jansn

Currently I’m reading this book ‘The Creative Economy‘ by John Howkins. It’s a great book on how people make money from ideas. He shows some basic principles, provides details on creative industries and then jumps in with practicle tips on how to combine creativity with business.

The book is a must read if you consider yourself in the creative industrie and work a lot with ideas, concepts and designs. Therefore I will only share an excerpt from his ‘Ten rules for success in the creative economy’.

1. Invent yourself
   Create a unique cluster of personal talents. Own your image. Manage it. Build momentum. Leave school early, if you want, but never stop learning. Break the rules. Be clear about your own assets and talents. They are unique. And they are all you have.
2. Put the priority on ideas, not on data
   Create and grow your own creative imagination. Build a personal balance sheet of intellectual capital. Understand patents, copyright, trademarks and other intellectual property laws. Entrepreneurs are more worried to lose their ability to think than if their company loses money.
3. Be nomadic
   Nomads are at home in every country. You can choose your own path and means of travel, and choose how long you stay. Being nomadic isn’t about being alone. They are likely to travel in groups. Writer Charles Handy says leaders must combine ‘a love of people’ and ‘capacity for aloofness’. Creatives need to be able to think alone or working together.
4. Define yourself by your own (thinking) activities
   Do not shape yourself by the job title somebody else gives you. People who are brave call themselfs ‘thinkers’. Computer companies try to sell ‘business solutions’ to their client’s problems. In the creative economy we each can think and exchange creative solutions with others.
5. Learn endlessly
   Borrow. Innovate. ‘A New Idea is Often Two Old Ideas Meeting for the First Time’. Be a magpie. Creative thinkers scavenger for ideas constantly. It does not matter where you get your ideas from. What you do with them is what matters. Use networks. If you cannot find the right network, start it. Take risks and do unnecessary things. Completely ignore Frederick Winslow Taylor’s famous instruction to the Ford Motor Company’s workers that they should ‘elimanate all false movements, slow movements and useless movements’. Wayward movements may lead to amazing discoveries.
6. Exploit fame and celebrity
   Fame and celebrity are the so called ’sunk cost’. They cannot be recoverd but can be further exploited at no expense. Fame and celebrity bring virtually unlimited rewards in terms of the ability to charge more for one’s services and to revitalize a life or career that is momentarily stuck. Being wel known is as important in the 21th century as typing speeds were in the clerical economy. The essence of being a star, as revealed by David Bowie, is ‘the ability to make yourself as fascinating to others as you are to yourself’. That is for being famous about being creative, not to get a lot of media attention.
7. Treat the virtual as real and vice versa
   Cyberspace is another dimension to everyday life. Do not judge reality by wheter it’s based on technology but by more important and eternal matters suc as humanity and truth. Bandwith is useless without a message.
8. Be kind
   Kindness is a mark of success. Data never say please. Humans can and always should say please, and mean it. People treat each other as they themselves are treated; exactly as a fast computer produces more data more quickly, so a kind person will be invited to more networks, receive more knowledge and create more.
9. Admire success, openly
   ‘The person who said, “It’s not whether you win or lose that counts” probably lost…’Don’t be fixated on success, be curious about failure. Creative people are strictest judge of their own successes and failures because they want to learn from them. The worst thing is depression, not recession. You will never win if you cannot lose.
10. Be very ambitious
    Just Go.
11. Have fun
    Creatitivity is supported by ‘Play’. When people have fun together some remarkeble work can be created. People that enjoy themselves are not only happy, but achieve more and fast. Be sure to not worry, the sleeping brain sorts out the previous day’s affairs as a ‘creative worry factory’. Feed it.

At the end, Howkins notes: ‘And when writing the then rules for success in the creative economy, don’t worry if you end up with eleven. You can break your own rules’.

When reading them, somehow I think I already apply a part of these rules somehow. In the coming weeks I share my experience on how I apply these ‘rules’. As the ‘rules’ are more guidelines I will share my experience on how I put them to practice.

I look forward to reply’s and experiences from others. So please share them. Let’s colaborate!

Today Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten wrote an article where he questions the term ‘Viral Marketing’. Normally I’m not that big of a fan about terminology, because it’s something that comes and go. But this time there is a valid point.

The term tossed in by Boris is ‘Reverberating Marketing’. I don’t think it’s catchy or sticky enough. One of the commenter’s tosses in ‘Amplifying Marketing’. That sounds better to me.

It’s within our nature to do everything possible to avoid catching a virus. Besides getting sick when getting a virus, I can’t think of anything positive related to it. On top of that, a virus mutates itself to survive. Quite nasty. Why do marketeers still think that broadcasting is about pushing a message, instead of letting an audience tune in and watch, listen or read it.

In my point of view Marketeers should focus on creating messages that are worth sharing. From time to time we all tell about that one commercial to other people, for example at a party or at lunch. Sadly, good commercials are rare. So it doesn’t happen that often.

Don’t focus on old channels that take loads of your budget. Create a message that is worth sharing and make it available and shareable.

Sounds new? It’s not. Most people will remember sending e-mails with commercials to their friends. Nowadays people put them on YouTube, add them to their profile pages on Social Networks and share them on Twitter.

