Is Volunia search or social? It doesn’t matter.

The launch of Massimo Marchiori‘s new search project, Volunia (live streaming tomorrow, Feb. 6, at 12 CET on the University of Padua site), could not come at a more interesting time for the discussion of what the Web will look like in the next five years.

This weekend we have been variously entertained by the discussion between Robert Scoble, John Battelle, Dave Winer and many others about whether the Web we have known and loved for the past 15 years or so is melting away, like polar ice caps (Battelle’s metaphor), under the heat of our planetary addiction for Facebook’s “walled garden” (an odd term from the ’90s era of AOL, but one that is making a far bigger comeback – under Zuckerberg’s leadership – than we ever thought it could).

And that’s just the PC- and browser-based Web, and now the Android-based Web, the one that was defined by Google and that Google defined. But search is changing, morphing beyond recognition. As a user, one of my most common search question is “where on my iPad is that app I downloaded two months ago but whose name I don’t remember”. As a business leader, I need to deal with whole new domains for SEO, such as ensuring the in-Market and in-iTunes Store ranking of my company’s apps. As a strategist, I wonder whether the whole debate between the open search model and the social silos model is somewhat overblown: they’re really two sides of the same coin, and the heft of that coin is the solid metal of advertising, the business that funded search for years and that is funding social today, as Facebook’s IPO filing confirmed just last week.

So, is Volunia going to be a search platform or a social platform or both? “Seek & meet”, says the company’s tagline, hinting at both. But it does not really matter. It is going to be – sometime, at a later stage, post-launch – an advertising platform. It will need to be. Because Marchiori’s backers, led by Mariano Pireddu, have reportedly invested a couple of million euros in the project; and even with the best researchers and engineers, even at Padua-level salaries and not Silicon Valley- level salaries, a couple of million barely gets you a workable beta, if at all.

So, consider Volunia a nascent advertising platform. To attract advertisers, it will need to attract eyeballs. Details are hazy, but today’s paper edition of Nòva, the Sunday supplement of Il Sole 24 Ore, reveals some hints (and promises a video with Marchiori showing off his creature, on the site later today).Many are rooting for Volunia, but early screenshots seem disappointing. The search box searches for sites, within a site, or for Volunia users; you can see which users have been to a certain page, and which ones are there now, with an interface oddly reminiscent of the Rockmelt browser. You can comment and chat on a Web page with other users (Google Sidewiki, anyone?) You can make friends with people who share your interests, based on the pages they visit. According to Pireddu, the engine can be used anonymously if one wishes, users will not be profiled, and navigation data will not be tracked – so there is a bit of DuckDuckGo in there, for now.

If Marchiori and Pireddu get traction, they will be able to raise serious money and build up their dream. If the Volunia beta disappoints (and disappointments loom large in both search and social: remember Cuil? remember Color?), they will have to pivot very quickly and downscale to lesser ambitions. But I am an optimist, and an Italian: so I wish them all the best and I look forward to being wowed by their creature.

(Updates: screenshots here; video – in Italian – here.)

Next Generation Women Leaders: Paris, March 22-24, 2012

Is your sister, cousin, daughter, niece or friend a university student or young graduate with less than three years’ work experience? Then suggest that she apply to Next Generation Women Leaders, a fabulous workshop by McKinsey in Paris, March 22-24. The deadline for applications is February 17.

My friend Eva Berneke is one of the speakers at the event (see program) and I am confident it will be a great way for young women to develop their leadership profile. Because the earlier you start thinking of yourself as a leader, the earlier you actually become one.

The future of work and what we’ll have to learn

The structural changes awaiting us GenXers in work environments, careers, and employment relationships have been debated at least since Jeremy Rifkin’s The End of Work (1995). More recently, the macroscopic uncertainties facing GenY have taken center stage. For both generations, especially in Europe, there is a stark awareness that the concept of retirement our parents relied upon no longer applies to us: I have friends who retired at 58, yet my own expectation (currently being enshrined into law by the Italian austerity package) is that I’ll be well over 70 before I can draw a pension from the coffers into which I’ve been contributing since my first paycheck, 20 years ago this year.

