iPad therefore iWant? Probably. Why? iDunno
5 February 2010
An hilarious take on the iPad by Charlie Brooker at The Guardian.
A star appears over San Francisco and a new gizmo is born. The iPad! At first glance it resembles an iPhone in unhandy, non-pocket-sized form. But look a little longer, and . . Nope. You were right first time.
Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing. Apple excels at taking existing concepts – computers, MP3 players, conceit – and carefully streamlining them into glistening ergonomic chunks of concentrated aspiration. It took the laptop and the coffee table book and created the MacBook. Now it’s taken the MacBook and the iPhone and distilled them into a single device that answers a rhetorical question you weren’t really asking.
It’s an iPhone for people who can’t be arsed holding an iPhone up to their face. A slightly-further-away iPhone that keeps your lap warm. A weird combination of portable and cumbersome: too small to replace your desktop, too big to fit in your pocket, unless you’re a clown. It can play video, but really – do you want to spend hours staring at a movie in your lap? Sit through Lord of the Rings and you’d need an osteopath to punch the crick out of your neck afterwards.
Wanted – Andrea Favale
4 February 2010
Sinan, my friend, my business partner, my pupil and one of my favorite people on the planet, homaged me with a short profile in his excellent blog, Sinanation, as part of his ‘Wanted’ series.
As usual, he was able to capture the essence of what matters, at least most of it. And, incredibly, he even found a decent picture of me.
U2 – I’ll go crazy if I don’t go crazy tonight
3 February 2010
Nothing could better describe my state of mind right now.
Incentives and Legends
2 February 2010
Another great start-up tale from Steve Blank.
Entrepreneurs and the early startup team all need to be motivated by a shared vision, passion and desire to build a large company. Yet it’s the company legends that live on.
Fund Raising
Our little startup was less than a year-old. We had been busy assembling our team and had just hired the last member of our exec staff. We had also just closed our Series B financing with a major overseas partner. The financing felt like a real validation of our strategy. In truth, it was only proof that our reality distortion field worked in Asia as well.
CityandOut – Restaurants
1 February 2010
Hi all,
Today we have released some new functionality on CityandOut. We’ve uploaded approx. 5,500 restaurants, mostly across Europe.
Some countries are clearly more represented than others as you can see from the breakdown below but we aim to continuously grow the database alongside our partner Livebookings.com.
We are planning to enable the booking functionality for the restaurants sometime next week.
Thanks for the amazing feedback and support showed so far.
Andrea & Mark
Sex sells. Everything.
31 January 2010
Does anyone really read “Playboy” for the Jokes? “Hustler” for Larry Flynt’s views on politics? Watch “Baywatch” for the story line? No, it’s about skin tight bathing suits revealing more the wetter they become, and the grabbing of perfect bodies under the guise of being saved. When was the last time you saw somebody from “Baywatch” in a Merchant-Ivory movie? Howard’s Rear End? I don’t think so.
The porn videos of the “80’s” are not much more revealing than today’s HBO. Sex, in the city, and in prison. It’s everywhere you look. On your TV. It’s all about immediate gratification. And the selling of it.
Gucci. Buy these clothes and have sex with the models. Even the designers are great looking. How many of his customers fantasize about Tom Ford? But does any woman really want a roll in the hay with Yves Saint Laurent? Compared to Bill Blass, Ralph Lauren is Tom Cruise. And how many gays have a thing for Marc Jacobs? Have you noticed how the Vuitton men’s line has taken off..
And what about music? It’s not a recent phenomenon. From Sinatra, to the Beatles, to Mark McGrath of “Sugar Ray.” Girls everywhere scream “Take me! Take me.” From suburban mansions to trailer parks, girls everywhere fantasize about the rock star of their dreams. All one has to do is study an emerging market to realize the importance of sex in the marketplace. Latin Media. Ricky Martin or Marc Anthony, who has the better voice or the bigger career? The answer is the better ass.
The “Backstreet Boys,” could they be more obvious? And how brilliantly they are managed and marketed. Little girls everywhere bemoan the fact that two of the band’s members are engaged, while “I Want it That Way” has become the Gay national anthem.
What I do find greatly ironic, in this “mine’s-bigger-and-better-and-hotter” world, is the competition over the cellular phone. In what other category is the winner the one who can boast, “mine’s the smallest”?
