Expired!

As someone may know, I have owned a decent number of iPods, some of which are still lying more or less forgotten in drawers. Needing to turn one into a digital recorder I purchased the excellent Tascam iM2 stereo mic only to find – shame on me for not reading the fine print with enough attention – that it only works with iOS 4.3 onwards while I don’t go past 4.2.1. Dang!

Guess this is another job for the still in the pipeline iPad 3.

Hate the haters

Before: Facebook is the grand-daddy of all IPOs, will make GOOG or AMZN pale in comparison.

After: the dirty bastards tricked us in believing the stock was worth much more than $38 a share.

What I do not understand is the following: even after the downward correction, Facebook is worth $68bn, or 67 times trailing revenues. What kind of sucker believes that revenue growth may compensate for this ?

C’mon people, are you NUTS ?

What happened is that Facebook needed cash to fuel the growth of his company, and it thought it could get it cheaper from stock market morons than from banks. As Robert Cringley put it about a week ago,  Mark Zuckerberg does not and could not care less for investor’s expectations; while no Facebook fan, I think he is last in the line of maverick tech founders (Gates, Jobs, Ellison, Bezos) who simply follow their instict to drive the company forward.

I think a lot of moves in coming years will have no other justification than “Zuck wanted this”, but judging from how well the 80′s Microsoft, Apple, Amazon or Oracle did or are doing when compared to professionally run giants such as H-P, well…

Duly updated: Social Media with donuts r.5

Sunny Brussels

In Brussels for the Social Media workshop organized by my colleagues: a great day with a room full on interesting people. Bram, Chloe, Alessandra and Peter organized everything perfectly and I am told there is lots of material whch should be soon availabe including – ta dah ! – video !

For some comments search the #kpsm hash on Twitter and, just in case any of the attendees happens to come here, here is the link to the database of Social Media Policies developed by Chris Boudreaux. Have fun!

Title is because is 27 °C in Brussels right now – next session, shorts and sandals !!!

Kazakh Chronicles (3)

This is turning out to be a mini-series, the last bit being about you never pay enough attention when traveling, so it’s more like a memo-to-self.

The outgoing trip from IST to ALA starts totally on the wrong foot: despite my confirmed reservation, and despite being at the check-in counter well over one hour prior to departure, the kind Air Astana people state that the flight is not overbooked, but overloaded (what on Earth does this mean? too many fatsos on board??) Together with another four or five people I wait rather trepidantly while the ground staff go back and forth, until finally we are boarded.

The return leg is not much better: for some reason I am convinced that my departure time from Almaty is a very civilized 11:20. When the hotel staff call me to inform me that my taxi driver would arrive much earlier than I expected, I stubbornly refuse to see my mistake, and  only upon being called by my guardian angel Sascha I relent and finally check the right ticket: indeed my departure time is 7:25AM, meaning wakeup at 3:30AM. Gah!

But even though I am on time despite myself, I still manage another slip: the small Almaty airport has only five gates, four of which are bunched together through a single physical entrance. Indeed this collective gate entrance does not include Gate 1, so I ask one of the policemen and he vaguely gestures towards the single entrance, so I sit down minding my own business and waiting for my flight to be called. Now, another little thing I learned about the Almaty airport is that essentially nobody speaks english – even the announcements are made in an english so broken to render it for me indistinguishable from russian; and so here I am, happily lining up to board the flight to Istanbul… except, get that, there are TWO flights to IST departing within 20 minutes from each other and I am lining up for the wrong one!

Such mistakes must occur rather frequently because a uniformed gentleman is asking all passengers for their boarding passes and, upon reading mine, ushers me to an elevator marked “1” leading to Gate 1 where everybody has boarded already and I get the treat of a bus ride all by myself.

P.S. By the way, Air Astana, given these flights are so popular (100% full both ways) why don’t you switch that route to a larger capacity aircraft from the measly A320 you crammed us in for the four and a half hours of the route? Thank you!

