Odiseo's Journey

Zeitgeist: Enjoy Obama

2008-02-20T16:05:00.000-08:00

Ten Startup Rules

2007-12-12T02:58:00.000-08:00

(The idea does not count only execution matters: 10 rules to launch a startup today)

1- do not wait for a revolutionary idea, the idea of your life will never happen, just focus on a simple exciting empty space you see and execute as fast as possible
2- share your idea as much as possible, the more you share, the more you get advice and the more you learn. Meet and talk to your competitors.
3- build a community around you through blogging and social software
4- listen to your community, answer questions and build your product with their feedback, involve bloggers as early as possible and get their feedback, if negative, adapt your product permanently
5- gather a great team with a very different skill set than yours, look for people who are better than you without being afraid of it
6- be the first to recognize a problem or a mistake you have made. Never hide it behind the carpet. Address the issue in public, learn and correct it.
7- do not spend time on market research, but launch as early as possible in alpha or beta versions. Keep improving the product in the open.
8- do not focus on a large spreadsheet business plan, you are so sure it is not going to happen anyway
9- do not plan huge marketing, growing with your community loving the product is much more powerful
10- do not focus on getting rich or selling your company, focus on your users, money is a consequence of success, can't be a goal

Leaving Basecamp

2007-12-10T14:52:00.000-08:00

Changing towards a new conscious capitalism

2007-11-19T16:58:00.000-08:00

In holometabolism, the larvae differ markedly from the adults. Insects which undergo holometabolism pass through a larval stage, then enter an inactive state called pupa, or chrysalis, and finally emerge as adults.

Holometabolism is also known as "complete" and "complex" metamorphosis. Whilst inside the pupa, the insect will excrete digestive juices, to destroy much of the larva's body, leaving a few cells intact. The remaining cells will begin the growth of the adult, using the nutrients from the broken down larva. This process of cell death is called histolysis, and cell regrowth histogenesis.

Cell death plays a considerable role during physiological processes of multicellular organisms, particularly during embryogenesis and metamorphosis.

John Doer: I am scared we are not going to make it.

2007-11-11T09:30:00.001-08:00

Eye Opener

2007-10-07T18:51:00.000-07:00

Call of Life: Facing The Mass Extinction
Uploaded by zendhe

This is a preview from "Call of Life: Facing the Mass Extinction," a feature documentary now in production.

The following content is from the site www.speciesalliance.org/, and aims to bring to light the fears many scientists have that human development at our current pace may lead to the extinction of possibly half of the worlds total species relatively soon.

The loss of biodiversity on earth has become so acute that scientists are now calling it a "mass extinction event." The crisis has many causes, all of which are related to human activity. Through interviews with eminent biologists, psychologists, anthropologists, historians, and many others, the film not only presents the facts of the shocking decline, it also explores the ways in which culture and psychology have conspired to determine our collective and individual response to this situation, and how the latest insights into natural systems could help us turn back the tide.

The film weaves biology, psychology, and cultural history into a clear and accessible story of our changing world. The audience is taken into the depths of the human psyche, through the toughest problems of our times and into the cutting edge of what nature has to teach us. The mass extinction is quite possibly the greatest threat that humanity has ever faced. Those of us alive today have been given a choice—one last opportunity to save the diversity of our planet. The decisions we make or fail to make in the next few years will affect the habitability of earth for millennia to come. This is the greatest adventure of all time—with the future of life itself in the balance.

Reviewing Enterprise 2.0

2007-08-19T10:11:00.000-07:00

What is Web 3.0

2007-08-09T08:59:00.000-07:00

Google’s Eric Schmidt definition:

What do the Net Gen do different from the Boomers

2007-06-28T14:46:00.001-07:00

View Story in Business week

WIFI Zone

2007-06-10T14:09:00.000-07:00

Poblado de EL CUCO, el Salvador, Playa las Flores. 5:30 am

Surfing the Web & the Waves.

Steve Jobs Speech on 1984.

2007-06-01T16:55:00.001-07:00

Howard Rheingold: Where the Use of WEB 2.0 is Taking Us

2007-05-21T14:26:00.000-07:00

Intyeresting interview of HowardRheingold on where the technology is taking us.

Click To Play

Howard Rheingold, chronicler of how technology changes the way we live, work and play, prognosticates how business leaders and organizations will change to adapt to the new technological realities. He argues that leaders will need to have an interdisciplinary understanding of issues, look to the youth in the company for innovation and believe that it is okay to fail. â€œThe organization wall will need to become a permeable membrane" and be "ambidextrous" to stay competitive.

David Blood on Sustainability

2007-05-16T12:37:00.000-07:00

Sustainability investing is the explicit recognition that social, economic, environmental, and ethical factors directly affect business strategy—for example, how companies attract and retain employees, how they manage the risks and create opportunities from climate change, a company’s culture, corporate-governance standards, stakeholder-engagement strategies, philanthropy, reputation, and brand management. These factors are particularly important today given the widening of societal expectations of corporate responsibility.

David Blood, Co-CEO and CEO of Goldman Sachs Asset Management (1999–2003)

For further data ,watch video of discussion between, David Blood, John Elkington, and Al Gore:

Lesson seven: Focus, passion, work, persistance and success

2007-05-13T16:58:00.000-07:00

Perspectives on Triple Bottom line

2007-05-09T17:00:00.000-07:00

20 years as managing director in Investment banking and Private equity funds, looking solely for economic value creation, for a 35% IRR for investors seems difficult to U-turn. But surprisingly, once you pass the intangible threshold (and you find it its not only possible, but the business of this century, which is in the midts of disruptive transformations, that occur faster that we can comprehend) you understand that its not a swerve that occurs but a simple changing of lanes.

Those years of Bulls and Bear... suspenders...

The signals are clear. The largest retailers of the US are adopting sustainable practices; Hundreds of consumers go through Wal Mart and Home Depot every week and receive a message.
(To those that claim greenwashing, I ask, "does it matter"?)
We Media is grouping conscientious consumers in thousands of participating communities; Myspace’s population has reached that of the ten largest countries of the world.

To the point….
My friend Carlos P. made a magnificent comparison today, he compared it to the sunset.
"Do you know", he said, "that between the actual sunset and what we see, there is an eight-minute delay"?
"If the sun had been turned off, we would only realize eight minutes after."

It's a question of time.

Rupert Murdoch: Oportunities of New Media

2007-05-07T15:42:00.000-07:00

Companies that take advantage of this new meaning of network and adapt to the expectations of the networked consumer can look forward to a new golden age of media. Far be it from me to suggest that either I or my company have all the answers. No one does. But the future of media is a future of relentless experimentation and innovation, accelerating change, and--for those who embrace the new ways in which consumers are connecting with each other--enormous potential.
Rupert Murdoch. via Forbes

The Power of the Web 3.0 by Paul Hawken

2007-05-02T06:01:00.000-07:00

Moore’s Law, which predicts that processing power will double in power and halve in price every 18 months, is meeting Metcalfe’s Law, which states that the usefulness of a network grows exponentially with arithmetic increases in numbers of users. These laws enable big corporations just as they do small NGOs, but the latter gain greater advantage because these new technologies amplify smallness more effectively than largeness. Large organizations don’t need networks; small ones thrive on them. Webs are complex systems of interconnected elements that link individual actions to larger grids of knowledge and movement. Web sites link to other sites with more links to other sites ad infinitum, creating a critical, fluid mass of information that evolves and grows as needed—very much like the response of our immune systems. At the heart of all of this is not technology but relationships, tens of millions of people working toward restoration and social justice.