Yet it is not just employees who will have to adjust to staying in paid employment much longer: it is also employers.

As employers, I am afraid we have no idea how to deal with this. Companies have, if at all, offered “early retirement” (say, a 3-year parachute to 55-year-olds) in order to downsize, restructure and make space for a few more young people at the bottom. Once “early retirement” means 68 or so, they’ll have to find work that vast masses of employees in their 60s can be productive at; perhaps part-time, with a different cognitive load (and physical effort), in different shifts or what have you. Have you ever been served by a call center representative in their 60s? I don’t think you have – but you will.

As employees, we will have to accept that not everybody can reinvent themselves as a “consultant”: people will just have to remain employed. We will also see, if organizations are at all meritocratic, the complete decoupling of the corporate pyramid from the age structure of the corporate population. It used to be that, as employees aged, a few managers floated to the top and the rest in their age group magically disappeared along the way (women, unfortunately, much earlier than men). No longer. Not only will we see people from our own generation at every possibile level in the organization (we’re just too many), but late in life those same people will have to deal – realistically – with having a boss much younger than they are. I am talking about employees in their 60s reporting to bosses in their 40s or even 30s. We haven’t seen this type of employment relationship, I believe, in the past half century or so. And yet this is the future of work, and this is what we’ll have to learn to deal with.

The Illusionists: Help fund it on Kickstarter

A few weeks ago, I had drinks with a young filmmaker I had started following on Twitter months ago. Her name is Elena Rossini and she lives in Paris. We talked extensively about her feature-length documentary project, The Illusionists. I’ll let her explain it in her own words:

As you may know, in late June I’ve launched an ambitious fundraising campaign for my feature-length documentary The Illusionists, which I wrote and I am co-producing and directing.

Here is the synopsis of the film:

THE ILLUSIONISTS is a feature-length documentary about the commodification of the body and the marketing of unattainable beauty around the world. The film will explore the influence that corporations have on our perceptions of ourselves, showing how mass media, advertising, and several industries manipulate people’s insecurities about their bodies for profit.

The Illusionists’ Kickstarter page has a video teaser and a longer explanation of the project: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1085595579/the-illusionists-documentary-insecurity-sells (its themes, style, and my motivations for making the film).

There are amazing experts already lined up for the interviews, including author & filmmaker Jean Kilbourne (best known for her iconic film series “Killing Us Softly”), psychotherapist Susie Orbach (best known for her books “Fat is a Feminist Issue” and “Bodies”) and Jenn Pozner (author of “Reality Bites Back”; she was recently featured in the New Yorker and on NPR). I’m also hoping to interview Umberto Eco, Gloria Steinem, Oliviero Toscani and Maurice Levy of Publicis, amongst others. 

Thanks to the incredible generosity of friends, friends-of-friends, Twitter and Facebook followers, the fundraising campaign has already achieved some amazing milestones. 12 days in, I’ve reached 43% of the total funding goal, with over 110 backers and more than 1,100 Facebook “likes” of my Kickstarter page. In short, I’m on cloud nine. But the road ahead is still long… if I don’t reach 100% of the funding goal by August 5th, I will lose all the pledges made so far.

On Kickstarter, I am offering “regular people” pre-sales of the film and various other gifts as rewards for donations:http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1085595579/the-illusionists-documentary-insecurity-sells (the column on the right). I’m also developing a special package for sponsors whose mission is aligned with the message of the film that would offer exposure on the site, in all press material, and in the end credits of the film.

If this is something that resonates with you, go to Kickstarter.com and fund it. I just did.

Meet Francesco Marini Clarelli, European Business Angel of the Year

There are business angels in Europe: they are less visible than the Silicon Valley super-angels, but they do invest in early-stage enterprises, they work to make the business environment more open to entrepreneurs, and they believe in the power of entrepreneurship to add dynamism to our tired economies.

