DLD09 Overview

DLD (Digital, Life, Design) took place a couple of days ago (January 25-27, 2009) in Munich and most of sessions are online for everyone to see. Here’s a real good one on the future business models for journalism and new media strategies.

This interesting panel included Jeff Jarvis, Tyler Brulé founder of Monocle, Jochen Wegner, Carolyn McCall (Chief Executive of Guardian Media Group) and Michael Arrington.

A few other interesting videos: David Kirkpatrick interviews Mark Zuckerberg, a really interesting session on Hispanic Markets, a session about City Design and a good overview of the Eastern Europe.

Make sure you also check DLD Liveblogging to find good text resumes of each session.

Update: I have also seen this video of Martin Varsavsky (FON) and René Obermann talking about the current situation and the future of global communication and digital network markets and I highly recommend it.

January 30, 2009 | Tags: conferences, dld09, events, monocle | Leave a Comment

Netflix CEO: Secrets of my success

Netflix founder and CEO Reed Hastings has done a short interview with Fortune talking about how he started the service and reached eight million customers.

In the interview he adds a couple of useful tips:

Target a specific niche: When there’s an ache, you want to be like aspirin, not vitamins. Aspirin solves a very particular problem someone has, whereas vitamins are a general “nice to have” market. [The Netflix idea] was certainly aspirin.
Stay flexible: We named the company Netflix (NFLX), not DVDs by Mail because we knew that eventually we would deliver movies directly over the Internet. DVDs will be around a long time, but we’re building for the day when they’re not.
Never underestimate the competition: We erroneously concluded that Blockbuster (BBI, Fortune 500) probably wasn’t going to launch a competitive effort when they hadn’t by 2003. Then, in 2004, they did. We thought, Well, they won’t put much money behind it. Over the past four years they’ve invested more than $500 million against us.
There are no shortcuts: Occasionally great wealth is created in a short amount of time, but it’s through a lot of luck in those situations. You just have to think of building an organization as a lot of work. It may or may not turn into great wealth.

These kind of interviews are generally far away from the day-to-day of running a company like Netflix but, nevertheless it’s always good to read good advice from such an experienced entrepreneur.

January 29, 2009 | Tags: ceo, entrepreneurship, netflix, success | 2 Comments

Frost / Nixon and fears of being an entrepreneur

I went to see Frost/Nixon (wikipedia) and loved it. It’s an incredibly great movie about a set of interviews but most importantly a great movie about entrepreneurship. Every entrepreneur should watch it and learn.

At some point David Frost confesses:
“I’m in this for everything I’ve got and still there is no guarantee I’ll ever see the light of day”.

From my talks with other entrepreneurs I often hear that being an entrepreneur can make you feel very lonely. You can easily feel no one else shares your vision or passion for the business. An entrepreneur normally does and thinks about so many things at the same time that a couple of tiny issues can quickly mitigate the whole motivation. Stress and fear are no strangers to any entrepreneur.

However it’s not that I’m wrong (although I can be). It’s that I want to succeed and even will all the motivation in certain moments everything can point out that failure could be the only option and like David Frost you just wonder ”Why didn’t anyone stop me?”

Who said being an entrepreneur was easy ?

January 27, 2009 | Tags: entrepreneurship, movies | 6 Comments

Understanding women

Trying to understand google is like trying to understand women. While it may be fun to try, both are futile pursuits.

Seen here while searching for answers on google behaviour.

January 27, 2009 | Tags: google, women | Leave a Comment

Jeffrey from Threadless on success

There’s so much good advice in this post that I didn’t even know what to quote.

Just stay true to your original plans; see them through; and understand that more-often-than-not, these new and exciting concepts are rarely vetted for use beyond their original purpose, thus having the extreme ability to only add layers of complexity to what you already do.

Jeffrey Kalmikoff is a partner & chief creative officer at Threadless and skinnyCorp.

If you want to know more about Threadless and their great concept do check this interview:

January 26, 2009 | Tags: entrepreneurship, threadless | 2 Comments

Vicky Cristina Barcelona

O amor. As relações. Pessoas. Pessoas. Pessoas. Tudo muito bem condimentado no último filme de Woody Allen.

January 25, 2009 | Tags: movies | 1 Comment

Boostrapping my flights to Switzerland

I’ll be travelling to Zurich and Geneva next month for LIFT. Travelling to the 2 cities in a couple of days can be quite expensive so I’ve spent some time on flight search tools and ended up saving 160€. Here’s how I did it.

My initial idea was to travel from Lisbon to Geneva via easyjet and then take a train between Geneva and Zurich (and then return via the same route). This trip would cost 170€ for the flight plus 100€ for the train. That’s 270€ for each person and since I’m not travelling alone that would set us back 540€! It was apparently the lowest-cost option but I went searching…

I started at skyscanner which is one of the most complete flight search engines online. It’s available in 20 languages and has a very good user interface. But my favourite search engine is much simpler one.

The Spanish startup Trabber is a great but simple service that searches more than 40 travel sites and has been fine tuned to provide one of the best user interfaces ou there. A good example of this simplicity is the ability to move back and forward one or two days using just links and making it simple and quick to search nearby dates:

The ability to Another feature, Search nearby airports, makes it easy to search for low cost flights (low cost airlines frequently travel to less known cities and nearby airports).

With this feature I was able to find the Basel Mulhouse Freiburg airport which is not far away from Zurich (where I wanted to go first). With Trabber I was able to fly direct to Zurich (actually Basel then train to Zurich for 70€ + 20€) and then 2 days later take the train to Geneva for 50€ (saving one way) and then finally a flight back to Lisbon for another 50€ (via easyjet again). That’s a total of 380€ for the two people. We ended up saving 160€!

By spending some time thinking smart and by making some sacrifice (not flying directly to Zurich) I am able to save a good amount of money that will certainly be a useful resource during the rest of the trip. That’s bootstrapping and it can be applied to creating a company or flying abroad!

Update: In Basel and Zurich I’ll be staying at the tiny but cheap and central EasyHotel. Photos here.

January 24, 2009 | Tags: bootstrapping, comparison, travel | 9 Comments

IKEA Oval Office

This IKEA campaign makes clever use of the political moment.

If the Obamas were a normal family they would have visited IKEA after the inauguration to redecorated the oval office.

Via CR Blog.

January 22, 2009 | Tags: IKEA, Oval Office | Leave a Comment

Obama’s HOPE Poster

Obama’s hope poster was designed by artist Shepard Fairey. This photo by Steve Rhodes.

January 21, 2009 | Tags: hope, obama | 2 Comments

Obama’s inauguration around the Web

On these kind of events the web always produces interesting links and points of view and on the same event. Here’s a couple of them:

Inauguration Day, by the numbers: CNN served 18.8 million live video streams, 600,000 Facebook status messages sent using the CNN application (average 4,000 updates every minute during the inauguration / 8,500 updates in the first 60 seconds).

A Wordle text cloud of Obamas’s Inauguration speech