From the book Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came Into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming (Viking). Paul Hawken is the head of the Natural Capital Institute, and author of The Ecology of Commerce, Natural Capitalism (with Amory Lovins) and other books.
taken from the article: The instinct to save the planet, appeared in Ode issue: 43

California. No Drive Day. April 29th

2007-04-26T04:30:00.000-07:00

"California No Drive Day on April 29, 2007. Give yourself and the planet a breather -- be incredibly creative in how you get somewhere that day or be incredibly lazy and go nowhere."

Please, if you live in California, don't drive on April 29, 2007.
That's a Sunday. Take a rest.
Thanks,
Nora Gallagher
Patagonia Environmental Editor

Lesson six: Steve Jobs Speech at Stanford

2007-04-18T18:11:00.000-07:00

Find what you love.
Keep Looking and Don't settle.
Stay Hungry Stay Foolish.

If My Space were a country it would rank 11th between Japan and Mexico

2007-04-17T13:55:00.000-07:00

Lesson five: Our potential to change

2007-04-12T14:30:00.000-07:00

Man has not one and the same life. He has many lives, placed end to end, and that is the cause of his misery.
Chateaubriand.

Does connection create friendship?

2007-04-02T18:08:00.000-07:00

John Mackey: On Entrepreneurs with transcendent purposes

2007-03-28T18:21:00.000-07:00

“Entrepreneurs create their businesses for a diversity of reasons. However, I believe that most of the greatest companies in the world also have great purposes which were discovered and/or created by their original founders and which still remain at the core of their business models. Having a deeper, more transcendent purpose is highly energizing for all of the various interdependent stakeholders, including the customers, employees, investors, suppliers, and the larger communities in which the business participates. While these deeper, more transcendent purposes have unique expressions at each business they also can be grouped into certain well known and timeless categories. Philosophy dates back to Plato; the timeless ideals of “The Good”, “The True”, and “The Beautiful” that humanity has been seeking to create, discover, and express for thousands of years. If we add the ideal of “The Heroic” to the above three we have the framework of higher ideals which most great businesses seek to express in some form or fashion.”

Source: Conscious Capitalism: Creating a New Paradigm for Business

The revolution really has started: More on Patagonia and Wal Mart

2007-03-24T06:38:00.000-07:00

"The revolution really has started," says Yvone Chouniard with a slow, curling and just slightly subversive smile. "I'm blown away by Wal-Mart. If Wal-Mart does one-tenth of what they say they're going to do, it will be incredible. And hopefully America will get a government that we need rather than one we deserve, that will put pressure on business to clean up its act. But the most powerful pressure will come from the consumer. Oh, my God, it's going to be really powerful."

As Chouinard sees it, there's only one downside to this good news: It's probably too late. "There's a race between running out of water, topsoil or petroleum. I don't know what's going to be first. Or maybe it will all happen at once."

Read the Fortune article.

Visit Patagonia Blog

Wal Mart and Sustainability 360: Greenwashing or true change?

2007-03-18T16:45:00.000-07:00

Wal-Mart’s CEO launched “Sustainability 360,” an initiative that involves working with suppliers to reduce packaging by 5% by 2013 – an effort that will be equal to removing 213,000 trucks from the road, and saving approximately 324,000 tons of coal and 67 million gallons of diesel fuel per year.
Wal-Mart's six path strategy focuses on its own environmental footprint and that of its 60,000 suppliers. It has big ambitions to cut the waste sent to landfill, build more energy efficient stores and take "a hard look at what is on our shelves".
The question is: are these thousands of suppliers genuinely trying to understand what sustainability really is? Or are they only changing their practice just enough so as to maintain Wal Mart as a client?
If Wal Mart is strict enough in its policy, and keeps setting higher sustainability standards, does it really matter if suppliers only go after Wal Mart business or if they truly embrace the sustainability phylosophy?
I believe one leads to the other, many companies like Patagonia, Interface, Natura, American Apparel have found the benefits of sustainable Business practices. Currently, Wal Mart and its suppliers are on the way to discovering this.

Paul Hawken, The author of the Ecology of Commerce, defined in a recent interview that "Sustainability comes when the light bulb goes on and you start to see that we are all involved, that everything is interconnected that your actions affect others", and when we do see this, you longer ask, or discuss, if it is right or wrong, you look for a solution.

100 million customers visit Wal Mart every week, many light bulbs should go on in their stores.

Yvon Chouinard lists Patagonia's values, and with them five steps to action> They are I believe, the five best actions to reach sustainability.

Chouinard's five steps.
read the whole essay

STEP 1: Lead an examined life. Most of the environmental damage human’s cause is a result of ignorance.
STEP 2: Clean up your act. Once you learn the environmental costs, try to reduce them. And when you can reduce them, you must.
STEP 3: Do your penance. No matter how diligent a corporation, it causes waste and pollution.
STEP 4: Support civil democracy. It’s obvious that governments and corporations hold a lot of power, but so do small groups of people who care passionately about an issue and press their cause.

STEP 5: Influence other companies. If you undertake the other steps, this one is a natural. The company that discovers new ways to be more environmentally responsible has an obligation to spread the word to others – to share the knowledge of what can be done.

At this moment Wal Mart is leading the influence movement on other companies,
60,000 of them!.

Sustainability vs Survivability

2007-03-16T14:35:00.001-07:00

I have just discovered a new term in Yvon Chouniard's book "Let my people go surfing".
A concept I had never seen applied before, at least for the human race.

Survivability.

To those that have come to understand the philosophy of sustainability, our greatest fear is that this term, could evolve into a more complex and irreversible situation, much beyond unsustainability.
This more "complex situation" has just been presented to me as: Survivability.

Lesson four: By Paul Hawken.

2007-03-16T14:16:00.000-07:00

"If everyone thinks you have a good idea, you're too late"

Chapter Eight: Mass collaboration is "framing" Corporate responsibility.

2007-03-15T13:08:00.000-07:00

Where we’re heading

These three forces –the revolution of the social sector, sustainable development and the participatory media– converge in the dawning of the 21st century to generate a radical change in the way we communicate, do business, and cooperate with the rest of mankind. Each of these currents in turn drives the growth of the others.

The “tipping point”, that moment in which something that is unique will become commonplace, is very near. The signs are out there for all of us to see.

Ordinary people’s participation in the media cannot be turned back. While YouTube, Current TV, and AOL are supplying them with simple publication and edition tools (for blogs, photos, and videos), mainstream sites like those of BBC and CNN are demanding contents created by this rising and powerful army of citizen journalists.

From participatory journalism to interactive advertising

People who increasingly participate in the communications media question and reject unidirectional advertising. And the phenomenon is on the rise. The new individual become global citizen participates and browses the Net as part of his daily activities. He connects when and how he likes. He demands a new relationship with companies and the manner in which the latter promote the sales of their products. Accustomed to conversation (permalink), this individual asks to engage in dialog with companies and expects to be heard by them.

Companies that progressively adopt sustainability practices will be the ones able to engage into and sustain an authentic dialog with their clients. Those that have grasped the fact that, in order to stay successful, they must change their way of extracting raw materials and producing – and reduce their impact on both the environment and humans.

There are myriad consumers looking for corporate information on the Web, talking among themselves about the products they consume and the history behind such products, and reading company blogs. The post on Kryptonite the padlock manufacturer is one of many proofs of the existence of a watchdog community operating via the Internet. They observe, share information, denounce and reward the companies they identify with.

Conscious consumers are creating communities where they review the impact of corporate behaviour (check dotherightthing.com)

The power of networks

The new participatory media is making an unprecedented impact on the social sector as well. Online communities are the natural ecosystem in which change-makers multiply. The tools for this are out there and within everyone’s reach. Thanks to the use of available technologies, every day there arise more people who –like Rodrigo Baggio and Iqbal Quadir– create their own networks for social transformation.