On May 12 Francesco Marini Clarelli, an Italian, was honored as Business Angel of the Year by EBAN, the European Association of business angels, seed funds, and other early stage market players. As an angels’ lobby, EBAN has committed to a few notable efforts, such as producing the white paper on Women and European Early Investing and launching a range of initiatives to support women and early stage investing. Italian Angels for Growth, the network that Francesco founded a few years ago in Milan, has been selected by EBAN as a pilot organization in its effort to bring women from 5% to 20% of early stage investors in Europe by 2015.

I have known Francesco for a few years, not just in my role as a mini-angel and member of Italian Angels for Growth, but also as a family friend. He prefers to keep out of the limelight. But in wine connoisseurs’ circles, he is best known for returning to Christie’s a bottle of 1784 Château d’Yquem, which they had mistakenly shipped to Francesco, instead of the 1904 he had bought: still a fantastic vintage, but not as phenomenally rare as the 1784, which may or may not have been a legendary “Jefferson bottle“.

Congratulations, Francesco! I hear you opened the 1904 with some friends a few years ago, but I am sure your cellar offered a choice of other worthwhile bottles to celebrate the EBAN award in style.

Why you should vote for me. LinkedIn European Business Awards 2010

I’d like you readers to vote for me in the Rising Star category of the LinkedIn European Business Awards 2010. You do that by going to this page and clicking on the red “Vote for me!” button.

But first, let me introduce myself. My name is Paola Bonomo, and I run an Internet business within a larger media company. It’s a heck of a tough job: with no clear end in sight to the maelstrom in the media industry, my team and I are fixing the basics, slaughtering some sacred cows, riding some tigers, and gearing up to leapfrog to reinvent the newspaper business. And I enjoy every minute of it. Slaughters included.

I come from a middle-class family, and I’ve seized all the opportunities I could.  I’ve attended Kindergarten in Germany, spent some undergraduate time as an exchange student in New York, and earned an MBA in California. I’ve worked in Italy, Spain, and Switzerland.  I’ve worked hard, and I’ve had some good mentors both in consulting and in the Internet world. I’m grateful to them.

If I were a politician, my agenda would be: rule of law, merit, and growth. I am passionate about meritocracy (see book and blog), promoting talent, and women’s empowerment in the business world.  I’ve been in business for almost twenty years, and I haven’t seen as much improvement as I had hoped I would see along these dimensions: we’ve got a long way to go. I believe in entrepreneurship and I enjoy supporting it through angel investing.

Of course, the LinkedIn European Business Awards 2010 are just a game. A game, because the winners win no money, do not get elected to political office, and do not gain anything tangible, other than an appropriately virtual prize: “a free years’ subscription to WebEx along with an hour WebEx mentor session with one of the judges”. The one Grand Prix winner will also get to meet one of the judges face to face. Although the one-hour session with one of the judges might be considered priceless, a year’s subscription to WebEx Meeting Center will set you back £24/month. So that’s the prize.

Yet, I like winning. Even if the prize isn’t much, and even if discussions have cropped up questioning the fairness of the rules or the decisions made by the judges. I don’t question any of these things: the rules are clear, and the judges are entitled to apply their discretion as they see fit. Actually, I feel like responding to the complainers with Sayre’s law: just like an academic dispute, this one is so bitter precisely because the stakes are so low.

Finally, I stand by the spirit of LinkedIn. Just like in-person networking, LinkedIn is not a game: all my LinkedIn contacts are people I’ve personally met and can tell you something about. (With one exception, Loic LeMeur, which to this day I cannot explain. I must have a weakness for French entrepreneurs.) That’s why, if you send me a connection request and I cannot recall ever meeting you, I will turn it down – or rather, archive it in the hope of meeting you in the future. But that’s also the reason why, if you send me a request for an introduction to someone else, I will  forward it. I’m a connector. And I try to keep LinkedIn a good, clean place. By not linking with strangers, I am aware I’m at a disadvantage in the Awards, which rely so much on votes from first-degree connections. Yet, it’s not enough of a reason to stretch my interpretation of the LinkedIn rules.