Virtually yours,
Patrick Bateman
Hitler reaction to the iPad
29 January 2010
Ray Barretto – Pastime Paradise
28 January 2010
Ray Barretto (April 29, 1929 – February 17, 2006) was a Grammy Award-winning Puerto Rican jazz musician, widely credited as the godfather of Latin jazz.
This is a great cover of Stevie Wonder’s Pastime Paradise I discovered thanks to my friend Chris, an expert in great music.
In case you wanna check out Stevie’s original version.
The Awaiting Table Cookery School
27 January 2010
Recently voted one of the best cooking schools in Italy by Food and Wine Magazine – the representative of Puglia at the prestigious La Dolce Vita in London – The Awaiting Table Cookery School in Lecce, Italy, is a small, intimate Italian cooking school in the most beautiful town in the entire sunny south of Italy.
The Internet of tomorrow
27 January 2010
The Social Analyst is a weekly column by Mashable Co-Editor Ben Parr, where he digs into social media trends and how they are affecting companies in the space.
Did you know that it’s been nearly twenty years since the first website was placed online? Have you ever thought about how the Internet and the web have evolved in time?
Ponder it: the Internet, a complex series of interconnected networks, protocols, servers, cables, and computers, has evolved from its early days as U.S. Department of Defense research project into the foundation for the World Wide Web, what we use today to interact with one another via browsers, email, Twitter, Skype, and millions of other online tools.
As we approach the imminent launch of the Apple Tablet and analyze new trends coming out of out of this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (our full coverage), now is good time to reflect on what the web will look like in the next decade — and beyond.
I have four big predictions to share for what the web will look like in the near future. This is what I expect in the evolution of our online lives:
Introducing CityandOut
25 January 2010
As many of you already know, for the last few months Mark and I have been working on CityandOut, our brand new startup project. Our aim is for CityandOut to become a true travel ecosystem where travel lovers and professionals can meet, get inspirations, plan, book and enjoy their travel and destination experiences.
We are partnering with a growing number of established players in the travel industry: Booking.com for Hotels, Livebookings.com for Restaurants, @Leisure for Villa rentals and many more.
Today we have just released the first tiny part of the service, a hotel search and booking solution. Our database contains approx. 72,000 hotels worldwide and the best prices at least in the European market. As you would expect the site is still buggy but you can confidently start booking your stay.
Over the next few weeks we’ll be releasing new bits as quickly as possible. We look forward to receiving your feedback on any issues on the site and suggestions for future features. We want to build the best travel platform in the market so we regard your input as crucial for our success.
Soon, we will be launching a fund raising round so if you are interested or know someone who might be, please give us a shout.
We hope you’ll love our little baby as much as we do and help us grow it strong and successful.
Love
Andrea & Mark
Be a local. Everywhere.
Lingerie Football League
25 January 2010
I’ll be timing my next trip to the States with one of these events. Period.
thesixtyone
24 January 2010
I just came across thesixtyone: it’s a sort of continuous radio of emerging musicians. The design of the website and its simplicity are awesome.
I set it up as my internet home page and I finally enjoy good music every day without having to worry about logins, subscriptions or pop ups.
In their own words:
On thesixtyone, new artists make music and listeners decide what’s good. We’re nurturing a growing ecosystem where talented folks can sell songs and merchandise directly to their fans. Unlike a record or distribution deal where they only make $1-2 per album (if they ever get paid, that is), artists on thesixtyone make at least $7 per album and are paid every 30 days — no wait for recoupment and no complex royalty schemes! We’re named after Highway 61, a U.S. route that runs along the Mississippi River and marks the origin of American music culture. Muddy Waters, Bob Dylan and B.B. King rode the 61. Elvis grew up in the housing projects along it. Highway 61 was the road by which people left their homes to take their music to the world. thesixtyone, inc. was created in 2008 on the basis of yielding the highest annual dividend of auditory happiness for our shareholders across the universe.
Bodywatching – The buttocks
22 January 2010
The buttocks have quite unfairly become the joke region of the human body. They make people laugh; they are a popular subject for dirty jokes. The behind, the back side, the bum, the buns, the arse, the rump, the bottom – whatever name they are given, the buttocks are looked upon as either ridiculous or obscene. Even when they are cosidered an erotic zone, because of their proximity with the genitals, they are more likely to be pinched or slapped than caressed.