As Bill Drayton said in words quoted above, “if we multiply the number of change-makers from 1% to 20% in the next fifteen years, that will be the most radical change ever witnessed since the agricultural revolution.” The participatory media will have achieved that – and more.

25% of Internet users participate in online communities. Glocalization ensures that, after conversing for hours with people from all over the world who share his interests, the new individual goes out to the street and starts building a commitment towards his neighbors, school, club, and community.

The new Internet, the Web 2.0 (blogs, vlogs, permalink, free software), is creating a space for conversation and universal community. Wikipedia and Ohmy, for their part, have shown that when the community claims ownership of the media, there grows a bond of trust that gives rise to a universal intelligence – where joint striving for the common good and collective building eradicate bad practices.

Our future lies in the weaving of virtual networks, held together by common values and issues. Social participation and sustainability are clearly two dimensions deeply related to awareness, responsibility, and growing commitment. And, faster than we can even begin to envision, the world is heading in that direction.

The media is here and the truth is out there. This conversation has only just begun.

On Corporate Responsibility for Planet Earth

2007-03-12T16:13:00.000-07:00

On Corporate Responsibility for Planet Earth

by Yvon Chouinard
Read the whole essay

As an alpinist who set out to make gear for my friends and never thought of myself as a “businessman” until long after I became one, I’ve wrestled the demons of corporate responsibility for some time. Who are businesses really responsible to? Their shareholders? Their customers? Their employees? None of the above, I have finally come to believe. Fundamentally, businesses are responsible to their resource base. Without a healthy planet there are no shareholders, no customers, no employees. As the conservationist David Brower liked to say, “There is no business to be done on a dead planet.”

But what does behaving responsibly to the environment mean? It took me nearly 25 years in business to learn how to ask that question. It has taken another 15 years of trial and error to uncover the process that Patagonia – or any environmentally minded company – has to go through in pursuit of answers. I think I know how to break that process down to five steps. These steps apply to individuals as well as to companies who want to reduce the harm they do and make a difference.

STEP 1: Lead an examined life.
STEP 2: Clean up your act.
STEP 3: Do your penance.
STEP 4: Support civil democracy.
STEP 5: Influence other companies.

Conclusion

In the end, Patagonia will never be completely socially responsible, nor at any time soon be able to make a totally sustainable (“cradle-to-cradle” recyclable) product. We have a long way to go and we don’t have a map – but we do have a way to read the terrain and to take the next step, and then the next.

SlideShare: Educational Materials on Steroids.

2007-03-12T13:48:00.000-07:00

New Media. New Life

2007-03-11T15:53:00.000-07:00

El País

Del Citi y la city a una vida de película

Patagonia's Environmental Essays: Combining Marketing of products with values

2007-03-10T13:52:00.000-08:00

The Patagonia Catalog might be the best example of creating environmental awareness while marketing products.

Patagonia's 2006-2007 campaign is devoted to de Ocean, In the catalogs, retail stores and on the Web site, they analyze the” vitality of human life and the marine environment".

The recent spring catalog has two very good stories about the human impact on the ocean's degradation.

This is an excerpt of The eye of the Marlin by Dick Russell.

Not so long ago, the ocean's bounty of seafood was believed limitless. Today, the United Nations reports that 75 percent of the world's fish populations are being overfished. Over 3.5 million fishing vessels scour our oceans, utilizing high-tech gear. "Factory" trawlers ensnare 120,000 pounds of fish in a single scoop of the net. Their impact on the seafloor is like fishing with a bulldozer that tears through fragile coral reefs.

Vessels that set 100,000 miles of longlines – holding nearly 5 million hooks – kill over 90 percent of the billfish. Marlin are considered "bycatch" and thrown back dead into the ocean. Both white and blue marlin will soon be on the endangered species list. The majestic bluefin tuna is on the verge of extinction in the western Atlantic, the victim of seines, harpoons and traps. An estimated thousand dolphins and porpoises a day drown in tuna nets.

Read the whole story.

Want to get involved? Visit OCEANA

See All Patagonia's Environmental Essays

Muhammad Yunnus: Beyond Grameen Bank

2007-03-09T08:36:00.000-08:00

Yunus affirms business schools should start turning out social-business MBAs trained in creating social returns: "People say, 'Don't be stupid.' I say there are a lot of stupid people like me. I don't want to make money. Lots of young people don't want to make money, because their mother, their father made so much money. They don't know what to do with their lives. There are many such kids in the U.S. They don't have any challenge left. Give them the challenge: Fix the world. Create a social business enterprise."

"The new wave in business is, forget corporate social responsibility and philanthropy - how do you integrate this into your core business?" says Yunus.

"The idea Danone has of creating a social dividend for shareholders - that's cutting-edge. No one else has come up with this interesting a model. It supports your brand, returns your capital, you're not going to lose money and you give your shareholders a vision of doing something good." he says.

In the fall of 2005, Yunus invited Danone CEO Franck Riboud to come to Bangladesh and build his first social business enterprise. Riboud listened, then agreed. The yogurt Danone would make would be fortified to help curb malnutrition and priced (at 7 cents a cup) to be affordable. All revenue from the joint venture with Grameen would be reinvested, with Danone (Charts) taking out only its initial cost of capital, about $500,000, after three years.

"I am destroying the culture, yes," Yunus says, beaming mischievously at the thought. "Culture is a dynamic thing. If you stay with the same old thing over and over, you don't get anywhere."

The same applies to Yunus's concept of microcredit. Sticking with the same old idea over and over only gets you so far. To really get somewhere, Yunus says ... well, there's this Big New Idea.

Read the Whole story at CNN.

Wal Mart and Unilever. Responible production - distribution.

2007-03-09T06:30:00.000-08:00

In late 2005, Unilever management sat with Wal Mart’s CEO, Lee Scott, to convince him that they could save, per year, 16 million liters of water, 113.500 liters of diesel, six million kilos of plastic and 630 thousand square meters of carton . The product, the All Small and Mighty, with sales over $100 million, became Wal Mart 's Value Producing Item and Unilever’s most successful launched product of 2006.

Saving Africa: New media, Branding, Blogging or Second Life?

2007-03-07T13:52:00.000-08:00

Saving Africa has become a worldwide crusade:
Google shows 73,900,000 Results / options for save africa. in (0.11 seconds)
but amazingly there is only One Sponsored Link.

The world is screaming for awareness on Africa’s problems, and hopefully, we will soon demand solutions.

It seems as if we are reaching a moment of understanding, where the problems of Africa are no longer theirs, but ours, of all of us, as we realize that we are all members of a small global community called planet earth.

Will we produce solutions? Or we will just keep building an intolerable consciousness on the subject.
Bill Drayton says: Understanding the problem is halfway to the solution.

But People need to be responsibly informed in order to understand.
Apparently New Media is coming up with some interesting ways of doing so.
Here are someexamples:
Discussion in the blogosphere: Technorati throughs 62,405 Blogs discussing save africa, this is one of them
There is version of Camp Darfur in Second Life for anybody wanting to have a virtual experience of walking through a ghosttown of a refugee camp, victimized by years of torture and genocide.
Second Life also offers a live discussion with Mia Farrow on the problems of Darfur

and the assortment of videos in YouTube on the matter:

Which brings us to Bono and the critisizim he is receiving for the outcome of Product Red campaign: They spent 100 Million dollars on marketing people the idea of consuming RED products but the commercial results, for those waiting for this money in Africa, were a disaster, since they only raised 18 million dollars.

