Your blog on alcohol

It's only half past two in the afternoon and my blog is already drunk and misbehaving. Bnox.be alcowebized.

TasteSpotting: a visual potluck of recipes

TasteSpotting: "Choose lobster. Choose rosemary garlic polenta cake. Choose gyoza, ramen, salmon roe, salmon, sashimi, sushi, 'pseu-shi.' Choose pizza. Choose pasta, pasta with pesto, pasta with peas. Choose ravioli. Choose coffee. Choose tea. Choose tea eggs. Choose Bacon Ranch Fries. Choose cupcake, cheesecake, cake, pie, pi, tart, cookies ... But why would I want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose life. I chose somethin' else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you've got TasteSpotting?"

Lovely concept! Made me very hungry.

Netlash Trendrapport 2011 is out!

44 digital experts, 91 pages (in Dutch). Download now netlash-trendrapport-2011.pdf @ Netlash.com or buy a print of Netlash Trendrapport 2011, de experts aan het woord. @ Lulu.com

The Christmas card Google doesn't want you to send

I just constructed this charming Season's Greetings message from a random mix of words google has blacklisted (meaning: Google will not try to fill in potential responses as you type these words into Google search and it will yield zero results). I tried a few times until I got the least offensive version of the card. Make your own at googleblackchristmas.com/.

Bastinado, in case you wondered, is "a form of corporal punishment whereby the soles of the feet are beaten with an object such as a cane or rod, a club, a piece of wood, a stout leather bullwhip, or a flexible bat of heavy rubber." Thank you, wikipedia!

Let your fingers do the walking /cc @cyriakharris

The abridged story of life on earth, as told through the medium of walking fingers by "animator of weird stuff" Cyriak Harris.

By the way, Cyriak is his real name, and he's a freelance animator based near Brighton, UK.

Google & Foursquare: thinking about location-based recommendations

Recognise the screenshot? It's from the Mall Scene in Steven Spielberg's 2002 neo-noir science fiction film Minority Report. In this scene, the Tom Cruise character is identified by a scan of his eyes, so that he can be immersed in personalised ads as he walks by. For the time being, it looks like our most accurate location aware unique identifiers are not our eyes, but our mobile phones. Come to think of it: you always wear your phone close to your body, and you're absolutely not willing to share it with anyone else.

The Mall Scene reminds me of something Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley said on stage at LeWeb10 conference in Paris a couple of weeks ago when he talked about pushed recommendations: "You could let your phone buzz in your pocket when you walk by something interesting." This means that he's thinking of a way to present your Foursquare friends' recommendations to you based on your location (or maybe even your Foursquare history) - whether you bothered to check in first or not.
Google's vice president of geographic and local services Marissa Mayer was thinking along the same lines when she was speaking the day before that at LeWeb: "We're looking for interfaces that our users are comfortable with," she told conference organiser Loic Le Meur. "You could be sitting in a restaurant, and have a social menu pop up on your mobile, based on other users' recommendations." The idea of "it's not advertising if it's personalised" is of course not new, but the interesting bit is where "personalised" seems to be narrowed down to "as defined by your social graph."

Looking for social media cases from The Netherlands

The past few months I've been driving everyone around me crazy with my upcoming book about social media for business. But if your network extends to Dutch digital/social media agencies, I really need your help.
The English version ("The Conversity Model", published by Lannoo Campus) will be ready by 15 February. The Dutch version ("Het Conversity Model") will be a little later, probably second half of March. The reason for this is a really good one: a second publisher would also like to distribute the book in The Netherlands. But they had one condition: that I should add more social media success stories from The Netherlands. Currently most of the examples in the book are written by Belgian agencies. To name but a few:

• London Virus, by Sylvie Dewaele at TBWA
• FanVanHetWeekend Facebookgroep, by Nick Decrock at Nocus
• Social mediastrategie for Kinepolis, by Sofie Verhalle at TalkingHeads
• Nestlé Nescafe Dolce Gusto, by Olivier Beaujean at Cleverwood
• Scrabble Battle for Mattel, by Geerlinde Pevenage at Noyz
• VW Drive Academy by Geert Desager at Tribal DDB
• Godiva, by Joke De Nul at Talkingheads
• Eurostar & girl geeks, by Caroline Maerten at Cleverwood

I need at least four more social media cases for the Dutch edition. Each one consists of a text of no more than 300 words, explaining in plain Dutch what this particular social media success story was about and why it was important. Ideally the "narrator" in this text was closely involved in the project.