It’s easy to see how this negative attitude has come about. The buttocks are not alone. Between them lurks the anus, through which must pass, day after day, all our solid waste matter and - even more notoriously – the occasional emission of gas. Futhermore, when we bend down the genitals swing into view, also framed by the twin curves of the butocks. So there is no excaping excretory and sexual associations.
It follows from this that to display the buttocks is interpreted either as a gross insult – a symbolic act of defecation on an enemy – or as a gross obscenity – a shamelesss presentation of sexual organs.
The buttocks display is sometimes made more abusive by the addition of the phrase ‘kiss my arse’. Taken at face value this is insulting because it demands a humiliating act of subordination. But there is more to it than that: the Greeks believed that the buttocks were the most beautiful part of the human anatomy. The human emispheres were so different from the tough patches of hardened skin on the lean-bottomed apes that the Greeks saw them, quite correctly, as supremely human and non-bestial. 
The curvacious Goddess of Love, Aphrodite Kallipygos – letterally the ‘Goddess with Beautiful Buttocks’ – was said to have a behind more aesthetically pleasing than any other part of her anatomy.
It was argued that if rounded buttocks were the hallmark distinguishing mankind from the beasts, then the monsters of darkenss must lack this particular anatomical feature. Early Europeans believed that the devil, even though he could assume human form, could never complete the transformation because he could never manage to simulate the rounded human buttocks. Historically, the devil was depicted as having another face instead of the buttocks. This second face is the one which was supposed to be kissed by witches as part of the ritual of the Sabbath. The concept of arse-kissing survived and the popular phrase was incorporated in the modern insult.
The females of apes have brightly coloured rumps. Their hind quarters become increasingly conspicuous and swollen as the time of ovulation approaches, then recede again as it passes. This means that a male can tell at a glance whether a female is sexually active.
Human females are different. Their rumps do not rise and fall with their menstrual cycles. Their buttocks remain protuberant throughout. Matching this, sexuality also remains high. As part of her pair-bonding system, the human female has extended her sexiness so that she’s always potentially responsive to the male (mhhhh…). The female’s sex signal is accentuated by two other properties: the backword rotation of the pelvis and the sway of the hips in walking. The typical female has a more arched back than the male. When she walks, the differnt leg and hip design of the female skeleton produces a greater undulation in the buttock region. She wiggles as she walks.
The females of our early ancestors were much bigger-buttocked than their modern counterparts as evidence from ancient skeltons points out. One possible explanation of this is that our ancestors mated from behind. As we evolved into erect posture and our rump muscles bulged into buttocks, the swallen shape became the main sex signal. Females with larger rumps sent the stronger sex signals so that this condition started to increase until the buttocks became huge. The huge buttocks started however to interfere with the sexual act. The males solved the problem by switching to frontal copulation. As part of this new approach, the female breasts became permanently swollen as mimics of the large emispherical buttocks. This later version of the human female, better balanced and more agile, was at a considerable advantage over the fat-laden earlier model, which was gradually replaced.
The presentation of the buttocks in a humble bent-over posturehas had an enduring role as an appeasament gesture. In this respect tre is no difference between the ape and human individual. In all cases the ‘presenter’ is saying “I offer myself in the passive female role. Please show your dominance by mounting me instead of attacking me”. The dominant individuals rarely attack such a subordinate, either ignoring it, or else mounting it briefly and making a few formalized pelvic thrusts.
Between lovers, buttock claspig is common in both courtship and copulation itself. It is this sexual linkage, again, that causes the occasional furore over the notorious Italian pursuit of bottom-pinching. Any attractive girl walking the streets of an italian city is liable to have her buttocks pinched by admiring strangers.
Media in the maelstrom (part 3)
20 January 2010
You can find part 1 here and part 2 here.
Playing the old Music
The debate is still raging on whether some of the major News Publishers are going to be able to charge readers for online content and therefore survive the current crisis and come out stronger.
Nobody probably knows how things are going to pan out in the end, but casting an eye to what recently happened to the music industry can provide some useful insight.
The music industry experienced a profound crisis in the last few years. While most of the traditional big labels were and still are struggling to understand what hit them and correct their course, new businesses and business models were born and started flourishing. What happened?
Music piracy, one of the symptoms of the Music industry desease, developed and spread like wild fire for two main reasons: A packaging/mispricing problem and a Distribution/usability problem.
Packaging/mispricing: until very recently, in the majority of cases, if I wanted to listen to a specific tune, I had to buy an entire CD with 9-15 (mostly crap) tracks or pay a disproportionate amount of money to buy just the single CD (when available);
Distribution/usability: music is something that people enjoy in the company of friends and that like to share.