But if conciousness is one of the necessary steps to a solution, Bono’s actions are having a positive impact: He constantly brings the Africa HIV problem to the head lines. People are listening. They are reacting. Maybe the first step to resolve this problem is wearing a RED distinctive product. Maybe this is the only way Bono can contribute to this cause.
But which is yours?
Get informed

EPIC: Stile and consumption meet Sustainability

2007-03-03T07:17:00.000-08:00

Click for video

What fuels this new Movement?

Growing emphasis on transparency throughout the international business world.
Mounting influence of ideas about corporate social responsibility.
Consumer demand for authenticity in commercial products.
Increasing global calls to eliminate poverty.
Rising pressure to protect nature.
More companies concerned about diminishing natural resources.

Source: Meindert Brouwer's forthcomming book Amazon Your business, via Ode.

Eco consciousness in Patagonia thanks to Youtube

2007-02-27T13:52:00.000-08:00

The Morenito lake

Last summer the practice water skiing on some Patagonian lakes suddenly went out of control. A significant increase of tourism, the economic reactivation combined with state deflated gas prices summoned, on any given sunny day, dozens of outboard motor boat fanatics.
Powerboats took a preference to the wind-shielded, still waters of the Morenito.

The ecosystem was deeply impacted as the natural habitat of black-necked swans and rainbow trout gave way to oily and raucous sketches of risky crisscrossing wave trails.
While authorities were well aware of the situation they acted obliviously to the many letters of eco conscious neighbors, kayakers and fishermen.

The impact of Cybermedia.
YouTube changed everything; all I had to do was to post this short video describing a normal summer day.

Suddenly the reality was there, accessible to anybody anytime. Over a thousand visits to Youtube echoed the mails that people were interchanging on the matter. In no time, the video link was reaching the local authorities. Not just another complaint letter to be filed in a drawer.
Two months after the video was posted the practice of waterski on the Moreno lake was banned altogether.

The video.

The Municipality resolution.

A letter sent by a neighbor describing some of this summer events.

Hi Ernesto,

Just wanted to thank you for all you have done to recover the tranquility of our Morenito!

Your campaign was successful; there was no skiing in the lake.

Things were rather funny: the day after you left (and during my siesta...) a group of 4 boats arrived jointly, took as base Scioli's place and started skiing.
One boat even stopped at your floating sign and spray painted it.

Well, some 5-6 kayaks showed up trying to stop them. I jointed, with Marina, in our gomon - camera and Prefectura's resolution in hand.
We had some very unpleasant discussions with the Sioli's friends and a tough (but more or less reasonable) conversation with this Repetto guy.
They finally left.

Susana Jimenez organized for the next day a visit of Prefectura. They showed up by boat and car. Whilst the boat patrolled the area, Susana visited with the Prefecto
Some neighbors. Since than Prefectura comes once a week.

The other day, apparently a newcomer, started skiing and immediately an armada of floating devices covered the lake. We saw these people never again.

Doubtless all neighbors appreciate the new situation, it is wonderful to see the lake with sometimes more than 25 windsurfer, rowing boats, canoes etc, plus people swimming without fear.

Susana than also invested a bottle of nail polisher to clean up your sign.

When we left it was common knowledge in Llao Llao that the Morenito was off-limit for skiing, actually plenty of outside kayaks come to visit.

Mission completed!

Regards to everybody

J

The sign painted by disagreen skiers.

Chapter seven: The Global Citizen, Sustainable Development Consciousness

2007-02-27T11:34:00.000-08:00

“The medium, or process, of our time – electric technology is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life. Everything is changing: you, your family, your education, your neighborhood, your job, your government, your relation to the others. And they're changing dramatically".

Marshall McLuhan, communication theorist

A new individual is arising. For two years we have seen these people pass like a shadow, but we haven’t lost their trail. They are people who are conscious of their role in society and participate through the media. And the medium of our era is digital technology.

The new individual is a global citizen who is connected to the world and online. Not surfing but googling. These people don’t passively receive information, but participate – mistrust traditional media, and challenge them.

“Besides breathing, what else do you do more than 3,000 times a day? What you do, or rather what you get done to you, is receive thousands of messages aimed at making you buy something”. Paul Hawken, author of The Ecology of Commerce

The new individual no longer watches a 30-minute news program or spends hours in front of the paper, but rather, on turning his personal computer on every morning (or entering a cybercafé), finds the news services he chose to subscribe to on the screen. He converses online and doesn’t want to be directed. He no longer writes to the paper’s “Readers’ Mail” page, but prefers the immediacy of Internet – and interacting to making speeches.

Signs: We are connected
• In Latin America, cell phones rapidly reached every social class and age group. Considered luxury goods or a working tool a few years ago, cell phones are now used by teenagers to send text messages (SMS) to their friends, by parents to know where their children are, by wives to know at what time their husbands will get home, and by those living in underprivileged neighborhoods, where telephone networks still haven’t arrived.
• Broadband connectivity is likewise reaching critical levels. Some access the new media via their laptop computers or iPods, and the majority of people do so at a cybercafé for less than 20 US cents an hour.
• 40,000 people participated in a cyber-activism campaign in Argentina. Encouraged by Greenpeace, they sent SMS from their cell phones so that Buenos Aires legislators would pass a “zero-garbage” law. It was a success.
• An amazing 500,000 million SMS are exchanged every year worldwide.

From consumer to selector
“By the time he or she finishes high school, an American teenager will have watched 350,000 commercial ads. The average adult watches 21,000 commercials a year. We are taught to identify car models rather than bird species, so much that we can identify a thousand brand logos but less than ten native trees. Besides breathing, what else do you do more than 3,000 times a day? What you do, or rather what you get done to you, is receive thousands of messages aimed at making you buy something,” remarked Paul Hawken in 1992, author, among other books, of The Ecology of Commerce.

The new individual, on the contrary, selects what he consumes, refusing to be overwhelmed and convinced by advertising to buy a certain product. Not accepting sales ads at face value, he wants to have things explained to him, wants to be engaged in dialog, to be heard – and is consequently more and more reluctant towards traditional advertising strategies.

The new individual does not reject consuming, but rather (since there was never so much information available regarding the history behind each product) makes, for the first time, purchase decisions based on companies’ ethical behavior. Pioneer brands such as American Apparel, Patagonia and Camper have made him used to reading labels, to learning which are the clean technologies and how his decisions can make a difference in issues of concern such as environment, labor and health. He is aware, and becomes a fan of trusted brands. He looks for authenticity and reacts strongly against deception and shallowness.

The new individual = The global citizen

Chilean students used SMS, MSN, and other Internet tools to paralyze all the schools in their country. With their students’ strike, they forced Michelle Bachelet’s government to promote a change in educational policies.

Local and global
According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project research entitled “Online Communities: Networks that nurture long-distance relationships and local ties”, some 45 million people who participate in online communities say that Internet has helped them connect with other persons or groups with shared interests, regardless of distance. Research also discovered that these virtual relationships are becoming offline interactions. “Internet also helps people increase their contacts with other people they already know and who live in their community,” the report concludes.

With regard to this, French-Canadian philosopher Hervé Fischer affirms that digital technologies offer more than one alternative to build a society that is more equitable and humanistic: “We have to go from the society of competitive loneliness to the society of shared responsibilities and solidarities. We have to create a ‘hyperhumanism’: a new social model based, like the digital hypertext, on links.”