So use good messages that are sticky within your marketing. Then make them available and watch the crowd within the channel picking them up and amplify your message.

For example: This un-official Zune ‘commercial’ did so much more to me than any of their official commercials. I first saw it on The Next Weblog.

As an Apple enthusiast I never thought of putting anything up about the Zune. I already shared it twice. Now I did it again. Think about it.

In my continuous quest to learn more about creativity I was watching a video on TED. Called ‘Creativity and play‘ by Tim Brown. I didn’t know what to expect. Inspired by Tim’s talk I thought to share my thoughts.

To be creative and move forward we need to play. That’s what Tim’s message is. Children play a lot and that’s when they explore their world for new possibilities, opportunities and things to learn. While playing they are more involved in open possibilities than adults. They don’t fear judgement by their ‘peers’ upon their actions. The more a child is trusting the environment he is in, the more he will play and forget everything that is happening around him.

To play we need to trust our environment and peers. Becoming part of the adult world, the first things that will be removed are our toys. All those things we enjoyed and had fun with. Lego that we used to build all those nifty constructions! Not good as Tim Browns says, and I agree.

Brown acknowledges a three stage process: ‘Playfull Exploration’, ‘Playfull Building’ and ‘Roleplay’. In short:

• Playfull Exploration is about going out and use play to discover new stuff
• Playfull Building is about executing your creative plans, still part of the game and not a different process. It’s just the moment you switch to build something that is tangible and could be discussed with others. During this process creative solutions for problems is key.
• Roleplay if there’s nothing to build, let’s say your desinging a new service process, use roleplay instead of playfull building.

So fast forward, we aren’t kids anymore. What do you need to implement play?

Besides an office that has room for relaxation and thinking, you need stuff that’s laying around to play with. Stuff you can throw at each other. Stuff you can use to show what you mean. Stuff that recharges your creative mind when having a ‘creativity block’.

Nobody within the professional field will be able (and probably doesn’t want) to play all day. ‘Play mode’ is the equivalent to divergent thinking. As a professional you need to make choices, therefore converge your thoughts. According to Tim Brown, those two go very good together.

I’m still learning and figuring how to switch between those modes more easily as I do know. Anybody that has tips and tricks on that, please let me know . I’d like to start some discussion and get more thoughts about this out there.

To conclude. One of my Twitter friends shared this video. A french speaking girl makes up this fairytail about ghosts, monsters, wizards, frogs. Not only very cute, we need to learn from this.

It’s time to press play.

Once upon a time… from Capucha on Vimeo.

On Thursday last week I’ve attended to the Amazon Startup Tour in Amsterdam. The day was about the services Amazon is providing to run webapplications and websites. Amazon Web Services (AWS) range from computing power, data storage to database services (and more). Two important reasons to use the services are scalability and uptime.

At the event a few dutch startups presented their great applications and how they use Amazon to run them. Afterwards there was time to ask questions to the starups and later on to Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon. One of the most interesting questions was about the data that startups store at Amazon. Martijn de Kuijper of Qash asked:

How do we tell our users that we don’t know where their data is, except that it is “in the cloud?.

The answer to the question is that all data from Europe on AWS is stored in Ireland, guaranteed. Therefore the data will be under the jurisdiction of Ireland. So another question came to mind. In essence, AWS is ‘controlling’ the data of our clients. For example what will happen when a client decides to delete his account. What will happen to his data? We asked this to Simon Brunozzi (European Envangelist of AWS). He told me that they always have been executing audits on the data of Amazon.com and also AWS. Recently a security whitepaper is published about this.

I think cloud computing is providing great advantages when you’re building a web application or starting an online business.

No let me rephrase that.

Using the cloud for your applications will remove a lot of constraints and will break some traditional rules of business development and IT management. Starting your online business will be cheap and above all will provide infinite resources at a click of a button. You can build web applications very agile, but the business wasn’t that agile yet. AWS and other cloud services make running your infrastructure and business very agile.

Martijn de Kuijper mentions this in a recent blogpost:

Again, I personally believe that Amazon offers a great service and I do trust them in such a way that I wouldn’t mind “sending” them personal data, but I think for a customer it’s a big step to know that I if they took the first step of uploading their data to  for example our server, their data is then stored on external servers.

First of all, I believe that a customer always is putting his data external. For example we’re running Tweetburner on our own server. For us it feels as an internal server (we can drive to Haarlem and put our hands on it!!). But for the users it is as much an external server as if we would use AWS.

Probably they would even prefer AWS above us running our own servers. Not only has AWS more security, more experience and more resources. They run their own multi-billion dollar webshop on there. If AWS fully breaks down, their webshop is down too. That probably is the biggest devotion a single hosting company is doing to it’s own services.

Cloud computing won’t ‘fog’ our business, it will strengthen by allowing to use external infrastructure and resources with a click on the button. Something I couldn’t wish for more as a business developer.

Just received this video about Wordpress 2.7 and it looks great. Can’t wait untill it will be available to install.

The things I like:
- New dashboard looks good, new ways of customizing the look and feel
- New menu system is more dynamic, it looks more flexible and will save you some clicks
- Lot of drag and drop features in there, which will make it more feel like a web app

Possible downside, it looks more bloated with features. I hope it remains as conveniant like WP 2.6.

Possible downsides