survive in tec- fresh towards life and change as well.
• The money culture is less pronounced
• Creativity and innovation need change even in dinosaur size and style.

“Don’t feed the lions!”  – please do….

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First of all, let me make clear that the title is a question and this post will give no answer. 

Second, if somebody has the answer, be my guest, will give you my credentials to edit.

Third, the salmon can be both a gift (as in the semiotics of Umberto Eco) and lethal stinky arm-extension (as in Asterix)

Fourth, let’s get serious.

Social enterpreneurship is one of the new buzzwords in business innovation. Buzzwords are obviously made up to speak situations that exist but with a lot of entropy until somebody names the fear away. And can also give you a scolarship to top-notch business schools, so your 5min of attention please.

To save you some brain cells from suranalysis I’ll give you three pictures of social enterpreneuship fields :

1. Economies in “turbulent times”
2. Recently patchworked societies
3. Niche populations in balanced societies

(sound too familar? need something more exotic? … please refer to expert-experts.)

Lately, I have the privilege to live in an environment that has 2,5 of the above.

Thus its quite fascinating that few people around me, move on the great dynamics of this 83,3%  (2,5/3) fluidity. The blocker is violence.

Violence such as

• rioting half the population against the other half waving salmons
• dangerous life-hacking (d-driving, d-careering, d-tax-paying, d-pressing your children and d-attending your lifemate)
• self-asphyxiation in a team
• tv

so what would you see happening first? closing the tv? feeling good? doing good? putting down the fish?

My two pennies on ………………………………………. putting down the fish, for many reasons of mass-psychology only Philip-Morris knew (but now we all do).

so, dear Greeks, enough with rioting, put down the fish, or better , put them in a plate.

Georgia

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babies + coolness + humor + timeless style = top of mind

it has good momentum to spread virally (one of the most watched in bing and this is how i found out ) and i am checking if and how often i will stumble over it

basically I blog …water, being in hiatus mode  as well

enjoy

Georgia

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To go from Atlanta to Athens you either drive (Athens, GA USA) or take a few planes (Athens Greece). If you belong to the second category you might feel a bit internet-sick and try to explore your options to connect.

I was like a child in candyshop to discover that in the US you can actually get onflight wireless internet, by GoGo  . Prices from 6$-13$ and a subscription predator at 30$. Killer detail: power dependency. Oups! But still impressive and probably can harm only some revenue and not the strass of the idea and its execution.

Because girls often are used to dieting, I waited until landing to JFK where I supposed that I could get some free internet. Spoiled uh? Yes because in Athens Airport you have a net-spa of 45min for free. Not the case in JFK where you can get power for free…but for internet you are serviced by Boingo. Really jealous of their presence (119,801 hotspots worldwide), I opened my eyes wide for precious lessons from their model and how they manage their business. Prices around 4$-8$ and a subscription model for 8$-10$ per month (119,801 hotspots… )

First Impression score for Boingo was 0.5 points.

1 for growth (119.801 hotspots…  )

1 for interactivity: very charming welcoming chat at registration, good simulation of natural communication

-0.5 for hope turned into undelivered promise: interactivity only on a hook level, if you don’t agree buying their subscription, the chat machine dumps you rudely, not replying at any other question chatted.

-1 for security: no paypal (ok fair enough but a bit destabilizing) What killed me was having to tap my credit card info which figured unmasked on my page.

Should I write stg about sense of privacy in public places or shall I go talk to the nice guy that came suddenly behind my back and asked me how I connected to the internet?

Georgia

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Yesterday evening I was cheerfully chatting with a friend, arranging meeting-up.

- Friend : blah blah blah;

- Georgia: blah blah blah;

… when I saw my self posting a thing I couldn’t recognise having thought of. Neither remembering having thought in a previous conversation. chilllll.

- Friend : are you nuts? why are you saying this?

-Georgia : (confused) ehhh, because it must have been this or that or the other thing.