Glocalization
That’s what the phenomenon is called. It refers to Internet’s aptitude for widening the social world of people who are physically far apart (global level) while at the same time connecting them in a deeper manner with the place they live in and their immediate surroundings (local level). It is thus that users start to gain awareness of problems afflicting their communities and to look for answers to those problems. They start wanting to cooperate, worrying about what happens on the block, at their schools, to their neighbors.

It’s just a few steps from this shared interest to the weaving of a web, a social and digital network. To thinking globally and acting locally.

The new individual:

• Creates.........................................Wikipedia
• Communicates ........................... RSS / Permalink
• Cooperates ..................................Glocalization

Chapter six: Sustainability, Triple bottom line, a new Corporate Consumer relationship

2007-02-23T11:43:00.000-08:00

“I managed Interface as a looter, taking things that were not mine. Things that belong to every creature on Earth. At some point I realized: Oh my God! There will come a time when this will be illegal. A time when looting won’t be allowed. Some day, people like me will end up in jail”.
Ray Anderson, chairman and CEO, Interface

A recent survey carried out by The Synergos Institute in several countries shows that 95% of consumers believe that companies have a debt towards their employees and the community. It also indicates that 3 of every 10 English consumers either chose or boycotted brands, products, or companies for ethical reasons in the last 12 months.
It would indeed look as if we are converging, little by little, at the same manner of thinking. The same ethos. Sustainable development, a concept that leads us not to live beyond our possibilities –– not to burn down our house to keep ourselves warm, or cut the tree branch we are sitting on. A concept that leads us to attend to current needs without jeopardizing future generations’ possibilities, in the words of Swiss philanthropist and businessman Stephan Schmidheiny. Actually, this concept is sheer common sense: the one that drives us to close the faucet while we are brushing our teeth.
Because of these and other signs, pioneer brands are already working on integrating the sustainability of their positioning strategies and communicating it to their publics. They understand the imperious need to establish a new relationship with their consumers.

Signs: Model companies and responsible consumers
• Toyota Motor Co. created sedan Prius, the first low-cost mass-produced electric car. By this means it expects to reach 15% of worldwide sales of hybrids, which would entail beating General Motors as the planet’s greatest automobile manufacturer.
• The annual sales of Interface –one of the world’s largest carpet manufacturers– add up to about USD one million-million a year. Since the company started its sustainability initiatives, it has saved more than USD 70 million. For the year 2020, Interface has set itself the challenge of becoming the first sustainable industrial company on the planet.
• Brazilian cosmetics company Natura was, back in the 80s, one of the first in the world to incorporate the concept of “refill”, thus proving its concern for its products’ environmental impact. Today, holding 19% of the market, it is the leader of its sector in South America – a brand valued at 113% of annual sales, and having grown 32% in sales in 2 years.
• No less than 84% of consumers in Brazil would recommend products that assign a percentage of their sales to a social cause or a NGO.
• 40% of consumers in Chile have punished or are willing to punish irresponsible companies.
• In Argentina, 51% of consumers are willing to pay more for products from companies that show they are socially responsible.
• According to the World Bank, European consumers have refused to buy American genetically modified foods.
• On the other hand, the USA –under pressure from its consumers–forbade the importation of tuna fish from Mexico due to that country’s not having prevented the killing of dolphins while fishing.

Nike: Change of habits
The world’s great economic and media groups base their business model on their capacity to influence the needs, desires and lifestyles of their consumers. But what happens when consumers voluntarily change their habits? Market researches have already identified a new consumer that rewards socially and environmentally committed companies while punishing irresponsible ones. Consequently, in order to stay competitive, companies must adjust their business model and anticipate new demands. Some pioneer brands have already found an innovative way of communicating with this new client.
In the aftermath of the scandal caused by its use of sweatshops (as denounced in Naomi Klein’s book No Logo), Nike started manufacturing in a cleaner, more responsible manner. “We know from experience how much a brand can suffer when its practices are questioned,” say company presidents Mark Parker and Charlie Denson. The company launched the Nike Considered line of products, incorporating organic cotton. Furthermore, it changed the values reflected in its advertising campaigns. “I don’t play for prizes,” affirms Ronaldinho, Brazilian football’s star player, in one of the brand’s recent ads.

Kryptonite: Consumers to power
Many are the companies have implemented decisive transformations in their way of doing business. They have understood that, in this new environment, brands must bare their souls, mission, sense, and commitment to a world that both desires and needs to be sustainable. They have understood also that deception cannot be gotten away with and that, in this era, consumers simply cannot be ignored.
Kryptonite is a manufacturer of bicycle padlocks. One year ago, a user posted in a blog that their “high security” padlocks could be opened with a pen. The company tried to ignore this and discredit the comment. A few days later, there appeared on the Internet a video showing that the padlocks were truly “made of butter”. Stubbornly, Kryptonite issued a press release insisting that they were safe. Then, another few days later, the story appeared in the New York Times, making an approximate 5 million readers aware of the episode. Kryptonite finally announced that it would change all the padlocks at an estimated cost of USD 10 million.

“We want to be happy and content and not to exploit our employees. We are interested in music, hedonistic, and love sex.”
Dov Charney, founder, American Apparel

American Apparel: The business of doing things right
American Apparel is located in downtown Los Angeles, where all the cotton garments the company manufactures are cut and sewn. While a great part of the textile industry has opted for foreign labor plants –located mainly in those countries where labor force is much cheaper than in the USA– American Apparel intended from the very start to distance itself completely from the so-called “sweatshops”. The company treats its employees with dignity and respect, besides offering them salaries that are way higher than the average, medical benefits and paid holidays.

This strategy has paid off fairly well: today, American Apparel is considered to be among the ten most growing companies in the country within its sector. In the period spanning the years 2000-2004, its sales increased 900%, compared with the 12,9% growth of the garment industry in the USA. Competitors GAP and H&M reached 40% and 76% respectively. For Dov Charney, founder and owner since 1997, the success of this no-logo brand can be explained thus: “Our aim is to make clothes that people like, without employing slave labor. And it seems that people are liking them…”

The future is here
The following news, published towards the end of the year 2006, show that the world has already changed.

• On September 20th, the State of California filed huge claims against six large car manufacturing companies for their responsibility regarding global warming. General Motors, Toyota, Ford, Honda, Chrysler, and Nissan were sued for manufacturing millions of vehicles that release 289 million tons of carbon dioxide a year into the atmosphere.
• “This is not a hobby. We aren’t doing it to improve our reputation or to feel good,” said Gary Sheffer to ABC channel. Mr. Sheffer is Communications and Public Affairs Manager of General Electric, whose sales of environment-friendly products have grown 100% in 2005, reaching a total of USD 10,000 million.
• “We want to transform the world’s largest supermarket chain into the greenest one, and to transform our suppliers as well,” says Lee Scott, CEO of Wal-Mart, the greatest buyer of organic cotton on the planet.

Sustainable human development
It’s part of the business already. It’s not certain whether it was consumers, activists, or pioneering businesspeople that set it in motion – but, sometime while we were all discussing its signs, the change began.

Triple Bottom Line
This term refers to a company’s results, measured in economic, environmental, and social terms, as expressed in the corporate reports of sustainable development-committed companies. For the time being, these measurements are voluntary. 68% of Western European multinational corporations currently carry out this kind of measurement, while in the USA, even though the figure is lower at a current 41%, the increase is still dizzying. In every case, companies presenting this kind of analysis have realized, before the rest, that in the immediate future consumers will become more and more responsible – and will demand to know the economic, environmental, and social impact of the products they reward with purchase.

