May 2013
1 post
December 2012
8 posts
December 2011
1 post
Social Status in Peru
Peru is a very culturally diverse country. It was conceived as a state not because people from just one nation inhabited it, but because it was how the viceroyalty of Peru was organized. Peru is a state with many nations inside, some are small others are bigger. It has been said that Jose de San Martin, the General of the Liberation Army and the person who declared Peru’s independence, stated...
October 2011
3 posts
Conglom-o: We own you.
When I was a kid I used to watch the Nickelodeon cartoon Rocko’s Modern Life. (Who am I kidding, I still watch it these days). Rocko is a subtle critique to the modern world and the industrial ways of living. Today I was reading an excerpt of Arlie Hoschield’s The Managed Hear: Commercialization of Human Feeling and I was immediately transported back to O-town the city where Rocko...
Fighting for the status quo
In the last couple of weeks the Occupy Wallstreet movement has gained much more press and the campaign has been joined by several protestors from many cities in the USA and around the world. Tumblrs such as “We are the 99%” had been created and have many inspiring protests. I believe in their concerns and that they are tired of current situation of the system we’re living in,...
Think Different, Live Different
Steve Jobs’s life will mark moments in each and everyone of us. He changed the way we communicate, the way we appreciated technology, the way we thought of design. He made many of us design junkies. He made us love simplicity and changed many life philosophies with the creation of a single button. He changed industries, revolutionized every single aspect of modern life. He taught us amazing...
February 2011
1 post
Ethnotrend: What is ethnography? →
ethnotrend:
Ethnography is a method of research that studies people’s behaviors in their natural environment. This method of investigation provides accurate results because it digs into people’s lives by observing, conversing and analyzing them as an insider, as opposed to doing surveys and interviews as an…
December 2010
1 post
When your employees don't want to work for you
I have some friends who run big businesses and they work really hard for their paycheck month after month with hard work. Yesterday as I was talking to one of them he told me of a problem he has. The employees of a department don’t want to work there any longer. All of them want to go to other jobs, look for new opportunities or even retire. I couldn’t believe the story, I’ve...
November 2010
1 post
Ethics in Advertising
I’ve been working with advertising agencies for a while now, though I’ve never worked for one. During this time I’ve been able to observe that in the advertising world the client has the priority even over the client’s customers. Sales people for advertising companies or account managers try to learn and embrace the client’s needs even if these needs go against the...
October 2010
2 posts
Still doing things a little different
As of lately I’ve been wondering if job security is really that good. I’ve been observing how people still build and plan all their life based on the premise that they will get a high paying job for someone else. What’s with opening a business? Stakes are higher, I get it. But do we really have so much fear in ourselves that we can’t open our business. I’m not talking...
OH MY GOD WHAT HAPPENED AND WHAT SHOULD I DO?
via ohmygodwhathappened.com When working in the Digital World we forget lots of things. This book reminds us of the things we might have passed by and corrects some missconceptions. Posted via email from Sushi with a fork | Comment »
August 2010
1 post
Starting a business in times of conformity
For a long time the comfortable, used to a paycheck me has been battling my starter self. This has turned into an epic battle inside me that not always leads to good decisions on my part. Starting a business it’s not an easy task. Not only because it’s hard to do it, but because it’s very hard to fight the programming in our brains that is set to looking for a job, waiting for a...
June 2010
8 posts
I live in a city
I live in a city with grace and history
It’s irregular architecture makes it weirdly pretty;
I live in a city with lots of warm hearts
yet not many you would trust;
I live in a city of selfishness and lack of goals
yet in adversity, the most resilient of all;
I live in a city with luxury and priviliges
being schooled is...
I'm also not a Brand (kind of a rant)
So this past couple of days I’ve been reading, rereading and analyzing the Manifesto: I’m not a brand from Maureen Johnson. I agree with her in the points she mentions. I’m a person and as a person I believe in having a personality. I know businesses have been dehumanizing us for a long time. The values businesses where built with were not human at all (risk mitigation,...
See things from other perspective (kind of tricky)
Today i was watching the USA vs. Slovenia football game (soccer if you’re american) and in the last couple of minutes the USA scored a goal that would have been the winning goal as the game was tied 2-2. The referee stopped the game and didn’t sanction the goal. There was no clear reason for what he did. The TV showed several replays and commentators spent the following 5 hours...