-Georgia : but I am telling you that the place has changed blah blah blah

Ecstatic I was watching myself from a certain distance. crazy uh? It happens a lot to push back thoughts but it was the first time I experienced doing it at real time. It felt like dreaming !

As tech-savvy TIE readers you realize that this is actually a particularity that this this lovely peer-to-peer program has and lets your profile being simultaneously active with different IPs. All it takes to experience this chilling story is having logged in from a different pc. (DIY)

So what’s the blog deal?

Well, it had never occured to me to experience  how older people might feel with technology, sometimes. Understand in theory yes, but live it never.
There it goes, now I can discuss with myself on skype and with mom in real life.

no comments please, I am moved.

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By the sea, you mostly think about people, pedicure, skin, sand, seaweed, tennis balls and of course you try to make a link between innovation, start-ups and their connection with guerilla marketing.
what? you don’t? come on, you are not even geek enough …

Keyword of this head-on-the-sand brainstorming : Guerrilla Marketing
Always very impressive.
Knitting sockets for street-lamps, waking up your co-citizens,  or printing you “tete” (head) on the floor out of the metro to sell records or ray ban glasses…. ah ! fascinating – respect for the brand / checked . prescription circle short-circuited and the brand needs a promotion to an icon.
I had kind of forgotten of this silly risky stuff going back to my mentally safe and rigid country-cocoon. Until a few days ago I stumbled over a campaign made for Media Markt from Leo Burnett that is actually a guerrilla marketing study-case. click it!
Media Markt Junkmen.
In two words the guys used an ancient  hoaxing mechanism for the real world and attempted to turn it into a sales channel. Actually  since it had a guerilla conotation the guys just tested reactions without really managing the channel. And of course they raised comments, digs and lifted eyebrows in various shapes.

Doesn’t advertising need it’s own R&D space? Second life what? Real life needed… To my attention, there are no real start-ups in the advertising space (end-to-end) so this risk had to be integrated into a big corporation’s structure like Leo Burnett. (ok maybe there are, but that’s another post)

Three comments from my side.
one : they and us have to get used to it, interactivity is here.
two : guerrilla has the same connotation as innovation, as for now (this is why geeks like that stuff)

three : next week, the time I hold my breath underwater I am going to take this further — How do you turn  guerrilla heroes and heroism into sustainable business and transform surprise to respect from the mass and their structured values ?

some of your good ideas might help me … breathe better

Georgia

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The best way to start this expose is with a “Marie Claire” phrase like : How has internet changed the way we trust?

Out of common sense I will jump to the conclusion : a lot, and it has transformed Trust into a peer-to-peer thing.

Attention! This is not about  the good old buzz-path of word-of-mouth. Peer to peer means that I use your resources-without-knowing-you and without-you-knowing that I use your resources.

Personnaly I am furious with this and I have jotted-down some cases to share

• We blog, tweet AND keep a secret diary for mother’s shake
• We start-up business based solely on V-teams (“Time” magazine’s best practice for creating a LILO company- Little In Lots Out)
• mWe umble-jumble generalities to colleagues and chat our PRO projects to your sexy-Sue73 on IRC

But I guess that’s my problem. With a Woody Allen film I will get over this social drama.

Some other smarter guys turned this into business. And created mint.com, a tool for managing online your financial assets, all of them. Aaaall you do is enter aaall your bank accounts data and they happily process. You never enter personal identification data. Well, sort of. Well is some countries. Well. (and that’s where Trust becomes like marriage : potentially outsourced to lawyers)

And then you announce how much you spend on life issurance, dippers and anchovies and they propose scenarios.

Does it sound familiar ? Does it sound Facebookish ?

If Facebook studied your Love, Mint.com studies directly your Money.

If Facebook is a $4b company by only having the potential to study your preferences patterns, Mint.com is a $?b company for having ready-made your spending patterns.

Peer-to-peer trust can make miracles for the little ? mark above. Alleluia.

JEALOUS Georgia.

PS: the anchovies are stolen, too stinky to be replaced with another example! thanks

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Happy new year !