“An authentic brand has to decide what it will give from itself. It must answer itself difficult questions. Who are we? What is our mission? How do we want to contribute to the world? This is the greatest challenge brands must face today: to rediscover their inspiration. It’s a process that can only be carried out by looking inwards, with less market research and more self-evaluation”.
Jay Walljasper, editor, Ode

Chapter Five: Wikipedia, collective intelligence and the long tail participation

2007-02-22T04:42:00.000-08:00

“The call is historic because it doesn’t issue from a political party. It issues from the Internet, and it’s democratic because there are cybercafés everywhere. The Web is the weapon, and that’s why old politicians don’t understand what’s happened. They only use it to look at naked chicks”.
Chilean student

Our global society is in the early stages of what could be a media revolution as great as that produced by Gutenberg’s printing press in 1448: the birth of the participatory media. The era of the mass media, which began in the twentieth century, is undergoing a crisis. The way in which people connect to information is being crucially changed by a series of technological modifications. There has been born a new force of citizen journalists, armed with photograph-taking cell phones, connected via the Web and with blogs as their means of publishing.
The question is how does one join the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle without knowing what the final picture looks like? By starting at the edges. That is why we certainly cannot predict the exact shape the communications media will take as a result of this revolution. Neither do we know what kind of citizen will arise as a consequence of the use of the participatory media. But at the edges of the system we perceive signs of change whose impact we can already see.

The long tail
The Internet made a U-turn after the 2001 collapse of the dot-coms. After the bubble burst, the only survivors were the software, sites and proposals that form the so-called Era of the Web 2.0. And this is not just about the Internet – because, in its infrastructure, it implies not only access to the Web (which has been in existence for decades) but also a widely spread, always-online broadband access. An access in which uploading speed will soon match downloading speed.
In the new model, small sites constitute the majority of Internet contents. Google’s success (and that of its advertising service, Google AdSense) lay in reaching the entire Web – the extremes and not just the center, the long tail and not just the head.
Thus, the most competitive companies will be those that reach a critical mass of information thanks to users’ participation and transform said contributions into system services. The challenge: to turn clients and consumers into contributors.

Signs: I participate, you participate, we participate
• Around November 2005, 57% of American youths created Internet contents, from texts to photographs, music and videos (source: Pew Internet & American Life Project).
• You can browse over 25 million blogs in the Technorati directory. The blogosphere has grown 100 times in 3 years.
• In the relatively small market of Argentina, 1 million people are broadband services subscribers. In any small town in the country, one can use Internet at a cybercafé for twenty US cents an hour.
• An Online Publishers Association research carried out in February 2006 has shown that 69% of American users had seen videos on the Internet, that 24% did it at least once a month, and that 5% did it every day .

Ohmy News, CNN & BBC: The birth of citizen journalism
In South Korea, Ohmy News, an online newspaper created by Oh Yeon Ho, a journalist retired from the traditional media, receives 2 million visits a day. But his newspaper has no editorial office or staff, no war correspondents, no prestigious columnists. Just 33,000 ordinary citizens who contribute their articles. It also possesses a rating system that places the most-read notes above the rest. A further novelty: just as people at a bar or restaurant leave a tip, Ohmy News readers can make small donations when they enjoy their reads. One article made USD 30,000 in one day. But Ohmy News is not an isolated case. The CNN has just launched the CNN Exchange section for the rising citizen journalism – where the public can upload texts, photos and videos. “Send in your story. Share your ideas. Leave your mark,” they urge. The English BBC, through its website, also encourages its users to participate. In that country, photos taken with cell phones during the London metro attacks surpassed any expression from the traditional media.

Wikipedia, the collective intelligence
Wikipedia is the best example of a novelty – collective intelligence. This free, user-written online encyclopedia already boasts 1 million articles in the English version and is 12 times bigger than the printed version of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Over 100,000 people from all over the world have contributed to the building of it. It has more visitors than the New York Times and CNN sites, among others. And it has been in existence for only five years.

We, the media
Every second that passes, a new blog is created in the world, according to the blog-searching engine Technorati. 50,000 new posts (entries of information, texts, photos or videos) are entered every hour. And yet a blog is more than a personal page such as have existed since the nineties – the difference being that now the new technologies allow us to link one blog with another, subscribe, and receive a notification every time the blog changes. It’s not just a link; it’s a “permalink”. The permalink is what has transformed blogs from a publishing tool into a conversation tool. From this chaos of dialoging and superimposing communities, the discussion has arisen. The Chat appeared. A “we, the media” world appeared. A world in which the audience is deciding what’s important.
It was none other than Charles Johnson, a blogger, who discovered that a photograph from the international news agency Reuters about the Israel-Hezbollah conflict had been digitally adulterated. The agency had to apologize publicly and withdraw from its files that and a further 920 pictures taken by photographer Adnan Hajj, who was fired.

The time of the Mojos
Research on audience tastes indicates that people increasingly want local news, sports, entertainment, climate, and traffic information, and less agency-produced, long reports repeated ad nauseam throughout the media. People expect to be told shorter stories and to be given relevant information. Based on this information, Gannett, the greatest newspaper group in the world, is trying to make its journalists focus on more local issues. That’s why it has invested in “mojos” (mobile journalists) equipped with laptop computers and always out in the streets, where things are taking place that matter to the community.

Clip culture: vlogs
Towards the beginning of 2006, the vlog (video blog) Rocket Boom was being watched by 350,000 people a day , half of which are outside the USA. A perfectly ordinary girl who every day issued her own three- to five-minute television program on the Internet, giving her own peculiar vision of reality. The cost of producing that program? Twenty dollars a day, plus a USD 14,000 Sony HDV camera and a set in producer Andrew Baron’s apartment in New York’s West Side.
YouTube was born in December 2005 out of the simple idea of making it easier to upload homemade videos to the Web. A million videos had already been published before its official launching. Halfway through 2006, 50,000 videos a day had been uploaded, and people were watching some 100 million videos a day. And these are figures that keep growing.
Contents change, supporting devices change too. Multimedia reproducers become portable. Users download videos to watch in their iPods or cell phones. Entertainment has ceased to be a synonym for sitting on the sofa in front of a square box. Reception moments become more personal.

The end of the media as we know them
For the first time in more than a century, ordinary citizens represent a challenge to the few corporations dominating the mass media. Borders between audience and communicators become blurred and sometimes downright invisible. The old media model was “there is a source of truth”. The new model is “there are multiple sources of truth, and together we’ll determine which are the most important contents and values”. An Oxford professor’s blog can become as popular as that of a Shanghai secretary telling about the trivial details of her daily life in China. The decision is in people’s hands.

Challenges
Questions arise: How will the brands make use of these new media? How do they want to talk with the new, participative citizen? Even though the media may have become sophisticated, successful models demonstrate that their strategy is among the oldest – telling stories. The challenge is thus to tell stories that move, inspire and promote participation.

Sustainability and Triple Bottom Line surf the disruptive wave of New media

2007-02-21T06:36:00.000-08:00

Cannibals with forks is probably the best book on Sustainable development since Paul Hawken’s The Ecology of Commerce. Fifteen years later, John Elkington, its author, and Chairman of Strategy consultants, SustainAbility, identifies seven revolutions that are already transforming the world of business. Transcending another diagnosis, and in an attempt to start walking the talk, he goes on to define the Thirty-nine steps to sustainability. We will elaborate more on future posts, for now check SustainAbility.com.

Elkington suggests that we are already seeing the emergence of a new- or renewed -set of values, many of which will be central to the sustainability transition. He defines sustainability “as a new form of value which society will demand and which successful businesses will deliver through transformed markets”.
This is a different approach to the traditional WBCSD or Schmidheiny’s definition.
I admire Elkington’s exactness in the affirmation “society will demand”, a concept we have been emphasizing for some time both in this blog and in the more elaborated Spanish version “el viaje de Odiseo”.

