Entrepreneurs Breakdowns and Breakthroughs

Contributing to Digital Sunrise Europe #DSEU on Indiegogo

In order to support #DSEU, we have started a campaign on Indiegogo. Something that started few months ago following the Digital Agenda Assembly in Brussels, it is now starting to take shape in this campaign. 

Some more information from the campaign page:

Digital Sunrise Europe is an independent Pan European initiative organized by close to 300 business owners, managers and social media savvy consultants motivated by the idea to make some significant contributions to a sustainable and economically more stable Europe. The overarching objective is:

Helping small and medium-sized enterprises generate incremental revenue by expanding their businesses across the EU,  by leveraging alternative growth strategies and creating 2 Million jobs by 2016.

The group volunteers to help businesses by providing free education, information events, strategy examples, guidelines, templates, networking opportunities, research and a reasonable amount of support in creating an expansion strategy at very little to no cost. Over the next four years, the group is set to help roughly a hundred thousand of the 20 Million registered businesses across Europe to expand and create on average 20 additional jobs per company.

While the Digital Sunrise team is made up entirely of volunteers, team members are seeing personal benefits from gaining experience, improving their reputations and growing their own respective businesses. Digital Sunrise Europe is currently a consortium of independent businesses.

http://digitalsunrise.eu/

Here is the current leadership team + a lot of volunteers:

http://digitalsunrise.eu/team/

Some thoughts of America

Just some random thoughts that came to my mind during the US trip:

• White foreigner does not equal Canadian
• The US is not worldwide
• Europe still has lots to learn about Customer Care (or at least Belgium does)
• Europe is slow, the US are fast. And so what?
• A 1.2 liter engine on your car can still drive you around, but if you use public transport is even better
• Selling water is not a crime
• Economy of scale is an attempt to lower people's self-esteem

Once upon a time in America

There is a lot I could say about this American experience, we are half way through and many are the memories collected in these days. It is probably driving on the american highways, the Niagara falls, still not understanding baseball or the election atmosphere which is already in the air; I dont know where I could start from.

I am putting together some notes about this trip and I will try to add them to this blog once I get back home.

For the time being, let me go and enjoy this lovely end of summer before getting back to the Belgian fall.

Social Animals

Social Animals: when the frog meets the tiger

Form of salutation in a Forest 2.0. Picture taken with Instagram.

There is no Sun on the skies of Brussels

Summer is already difficult on its own in Brussels: no sun, no warm and a city that quickly gets empty by mid-July with expats and locals flying to warmer destinations. It is for this reason that the Brussels Airlines newsletter looked bit funny to me. Take me to the sun! it says showing large yellow suns on Spain, France, Croatia, Romania...Poland and Scandinavia.

I know that social media engagement is fundamental but to tempt customers by suggesting Sweden as sunny destination makes me laugh. It is probably the lack of sun.

From Google to Yahoo!: Marissa Mayer Account might be down or moved permanently.

From Google+ Profile

I was just checking Marissa Mayer Twitter Account today to see how much she has been twitting about her switch to Yahoo!
After thirteen years at Google, becoming the CEO and President of one of its main competitors must be a whack of a challenge! However, if they give you to run Yahoo! at the age of 37 when the company keeps losing ground to its competitors, it means the expectations are high.
Ms. Mayer is not Tweet addicted but her account has a considerable number of followers. She thanks her Google colleagues in one of her latest tweets and then she starts with Yahoo!-oriented new tweets. Interesting enough, at the moment of writing this blog post, Marissa Mayer's profile description on Twitter only reports the link to her Google + account. And here it comes the funny coincidence due most probably to my internet connection. I click the link and a new tab opens with the message you can also see reported in the screenshot below:

The webpage at https://profiles.google.com/marissamayer might be temporarily down or it may have moved permanently to a new web address

At Google they probably did not like Marissa's move to the competition, and they thought it was good to remove her Google+ profile right away.

It goes without saying that I just needed to refresh the page and I landed on the Google+ profile. It was my connection having issues but it is funny to notice that it happened with the profile of one of the used-to-be most influential person at Google. Will Ms. Mayer keep using her Google+ account, and to have it linked to her Twitter page? What is her web strategy going to be when Social Media becomes more and more about business?

Marketing Holocaust

It simply is a movie that blows your mind: Detachment by Tony Kaye was amazing. Great was the interpretation of Adrien Brody in the role of a substitute teacher with a new group of students.

There is a scene when Henry (Adrien Brody) manages to get the students attention. It is a lecture on the consequences of XXI century. It is the Marketing Holocaust we live in.

How are you to imagine anything if the images are always provided for you? 

To deliberately believe in lies while knowing they are false.
Examples of this in everyday life: I need to be pretty to be happy, I need surgery to be pretty; I need to be famous, fashionable.
Our young men today are being told that women are whores, bitches, things to be screwed, beaten, shit on, ashamed. 

This is a marketing holocaust: 24 hours a day for the rest of our lives the powers that be are hard at work, dumbing us to death.
So...to defend ourselves and fight against assimilating this dullness into our thought processes, we must learn to read, to stimulate our own imagination, to cultivate our own consciousness, our own beliefs systems.
We all need these skills to defend, to preserves our own minds...

Here is the link to this scene of the movie Detachment. Try to see the scene and then repeat a couple of times: how are you to imagine anything if the images are always provided for you?
Give it an answer as you can.