If you like what I stand for – innovation, meritocracy, real-life connecting -  please consider voting for me. If you’ve already done so, please tell your friends. Thanks!

Eating Animals

Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer is an exploration of factory farming, as practiced in America today, and a tale of the author’s decision to choose – not just for himself, but for his young son as well – a vegetarian diet.

You may recall that I think about this stuff a lot. While at times more radical than Michael Pollan in his criticism of supposedly humane animal farming methods (“Polyface Farm… is horrible. It’s a joke”), Foer reaches similar conclusions, namely that — with possible, but in Foer’s eyes impractical, exceptions — meat is not to be eaten. This is for two reasons:

• The suffering of factory-farmed animals, which is extreme and avoidable, if we only choose to avoid it;
• The environmental degradation caused by factory farming.

Both points were argued by philosopher Peter Singer as far back as 1975, although, curiously, the only Singer that Foer quotes (while quoting other philosophers, such as Jacques Derrida and Emanuela Cenami Spada) is Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer (who similarly argued that animal rights are “the purest form of social-justice advocacy, because animals are the most downtrodden of all the downtrodden [...] Humans are unique, just not in ways that make animal pain irrelevant.”) Peter Singer, incidentally, took a very clear philosophical position on a not-unrelated question that Foer only hints at: “And eating animals is one of those topics, like abortion, where it is impossible to definitely know some of the most important details (When is a fetus a person, as opposed to a potential person? What is animal experience really like?) and that cuts right to one’s deepest discomforts, often provoking defensiveness or aggression.”

Both of what I call the Singer-Pollan motives, in the intervening years, have grown worse (fish farming, by the way, runs into just as many animal welfare and environmental issues as the land-based animal variety). Animal breeds have been further selected for traits that result in vicious side effects (walk? what factory-farmed animal needs the ability to walk?), and environmental and human health issues resulting from factory farming are increasingly well documented.

It is to this last point that Foer adds, it seems, more data than has been widely discussed in the past: studies by the UN and the Pew Commission show that, globally, farmed animals contribute more to climate change than the entire transport sector (cars, trains, planes and ships combined). Animal agriculture is responsible for 37 percent of anthropogenic methane and 65 percent of anthropogenic nitrous oxide: both gases are key contributors to global warming and offer many times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide.

As for human health, the impact is not just on the communities who live near factory farms (and breathe, let’s say it, powdered animal shit every day), but could be global and take a heavy toll. Antibiotics are increasingly ineffective, as we know, because farmed animals are fed antibiotics nontherapeutically: in the United States, 3 million pounds of antibiotics are given to humans each year, but 17.8 million pounds are fed to livestock (and this latter figure is underreported by 40 percent, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists). Also, while this past season’s flu was eventually much milder than anticipated, pandemic experts agree that another influenza pandemic on the possible scale of the 1918 Spanish flu is “not only inevitable, but overdue”, and that growing demand for animal protein (and therefore the increasing scale of factory farming) is a primary factor in the emergence of zoonotic diseases. Globally, the problem isn’t just that the Chinese and the Indians will want to build roads and drive cars like we do in the West: it’s that they will want to eat chicken like we do in the West.

Finally, even the meat gourmet’s alibi – the existence of luxury farms, where biodiversity is promoted and animals are grown humanely and slaughtered mercifully (it is notable that finding suitable slaughter facilities is a challenge even for the most committed humane farmers) – seems under threat: witness the departure of pioneer farmer Bill Niman from Niman Ranch in August 2007 after disagreements over animal protocols. It seems that market forces conspire towards the lowest common denominator, and premium brands are not strong enough to survive if they want to do things differently. Yet, at the high end of the market, I am incredulous that the market cannot find a solution, and I don’t want to believe that the market space for these solutions is not destined to increase. You’re telling me that you can buy a $9,000 handbag, a CHF10,000 evening with a call girl, or a $1,000 bottle of wine, but you can’t go to a premium meat store and buy a humanely farmed and humanely slaughtered €55 chicken? That sounds so wrong.

