Fendi will be playing quite a role in the event this year, introducing the F Factory, a limited-edition retail project in the Miami Design District’s Moore Building (home to Zaha Hadid’s “Elastica” permanent exhibition), starting November 30 2009 and running until Christmas.

The shop will feature the brand’s most coveted bags, complete with Fendi’s Roman craftsmen on-site to personalize each one. But in true Basel form, art and culture will infuse the retail. Graffiti artist Andre is creating three needlepoint panels live in three 60-minute “performances” in the space, which will then be stitched into a unique Fendi bag.

You can buy your own Fendi Baguette Needlepoint Stitch Kit, designed by Silvia Venturini Fendi for $995!

Other collaborations include Moritz Waldemeyer’s collaboration with Fendi to create six custom-made Gibson guitars with Silvia Venturini Fendi, which will project lights on the walls when played by American band OK Go.

The Limited Edition Experiences program in the Miami Design District. Launched by Dacra, a real estate company that owns 80% of the 18-block area that constitutes the Miami Design District, Miami’s Limited Edition Experiences program brings together designers like Cynthia Rowley,Duncan Quinn, Christopher Ross, Maison Martin Margiela, and Marni, all of whom engage consumers with a series of initiatives ranging from pop-up stores to limited-edition wares, in-store events, documentary screenings, and more.

Luxury fashion engaging in experiential goods and services… could this be the new Eco Luxury market of the future? I can’t wait to see how these pop up projects proceed!

For more info visit website

Nowadays small companies know exactly what its happening in the battlefield because they applied different strategies and solutions and if something don’t work they just  change it  right  away, there’s no hierarchy there or bureaucracy, they just  do what they  gotta  do.

Technology is changing as well the way we communicate; you can’t expect to sell your product as usual , you gotta bring down that creativity.

In big companies its complicated to make changes, because there are some communication barriers, my friend what im telling you is to tear down those barriers and let the changes and adjustments Flow, because otherwise you can’t keep up.

Noting has to be perfect, but at least you have to let those changes  happen in some how.

@GustavoMKT

TakeAway:  Through effective consumer management and distribution strategies, Netflix has changed the rules of the movie rental business and managed to fend off competitors along the way. 

However, as the game continues to evolve and Netflix’s distribution advantages become obsolete, will its subscription/information-based consumer loyalty model enable sustained success?

* * * * *

Excerpted from Knowledge@Wharton, “Netflix: One Eye on the Present and Another on the Future,” October 28, 2009

In a year when DVD sales are falling and studios are facing major shakeups … Hollywood is beginning to look a lot like one of its own slasher films … however, there is at least one success story in the movie industry: Netflix.

… Netflix made a splash in the movie rental business by offering an online subscription model with a flat monthly fee for unlimited rentals and no late charges. Since then, despite a recession, fierce competition and the emergence of online video delivery, the company continues to thrive … Netflix is now in a race to transition to a business model focused on streaming content online …

In 2008 Netflix introduced a “Watch Instantly” service that allows consumers to stream movies on their home computers. Since then, the company has forged a bevy of partnerships to embed its Watch Instantly service in television sets and game consoles …

Netflix CEO said the company’s goals were simple: Grow revenue, subscribers and earnings while expanding into streaming content … 

However, Netflix’s DVD business faces intense competition from companies ranging from Apple (iTunes) to Blockbuster to Redbox … and … Netflix’s video streaming model is under fire from powerful rivals … YouTube … But it’s not as though competition is anything new for Netflix. So-called “Netflix killers” have surfaced repeatedly in the last decade … but they haven’t been able to stop Netflix’s momentum …

Netflix has proven its doubters wrong repeatedly, but it is unclear how the balancing act between the company’s old and new business models will play out …

For now movie rental sales figures are playing to Netflix’s advantage … DVD rentals have held up well as consumers opt for cheaper forms of entertainment … Particular strategies have helped Netflix maintain its lead, including:  1) Keeping one eye on the road and one eye on the turn ahead … 2) Employing a subscription model … 3) Moving quickly to stay ahead …

The longer Netflix can maintain its old model while investing in its digital streaming business, the better off it will be. Rivals can’t easily emulate the company’s distribution centers and information systems that allow it to deliver DVDs within one business day to 97% of its subscribers … And, the company’s physical assets have created a “moat” around the Netflix business model …

Digital distribution lowers the barriers to compete with Netflix …

Edit by TJS

* * * * *

Full Article
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2367

* * * * *

A host of new Coventry and Warwickshire SMEs have been finding out how social media can help kick-start their businesses.

 Around 40 start-up businesses from the region attended a presentation from experts at Coventry-based Bridge PR on building their digital presence to help succeed.

 The Coventry and Warwickshire Chamber-backed event at the Brooklands Grange Hotel, Holyhead Road, heard from Bridge PR’s commercial director Denise Taylor how social and digital media tools could help build their brand identity and raise their profile.