And now for the bad news: I need these texts by Tuesday 4 January 2011. Want to make sure your agency is part of my book on social media for business? I'm looking forward to your mail!

Tomi Ahonen's 10th book on mobile industry is a free download

Some say you can only be taken seriously as an author after your tenth book. Well, consultant in technology and telecoms and author of "Mobile as 7th of the Mass Media" Tomi T Ahonen (@tomiahonen) just wrote his 10th book. The title is, as you would expect from a mobile expert like Ahonen, The Insider's Guide to Mobile. And here's the good news: the rough edit, or bèta version of this book is available at Lulu publishers for free.

340 pages of stories, examples, theories, case studies, calculations, analysis and opinion, about where mobile is today, in late 2010.

If the word "mobile" is mentioned anywhere in your LinkedIn profile, this is a must-read. Hat tip to Yves Kallaert for pointing this one out to me (that, and the fact that Ahonen mentions in the book he reads this blog, which really made my day!)

Your smile is my mirror /cc @SOUR_official

I know the words "interactive" and "personalised" are often abused when it comes to online videos, but what Japanese band Sour just did will blow your mind (or your browser). Visit sour-mirror.jp/ to get immersed in porn trap style popups and liberal use of your user generated content. Use Chrome (ver 5.0 and up) or Safari (ver 5.0 and up), connect with your Twitter, Facebook and/or webcam, and wait patiently. It's worth the wait.

If the loading time is beyond your attention span, watch the Sour (Mirror) non connected version on Youtube.

Ignite @ LeWeb10 : Twitter Diplomacy, Japanese geeks, and teen entrepreneurs

Ignite is a style of presentation where participants are given five minutes to speak on a subject accompanied by 20 slides. Each slide is displayed for 15 seconds, and slides are automatically advanced. It's perfect for the "short attention span" online audience - but also a welcome change in a larger conference, where you can't help but zone out after the third "death by powerpoint".

At LeWeb, the Ignite style presentations were equally fast paced, and to be honest the short format not only forced some speakers to stick to the point, but also gave us an opportunity to hear voices we wouldn't have heard in the "classic" speaker environment.

I can recommend Fumi Yamazaki (@fumi)'s talk on Japanese culture in general, and the female Hatsune Miku character [SLYT]. Young Ricardo Sousa was also very convincing in his talk about how teen entrepreneurs can change the world [SLYT] but my favourite one was by Matthias Lufkens from the World Economic Forum [SLYT, Slideshare deck]). I don't think Twitter enables true diplomacy, or that, as he claims, you can address world leaders with a simple "@" and that they or someone of their staff will reply. But his presentation gives an interesting bird's eye view of how top level politicians are present on Twitter. And, in some cases, how they use it to interact and show a more human side of their personality to the world.

Twitter Diplomacy (Twiplomacy) - #LeWeb 2010

View more presentations from Matthias Lüfkens.

LeWeb10: Social gaming: virtual gifts, real-world money

You know it's funny: until six months ago, I hadn't even heard about puzzle video game Angry Birds. The (Finnish) company behind it, Rovio, only exists since a year or so. And yet the Angry Birds were the talk of LeWeb - this epic costume that Loic Le Meur was wearing when he announced the Q&A with Rovio's CEO Mikael Hed probably had something to do with that too. ( Photo by @Kmeron for LeWeb10 Conference.)

Today, Angry Birds is the best-selling iPhone app of 2010. And if you are able to understand what the birds are saying, you know you're an addict too.