Kazakh Chronicles (2)

• I was mostly lucky, weather-wise, but this is no Mediterranean island: +50 °C summers and -30 °C winters remind you that you’re sitting between Siberia and the Gobi desert
• Although it has huge oil reserves, dirt-cheap gas is not part of a Venezuelan-style social contract; regular sells for about $1/liter – having said that, kazakhis love big cars, a fondness only partially explained by the tough winters.
• Speaking of cars, I think this is the only country in the world where you can pick your choice of left and right-hand drive cars, the latter being much cheaper; when the government tried to ban them, people protested and officials caved in, pulling the ban.
• There are taxis. Oh, yes, like millions of them. Essentially anyone spotting a person gesturing for a cab can stop and haggle a price for the ride. How professional taxi drivers manage to make any money is a mystery to me.
• I had both kazakh food and uzbek food – the latter is more elaborate and frankly overall better tasting. If you like horsemeat, however, this is the place for you.
• I wasn’t able to identify a kazakh type for the boys: they range from the heavily built to the very lean, reflecting the ethnic mix; girls however are almost invariably very attractive, tall and slender, morphing over time into rather stocky wives. Diet, pregnancies, sloppiness? Who knows.
• Turning to Social Media, it seems most of the issues are the same facing us in the west, demonstrating that the fear of losing control has nothing to do with the recent history of the country.
• Trolling seems – however – a big problem. Companies and politicians hire professional trolls whose job is to provoke the opponent into saying something they shouldn’t be saying to then use it against them. In the breakout session moderated by Larissa some of the panelists relayed tales of destroyed reputations because of this. Everyone seemed quite surprised to learn that trolls are, at most, a curiosity in the west and simply calling them out as such is usually sufficient for the rest of the audience to tune out. Not so here: one of the panelists illustrated a list of tip on how to defend yourself from trolls, item #1 being “Use humour”. Rather disturbingly, I got the sense that public relations is (at least by some) equated to “positive trolling”; not so flattering…

Kazakh Chronicles (1)

What did I learn about…?

This is the kind of question you ask yourself on long-haul return flights: you’d hope that after 48 or 72 hours in a foreign country you visit for the first time, you’d know it a little better than you did before.

In this case, I had a very easy comparison, as the total of what I knew about Kazakhstan was from reading its entry in the CIA World Factbook.

Of course, I have often complained about the fact I tend to arrive somewhere, see the airport and immigration, cab my way to an hotel, do whatever business meetings I have scheduled, rush out to the airport, security, immigration and… if it wasn’t for the language, you’d never know you left.

My short kazakh trip offered me several improvement over this basic model, the first and main one being having access to Alexandra (Sascha) Shegay as my guide and tutor. Thanks to her kindness and good english, I was able to discover a little bit about this country.

A few pics.

Learnings, the serious ones

• This is a YOUNG country, born about 20 years ago after having been a soviet republic. When you are this young, in many ways you are still trying to find your own place in the world order. How much of the collectivistic past will you retain? But, most importantly, what are the alternatives? We take those for granted, and of course we know that every alternative comes with positive and negative sides, but just think of how easy is to manipulate someone’s opinion when you can, for example, filter out all the positives and only show the negatives.
• This is LARGE country – look it up on a map. With a land mass roughly equivalent to western Europe and a population about the size of Benelux, most of which live in a handful of main cities like Astana and Almaty (better, Alma-Ata), the closest parallel that comes to mind is Canada – replace the tundra with steppe and you get the picture: a vast wilderness where humans are few and far between.
• This is a RICH country: it holds among the largest world’s reserves in oil, gas,  uranium. And given the sheer size of the country, there is probably untold riches yet to be found. Not quite clear to me kazakhs (nor their ruling class) really know what to do with all this wealth, but there is certainly an enormous potential.