Many thanks to the sir that proclaimed this day a universal holiday!

The wormhole created from this generalized ambiance gave me the time to feel a thought more random and more intense than my routine-fishbowl-thinking. (well I hope…)

I read something very beautiful today.

Paloma, in « L’élégance du hérisson » has a reflection on people flaming up cars in Paris. Because I always have this « rioting thing » on the back of my mind I spent a moment thinking about Paloma’s “why” explanation.

She describes a scene with an adopted Indonesian peasant child drinking tea in the middle of heavily civilized Paris. Mind the gap between the two points of reference of this child. It is half the earth. And the child falls in. His identity and then culture is lost somewhere on the road, and with no culture he is an uncivilized animal. That’s the way she puts it.

I can add nothing to it but another camera : For me, the violence on cars is the scream of somebody falling in this gap. In the case of my country the gap that makes us scream is maybe that we have to live like old people when we are very young and like children as we get older. Having experienced this, I think very high of Internet and its democratic turbines. For the moment and at its present shape internet is one sure open bridge to feel connected to your civilization, whatever you feel this is, with no logistics involved.

very much like santa claus for those of you that gave up believing.

hope?wish

Georgia

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is 39 < 26?

Oh my god! I am older than internet!!!!

I woke up this sunday morning with this geek neurosis, suddenly feeling terribly old and rrrrushing to my computer to confirm that it was only a bad wake-up confusion.

…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vf53PczuJXc]

But no, it was there, in front of my browser I could feel my senile arthritis, my fingers tapping same old familiar adresses, my reflexes being sterilized and the randomness having somehow disappeared from my contact with the internet. Before I began preparing my Facebook “so long” event, I stopped a while

and thought about this paradox. How can this organism that functions 24/7, can work against what we know and manage to keep its youth and firm ?

Internet has apparently found the answer to aging-free eternity, buzzing cheerfully  in the face of its devoted aging fans (me!).  And as its commodization sets in, the evolution is a thing of younger and younger devoted fans (me?, hmmm….).

Having a sunday coffee with a friend only made my neurosis worse (he was paris,  not woody allen). We chatted about our home social crisis, which is initially and  significantly driven by 15y.o. teens.

To give you another picture, imagine Greece as a football field:

Right in the center you have about 1.000.000 young active people trying to play football, and everybody else packed in the seating area. The rest of the field is empty. <void>

Not because there is a gathering prohibit like in the parisian 2005 events, but simply people in the comfortable seats feel the field as their garden and the grass is not to step on.

Sometimes some young at hearts have a walk there, like dogs enjoying the city.

Are they visible?

When you have a certain age, sharp vision and hearing is quite an issue.

To bridge the gap, the masscha media,  have placed their cameras to zoom in the field and journalists to amplify the sound. You now wake up with very educating tv-magazines that explain in the morning breeze the complex dynamics of action and reaction in social crisis.

You learn about corruption, politics, sociology theories, with your morning coffee. And then you go search for handkerchiefs from your local store and the old lady analyzes the dirty secrets of police to her peers…Excellent!

To come back to my neurosis, this time I realized that I am sitting around the green and not in it. It’s not that I don’t have energy or reason, it is my social network that has classified me in the oldies (but goodies I hope). As simple as this, since I don’t have friends in highschool, and I don’t live right in the heart of the  Exarcheia “anarchy ghetto” (mercy masscha) I get to learn things with a delay long enough to receive them and not live them.

My hi5, facebook and me!cha refugees have wrinkles, so so do I…

No matter in how many protesting facebook groups I sign up, I see and hear the internet getting younger as I get doggy.

Georgia

bonus quizz :

What is the news in this video ? or  me!cha vs masscha live from your TV

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Hi, this is not a technology report – analysis, so somehow out of the usual TIE dresscode.

But I feel that I should blog about what is happening in my country Greece nowdays for all the impact that it has on a personal, national, European and human level.

Last Saturday night a teenager was shot by a policeman in the street.