Rovio CEO Mikael Hed talked about plans to bring the game to PC and gaming consoles, or even to turn it into a movie or children's programme. The interesting part was when they talked about revenue models. In classic internet business models it's often impossible to charge consumers directly - the Android version of Angry Birds is free because the apps offerend in the Android Market are not available in all countries. In cases like these, Rovio chooses for an ad supported model. In other cases the end consumer can be charged directly, for example through an App Store. But casual games, although they use the web as their main environment, are breaking these models. A lot of real-world money is flowing into casual games, and vice versa. To give you an idea: an advertiser, like a flower delivery service, could temporarily offer casual gamers to use their virtual credit to have real roses delivered to someone's real doorstep. On the other hand, if you're an impatient gamer, you can already buy game credits and buy virtual gifts with real money. I remember Mark Zuckerberg talked about the market of virtual gifts a couple of years ago, and how big that market already was in China.

From the Q&A that Veronica Belmont had with Playfish Co-founder Sebastien de Halleux I learnt that this not only proves how disruptive the casual gaming industry is, but also why this industry succeeds in generating revenue streams directly from the consumers: the game industry is different from the web industry because it is user centric, not advertiser centric. That, and the fact that they've succesfully tapped into a large demographic: that of the non-gamer, who is attracted by the low entry barrier and gradually converted into buying virtual goods for very small amounts. It's a model that's very scalable: there are no distribution issues, and eventually all these individual micropayments add up to substantial revenues.

We had heard freak news about gamers neglecting their real babies because they were too busy tending to their virtual ones, or that Farmville sells more virtual tractors in the U.S. than real tractor vendors combined, but I think the popularity of Angry Birds proves that casual games are serious business, and that once more the boundaries between virtual and real are slowly fading.

Live Christmas cards

Take camera 3. Quick, before it turns dark in Sweden!

--> levandejulkort.se

Leweb10: @jowyang advises against hiring social media gurus

One of the best keynotes of LeWeb 2010 was Social Business Forecast: 2011 The Year of Integration by web strategist Jeremiah Owyang. To a room that consisted of (educated guess) 75% "social media professionals" looking for business, he had the guts to say companies should absolutely not hire social media gurus, ninjas or samurai. Picture by Adam Tinworth:

Owyang's talk reminded me of Jennifer Preston, who, after being "Social Media Editor" at the New York Times for 1 year and 8 months, will become a full-time reporter again. The New York Times eliminates its "social media editor" position altogether. In an interview with poynter.org, Preston explains that

Social media can't belong to one person; it needs to be part of everyone's job. [...] For us to really, truly sustain and scale the use of the social media tools we need to have our desk and department heads and section editors owning the social media channels and managing the conversation that’s taking place.

The advice from Owyang:

• Hire a program manager rather than a social media “hot shot.”
• Seek candidates with a track record of early technology adoption in their careers.
• Look for a corporate entrepreneur, comfortable with “calculated risks.”
• An internal resource to serve the entire enterprise.

Keynote: Social Business Forecast: 2011 The Year of Integration

View more presentations from Jeremiah Owyang.

Leweb10: Kaizen, Renault Twizy, and @princess_misia

This year's LeWeb theme was "Platforms" and to be honest I was a little confused by that. Turns out it was not about jumping on trains or off cliffs, but about something you might summarize as "sets and settings that allow shared market places". Originally, the computer and internet industry were all about computing platforms, where application could or could not be run. This is where Linux, Mac OSX, or Microsoft Windows used to fight their battles. Nowadays you might say that Android, Blackberry OS, Symbian, iOS and even Windows Mobile are still in that arena.

Facebook has been a very disruptive player in that field, using sets of APIs and tools to connect 3rd party developers with the impressive Facebook user base. You can say what you want, but until a year or two nobody would have thought that this social network would position itself as a platform for, among other things, casual games.

But the big surprise in the platform topic was first speaker Carlos Ghosn, Chairman and CEO of Renault and Nissan. As you would expect, he talked about zero emission and electric cars, and how cars are still an object of desire, but no longer a commodity. But when he talked about how his industry applied Kaizen philosophy to keep their focus on continuous improvement of processes, he made an appeal for developers to make apps for cars. Innovative, useful, and safe apps that would not only help the driver get to his destination more quickly and comfortably, but at the same time let him or her keep her eyes on the road. Think about it: Carlos Ghosn sees cars of the future as platforms, or as Loic Lemeur put it, he's building the iPhone of the car industry.