Central Asia is not as strife-ridden as, say, the Middle East, but it knew and still knows its share of unrest. However, the remoteness and relative isolation made it more difficult to deeply contaminate it with western thinking: in this sense, the Internet plays a key role as it’s probably a much faster access route to western ideas, culture and models than physical travel, for the most part limited to Turkey, Russia and the Gulf. This peace is almost surprising when one considers the great ethnic and religious diversity: in the Soviet era, Kazakhstan was the dumping ground for all kind of “non russians” Stalin felt he could not really trust; together with the native kazakhs, you find uzbeks and kirghiz, but also (a lot of) russians, koreans and jews representing therefore all three monotheistic religions as well as the nomadic nature-oriented cults.

A lot of this relative peace is probably the fruit of a semi-democratic political: president Nazarbayev was recently elevated to the rank of Father of the Nation, meaning he will rule for life; jokingly I told Sascha this probably means the Parliament is split between the party which supports the President and the part which supports the President… very much. While this may not conform to our ideal of representative democracy, it avoided bloodshed and clashes as in nearby, much smaller and poorer Kyrghyzstan.

In this process, young people play a key role: although the ageing ruling class does its best to hold the reins on everything (mmmm, wonder where else I read this), biology is the youngest generations’ best ally: they will study abroad, come back with new ideas and given the small size of the population, these new ideas will spread rapidly.

But even before they do this, I think kazakhs need to find themselves: they need to get rid of a lot of ugly things strewn across their country, from soviet era buildings to arab-garish glass and steel monsters to rotting infrastructure, they need to rediscover their roots which do not start 20 years ago, nor 100 as the bolsheviks would have liked them to believe. They also need to find their place in the great migratory movements of the Middle Ages with mongols pushing huns pushing goths all the way to Italy and Spain: this changed the face of Europe, brought down the Roman Empire, set the stage for the arab invasions and the crusades.

In all of this, they will find beauty and rediscover the ability to dream.

Good luck, Kazakhstan!

Back to Istanbul!

It’s great to be back here, unfortunately only as a stop over: this time IST is truly my door to Asia, on my way to Almaty, Kazakhstan, where I will speak at the PR Summit – sure looking forward to that.

But the vagaries of flights and schedule changes mean I get to spend a few hours and a night here in magic Istanbul

The view from my hotel room says “Eastward, ho!” and I do take the time for a stroll in the busy streets to buy some delicious baklava for the whole family. My conversation with the store owner goes well, but unfortunately cannot venture in the minefield of having some more of this stuff shipped over to Italy when I will run out of the stash I am buying. Unfortunately no pomegranate juice vendors in the streets – perhaps it’s off season.

I know Mine and a few other friends are watching my tweets: next time this needs to be organized better, but for once I am not guilty of poor planning, but rather a victim of it.

The sense of pride I feel in being able to find my way to the sweets store is ridiculous, as it’s only a few blocks from my hotel, but with age, I am finding these small rewards very savoury.

Voluble Volunia

I had paid attention, back in February. I had expressed criticism at the PR mistake of over-promising and under-delivering, and had hoped the tech behind the launch could, against all odds, be remarkable.

Today they’re back, telling us they’ll “integrate one of the main search engines” (read: Bing)  to do… well, what, exactly is every centimeter as unclear now in may as it was back in february. So far the big innovation is a single post blog where they apologize and remain coherently fuzzy about what exactly it is that they do.

Never fear, however – plenty of people in the comments who “firmly believe in this project, even though I never tried it”.

I would feel less inclined to sarcasm if this “100% italian project” at least spoke the damn language:

• “ragguardevole” does not mean “respectful”, but “sizable” – the word they meant was “riguardosa”
• “doviziosamente” does not mean “duly”, but “abundantly” – the word they meant was “doverosamente”

If that’s italian innovation, I am beginning to understand a few things…

Happy birthday, mr. Feynman!

He’d be 94 today.