WandG’s arrives in Portugal

Today’s the premiere of the new Wallace and Grommit movie in Portugal. Movie theatrers, teaser or imdb for more details.

I haven’t been in a movie theatrer since August when I saw Enki bilal’s Immortel (which I really liked). Maybe tomorow I’ll go and revisit Nick Park’s art.

October 27, 2005 | Tags: day to day | 2 Comments

A bakery in Lisbon: business views on a opportunity.

Every since I began living here that I have a few different ways of getting my daily slice of bread.

Usually I buy it close to home on local commerce. There’s a 8am-9pm grocery and a bakery/café. The first has a very good type of bread but variety is low. The second sells pre-cooked frozen bread which is eatable but bad. Ocasionaly she makes bread at home. It’s a very good bread but it takes some preparation time and sometimes you need bread now.

So I began thinking that maybe there’s a good business opportunity for a bakery around the north part of Parque das Nações. Let’s see:
Growing market: It has a very big area, full of new buildings and soon full of people (fortunately I live further north but I can always ride there).
Space available: Lot’s of empty and well located space for rent or buy. They’ll cost double once buidings are full of people living here and you can still choose now. Another idea is to have drive-in capability. How many people drive home and would love to buy bread on the run?
First-mover advantage: A big part of these people will buy bread somewhere. When they start living here they’ll test every option. So there’s a good chance a good bakery that starts business now will have a very good first-mover advantage.
Opportunities to expand: A lot of businesses are close-by. Why not setup a deli-deliver business for dead-hours? Profit-margins around 70 % must be a good motivation.

(photo from a lovely Copenhagen bakery)

Before writing this I had a argument with a friend about bakery profit margins (yes I know, there are far more interesting ideas to discuss). Based on the fact that bread is a commodity I thought that profit margins for a bakery where generaly really low. In part that’s true. As my friend questioned and as this article points out a bakery can survive on a lower profit margin. How?:

Some bakery operators have become more diversified. A greater variety of products will draw in more customers. Besides, it offers a greater profit. Someone buying a donut will question the price if it’s 10 cents more than down the street. However, the same customer will pay 20 cents more for a chocolate cake and not question its cost as this now gets into a luxury category.

By diversifying a bakery can use it’s daily destination advantage to sell more. So bread is used to bring customers in and help sell selling many other goodies.

I will not open a bakery myself. It’s not my business. Althought my business runs on the same principles. It’s fun to look at how all the same principles are applied to a Web business much like they are applied to a bakery business. Location (domain), growing market, cross-selling, etc. Although some people thought, during the bubble, that it was different, it’s not. It’s all there.

I believe that it’s from people’s problems and day-to-day situations that (problems thus) opportunities arise and that’s why I’m giving my open feedback. If any of you just happens to open a bakery (or any other business) here (or somewhere else) let me know, we can always have a brainstorming session over a cup of coffee and besides that, I’m still looking for good bread…

October 26, 2005 | Tags: business | 1 Comment

How to make a city bicycle friendly?

This is a question I’ve been asking myself for quite a few years. I live in Lisbon and (much) less than 1% of people use bicyles to go to work. There are a lot of discussed reasons for this. Traffic, highs and lows of the terrain, missing cycle paths and many more. But Copenhagen was once averse to bicycles (yes!) and it did it. It transformed itself into a bicycle-friendly city. Read this article to find out how they did it. From reading the article I am aware that some of the key points could (and can) be implemented here, but some can’t. Here’s the list.

Key points that would be easy to implement in Lisbon:
- A safe, continuous bicycle infrastructure linked with public transportation obtained through bicycle planning that has the same status as public transport both in planning and funding. Political decision.
- Bike paths and routes are either clearly marked or separated from vehicular traffic by curbs. Bike lanes have their own traffic signals and bikes are prioritized over cars at places where they meet. Takes time. New and refurbished roads should comply to this rules.
- Extensive marketing and public relations campaigns have been implemented to get people to leave their cars at home.
- Fees and taxes for automobile purchase add huge percentage to the price of a new car. There are few parking spaces, and the ones that exist are very expensive. They already exist.

Key points that would be difficult to implement in Lisbon:
- Sponsored and refundable-deposit-based free bikes within a specified area. Vandalism and robery still have advantage hover respect for other people. Hard-to-steal/damage bikes should be used.
- People live far from where they work. If public transportation makes it easier to take bikes at least a part of the problem would be solve.
- Lisbon is not flat. That’s a psychological barrier. How many people do really go up and down a hill everyday in Lisbon?

I would really like that we could use more bicyles in Lisbon. Provided that (political, physical, marketing) things are strategically direccioned that way it wouldn’t be difficult for people to (slowly) start using them. Then I would probably buy two of these or one of these.

October 26, 2005 | Tags: day to day | 12 Comments

24: Day 4 is over, Day 5 is coming.

24 - Day 4 is over. We can’t get sick os seeing it. It’s really addictive. After 96 episodes of the ‘4 days’ I’m still anxiously waiting for Day 5. As soon as we finished Day 4, I started searching for information on Day 5 . I found a few interesting (and some speculative) things.

24: The Game is coming (still on hold at Amazon). Exclusively on Playstation 2, the game is set in between Season 2 and Season 3. One of the good things about the game is that is answers some of the questions still unanswered about CTU. For example, how President Palmer recovered from the attempt on his life or why Kim Bauer started working on CTU.

