Lisbon Christmas street lights (via Webcam)

Apart from its religious meaning, Christmas brings along a lot of other things that have more or less symbolic meaning: trees, shopping, Santa Claus, gift and a lot of lights.

I used to hate Christmas lights mostly because I find it strange to see every building full of rows of lights in no order what so ever.

But there’s certain kind of Christmas lights that I like. Christmas street lights. Thankfully Lisbon is full of them at this time of the year and even the most empty places become alive at night. Lisbon’s Baixa (downtown) is one of those places.

Lisbon Christmas street lights
Photo by Paulo Guerrinha. More at his Christmas street lights gallery.

Besides the regular lights there’s a huge Christmas tree that fills an otherwise soulless plaza.

If you’re far away or just don’t want to be in the middle of the traffic, you can see it live via the webcam that SAPO put the top of the tree.

For the geek in you, the camera is an Axis Network Dome Camera and it’s right at the top of the steel construction that is supporting the, 75m and 2 million lamps, tree.

November 30, 2006 | Tags: | 3 Comments 

The social web

I think that no one that usually uses Internet has any doubts that the web, as we know it, is changing to a more social one.

Some folks like to call it the “Web 2.0”, others “Social web”. Although the name it’s not the most important, I definitely prefer to call it “Social web”. For me “Web 2.0”, and all the buzz around it, sounds like a growing bubble, that will blow up, one of this days. Do you really think there is space and users to all the startups that born everyday, offering all sort of new services?

Several years ago, at the beginning, the web was mainly a place where we could find static content from enterprises and other organizations, such as central and local governments and some dynamic content, as the traditional media begin to use the web as another place to publish their news. Beside the static personal homepages of geocities, tripod and other similar websites, I think the web was a place of “other’s content”, where users couldn’t place content, and over all, where users couldn’t publish content everyday on a quick and really easy way.

That’s why I believe the blogs played a major role on the web that we have on our days. With the blogs, and all the tools developed to publish contents on the web, like Movable Type, Blogger and WordPress, and the several services that has been launched on the last 2 or 3 years, like Flickr, Digg or YouTube, the users have the possibility to publish content on the web. As so, we are now facing a new web, not a place of “other’s content”, where it’s to hard and expensive to enter, but a place of “everyone’s content”, where everyone with a computer and a internet connection can in a few minutes, easily publish their texts, sounds, images or even videos, without having to spend a cent.

At same time, even the traditional media are gradually changing their presence at the internet, introducing several new features, like comments, correction of the articles, ratings and others, like you can find on the new website of the Spanish newspaper “El Pais”.

Post written by Hugo Neves da Silva - guest blogger of November.

November 27, 2006 | Tags: , , , | 1 Comment 

A good afternoon at DeliDelux

Good moments spent at gourmet and wine store DeliDelux. Great place with great ambiance.

She ended buying a few products for tonigh’s dinner (which was wonderful) and a friend offered me a Malhadinha 2004 (direct link soon) from Herdade da Malhadinha. Can’t wait to open it.

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More photos at my sapo fotos gallery

November 18, 2006 | Tags: | 1 Comment 

Bruno Giussani

Since I met Bruno at LIFT last year I have been reading religiously his blog Lunch over IP.

LOIP logo

Bruno’s blog has won a couple of blog prizes but that’s not the reason I love his blog. Bruno is a talented writer. Bruno in his own words:

Bruno Giussani is a writer (IHT, WSJE, Business Week, Foreign Policy, L’Hebdo, Ilsole24ore/Nòva24, Infoweek and other publications), author of several books and the producer of TEDGLOBAL and other conferences. He is a member of the Boards of Internet consultancies Namics and Tinext. He was a 2004 Knight Fellow at Stanford University. He lives in Switzerland.

In general I rarely re-read posts but Bruno’s ideas and writing quality are so good that I often come back. For example check one of his recent posts - Conferences write-up: The Relevant New 2.0 which covers his writing on some of the most interesting conferences around the world. It was in his blog that I discovered the slow movement through his post Slowing down, quickly.

Bruno’s blog is for sure one of the most interesting subscriptions that I have. Thankfully, Netvibes and RSS are always there to let me know when there something new to read.

November 18, 2006 | Tags: , | 1 Comment 

A look inside real state web startup Trulia’s

Robert Scoble interviews Peter Flint (Founder and CEO) on the offices of real state web startup Trulia.

trulia real estate search logo

I think it’s a very interesting interview where you can learn about Trulia’s business. Peter talks about the business, the product, the technology, the team, the business model and some other details.

Trulia is a vertical search engine focused on real estate market. There’s a demo here. Trulia’s business model is based on advertising. They’re after a portion of the $2 billion spent in real state advertising online.

As a side note, it is always interesting to hear a real entrepreneur describe what a real entrepreneur does: As an entrepreneur I want to solve meaningful problems. That’s it.