I am of course over simplifying here, but it is safe to say that Apple, with iTunes, figured out that people didn’t want to steal music but that they were simply using technology at their disposal to ‘take’ and enjoy music the way they wanted, not the way the labels wanted. With iTunes, you can listen to samples of music and then buy single tracks at a reasonable price. They provided a good solution to the Packaging/mispricing problem and a partial solution (the portability part) to the Distribution/usability problem. They are now facing increasing pressure to let people share the music they have purchased with their friends and, soon, with other devices. This will solve the rest of the problem.
You can argue that News Publishing faces the same problems (with some important differences) of the Music industry.
The Packaging/mispricing model is represented well by the magazines which were, in fact, the first form of publishing to face intense pressure and collapse. Why would I spend 3-6 US Dollars to buy a magazine when there’s probably only 1-2 articles that are of interest to me in each issue? There’s also a Distribution problem; the problem here is less about consuming and sharing with one’s friends and more about getting the news fast, and making sure that I am not missing any important news I need to do my job. There is also a lot of ‘noise’ news that I don’t want to see. An important difference with the Music industry is that many people use news also or mainly for business and cannot afford to miss something important to them. Professional news consumers also tend to manipulate (that is copy, paste, edit, format, etc.) the news for presentations, research and other uses.
The first obvious deduction from this analogy is that people don’t need or want an online NY Times or WSJ or FT. They want a ‘tool’ (the equivalent of iTunes) where they can pick and chose news (content) relevant to them regardless of the original source as long as it’s reliable (we’ll discuss UGC in more detail in a later post). In Music, people are happy to pay 99 cents/pence to buy a single tune with iTunes or to pay a monthly subscription (for a ad free version) for services like Spotify, Pandora, LastFM, etc. These tools not only let people listen to specific tunes but also allow them personalization, discovery and interaction.
Similarly, I am certain that people would be happy to pay a fair subscription price for a system that gave them access to all relevant content with additional tools letting them personalize, share, manipulate, etc. valuable content.
Yes, it’s a big switch for the Publishers, who are also, for reasons that baffle me, still heavily reliant on advertising, but it is a necessary change that should have started years ago.
Of course there are many differences between Music and News Publishing. But, these similarities are obvious and cannot be ignored. We heard Murdoch treatening to pull out his properties from Google; Google is not sharing enough of the upside with the papers. Murdoch doesn’t want to take his content away from Google, he just wants Google (or someone else) pay for it, be it through a subscription model or supported by advertising.
Now, I am all for free content but someone has to pay for those (you can say rarer and rarer) serious journalists who provide real value.
So, quality journalism in my view will survive and grow stronger, but the Publishers will continue to suffer unless they embrace (or build their own) new business models.
People don’t care about the WSJ or NYTimes as they don’t care about EMI or Virgin: They care about the content (the news article or the tune) and the content makers (the journalist or the musician).
The above is a simplistic view of the issue facing the entire Media industry but one that I believe is at the very basis of the problem and cannot be ignored.
Some related info:
Study: Internet radio reaching 32 percent of households, e-readers are hot, newspapers are dead
G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra
18 January 2010
I have never been a fan of the G.I. Joe characters, whether in comic book form or as toys. Primarily because G.I. Joe is a US produce that didn’t really make it in Italy where I grew up. So, I was a bit skeptical about watching the movie. I thought it was going to be an over the top, plasticky film made for kids. I was wrong.
Yes, it is an over the top, full blown fantasy of a movie but it is incredibly well done. The special effects are excellent and the pace is great. It’s a non-stopping streak of explosions, car chases and incredible photography, under water, in the desert and in the sky.
I am now a fan and can’t wait for the sequel. If you enjoy action packed movies like X-Men or Start Trek, you’ll love this one too.
I should probably add that watching Sienna Miller/Ana DeCobray and Rachel Nichols/Scarlett O’Hara wearing a series of very hot costumes through out the movie and fist and kick fighting against each other in one of the best sequences of the film, is by itself worth the price of the ticket.
I can’t honestly remember who the male actors in the movie are.
Jeff, Amazon and I
15 January 2010
There are a lot of great companies and great business men out there. Microsoft, Google, GE, Bill Gates, Warrent Buffett, Sergio Marchionne, and many more.