Ever since, Athens and many other Greek cities live in protesting, rioting, and worse, looting and burning of public and private urban tissue.

( details )

It is not the first time citizens fall pray to urban risks, neither in Greece nor in other cities of the world.  Reaction is always part of the game. But extending these reactions over a surreal period of several days, signifies that the game is still a subject of negotiation under the sound of anger.

For me, and for many other people living here, it is a strangling of our logic.

It is only by focusing on each incident separately that we can form a vision on the facts.

Whoever tries to see these past days as whole, is faced with profound stress because there is no connecting line, typical of violence, eh?

So instinctively each part of the population identifies his reason with his own anxiety in this massive crowdsourcing of hate colours.

for example…

Teenagers face their economically and socially undermined environment.

Students and people who enter the productive ages face the paradox of building a life in one of the most expensive European countries by means of parental mecenat.

People in their 50s revive their post-war issues.

Pensioners stress the absence of social welfare.

Artists reason on cultural sins like sleep and obesity.

A big happy extended family …

Life in Greece is beautiful, most of the time you feel as if it is a party. If it is not in the air, it lives in the minds of the people.

Sometimes people get drunk. In 2004 we were drunk by the sudden euphoria of the Olympic Games, and in the aftermath we kept on the festivities (very bad for our credit card reflexes)

In 2008 we are drunk with anger.

This is a good kick to begin bringing to reality what we have in our minds. And start building.

Soon, when the violence will be over, we will have no illusion if burning everything down could have been a solution.

A big “NO” will be stuck in our minds hopefully.

And hopefully our animal farm is short-circuited here.

me & my friends, after

With or without Mr Jones we will be more ready to build what we want for Greece.

First thing is to put in action some conciliation practices and rebuild our public safety mechanisms.

Instead of overeducating kindergarteners and pappy-students, getting our guardian angels to learn the basics.

And then begin reintegrating them in the society, which has fiercely stereotyped and dehumanized them.

And then reintegrating ourselves in the society.

And then working for it and not against it.

We all now that, either in Greece or in other parts of the planet.  now it’s time to begin doing it…

no grande finale in this article, because I will sound even more like a third class politician.

+ behind the violence, there were also some interesting stuff on how people communicated during the crisis, I will blog about them soon, when I find my words back.

Georgia

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Hey there, planet mainstream here, are you in for some blockbuster scenarios?

After 2 peaceful years of gardening new products and shopping (still checking if Yahoo comes in the right size) Microsoft has apparently decided to go extrovert and check out the competition. The new internet explorer, IE8, marketed as the “discrete one’ comes with features like ‘In Private Browsing’ that help you block away some aspects of commercial intrusion such as cookies, history lists, and ads.

Wait a minute, are ads angels or demons? It depends on whose side you are, ads are actually multifaceted like mood rings: their use and value are subject to the judge’s role, critical spirit, need of information.

Web ads are mostly seen as angels: they do no evil, they function more elegantly than on other media, probably that’s why people put up with them and other people have based business and state funding models on them.

Demonizing web ads is not part of the ‘InPrivate Blocking’ goals, free will rules. But with privacy on internet becoming a hot topic for regulation, InPrivateBrowsing is actually a do-no-evil, democratic timebomb.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fMqJWoOjE4]

So, this is my scenario.

(late this summer, honey I’m home)

Microsoft is risking committing twice the same antitrust crime, expecting the ad-allergy to spread like a demon-ex-machina by means of ambient buzz (autumn leaves and dust).

(later this year, in the city)

In the same way we’ve rapidly become eco-aware, we begin paying more attention to our privacy.

(you’re just too good to be true)

As Google’s adwords becomes better and Google’s search engine becomes more personalized the results of these two tend to look alike. At some point, our contextual aesthetics react to the lack of difference in the typology of service. Allergy. (atsum)

(in the meantime, the trial)

Then, the second antitrust trial for Microsoft magnetizes ambient dynamics towards privacy awareness.

(whose side are we?)