I am convinced that this demand will be the most critical factor of change, it will be sudden, decisive and of great impact. Most businesses will no even know where it is coming from since the power force behind it is strengthening and escalating in what we have defined as the New Web, We Media or the upcoming Web 3.0.

Elkington goes on to affirm that the revolution "is under way and is fueled by growing international transparency, and it will accelerate. This process is itself being driven by the coming together of new value systems and radically different information technologies”.

Due to its publishing date (1997-99) the book does not mention the changes profound changes in the Web 2.0. (which I might have overly stressed in this blog).
We clearly concur that powerful forces are colliding for a major change in the way we produce, consume and communicate. He defines seven revolutionary forces: Markets, Values, Transparency, Life-cycle technology, Time, Partnerships and Corporate Governance.

The “tipping point” (a term coined by Malcolm Gladwell to define the moment when something unique and unusual becomes normal) has come so much closer to occur since then, and it is about to take place, if it has not yet.

I coincide with his seven drivers, but I am convinced that since the publication of this book three of them have proven deeper in strength and have confirmed the erosion of the foundations of twentieth century capitalism: a profound value shift in society, an anew business conscience and the transparency new web technologies have instated.

Business will find its thinking, priorities, commitments, Elkington affirms, and activities under increasingly intense scrutiny worldwide. Some forms of disclosure will be voluntary, but others will evolve with little direct involvement from most companies. He convincingly concludes, “The transparency revolution is out of control”.

Wikinomics meets the Long tail

2007-02-20T07:17:00.000-08:00

I have just finished two incredible books: Wikinomics and the Long tail.

My summary on them is the following:

The change already occurred.
In 2004 ITunes redefined the music industry. In 2005 Skype redefined global communications: In only one year, its user base went from one hundred thousand to one hundred million.
In 2006, as amateur blogs began turning the attention away from mainstream media, a new participative and programmable web appeared to rapidly stamp out the static web altogether.
In this sense, Blogger outgrew CNN, Wikipedia replaced Britannica, MySpace outgrew Friendster, Craigslist -Monster and Flickr - Webshots.
Then, You Tube redefined the video industry altogether by introducing the revolutionary concept of “user generated content”. These events prove that this new Web 2.0 is not disruptive in itself, but a platform for thousands of potential new disruptions.

A new era has commenced, one that is characterized by community, collaboration and self-organization.
Having matured beyond its years as a static presentation medium and a collection of stationary documents, the new web is now an actively running conversation.
Its foundations have launched new dynamic forms of community and creative expression.
It has become a massive playground of information bits that are actively shared and openly remixed into a fluid participatory tapestry.
Billions of individuals are connected and actively participating in a different approach towards social development and the creation of a new economic democracy.
The new community principles are: openness, peering, sharing and acting globally.
If we would chart the impact of these changes on business economics, the line currently seems to maintain a gradual ascent, but we are about to experience a steep ascending boost in the graphics as a new generation get out of school and flow into the workplace.
This is the generation that is empowering the new Web.
Connected most of the time they are becoming to be known as the Net Gen. While their parents are passive consumers of media, this new generation are active creators of media and web content. They are participants, not just observers, and therefore they have incredible access to information.
The computer is no longer a static box, but an amazing doorway for interaction.
According to a Pew investigation 57% of them are active content creators and most upload it to the web.
While the boomer generation value loyalty, seniority, security, and authority, the Net Gen treasure openness, innovation, mobility and authenticity.
Their constant participation seems to be characterized by the strong Ethos they demonstrate in their sense of common good and collective social and civic responsibility.
This new entire generation is growing up grouping into thousands of cultural tribes connected by shared interests and less by geographic proximity.
Their tastes are more diverse than the thousand of marketing plans being fired at them. This will signify a radical change for marketers since faith in advertising and the institutions that pay for it, is disappearing, while faith on the individuals is on the rise. Peers trust peers. Top-down messaging is losing traction, while bottom up buzz is gaining power.
As the boundaries between the enterprise and the market dissolve, the opportunity to bring Net Gen and other customers into a relationship of trust with the enterprise in a conversation where stakeholders become cocreators of value, possibly presents the most exiting long-term engine of change and innovation the world will ever see.
We are entering a time where a company’s brand is not what the company says it is but what Google says it is.
This new Web is based on recommendations, where word of mouth becomes even more powerful and the marketing of brands is been amplified by the interactive effect of peer recommendations.
Web Word of Mouth participation is transforming the information age into the recommendation age
More and more use the mass medium less and less. And more and more will soon be most.
In this framework, a new kind of business is emerging: one that opens its doors, one were transparency is a powerful new force for business success, and in which certain companies will have a lead role in redefining marketing and advertising techniques, where trust will be the essence of a new relationship and partnership between companies and customers.
Firms that create trust-based relationship with their stakeholders through this interactive Web, will be able to take advantage of sprouting business ecosystems that create incredible value, originated in these participative and peering relationships between the thousands of vibrant communities online.

We Media final conclusions: The influence of online communities on corporate behavior.

2007-02-14T13:58:00.000-08:00

As the Web evolves beyond 2.0, thank to open source participative software, people are finding each other online around shared interests, and although these thousands of active communities are not tangible, they are real, this is a not virtual phenomenon as many assume.
Geography is been redefined and becoming totally irrelevant as a Brazilian organic grower starts sharing real time information and content in an extremely efficient knowledge created partnership with a New Zealand farmer who shares his same passion.
This goes further than getting information from Wikipedia, it is no longer about downloading content, people are grouping in specialty communities revolutionizing decision making processes in a way it never seen before. Consumption, production and communication patterns are changing as people, influenced by others they trust online, share news, information create a collective intelligence and constructive partnerships. Since this is a web occurrence, most people are not aware of the enormous activity that is taking place online, since in our “real” world everything flows as usual, but we are about to get our heads up when Technorati will soon announce 100 million registered bloggers and MySace 200 million users online.
Since the demographics are so overwhelmingly young and the Millennials are not in power positions, we are not experiencing yet any real transformation in behavioral patterns nor corporate changes. But these adolescents, that are now partying online, will soon be making corporate, political, and consumer decisions in the real world. They are accustomed to watch little television, and since they access the news online they seldom read newspapers. They do not respond to traditional marketing campaigns or advertisers. They respond to each other. Their trendsetters are their peers on MySpace, people who they trust. Opposed to us, the boomers, they are not to be influenced by mass media, they decide for themselves.
They are accustomed to the constant exchange of ideas online; therefore corporate communications will have to change dramatically in order to dialogue with, and between, these new stakeholders.
As these increasing online communities seem to build themselves around common interests and goals, companies that want to develop relationships, will have to open up and integrate management, employee and customer blogs into a common blogosphere where product, corporate responsibility and customer information will be shared in Wiki like platforms.
Stakeholder’s active participation will probably outgrow customer reviews, and powerful new models of production and consumption will be created based on a new integration of community collaboration and self-organization.