 “Digital and social media are turning how we access news on its head and companies need to look at how they fit these tools into their overall marketing strategies to create their brand indentities and raise their profile.

 “Bridge PR is one of the forerunners in helping businesses with new media and new media training and delegates at our event heard how they could use social media tools cost-effectively to their best advantage.”

 Gary Lillistone, managing director of Bridge PR, said: “It was surprising to here that a lot of start-ups are already tentatively using these new media marketing tools. Our aim is to help them refine how they use these tools to their advantage to give them a competitive edge in what is still a challenging trading climate.”

I’ve been thinking about this post for quite some time now. Looking for the right approach and how to balance pros and cons about the theme. Truth is, at this point, there is no general accepted final answer about video games. They are a relatively new form of entertainment compared to other forms such as television, radio or movies. And the fast track that video games took made them carry the burden for a bunch of contemporary problems in our society.

For example, video games have been blamed for the disaster of Columbine in 1999 and in Helsinki in 2007 [1]. They’ve also been blamed for kids that don’t want to go to school or bad school performance; childhood obesity, and the list keep growing. However, more and more research shows that video games have hardly anything to do with most of them. Kids that suffer from any of those have shown psychological backgrounds that explains better their problems than “video game addiction”[2].

In fact, I share the opinion that only troubled minds get addicted to video games. In our current society we only praise successful people, stories, and those who became rich and famous. I’m not a psychologist but I like to question the kind of pressure we put in people these days. Advertisement, movies, TV series, cartoons, and, more concerning, in magazines, newspapers, TV news reports everyone has some special powers that make them better than the average man or woman is. And hardly have we seen their failures. And not only kids are affected by that.

I heard once from a Human Resource consultant that “we are supposed to know to dance like Astaire, to choose wine like a professional sommelier, to sing like Sinatra, and to excel in every aspect of life but we are failures if we are learning how to do these things”. Have you ever considered that perspective? And how long does it take to learn all those things? Truth is that in virtual worlds offered by Video Games we accomplish a lot more in less time than in real life. And this reward, in troubled minds, can lead them to focus on virtual worlds rather than the real one. In a way, video game accomplishment offers an alternative to the mediocrity that daily life scrapes on our faces everyday – taking school exams that you have no idea what’s that course for, paying bills, paper work, fixing the door bell, or changing a flat tire. They offer us those special powers and allow us to dance like Astaire, or play guitar like a Guitar Hero (pun intended).

I don’t want to celebrate mediocrity. But I think we might as well value the process and the learning involved in trying – and not turn every mistake into failure. Because if we want to do something different (innovate) we are incurring into a great chance of making mistakes in the process. And if we do not take advantage of those and punish mistakes as we do today, how are we to ask for people to innovate? Video games instead, when you die you get new chances, and you can question what you are doing wrong, go to the internet to find out about it and so on. There is learning after dying – because there is purpose and a clear goal.

There’s a lot to be said about video games and some points are quite controversial. But this is just a first post of a series I’ll try to write discussing their use in many other fields that not only entertainment. Video games offer a far more interesting interface than regular software and some are aware of that power and willing to experiment with them. Here I just want to make the point that video games are not evil or responsible for the collapse of virtues and values in society. Those opinions are just facing a hard time in accepting the new as generations ago had as the following illustrates: “A pastime of illiterate, wretched creatures who are stupefied by their daily jobs, a machine of mindlessness and dissolution”. While this might illustrate the type of attacks that video games suffer today, it was actually said more than 70 years ago about the movies – which today are considered a form of art[3].

So instead of blaming them, perhaps we should look more carefully into them.

[2] and [3] Steven Poole (2004): Trigger Happy: Video games and the entertainment revolution. Arcade Publishing.

This past Thanksgiving weekend there were times when I wished my father’s friends had email or I had their cell phone numbers. But when I thought about it, this was the kind of news that should not be conveyed in such an impersonal way.

You see, my father passed away Saturday morning. It was rather sudden, but everytime he was hospitalized for pneumonia, and that has been several times the past couple of years, there was the possibility it would be fatal.

With all of the various digital media, none of them really is suitable for telling friends and family that someone they care about has died.  To tell the many people in his address book that they have lost a dear friend, though, a phone call was much more personal than any “personal media” or written notice could have been. It wasn’t easy, it took a lot of time, but in the end, many thanked me for calling and letting them know. In many ways, it was good for me, too, to hear what a true and loyal friend my father was to so many people, some of them who had worked for him and stayed in contact the past 20 years or more.

It has been interesting working with the funeral home for which I helped set up their first web site back in the late 1990s and to know that people will be able to post their condolences to my family via a medium that was just gearing up and is now ubiquitous in our society.