The 24 Insider has lots of information on Day 5 and seems to base the information in local sources. It has an interesting description of the The Day 5 Prequel and also has some Day 5 Behind The Scenes Photos.

24-fr (in french) has a funny parody video of 24.

If you want full information on everything 24 head to tv.com’s 24 section. Besides news and pictures it has cast and description for each of the 96 episodes.

October 18, 2005 | Tags: day to day | 2 Comments

Mac OS X Panther problems with Sony Ericsson W800i

I haven’t updated to Tiger yet. The Powerbook is running really nice and productivity is really high. Changing to the new version of the OS means making some changes that I haven’t had (mental) time to do. Nevertheless things don’t stop and I’m starting to get behind when it comes to new software and hardware connectivity.

Yesterday I was trying to connect my new Sony Ericsson W800i to the Powerbook and reached a dead-lock. The Mac OS X 10.3 iSync doesn’t support this phone. So one of the available options was to start thinking of doing the OS change. But by now I’m waiting for a new +200Gb external hard drive to help me backup (next week maybe).

In the meanwhile I needed to put all my address book contacts in the phone so I had to find another answer. I did a search for isync and k750 (K750 more popular than w800i but has the same problem with isync) and found some help. It’s a hardcoded patch but it worked fine and I’m now synchronizing the phone and the notebook.

The phone’s great. Music quality is awesome and the headset is great. Menus work really smooth too. But the best thing must be the 2.0 MegaPixel camera with (digital) zoom, Auto Focus and flash. I have a fully integrated camera, phone, walkman and personal assistant which weights less than 100g. What’s next?

BTW, I like the new video iPod. As portable media center is a great step. Hopefully, future versions will have more video resolution and then I’ll consider buying one.

October 14, 2005 | Tags: mobile, tech | 26 Comments

Wallace and Gromit history destroyed

I’ve been a fan of Wallace&Grommit for many years now an the news that the ‘entire history’ of the company behind it was destroyed in a fire comes as a bit of a shock. CNN is reporting that The roof and three interior walls of the Aardman Animations building in Bristol, west England collapsed after the blaze tore through the Victorian building. The sets [...] are all thought to have been destroyed.

I was hoping one day I could visit a WandG museum. Now that’s going to be a bit more difficult.

Produced by Nick Park W&G is a marvelous stop-motion animation series. Following the sucess of the first three short-films (which are amazing attention to detail) A Grand Day Out, The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave Aardman produced the famous (but not so good in my opinion) Chicken Run.

A new film, Curse of the Were-Rabbit has been launched in the US last weekend and is coming to Europe in a few days. Can’t wait to see it.

A nice reaction from the men behing W&G. Nick Park commented that In light of other tragedies, today isn’t a big deal.

Update: First real news story than I’m directed too by the The most-discussed news story feature in technorati.

October 11, 2005 | Tags: animation, day to day | 1 Comment

Automatic Tagging with Tagyu

Adam is making an interesting experience with automatic tagging service Tagyu. Insert some sample text (blog post, news story, etc) and it tags it for you.

Certainly useful if results get a bit more accurate.

Anyway, good work Adam.

Update: Pedro points to the need of something that would help him tag and search his stuff across all services.

October 9, 2005 | Tags: tech | 2 Comments

State of the Blogosphere: a view from technorati.com

Interesting read the 6-month round-up of the State of the Blogosphere from technorati’s CEO David Sifry. This is a really interesting view of the blogsphere since is made up with data from one of the leading blog tracking sites.

Part 1: Blog Growth point out that in just 5 months technorati doubled the number of blogs it is tracking. Part 2: Posting Volume shows how current events influence the blogosphere. The Tsunami, the Superbowl, Live8, and the London Bombings each caused a spike in the number of posts made.

Part 3: Tags and Tagging explains how tags have been growing at technorati. It’s shows some really amazing graphs on the growth of tags. On the first week some 100.000 different tags were added to the system. A really nice video on the evolution of tags at technoratti is available. Part 4: Spam and Fake Blogs talks about the rise of spam and fake blogs on the blogsphere and how the players are dealing with it. Part 5: The A-List and the Long Tail is about power. The power of blogs compared to mainstream media.

Being a technorati user I can only hope that this information is used to make the service even more accurate. As a developer I hope they open up this data. Who knows what kind of things the long tail might just do with it.

October 9, 2005 | Tags: tech | 1 Comment

SAPO Fotos

Not even the moon (that decided to eclipse the Sun) can make any shadow to the launch of the beta version of SAPO Fotos, the new PhotoSharing service from SAPO.

I’ve added some photos there and created my own gallery. Other photo galleries include Pedro Custódio, João Pedro, batixa, Eduardo and Jonas. You can also look at all the latest photos.

A lot of cool things will come in the next few weeks / months. We have a bunch of things being finished as we speak. The first major thing we have been playing with is tags which we’ve included. We’re hoping that people start using it. Tags are an important feature that will help build community.

After a long summer of work I’m finally able to anounce the beta version. I’ve written about it in the past. First because I was having a few initial issues with dealing with the project load and then I’ve realized how important were some of the things (read knowledge) I brought from the trip to Copenhagen.

Update: Pedro has posted somes notes (in Portuguese) about it.

October 3, 2005 | Tags: day to day | 9 Comments