Homo Viator

I sure hope you did not buy that lame iPhone that does not offer much more tha a good design. Let`s face it: The camera sucks (it does not even have video capability) and surfing the internet with the phone is one slow experience, unless you go through Wifi. My Nokia N95 is still the unbeaten champ of the multimedia mobile race. It has a 5 mega pixel camera and shoots great videos. It will still my gadget appetite until the next generation iPhone comes out this summer, which I plan to buy if it manages to meet my technological demands. Apple was smart to bring out a lame duck for early adopters, who just had to have it and then bring out the real deal a couple of months later. A bit of a rip-off to those who bought their trial version though.

Living in a capital, the center of power.

Poor Obama, let's hope that his turban-wearing will not scare off too many Americans. Can you understand the fuss?

HV readers know it first ;-). Thankfully facebook decided to change its layout in order not to be eaten up by all these childish and useless applications. There are entertaining and useful ones, but let`s face it: The majority of those applications suck!

This is what the new design will look like:

For anyone who has ever worked in advertising or wants to understand how office politics in big advertising agencies and marketing departments work, this is one wicked video. So funny!!!!!!!!!!!!



Well, if one depicts the advertising world like that one can just imagine what the finance industry would look like.

GREAT AD for OBAMA!



I will have a look at this doc over the weekend....

Oh Yes-oh yes! This is what I have been waiting for, a video blog that is dedicated solely to the presidential campaign. Niiiiice!

One of the last vids you will find on the site is from the Texas Debate between Obama and Clinton. Just watch the facial expression of Clinton when Obama speaks. He is just too good for her!

Oh gee, America is so ahead of us when it comes to creative communication methods and making use of existing technology. Check this out, it is so well made.

I recommend you this video not based on the content that it convey but based on the wicked way it is made in. Web TV is the future of communication, the future of entertainment, the future of education and hopefully my future as well!

Seesmic is a conversational video platform and although i am not too fond of the design of the site or its UI, I do like the idea behind it very much and enjoy watching both Loic Le Meur`s video blogs and the Seesmic Café shows.

Here Loic's video post on how he raised 6 Million dollars for Seesmic. If it just were that easy.



And here the Seesmic trio visiting their key investors at Atomico, including Niklas Zennström, who founded Skype and Joost.

Had one of the two best meetings of my life today, with the embassador of an African country. The other one being my meeting with the Vice President of Colombia one year ago. I blogged about that one already.

Since some of my ex-colleagues read this blog I better not say what country the embassador was from today. ;-)

But it was an inspirational man, full of confidence and optimism, with an open heart and "..only love to give." A politician, who acted more like a business man and one who believes in the potential of the young and unexperienced. He encouraged me to keep my ideas to myself and go through with them, as old institutions would not speak my language. We clearly spoke the same language though and he offered me more help than I would have ever dared to ask for.

He immediately called a German billionaire investor on his cell phone, one who has just created an African Development Fund. This guy currently organizes a trip for his investors to visit the country that his fund mainly invests in and to meet with leading politicians and business men there. The ambassador told the guy to invite me to this journey (which alerady starts in March) and after hanging up told me "the deal is done, with that trip I opened all the doors for you."

I have always told my close friends of the industry that I believed in the concept of the product that we offered. Giving developing countries the chance to communicate to potential investors, promoting those countries as attractive investment destnations is a perfectly valid business model that could, if executed properly, lead to a win-win situation for both the company that produces the advertorial and the country investing in such initiatives.

It was the type of end-product that we created and the way we sold it that made me think of possible improvements to the industry's standards. Most countries that invest in such reports never see any measurable ROI. Why is that? Because the companies that produce these reports are rarely interested in long-lasting business relationships with local governments. If they were, they would be more honest, act in a more transparent way and not create a different agency for every media that they have in their portfolio. The ironic thing is that governments are more and more aware of those same methods that all players of the industry share.

In a way this industry is the most static one I have ever seen. Companies even call their internal documents (P6, Controllo, etc.) the same throughout the industry. I do not want to bash those methods but rather see the statics of the industry as a good opportunity to succeed with an alternative model. The embassador, who happened to have a FT report on his country with him, also saw the weaknesses of the industry's methods and the great opportunity that lay in doing it differently. He was convinced of my idea ; let's hope I wil be able to convince his government as well. Getting invited to meet with the President and chief Minsisters, with all expenses paid, seems like a good start. Wish me luck!