People are mostly concerned with the direct impact of this issue on their lives rather than the health of the economic competition. This aspect works for Microsoft.

(in the spring, jingle bells blossom/ after the trial…)

As time goes by, behavioral reflexes are built on this awareness.

By highlighting that do-no-evil doesn’t equal do-good, the trial triggers the attitude of systematically using the ad-blocking features in IE or elsewhere (Firefox, Safari…)

(is the trial just a bad dream?)

Google on the other side is still our clean cut hero, our Brandon Walsh.. Fighting for free airwaves, for openness, for us, has chosen an original model of B2C partnership. Beyond a company it acts as a web NGO.

So what is the best path to protect its core business? The legal, the educational, the crowdsourcing or the self-transformational?

Will Brandon

a) complain to the highschool director ?

b) organize an ad-contest for the beach-club kids to campaign for homeless veterans ?

c) run for highschool president ?

d) or study hard to access UCLA?

…to be continued

Well, I also have some legal questions:

If InPrivateBlocking is banned, is the same feature declared non grata for other browsers as well ? What about other add-on programs-is size(impact) shaping legality?

How is the applicable legal domain chosen? Is it an issue of commercial or civil law and how is EU regulation restrictive in each case?

Piss o’ cake?

Georgia

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Everymonth same question : Why shall I pay this horrible mobile bill?

Reflex-logic tells me it’s because there is my name on it, I am the person who did all these calls, who used all this bandwidth and all these services.

But what do I pay for?

When I place my calls I take the initiative of starting bipartial exchanges and if people I am calling (Hillary, Pico, Woody) don’t reply, I don’t pay.

If they accept my calls, then they confirm the fact that it is also a good initiative for them.In this case it is also a good initiative for my operator because I confirm the usefulness of the service that is provided to me. Well, for the operator of the receiver it sucks a bit, because during all this time I pay my operator, Pico cannot initiate any rewarding conversations for his operator. Which is another evil benefit for my operator, since I crunch competitors’ revenues.

So why do I have to pay for taking such a good initiative?

Well, this corrosive question was planted in my mind around ‘98 or ’99 or ‘97 (I don’t really remember) through eeea.gr, but at the time having a mobile phone was rather generating social value and competitive advantage over rigid fixed-line communicators so model was right. Plus I was too young too pay for anything and thus to ask questions on my business model and how it fits with my mobile operator’s one.

But now that I am surrounded by attention-driven models and staples are harder to find on a desk than cellphones, I find paying for calls I place simply obsolete and naive.

Obsolete because I am child of the attention-era. I am immersed in a world that the more buzz you create the more precious you are considered (name it web socializing or coffee-brake storytelling it is always business and if you want to calculate your ubiquous score just play with this socialbomb game). Under these criteria, buzz is more valuable than the business itself. So if I buzz I should get the business (the call) for free as a minimun reward.

Naïve, because charging only for duration is reducing the communications’ value chain

to a single parameter. Driving earth flat again.

And behavioral yield? Why not rewarding me for calling numbers I used to/could call from skype or fixed lines? For calling people I haven’t called for some time? For calling people that have a free line (because they work for an operator not because they have a corporate contract)? Why not penalizing me for ringing?

And geography?

My operator is totally indifferent if I use my mobile from my bathtub or from a train in Marseille.

And so on…

Most people that do dollarious bills, don’t go through their notices to verify them. We don’t have a personal registry to compare it to the one we receive from our operator. Only when it feels completely absurd we will go through the verification Golgotha. (when for example your operator decides that you have moved out of the country because you have a boyfriend in another country and therefore charges you with roaming prices for all local calls ! ..!!yes yes).

So billing should first create the feeling that it is fair. And complex models based on behavior are very good at this.

Marketing is very good to acquire new customers but we won’t stay loyal to something that it doesn’t feel right. Look at facebook, does it charge you for throwing sheep to people?

