Naming fail. Only in Switzerland

I propose an award for the Swiss marketing genius who choose,  as the Migros own-label toothpaste brand, the name of a fungus that causes irritating genital infections.

Human capital

I am back from two days in London and still thinking about the experience. This was a different trip for me – no museums, no galleries – just long walks, some shopping, some dining, some warming up at the fireplace in the lounge at the hotel. I must not have noticed before, but this is what hit me this time: everybody we dealt with was on top of their game. I think this means if you’re very good at something, you go do it in London. Some outstanding people were:

• The Albanian head sommelier at Gordon Ramsay’s at Claridge’s. We had very good conversations, both about wines and about Albania.
• The South Asian saleswoman who sold me two pairs of jeans (Hudson and 7 For All Mankind) after having me try on about a dozen to find, in her opinion, the perfect fit.
• The young pale blonde English woman who took us through the entire range of Jo Malone fragrances until we found the two that were just right.
• The Italian maitre and staff at Pont de la Tour, where we had a festive lunch and felt at home despite eating turkey and looking out at Tower Bridge.
• Everybody at 41 Hotel, including a concierge with the fantastically literary name of Adele Coetzee.
• The hostess at the lounge we used at Gatwick airport, who gave us a most enthusiastic overview of her facilities and truly looked sorry we couldn’t stay longer when it was time for us to board.

This sample is, I admit, biased towards the retail and hospitality sectors, places with brutal competition where staff can’t help but being eager to please in the current downturn. But if this small sample says something about the quality of human capital in London that holds true across the board, then it must be one of the reasons why London is such a great city.

Monetizing LinkedIn: this is where it gets creative (Banana Republic promotion)

LinkedIn has long been admired for its thoughtful and apparently highly effective approach to monetization. Yet, today I was a little surprised to be offered a pop-up promotional box (pop-up! yes, a pop-up!) after a minor update to my profile:

I like 25% off coupons as much as the next person, I guess, and may well use this one on my next trip to the mall. But the thing is: I go to Banana Republic exactly once a year, and I always buy the same stuff (say: three pairs of pants, a dress, a sweater or two). So, for them, it’s money that they basically leave on the table.

For LinkedIn, it’s another way to essentially sell their audience to an advertiser. Is there an opt-out? Of course each promo has its own opt-in mechanism, and you can just close it if you don’t care for it, but is there an overall button to opt out that says “I only want to use LinkedIn as a professional tool and online Rolodex, so please do not show me any pop-up sweepstakes or promotions“?

The Numerati and The Broken Window: fiction beats facts

Stephen Baker and Jeffery Deaver have recently taken the very same topic – the explosion of data mining on every trackable aspect of our behavior – and done very different things with it.

Stephen Baker is a veteran BusinessWeek journalist, and The Numerati reads very much like, well, a collection of BusinessWeek stories. In seven chapters titled Worker, Shopper, Voter, Blogger, Terrorist, Patient, and Lover, the author offers a quick tour of what’s going on in domains of our lives ranging from employment to dating. While some factoids hold promise (could Parkinson’s be diagnosed though analysis of imperceptible changes in voice patterns, years before the visible onset of the disease?), the book does not really dive into the matter at hand (it contains not a single mathematical formula or line of code), nor does it offer satisfying profiles of those that Baker points to as the new masters of the universe (having investment bankers rather fallen out of fashion lately), the applied mathematicians and algorithm developers (“Numerati”) who are working to extract and use every single detail of our lives. Being familiar with many of the commercial uses of data, I thought at least I’d learn something from the chapter about global terrorism; I didn’t (even the NSA saw it fit to keep the reporter out of its walls, let alone real terrorist cells). The final chapter, Conclusion, is a coy defense of the hope that liberal arts majors will still count for something in the brave new world ruled by the Numerati: “We should grasp the basics of maths and statistics – certainly better than most of us do today – but still follow what we love… [...] Even in the heart of the math economy, at IBM Research, geometers and engineers work on teams with linguists and anthropologists and cognitive psychologists [...] The key to finding a place on such world-class teams is not necessarily to become a math whiz but to become a whiz at something.” I’m all for greater numeracy in basic schools, but if I were to counsel a young person choosing a course of studies, I still would caution that the opportunities for world-class epigraphists or papyrologists are, well, limited.

At the center of Jeffery Deaver’s The Broken Window sits an inscrutable data-crunching corporation, Strategic Systems Datacorp. Yes, it is a fictional construct; yet it does not seem materially different from ChoicePoint, Acxiom, and other companies run by pioneeristic Numerati and briefly profiled by Baker (rather too briefly and uncontroversially, if you ask me). The Broken Window, like many of Deaver’s books, is of course a thriller, featuring quadriplegic forensic expert Lincoln Rhyme and prematurely arthritic detective Amelia Sachs. Whether you like the genre or not, Deaver has done his homework before sitting down to write The Broken Window. In fact, I maintain that, once you strip away the layer of fiction, The Broken Window is both more entertaining and more informative than The Numerati. At least it helps you get a much better perspective on the privacy debate; it makes it clear that identity theft is a serious issue, and that paying for everything in cash, holing up in an unwired apartment and cutting RFID tags out of book bindings cannot possibly be a desirable solution. I am a big fan of the European Union for a couple of reasons that in my opinion make it a success (compensating for the folly of farm subsidies and the endless death throes of its surprisingly robust governance model): the Euro (I have been arguing that most of us here would have spent the last several weeks out in the street banging pots and pans, like Argentinians in 2001, had it not been for the common currency) and the EU privacy protection framework. In fact, I would probably be somewhat tolerant of American-style intrusions on my privacy (most bloggers are, I think by definition) if I lived in the United States, but I just have a preference for EU rules. A strong preference, I guess, after reading Deaver’s thriller.