In the meantime, I sit on the fence with growing discomfort. I tell myself: I am eating meat in Argentina, in Switzerland, not in America. It may make some difference, but ultimately not a fundamental difference. And I eat meat in Italy, too, where I know nothing about the production of meat, but I suspect that factory farming isn’t all that different from what it is in America, as documented by Pollan, Foer and others. And I suspect we’ll talk about this again.

One more sign I no longer work at a high-tech company

Over here, we believe that babies are born in cabbage patches.
Season’s greetings and a happy 2010 to you all.

Project 10^100: a missed opportunity for girls and women

Well, Google’s long-delayed Project 10^100 has finally come to the voting stage. And all of the 16 bundles of ideas that have made it to this stage are worthwhile endeavors.

But they’re also a missed opportunity. None of the ideas is about empowering girls and women. In fact, the word “women” is entirely missing from the page that describes the 16 finalists.

Yet, economists have proved again and again that getting girls into education, teaching women about their reproductive rights, financing women’s ventures, and setting up services that allow women to be productive in the workplace is the hidden lever to unlocking growth and prosperity. None of the 16 ideas up there on that page recognizes this. (Sure, many women will benefit if voters choose to fund better technologies to remove landmines, or more education for African students, or early warning systems to prevent mass atrocities – including war rapes. But there is no idea up there that says  “let’s spend this money 100% on women”).

My proposal? Together with my friend Raffaele, I had submitted an idea about women’s leadership and role models. It went like this: The 1,000 member companies of the World Economic Forum would commit to having neither gender represented by more than 60% of Directors on their Board. Sure, it would primarily have impacted the West, and not so much of the developing world. But it was a very low-cost idea – all it takes is leadership, commitment and some monitoring systems – and it would have triggered a vast culture change in our business, political and civic organizations. Culture change will come anyway, you say? It doesn’t: we’ve stopped making any measurable progress at all – except for places with forcing devices, such as Norway. It didn’t fly: let me know if you find a better forum to promote it.

In the menatime, how are you voting on Project 10^100?

Top 7 signs you no longer work at a high-tech company

1. The demographics of the place more closely reflect the outside world. You feel young again. Unfortunately, it is advisable to adopt a more conservative dress code.
2. There is no WiFi in the building.
3. You are issued a Blackberry in an older version than the one you had before.
4. You are issued a large and sturdy laptop that is heavier than the one you had before. I mean, a couple of pounds heavier. That’s a lot heavier, for something you want to take home at the end of the day.
5. Your laptop carries an operating system and applications in the local language, and there is no way to get them in English. You have to relearn most of your keyboard shortcuts. CTRL+p? forget about it, now it’s CTRL+SHIFT+F12. CTRL+s? it’s become SHIFT+F12. CTRL+f? start getting used to CTRL+SHIFT+t. CTRL+a? You still haven’t figured out where that one has gone. You fear serious losses in your productivity.
6. They don’t use Skype. In fact, Skype is blocked. They don’t use any other instant messaging application, actually. When they need to chat, they write emails back and forth to each other. You fear even more serious losses in your productivity. You ask for an exception to the Skype block.
7. Every morning, a thick bundle of newspapers is delivered to your desk. Some Web-only dailies are printed out and delivered to your desk. Little by little, one piece at a time, you start trying to stop the madness.
8. [Bonus] You wrap up a meeting with a colleague. You say “OK, I’ll send you a list of those items in a spreadsheet or something.” He says “That’s OK. As long as you don’t send me an Excel. I don’t do Excel.”