Well I only hope that my operator won’t begin intelligizing his billing by adding the parameter “ corrosive bigmouth”…

… end of story- I’d better prepare my “Why I love my operator xxx” article

… sweetness, sweetness I was only joking…

Georgia

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Hello la’ys & gtnlmen,

summer is here (!) and so are various risks associated with UV, swimming, pool-walking, heat, diet, etc.

Did you ever think how knitting could be dangerous for you? Ok, it may be quite weird to consider knitting during summer, unless you are a doily enthusiast or just want to make a personal gift to Jeremy’s artist elephant (an elephant-sweatshirt takes some time)

Think twice before picking up your needles, think about Mazz…

Mazzmatazz, a Dr Who fan with a talent for knitting, published photos and pattern directions of Ood and Adipose, on which BBC Wordwide had copyrights,since they are Dr Who characters. This got her an email in her inbox alerting her on the legal consequences of this act.

Mazzmatazz removed these elements from her website and searched for support from the Open Rights Group on this intriguing situation. It’s not everyday that you risk legal prosecution for buying into a brand symbol.

Is this an exaggerated situation indeed ?

I would say it is, since it interprates the motivation : the “Mazz did nothing more than contrefacon” attitude reduces the creative transformation process to a simple copying reflex.

Then, it sets a miserable legal granularity that drives semiotic diversity to extinction. If nobody can speak, sing, sketch, imitate moves of Adipose without buying copyrights beforehand, then Adipose will not fertilize any other ideas, and will be a symbol quickly forgotten. Save fat !

but wait,

Do we actually have somebody playing tennis in the swimming pool? eh, I mean mixing up the rules of two different business models: If BBC Worldwide is getting royalties from the brand and paraphernalia, it seems to me that Mazzmatazz did not monetize this artwork by selling it directly. If she goes for indirect revenue generation (let’s say from traffic on her site, or publicity, or from boosting her productivity by having a fulfilling hobby, or whatever), let her play on her field. Or else, BBC is bullying “we are competitors, either you like it or not”.

On the other hand, BBC Worldwide, may have needed some field exercises on applied IP law on digital content (mesure the image impact, the propagation speed, the volatility of its arguments). Fair,because when a real crisis is in, I suppose it will be too late to test the legal function.

Or maybe they are doing some buzz about the new cycle of Dr Who series. Knitting is a rather cult activity, exactly like the audience of Dr Who.

Anyway, just in case you got as impressed as I were by this story, remember not to facebook any monument-like castles your cousins built on sand this summer. And let’s hope that this IP hot stream will begin to settle down until Halloween / carnival because I want to pose with my Pink Panther costume. Tara rara, rara…

Georgia

( for a more in-depth legal analysis on the issue, see Andres Guadamuz content, enjoy)

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Unlike other Mondays’ reputation, March 17th was a bright one in London.

…Post-reporting from the “Creative Business in the Digital Era” seminar, in 01zero-one centre in Soho.

The idea in the CBDE was to bring together people from different walks of the creative industry (music, cinema, publishing, photography…) whose common point is the zeros and the ones: digital works and concepts.

…so as to exchange on intellectual property, open rights, business models, digital marketing, creativity, its stimulation, its canalisation…

If it wasn’t for Suw Charman-Anderson and Michael Holloway from the Open Rights Group (a growing NGO community focusing on Digital Rights Issues) I would have probably stayed home and the other guys may have crossed each other on the pub. So thank you guys for setting up and animating the whole day!

The project has a wiki, at our disposal beforehand – a great thing, given the variety of the people attending.

On Monday we warmed up with a notion-shower by Suw, then got in the shoes of Radiohead and their In RainBows experiment and finally had some real entrepreneurs of the digital era sharing their vision:

A great Tom speaker and Reynolds author of “Blood, Sweat and Tea” distributed under a Creative Commons Licence.

John Buckman, multi-entrepreneur, mostly known as Magnatune CEO and as Bookmooch owner.

And finally, David Bausola and Rob Myers, the principal conceptual stormers behind the project “Where are the Joneses?”.