In summary, if you know absolutely nothing about data mining, cover your bases and read Baker’s book. But if you know a bit, or you actually work with data, then skip it and snuggle up in your couch with Deaver’s.  You may well learn more, and you’ll definitely have more fun.

From kitsch to sexy

At the next office meeting, I need to propose an investment in replacing our old and worn-out calciobalilla with this shiny new one (Teckell by Adriano Design and B.lab).

Seriously cool gadgets: Samsung ML-1630

Like many Milanese, I have set up a living room corner to double as a home office. Today, I ditched that workhorse of a HP LaserJet 2200d printer, a reliable device I’ve enjoyed for years, but no longer, or maybe not ever, a star in the looks category. (It has to be the printer equivalent of the Nokia 6310 – a cell phone that I also owned years ago and that, I just found out, still sells like hot cakes to aficionados on eBay). In the HP’s place, here comes the Samsung ML-1630.

This has got to be the iPod of printers. The Wii of printers. The Birkin bag of printers. I don’t think I’ll subject it to many heavy-duty tasks – that’s not the purpose of a home printer. A home printer needs to look cool, occupy a small footprint, and save one from going to the office nights and weekends. This one will do the job perfectly.

Kudos to Samsung: they’ve got a winner. Here in Italy, the ML-1630 retails for approximately 200 Euro, VAT and shipping included. That’s while supplies last. My favorite store, as you know, is here.

Shanghai cool

I have slept in hotel rooms decorated with Venetian views, English landscapes, Roman ruins, Balinese rice paddies and Arizona skies. I had never slept, until last week, in a hotel room where the decorators had chosen to take their (loosely Warholian) inspiration from tin cans. Here are a blown-up syruped fruit label in the living room of our suite, and a pattern with fried fish and beans above the bed.

When we returned to our room in the afternoon of Dec. 31st, we found a tongue-in-cheek surprise from the management: on the immaculately made-up bed were two aspirins and two pairs of cheap sunglasses, a men’s RayBan Aviator-type and a huge women’s white-framed 1970’s-looking model. We had no choice but to wear them when we went downstairs for breakfast on Jan. 1st. Overall, we loved the hotel (although I am sure this was in part because we chose a spacious corner suite) and felt quite at home there – the intended effect, as Jia, we are told, is a Mandarin word meaning “home”. Here is their site.

Shanghai was a discovery. As Norman Foster reportedly said, the process of urbanization that took 200 years in Western Europe is taking about 20 years in China. Futurologists have argued for some years that contemporary Chinese development is one of the most impactful trends in our lifetimes (see, for example, Peter Schwartz’s Inevitable Surprises). There is a palpable sense of things happening.

Notwithstanding the Chinese middle class fascination for Western brands, I tried to shop for cool local stuff and was able to take home some Shanghai finds. It’s way too cold now, but this summer I will be wearing a few nifty designs by SQY-T:

Finally, there’s stuff that’s not cool about China. You do hear about censorship, but you do not realize its full extent until it hits you in the face, to the extent that you wonder whether your browser is truly having a technical problem. From the hotel’s WiFi connection I could check the weather, set up an order of groceries for my return home, catch up on the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, and so on; but I got a server timeout if I wanted to access either of my blogs – I have to think, because both have posts tagged with alarming labels such as “politics” and “politica” respectively. Readers, if you are better versed than I am in Chinese Internet policy, please enlighten me. Subjectively, it was a fairly spooky experience. And, as much as I loved Shanghai, I was reminded of a few freedoms we have over here, and we should never give up.

Shopping, product review sites, and policies for treating unladylike words

There seems to be a new crop of “Web 2.0 product review” sites, whatever that means, and it’s hard to tell which ones can stick around for the long haul. Some of these seem to gain momentum, then flounder in the space of a few weeks; they may be designed by people with nice ideas, but no clue about a traffic-building strategy.

As a side note, they have different policies for treating unladylike words.

Here’s a product: a pretty embroidered blouse by Swiss-Parisian designer Nicole Locher, whose motto is “Perversion with a touch of class”.

On the designer’s own site, lochers.com, the name of this style is “Cute Little Fuckers”.

On iliketotallyloveit.com, it shows up as “Cute Little F*ckers”.

On thisnext.com, it is garbled into “Cute Little &%&#@”.

I love most of Locher’s models, especially “I don’t play nice”, “I like it rough”, “No time to fuck”, “Insatiable little thing” (hey, you’ve got to have different shirts for different moods), and “I can only please one man a day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow does not look good either…”.

Still, it doesn’t look like the policies at those review sites actually help you find cool stuff like this. If I read “Cute Little &%&#@”, my eyes just sort of glaze over it.

And the pretty blouse is never found.

Ah, the eternal dilemmas of good manners and censorship.