• LeWeb2010 - Welcome Keynote - Carlos Ghosn @ YouTube
• LeWeb2010 - Carlos Ghosn - Q&A with Loic Le Meur @ YouTube

Renault's concept car on display, the Renault Twizy, (fortunately) looked more like a TronMobile than an iPhone. Picture by Stephanie Booth:

This little car was certainly a conversation starter, and I even got an offer to give it a spin and drive it around the LeWeb buildings. (It fell through because of the snow, and by the time the grounds were cleared, I was in fellow blogger Clopin's car on my way back to Belgium). Renault had organised a contest to win this car and guess who won? Fellow girl geek (and VP Digital & Social Media Strategist at Porter Novelli, foodie, blogger and a bride to be) Marta Majewska (@princess_misia). You go, girl!

Leweb10: What shall we complain about this year

My first LeWeb was in 2006, and every year this tech conference manages to take me completely by surprise. The idea is to put thousands entrepreneurs and tech professionals from all over Europe and the world in one room, have them listen to speakers from succesful web and tech companies like Facebook, Twitter, or Nokia and then see what happens.

Other years the heating had broken down, the tiny food portions baffled the American conference goers, or there was barely any wifi for all the laptop and smartphone toting visitors. Not this year. Almost every classic LeWeb meme was there - even including the "My name is Anina. And I have a question." Every meme, except for the complaints. On the first day of LeWeb at around noon U.K. blogger Adam Tinworth (@adders) even remarked:

And then it started snowing heavily, turning, as Loic Lemeur remarked, Paris into a giant ski resort. Traffic went into a gridlock, taxis kind of gave up and hid cowardly in their stations, and sidewalks in Paris were crowded with lost looking tourists and conference goers, some of them on high heels, trying not to trip and fall head first into the icy ground.

In spite of the snow and, much to the surprise of some, the inability of Loic Lemeur to fix the weather, Leweb10 was a well organised and interesting conference. I had expected the Wikileaks hot topic to explode at LeWeb, but that didn't happen. What I did learn, I'll elaborate on in the next few blog posts.

I'm at #Leweb! Here's the live stream, courtesy of @ustream

LeWeb Main Stage

Syd Mead on how creativity drives the future

2019: A Future Imagined: "Visual Futurist Syd Mead ('Blade Runner,' 'Aliens,' 'Tron') reflects upon the nature of creativity and how it drives the future. Photographed in P2 High Definition, this featurette provides insight into the fascinating mind of one of the most influential artists of modern cinema and automotive design."

2019: A Future Imagined from Flat-12 on Vimeo.

Marketing Foundation Congress: honey pots and live streaming

Got my new "business cards" just in time! These little honey pots will also be available at the LannooCampus booth at this year's Marketing Foundation Congress. I'm speaking on Saturday 14:10 - 14:40. That's just after lunch... My topic: "Innovation is the true ROI of social media. Or how to get customers & influence people with social media."

Can't make it? No worries: the event will be live streamed from standaard.be/biz/marketing/ .

The Joy of Stats

I've seen Swedish professor Hans Rosling speak at LeWeb conference in Paris in 2006 and 2007. I like the way he keeps looking for ways to present complex data sets in a simple and visually appealing way. This video is a fragment of the excellent BBC series The Joy of Stats.

YouTube - Hans Rosling's 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes - The Joy of Stats - BBC Four: "Hans Rosling's famous lectures combine enormous quantities of public data with a sport's commentator's style to reveal the story of the world's past, present and future development. Now he explores stats in a way he has never done before - using augmented reality animation. In this spectacular section of 'The Joy of Stats' he tells the story of the world in 200 countries over 200 years using 120,000 numbers - in just four minutes. Plotting life expectancy against income for every country since 1810, Hans shows how the world we live in is radically different from the world most of us imagine."