What are the Joneses? Based on a series-like format, it is mostly a transmedia chameleon; the product is shaped by its environment and its audience, the significance changes depending the angle you choose to look at it.

Nobody knew in advance where the joneses were, the public decided the how-what-where, sending them around Europe to find their siblings, participating themselves in the scenario, in the acting etc.

Mr and Ms Jones, if you came to France you might have recognised Laurent Godard as your sibling : he’s the father of Flateurville, a “discussional” building of a village to finally come up with a film. How? Through regular interactions with the audience, in a “salle de jeux” every Thursday evening. More to discover “sur place” if you happen to be in Paris.

The whole experience made me more aware of the fact that prediction is a quite autistic procedure in digital business, you’d better keep it away if you want things going on smoothly. Well I suppose that it had always been like this, long before I woke up, but in digital business where cycles are faster and faster, prediction seems really outdated.

So, just for the pleasure of philosophizing a bit, prediction may have been only a temporary solution for the industrial first era of business, serving to bridge the gap of the missing dialogue with the “consumer”.

John Buckman made this quite clear to me when discussing on his Magnatune and Bookmooch activities where he applies a trial-error-adaptation schema.

“listen” and “reply” in a way that makes sense, seem to form the principia of digital business for those who do it. The commercial transaction being replaced by a commercial natural language dialogue? trial and error this question as well…

Shall this be confirmed, does it mean we’re finally moving on from Industry to Internet? spring feels good…

(to be internetically correct, if someone who reads this is on the south hemisphere, enterring fall, please replace the season by the metallic mecanism as far as spring is concerned, it also feels good)

To get back to last Monday,

My personal favourite gadget presented that day is CCMixter, a pool-tool of music creativity on a “molecular” level : you can post and find samples, remixes,  a capellas and build on them since they are licensed under creative commons. Quite solid concept, as it connects the two extremities of the 2.0 value chain: the artist with the user. Plus it teased some of my memory parts referring to other music tools, like C-sound. I wonder what applies in the case of music-code copyrights…

Cheese.

Accuse me of writting cheese, “come on Georgia, stop name dropping and all”

Nope nope, cheesy or not, the sensation of this seminar was like a cute baby incarnating the taste for openness, the playfulness of creativity and the cosiness of legally-correct digital business.

loved it.

Cheers.

Georgia

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Uf!

My faith has been restored: we live in a civilized business world where everybody can be a winner, sky is the limit etc.

More specifically, as far as the 700Mhz part of the sky is concerned, the breaking news are that there are no breaking news and no disruptive solutions:

Winners

US government has won

~ 20 billions of declining US  $.

AT&T has won

the C-block and the pride of carriers being carriers.

AT&T’s lawyers have won

significant fees and gem experience from lawsuits concerning the Openness clause.

Google has won

• the right to patch their apps on (carter)mobiles,
• access to the mobile advertising market (~ 3 billions d.US $)
• and saved ~ 5b.d.US $ to invest on their core business and on P&L  communication (partnerships and lobbying)

Consumers have won

• a stable thus fitter-happier-more productive market
• having the actors empowered and doing their best to focus on client satisfaction with the cease of this corporate battle
• a monetization of their mobile clicking
• federal income

(others)

… you’re welcome to brainstorm.

Geometry: Symmetry and a 3D market that moves in balance.

The equilibrium of this auction is a piece of art.

The main financial flows are organized symmetrically, in analogy of size.

This is my oversimplified prism:

• Big still pay the Big (B to B) : AT&T pays FCC
• MicroPlayers AKA “consumers” pay attention that pays Google (MP to G)

The notorious interoperability in telecommunications could actually apply to business models as well , since each one has found its place in this multidimensional world.

As you can see above  the 700 MHz space has been defined in 3D :

Little red axe: MP to G

Big red axe: B to B

The long red tail: their future interactions.

I commit to review my proposition to do away with auctions as sales procedures, taking off my hat to these infamous Google game theorists.

Hey guys, would you care to take a look into tougher games once you’ve finished with business peace?

Georgia

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