Location Based Collaboration
Location based services are the big thing of 2010. Users are adopting them at a fast pace and bloggers are talking about them (and i couldn’t be the exception) a lot. Most of the content created on location based services focuses on the business model they will follow and how businesses can profit from participating on them. But today i’d like to focus on how location based services...
Communities and Relationships (and Business)
The rise of the real time web or “more” social web has given us the opportunity to meet more people and add them to our group of trust. When socializing off-line we’ve always have some reservations to add people to our trust circle and consider them friends. The “strange” thing is that with the rise of the web we’ve learned to trust the people we meet online...
Your Users Don't Want Your Product
If you are in business - been for a while or are just starting - you always go through the developing and launch process of new products with the premise that there is a percentage of users willing to buy and try your product for a given price. So if you launch a new brand of Orange Juice you actually think users want to buy your Orange Juice. Or if you launch a Android phone you think that users...
Why do we need a Customer Centric Business to...
By this time many of you have heard of Social Media Marketing and how businesses are embracing it and experimenting with it. You see businesses engaging with customers on Twitter, Facebook and blogs. Businesses trying to embrace Social Media will often ask themselves whether they need to start with a blog, a content team, or just a customer service team over Social Networks. I think this is the...
May 2010
5 posts
Are you having 'The Conversation': Make sure to...
A week ago Vanessa Miemis shared a conversation where she spoke with @jazzmann91. In that conversation they talked about how to have The Conversation and some key points that we needed to take into consideration while participating in ‘The Conversation’. I suggested that it will be good to have all of the points treated there organized into a post so that we could go back and read...
Internet Week: The Open Internet
The fact that the Internet is an open platform allows us to create and develop all sorts of applications and sites without having any restrictions or the obligation to buy complex licenses and proprietary software. This is all a result of the open standards - HTML, XML, RSS, HTTP -and the open source software available to develop, upload and debug our apps. The Internet went through evolution and...
Comapany Culture: Why you need to pay attention to...
Almost every company in the world has a mission statement or some core values. The idea of having a shared goal is a good one, the problem is that sometimes the goal isn’t good enough for people to jump in and make their best effort to attain it. Yesterday I posted about how the KPIs and processes need to be aligned with the mission statement, but i deliberately left out the thought of...
Business KPIs and why many are still failing
Everyone has called a Telco with a problem and ended up being offered an upgrade instead of a solution to the problem. Last week I called my local Telco and ISP because I had a problem with the router they provided, they ended up not solving the problem and offering me the ‘best opportunity of the month’. This problem isn’t about bad costumer service or people not caring about...
Human Business.
I’ve heard a lot of people say “Stop saying your business needs to be more human and make the case for it”. Well I intend to make a small case for it and to promote the idea that rather than being more human a business needs to leverage the humanity of their talent in order to be successful as a business. Anyone who has worked in a big corporation (somehow it happens less in...
April 2010
3 posts
Shopping is not the same
The process of shopping has shifted from the sales cycle to the buying cycle and businesses need to start embracing it. In the old, mass media, days there was sales cycle because the only source of information came from the vendors and the need was motivated by advertising. Since the rise of the internet the limited power of word of mouth has grown to become the main source of recommendations. Now...
If you want to meet your objectives, make your...
I’m no expert on usability, but I’ve done plenty in the last couple of years to know that good usability will help you meet your goals. This applies to the internet and to the offline world in a similar way. The design of the product, service, website, building or concept needs to be done after we’ve established clear objectives and long term goals we want to achieve with it. ...
Business Models should include a revenue model:...
Business has evolved a lot in the last few years. Finally all the technological improvements of the last decades are pushing towards a major change in the way business is done. The first changes came to change how we managed customer relationships and information and now go up to how we organize working teams throughout the world. This change has led to the rise of new business opportunities...
March 2010
6 posts
Book Club on Steroids
Today I had an idea for a service that can make a difference on how we buy books. Actually, it can make a difference in us buying anything at all. Notice I say buying rather than selling. I see that Amazon recommendation engine is more a way for them to sell than for us to shop smartly. So let’s say you’re not part of a book club, but you know some people that read good books and...