I think had he had a chance to experience the Internet, my father would have found it to be full of information on many of his favorite topics. He was a lifelong student, always studying different philosophies, the history of religions, country-specific histories and the origins of mythologies. He would have found a wealth of information on stocks he was watching or the expected performance of stocks he held.  He would have found many things that frustrated him as well, but I think he would have appreciated the free exchange of ideas; or the ease with which he could have looked up the works and writings of what he considered to be the “great thinkers” of humanity.

To communicate his passing, this was not a time for digital messages. This news required the sound of a human voice.

(vía:http://dacuarchipielago.wordpress.com)

“Por fin en video la sesión de video-saludos acontecida el 2 de noviembre de 2009 durante el “jalowin sonidero” realizado en el mercado pescaditos, santa úrsula coapa, méxico, df.

Esperamos sus comentarios!!!”

Series: Bleach (anime & manga)
Finished: January 24, 2009 (this is uncertain because I edited this about 5+ times…)
Estimated time taken: 30+ hours. (Not more than 38 probably.)
Layers: Around 100-120.
Made in: Photoshop CS4.

Details and progress »blabla, will edit soon

 PR is changing. No longer is it a world where our sole aim is to influence journalists and editors of key media.

 Social media and the internet is rapidly gathering momentum. Suddenly everyone has become a journalist, everyone has a voice in cyberspace and the potential to influence consumer decisions.

 And that is precisely where Bridge PR is focussing a lot of attention. A recent example has been our work with the Good Garage Scheme and its ‘well oiled’ campaign which has taken up residence on the home pages of a number of key industry websites.

 The press release wasn’t issued to them but what excites me about this is that it perfectly illustrates how the world of PR is changing. If the article is not specific and more generic you have the potential for it to be picked up by websites and bloggers surfing the internet for quality material to populate their sites.

 In this case, the generic advice to motorists was the key to its success. The campaign aligned itself perfectly to associated industries and their respective websites.

 The potential there is clear to see and it’s the potential to influence not just tens of thousands of readers but hundreds of thousands and even millions. While the journalists and editors remain crucial to our industry and shouldn’t be cast aside, they no longer have the monopoly on influence and the generic approach has the potential to reach millions and what price can you put on that?

(vía: http://dacuarchipielago.wordpress.com)

Sesión de video-graffiti realizado el 28 de octubre de 2009 en el mercado pescaditos, santa úrsula coapa, méxico, df.

…electricidad conseguida del módulo de policia (llamado oficialmente de “participación ciudadana”)

…tags de múltiples jóvenes que se encontraban en el lugar

…. música de bocafloja

…auspicio del imjuve

gracias a todos los que participaron en esta intervención!!!

Really innovative use of Facebook by Ikea, massive kudos…

Having seen a few studies on word of mouth advocacy, the returns are certainly impressive.  But what continues to bother me is that it just doesn’t happen in real life, or at least in the way the data makes out.

Every conversation needs a starting point (every meme needs a spark) and if you’re lucky enough to have a game changing product (a purple cow) you will get that.  I was lucky enough to work on the launch of the very first iMac and that was one of those products.

I believe that news drives conversation and therefore search and one of the studies I have been looking at backs this up (55% of Americans have at least one conversation every day about what’s in the news, some 2.8 conversations) and there is also pretty comprehensive evidence to suggest that advertising plays a significant role in driving conversation.

So if the product is neither ‘disruptive’, your not newsworthy and aren’t advertising, how can you be in the conversation?

I ask this because over the past few weeks I’ve yet to find myself advocating any brand, UNLESS I’m asked.

Advocacy, therefore, should also be scored on a spontaneity metric, but working on the inside of PR, you don’t care about that if the media are interested or proactive.

Don’t care? you’re fucking delighted to be frank.

And that’s why social search will increasingly become more and more important.  Yahoo! Answers trojan horse perhaps.

For every ‘can anyone recommend a good restaurant for lunch near Old Street’ email that goes round a closed community (the office), people are putting it out there, digital channels makes the asking that much easier and the pool of expertise, that much more expansive.

People want recommendations from those with experience and will actively court those people.

Nice to know that one of the old Fleet Street truisms for news thrives online:

“There are good guys, bad guys and experts!”

You have got to see this movie!  I’m busting a button.  Corey did a superb job creating this short clip.  Let’s see…writer, director, actor, pre-production, animation and post-production…what’s left?  Can I feed the Wyrm?  PBill

Click here now!

Programs Used: Internet Explorer, Windows Movie Maker

Scope of Knowledge: Ability to produce educational video clips for the use in a classroom.

Work Sample: Click http://www.teachertube.com/viewVideo.php?video_id=146342&title=EDIT_202_Sample&ref=Glegloff to view sample.