I am however particularly fond of one company and its founder: Amazon and Jeff Bezos.
I love them both for many reasons:
Amazon is one of the most successful and longest standing internet companies. It contributed to create e-commerce and affected the retail market more than most other companies. It changed the book publishing industry and is about to do the same again with the Kindle.
It has brought incredible innovation to the retail logistics sector and has been the first major player in the cloud computing space.
Jeff Bezos was never bothered by all the criticism he and Amazon received in the early days; he mantained his cool, his vision, and executed better than most. Amazon wasn’t an overnight success like it seems to happen to many internet companies, these days. It took time and a lot of work. They succeded through determination, vision and innovation.
They did so with a smile on Bezos’ face all the way through. There are countless magazine covers and pictures of Jeff Bezos’ happy and cheecky face. To me, it’s the face of success and confidence of a man who is above others.
Amazon’s relevance recommendation system is still one of the best and most reliable out there and it makes you wonder why more people have not copied it also in other sectors.
With all its focus on customer needs, however, Amazon cannot escape some criticism: I have two Amazon accounts, one created when I was living in the UK and one created when I was in the States. I have the same email and password on both, but Amazon seems to think that I am two different people. And I had to ‘train’ both accounts about my preferences. The system was recommending to my US alter ego books I had already bought in the UK. To me, this is silly, not to mention, insane.
And have you tried to contact Amazon with a complaint or an issue? You simply can’t.
Still, I admire Bezos and what he’s achieved. I believe that he will continue to be one of the leading business innovators for many years to come.
Whether he will win the ebooks battle or the cloud computing one, I am not sure. I am certain though that he will be around, strong and prosperous after many of his competitors have come and gone and that Amazon will be leading the way in many fields.
For my part, I like to think that I have learnt from him many valuable lessons about e-commerce and the internet business in general. About being confident about my believes and that success takes time and effort.
I am applying this philosophy and some of Amazon’s tools to my current venture.
Wish me luck.
Being a VC in the Nordics
14 January 2010
As part of my Nordic rehabilitation process, following my older post about Sweden, here’s an interesting analysis of VC activity in the region.
It clearly shows that, on a per-capita basis, the Nordic countries kick ass in the Internet and Software sectors. Must be because there’s nothing else to do over there… shooot, shouldn’t say that.
Here’s the article:
By Daniel Blomquist, January 13th, 2010
At the end of the day, for a VC it is all about exits. We are in the business of building companies and then selling our shares at a (hopefully much) higher value than we originally purchased them for.
As a VC in the Nordic region, we wanted to understand if the market in which we operate is attractive enough in terms of if it is producing enough exit value. We also wanted to improve our knowledge of:
- are there differences between the Nordic countries
- in which sectors value creation has occurred
- impact of VCs both local & international
- exit market in terms of IPO vs M&A and important geographies for exits
- the time it takes to build companies that get exited
Continue reading here
Sex and Guilt
14 January 2010
It seems that society at large feels the need to attach a certain level of guilt to all sexual activity. The level of guilt varies on a scale dependant on the sexual act in question. In the case of consenting adults who are both married and desirous of procreating, the guilt should be negligible. In the case where one of the participants realizes after the fact that the temptress he has just seduced is a minor, then the guilt level could hover somewhere around enormous.
No, I do not condone this, I am just making a point.
The problem with analysis is that those trained in the art of delving into the confines of another man’s psyche often get lost in the depths and lose sight of the fact that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Also, an essential part of sex is the fantasy that is attached to it. While there are no boundaries, there still might be guilt. But guilt must be acknowledged before it can have any effect. I tried to confess once, but no one would listen. I agree with your statement that fantasy doesn’t always need to become reality in order to be satisfying.
I do feel, however, that the boundaries of sexual behavior have been significantly expanded by the Internet in an inverse proportion to the anonymity that it provides.
The joke, of course, is that Internet sex is not sex at all, only typing.
Virtually yours,
Patrick Bateman
Shadows in the rain
13 January 2010
This is possibly my favorite tune of all time. Listen to it till the end, listen to it multiple times and marvel.
Sting is great as usual, the rest of the band is simply out of the ordinary. The playing is sublime. This is music at its finest.
Sting (Vocals & Guitar) Omar Hakim (Drums) Darryl Jones (Bass) Kenny Kirkland (Keys) Branford Marsalis (Sax) Dolette McDonald & Janice Pendarvis (Backing Vocs).