Social Media changed consumer expectations and we...
Everyday in the Social Media world we talk about how some businesses still don’t get Social Media and how many businesses aren’t doing it quite right. The main problem I’ve identified for this is that the usual organizational values and processes haven’t changed at all with them entering social media. Getting into social media is a change of game for businesses. While...
Look Good vs. Work Good ....What your site needs
Today I had an interesting twitter conversation with Lyndi Thompson on web design. We were debating if design was actually important to the results of a site. It all started with me saying that unlike pens (you’ve had to notice that expensive pretty pens last less than cheap pens) websites need to look good and work good to be succesful. Lyndi told me there were some sites that were not...
Location, Location, Location ....¿on the costumers...
With all the current hype about location apps and how they can be beneficial to business comes a very huge concern on why aren’t this companies not developing beneficial applications for their users. As Marshall Kirkpatrick from RWW says on his article 6 Thoughts About Location Madness there’s a huge hype that will come from the press in the following months as there is still much work...
Change Work: Change the World
Today I was reading a post by Amber Naslund on working hard and working lot’s and I remembered Dan Pink’s talk at TED, which is one of my favorites. In his talk, Pink talks about ROWE (Results-Oriented Work environment) which is applied at Best Buy. Needless to say I immediately did a google search for ROWE resources and found the site of the two creators of this approach to working...
Make it remarkable
I was reading Purple Cow by Seth Godin while I was setting up the strategy for some new ventures I’m working on and found it key to make a remarkable experience for my users as this is the only thing that will finally drive us to success. Being Remarkable for me is not just being different, but being better and delivering WOW! Users need to be in love with your product or service, but they...
February 2010
4 posts
The Teaching Business Model
We’ve all heard the quote telling us to teach someone to fish and not giving them the fish. This is true as making people able to do something for themselves is better and the feeling of doing it is one of the reasons I started a business whose goal is to educate. However the education business model is not perfect for reaching the highest amount of people we can aim to affect (or is it...
The Soul of my iPod
About a year ago, on a February night, I was walking back home from the gym when I got robbed at gun point. I was lucky because I only take my iPod or iPhone to the gym. That day I had forgot to plug my iPhone and the battery was low so I decided to take my old iPod classic. I remember saving money to buy it as a teenager (not that long ago) and going to the store and paying for it with my hands...
Stop thinking of Social Media
I don’t know about you, but I’m starting to get sick of people talking about Social Media es the holy grail in itself. I think we all agree that Social Media is very important and that it has produced lot’s of changes in our life. The impact of social media in our day to day is enormous and it’s not different for business. Hanging from this I see lot’s of people with...
Why do companies want to be our Dominatrix?
Catchy title huh? You bet. Behind this title there is something I’ll like us to give a thought to. Have you noticed how companies are the ones that want to control their customers all the time, control their experiences, guide them through the shopping process, motivate them to buy and all the “pull/push marketing” stuff? It’s like companies wanted to dominate the...
January 2010
6 posts
Strategy and the fast changing world
Nearly all the people with a business background (which is pretty much everyone: from professionals to craftsmen) talk about business strategy. Some define strategy from Michael Porter’s perspective and some have a hybrid theory coming from the many academics that started writing about it after Porter wrote his famous books in the 1980s. Strategy was based in a competitive advantage a firm...
How wrong we are when we're wrong
When we are at school we feel bad when we’re wrong. The academic system and almost every other system in life (even the Business environment until not so long ago) punishes people being wrong. If you’re wrong you’re gonna get yelled at, a bad great, grounded for three months and with no Internet. As humans we’re wired to be wrong and learn from that. It’s a path of...
Ideas made reality
So, I got this idea for a business last week and I have no idea how to code or do technical stuff whatsoever. That means I don’t have the technical knowledge to do it as I studied business. I’ve liked the internet and it’s potential for a long time, but never took interest (or had the time) to start learning how to do the coding part. I learned basic HTML (XHTML) and CSS, but...
User Controlled Privacy Settings
I’ve been looking at many social apps that don’t let users control their privacy or don’t encourage it. As users we produce information on-line all the time and that information is pushed to our friends, followers or connections in a way we can’t control. In this past year I’ve became all pro user control. The users need to be in charge of the experience they are...