Credits:
Agency: Jung von Matt
Executive Creative Director: Deneke von Weltzien, Armin Jochum
Creative Director: Thimoteus Wagner
Creative Team: Jonas Keller & Daniel Pieracci
Art Director: Jonas Keller
Copywriter: Daniel Pieracci
Agency Producer: Meike van Meegen / Vanessa Fischbeck
Account Supervisor: Christian Hupertz, Yves Rosengart, Alexander Kerkow, Maria Groh
Production Company: MARKENFILM GmbH & Ko KG
Producer: Frauke Weisheit
Director: Dirk Urbaniak
D.O.P/Lighting/Cameraman: Michael Goljanek
Music: Georg Friedrich Händel
Sound Design/Arrangement: INFECTED Postproduction GmbH, Mikis Meyer
Post Production: INFECTED Postproduction GmbH
Postproduction Producer: Henrik von Müller, Julian Büchner
Flame Artist: Dirk Urbaniak (INFECTED), Niko Papoutsis (Digital Straik)
3D Artist: Christian Keller (INFECTED), Tim Borgmann (Freelancer)
Special Effects: Mathea van Kann, Eddie Dregis, Richard Stanley

via adme.ru

Credits:
Director: Michael Gracey
Agency: BETC
Agency Producer: Fabrice Brovelli
Creative: Agnes Cavard & Valerie Chidlovsky
DoP: Alex Barber and Greg Fraser
Production Company: Partizan Midi Minuit
Executive Producer: Jaques Etienne Stein
Post Supervisor: Rahel Makonnen
Editor: Ben Harrex@ Final Cut

via MPC

Just wishing everyone observing the American Thanksgiving a very good, peaceful, restful and enjoyable holiday.

I’m still burrowed in the work of launching a sports site I’ve mentioned here before, and hope to finish that in the coming days.

My posting here has been more sporadic than I intended as I work on that project, but I want to return to more active blogging as soon as possible. There’s been a lot going on in the journalism and media realms, as usual, and there’s so much I want to explore when I get the time.

So my thanks to you for your patience.

In the meantime, help yourself to some links on journalism, media and work, plus some miscellany, that have caught my eye on the fly . . .

• Walt Disney vs. the news industry: How bad management is killing newspapers and their websites (Online Journalism Review)

• Journalism, Technology Starting to Add Up (MediaShift Idea Lab)

• How Demand Media’s Business Model Can be Applied to Niche Sites (Poynter)

• Reinvention: Now the job requirement for Boomer women (Vibrant Woman)

• It’s Not the Recession, You Just Suck (Outspoken Media via Mike Wells)

• Local Bookstores, Social Hubs, and Mutualization (Clay Shirky)

• Coffeehouses: Bringing the buzz back (Wall Street Journal via Evgeny Morozov)

Initially when I was studying for a diploma, every time anyone asked me “What’s your plans after this?”, I used answer confidently that I’m gonna work for sometime then continue with my studies. My reasoning was simple, that I would be more matured by then and working experience would help me understand my subjects better.

So now here I am, straight after graduation in the media field – even got a job I exactly wanted. But somehow, I’m not as ecstatic anymore.  I have to be honest and say that it was hard for me to accept that I’m working now, instead of having a jolly good time in uni. Suddenly reality set in and the torture of sitting in one place the whole day facing your computer screen began to crush me.

So you hate your job?

Don’t take me wrong that I don’t like what I do as a digital planner. (Okay, doing the excel sheets are bit boring but…) I’ve been exposed to so many new, interesting & challenging stuffs that I would have never known if I wasn’t working. But it’s the flexibility that I need.

Of course, everyone was advising me about it – “any job wouldn’t be easy when you start, you’ve got to work your way up”. In other words, it means you’ve got to sacrifice time that you used to have with family & friends, give up your passion, hobby and literally run of a working treadmill like a hamster.

Observing people around me, it seems like it is the norm, this is how life is supposed to be once you begin your career. Somehow, back to square one – I can’t digest that!

I don't wanna end up this way!

What’s your point?

Reading an article by Alexandra Wong in The Star, I realized that I’m not alone in this situation. Many others feel the same way but have somehow got used to it. Bunny as she calls herself in her blog, is one person who refused to be the average. Instead of going with “the flow”, she swims against it.

I respect her in many ways after reading this article, she definitely made a profound impact on me. How I wish I could take charge of my life too, and follow her footsteps. And that got me thinking, ACTUALLY WHY NOT?

So you gonna quit your job or what…?

I don’t have a plan yet, I dunno what I’m going to pursue after this – digital media, copywriting or perhaps start my own business.

By doing so, maybe I won’t have to image that I’m working in a big corporate company anymore or stand a chance to be titled a manager in the long run, or maybe I won’t be making as much money. There are many maybes, but it definitely seems like a better idea than working my life away.

But till then, I’m gonna do my very best and learn as much as I can in my current job.

carpe diem

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