November 18, 2006 | | 2 Comments 

Future of Web Apps, London Feb 20 - 22

I’ve just registered for the Future of Web Apps in London. I’ll be at the 2-day conference and also going to the workshop day.

Future of Web Apps

I’ll be attending Scalable LAMP Development for Growing Web Apps with Matt Ogle from Last fm and also Building Online Communities with Tara Hunt from Citizen Agency.

It’s very cool that the organization setup an online Lounge where people can interact with each other prior to the conference.

See you soon in London.

November 13, 2006 | Tags: , | 2 Comments 

Etsy launches version 2 (or How to launch a new version of a website)

Social Shopping site Etsy is launching a new version tomorrow morning.

Etsy logo

They’ve been preparing for this version for a few months and it has been a wonderful journey to watch since the whole process has been described at their blog.

They first asked their users to answer a survey so that they could understand what should or shouldn’t be changed.

From the survey they understood that pricing was too complex so they anounced a new pricing for the new version.

Taking advantage of being all together in a gathering they decided to present the team doing version 2 to the community.

A few weeks lated a post with some screenshots (Homepage, Shop Home, Item View) generated 143 pieces of love and feedback.

They arranged a Town Hall meeting (virtual meeting with a lot of Etsy users) to talk (and listen) to some of their users what the new version was going to be about.

A few days before launch they decided to launch a new version walkthrough not only previewd some of the news features but also helped prepare a lot of people to the new changes.

They did a live load test with some of their users.

They posted that they started installing the new version and got back more that 100 comments wishing them good luck.

Because of all this users interest, as they make the final deployment, the temporary homepage displays a log of the latest information regarding the instalation.

Etsy Launch

I’ve written before why Esty is such a special site. They share a lot of information and make their users feel a part of Esty. It’s an amazing community where people really feel they are important and have a say in the future of the service. For me that’s the key to the success of Etsy.

Update: It’s online now.

November 13, 2006 | Tags: , , | Leave a Comment 

Podcast Sena Santos

Franscisco Sena Santos is one of my favourite Portuguese radio journalists. For years I’ve heard him over at TSF and Antena 1.

Now he has a podcast. Every morning he goes through the world’s newspapers and gives us a brief view on what is going on. A really good start to the day.

Sena Santos

If you would like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do it right here (in Portuguese only).

November 12, 2006 | Tags: , , | 1 Comment 

Guest blogger: Hugo Silva

I’ve decided to try something new here at the blog so I’ve invited Hugo Silva to be my guest blogger during November.

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I’ve met Hugo at LIFT in Geneva last year (although we live in the same city and work 5 min away).

There are many reason why I invited Hugo to do this. Among those reasons I think it’s interesting to know that Hugo is doing a Master on Communication, Organization and New Technologies, with a thesis on weblogs and that he’s one of the organizers of SHIFT. More about him here.

I hope you enjoy it.

November 10, 2006 | | 3 Comments 

Like.com and the niche market approach

A new product has been launched using the same technology that was being used to power image search engine Riya. The news is everywhere.

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What I like most about Like is that being a shopping comparison site they are targetting a specific target, Women and pursuing a market worth of $15-$30B. Instead of going all the way.

They are following a purple cow strategy and decided to build something truly different and used technology to get [us] there.

Munjal Shah (CEO and Co-Founder) has been writting a couple of articles on the development and launch of Like. On Episode 15 he explains what his business is all about:

Riya 2.0 would help most in hard to describe items for which searching inside photos was most important. Objects that had this property tended to be soft goods like clothing, jewelry, handbags, shoes, home and garden, etc. Looking at Hitwise we realized that while there were $15-$30B worth of these items sold on the Web, almost 65% of the buyers for these items were women.

He explains what he learned from his research on what women are doing online:

we learned about how truly technology savvy women aged 25-30 were and from People Magazine we learned just how popular dressing like celebrities was for the mass consumer market. However I learned the most from the bloggers.

Ahd he shows what the blog fashion business is:

Lesley Scott from fashiontribes, Julie Fredrickson (and her very smart partner Philip Leif Bjerknes) from Coutorture, and Michelle Madhok from She Finds. All three had been building their online magazines and had seen their blogs take off. All three where experts in fashion and style.
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Their audience was just starting to transition from email lists like Daily Candy. All three had experimented with various revenue models, had done great SEO work, and were building traffic month on month. They seemed aggressive and driven. I could relate to them as a fellow entrepreneur. In the 45 minutes we spent together, I learned so much from them and I realized just how little I knew about the world of fashion.

He concludes his post with a smart remark on what it takes: The key to being successful is to learn as much about how you customer thinks as possible… even if you are the wrong gender

Screenshot Like.com

Developing Like for a specific audience with a clearly defined market allows the strategy to be much more focused and the problems to be much smaller and thus easier to solve.

Update: Scoble give us much more details here like the $100.000 paid for the domain and the 250 servers needed just for the current setup. Plus some videos too.

November 8, 2006 | Tags: | 7 Comments 

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