We Media Miami conclusions (III): Entering the Web 3.0

2007-02-13T04:28:00.000-08:00

Due to deep changes in technology triggered by open source software and new collaborative media we a defining what some already call the Web 3.0.
As Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams define it in their recently published Wikinomics:
“ This new participation has reached a tipping point where new forms of mass collaboration are changing how goods and serviced are invented, produced, marketed and distributed on a global basis. This change presents far-reaching opportunities for every company and every person that gets connected.”
"MySpace, YouTube, Linux and Wikipedia – today’s exemplars of mass collaboration- are just beginning..."
In their book they go on to describe seven unique forms of peer production that are making the economy more dynamic and productive, and we will discuss more about this in future posts.
But what they affirm in the quoted test is true it is just the beginning of an incredible revolution in of mass collaboration.
My-Wi-Li-You is my aphorism to describe these four revolutionary first entrants to the Wikinomics era, the Fords, the Bells, Sears and Procter’s of this century.
Following with the WE Media Miami conclusions, a new question arises: when the audience, this new participative individual take the overall control of the web and the true Web is born, the Web 3.0, a Web that requires identity, true collaboration and commitment, will “Mywiliyou” survive???.

Jason Pontin, editor in chief and publisher of the MIT's Technology Review, is skeptical about YouTube, “it has not become a journalistic media”
He affirms that Splashcast, recently reviewed, is the “coolest” concept, and will probably challenge YouTube/Google to adapt the concept of user-generated video.
He also states that Blinkxs will revolutionize search video content. Searching text is easy since you can identify words, but searching for video content has been impossible to now. “Blinkx lets you find what you want in video”.

MySpace will evolve with adolescence usage, and as their participants grow up in social media and the Millennials get their fist job, or go to college, MySpace grow out of puberty and probably a new and different MySpace more aligned to the new times will grab the youngsters attention. It is difficult to keep leadership when the audience has the control, as we have seen with MTV, which is paying the consequence of entering adulthood.

We Media Miami conclusions (II): Participation, the end of anonymity, the demise of traditional advertising

2007-02-12T14:48:00.000-08:00

Broadcasting and telecommunication managers initially envisioned Internet as another distribution conduit to channel more content and advertising to the rapidly growing PC user market.
It was aimed at the broadest possible audiences, those anonymous masses they already reached through their TV, Cable and Radio frequencies.
As such, Internet was initially thought as a download content distribution media and the same agencies that created advertising campaigns for corporations, cloned the simple and successful billboards into Web banners, convinced that the same business model would work.
It didn’t, as the Internet Ecommerce evolved to a Web 2.0 Me media, advertisers discovered that the same communication formula wasn’t working. The audience was different, it was not passive individual, but an active participant who actually expected companies to stop “selling” and start dialoging, who wanted companies to speak a common language, that of the participatory media. People were searching for relevant contents to be informed, to learn, but also wanted to construct a personal history, and participate. They were “uploading” and sharing personal information. And as the Millennials appeared, a new standpoint appeared regarding Web identities: the posted pictures, comments, preferences, recommendations and ranks. They tagged and linked and voted. And as the chat evolved to MSN and blogs, identities became relevant and as important as the participation itself.

Credit card numbers together with Ebay reputation and Amazon preferences evolved to information of who we are as people, our interests, in music, books, and media. Our passions, secrets and habits are increasingly shared with our MySpace friends, our new community. We entered a new era, that of We Media, an era of radical change for media companies and marketers.
As Chris Anderson states in his recently published book the Long tail & Long Tail Blog:
“Faith in advertising and the institutions that pay for it is waning, while faith in individuals is on the rise. Peers trust peers. Top-down messaging is losing traction, while bottom-up buzz is gaining power. A Company’s brand is no longer what the company says it is, but what Google says it is.”

Peer Word of Mouth is more important in the decision making process that a product advertising campaigns, as Zara the Spanish apparel company confirmed in a recent study: peer recommendations, accounted for 39% of the purchasing decision of their customers while conventional advertising only impacted in a 27%.

As Anderson points out, "remarkable democratizing forces are remarkably un-democratizing industries".

We Media is here.

We Media Miami conclusions (I): The death of printed newspapers

2007-02-11T01:34:00.000-08:00

The death of printed Media in 10 to 20 years?

Although it seems impossible to Oldmedians, and most of them are skeptical or deny it, think of this: Millennials, this new user-generating content self publish generation, is just flowing out of high school and they are not accustomed to reading printed newspapers in order to access the news.
Most Oldmedians say "but.... you need to hold something in your hands to read it", listen up, if this is true, for those that have this habit, of holding something in their hands, known as “the hold & Fold” factor, EInc, out of MIT will be launching a revolutionary slim sheet that beams custom made information from the internet.
Sony’s reader, although not as flexible, will also be in the market this year.

But......Don’t underestimate the Oldmedians, Big media will catch up pretty fast, Oldmedians are listening. The We Media convention was outbalanced by these “media elites”, networking, listening and learning. Newspaper editors worldwide are learning from the blogosphere, and although it seams that blogs are to drive the mayor media, this will probably won't be so......

BlackBerry on a Sustainable Development campaign

2007-02-10T06:59:00.000-08:00

Has BlackBerry decided to associate its new campaign to the sustainable development “green” movement that Wall Mart and GE embraced last year?
We will probably see more of these ads where BlackBerry speaks through committed environmentally friendly leaders.

"I'm passionate about sustainable environment. Our premium homecare products are bringing green to mainstream. In the last three years, the company experienced 3,400% growth, kicking off a tidal wave of demands on my time. I never stop moving. Firing up a laptop isn’t going to happen. Blackberry gives me fingertip access to what I need. And I guess most importantly, it helps me manage my own sanity." Says Adam Lowry co-founder of Method products Inc.

We media Miami

2007-02-09T13:25:00.000-08:00

New media explained:

Via Chris Anderson, Wired

Gore and McLuhan, a road full of inconveniencies

2007-02-05T15:44:00.000-08:00

Today I received these books from Amazon, I had unfortunately misplaced, or lent, both an Inconvenient truth and McLuhan's understanding media.

The world is full of inconvenient truths, our problem is that we are either afraid to listen, or unable to see them.

Denial is probably our most effective countermeasure. We are afraid to see, to understand. We probably don’t fear the truths themselves, but dread their follow-up consequences: commitment or action. We despise their combination: commitment to action.

“The medium is the massage,” wrote Marshall McLuhan.

"Societies have always been shaped more by the nature by which men communicate than by the content of communication.... It is impossible to understand social and cultural changes without knowledge of the workings of media."

This was right forty years ago, and still is, but did McLuhan envision Web 3.0?

Was McLuhan referring to old media concept?: That of one transmitter, powerful and influential, and one audience, millions of passive individuals receiving the same message.

Did he envision Internet? and its flip-flop, from an initial extension of the old media formula, devised as an edit-publish concept that brought connectivity to millions of ‘eyeballs”, to an out of control and mutating phenomena of publish, and then edit, RSS of sprouting participating communities online.

"Understanding is 50% of the road to the solution" afirmsBill Drayton the creator of Ashoka.

This is just the beginning. Power is no longer where it used to be.

The revolution of the Civil Society Organizations and The Sustainable Development movement will be empowered by the advent of the New Media

2007-02-03T07:58:00.000-08:00

By Ernesto van Peborgh
For LA NACION

Permanent link to La Nacion article

Towards the most revolutionary change

Wal-Mart, the greatest supermarket chain in the world, announced its commitment to the environment. Muhammad Yunus, the economist who created the first bank for the poor, received the Nobel Peace Prize. The giant Google acquired YouTube, a website whose only assets are millions of homemade videos uploaded by users.

These and other events that took place towards the end of 2006 are signs of three powerful forces that are changing the world: sustainable human development, the revolution of the social sector, and the boom of the participatory media.

Sustainable human development is a group of concepts and practices that allow us to consider what kind of world we shall bequeath to our children and the children of our children. It represents a profound change vis-à-vis the industrial model that was established in the Western world in the eighteenth century. This current implies a different look on our planet, companies and governments, and our way of producing, consuming, and living.

What is most striking about the times we live in is the sensation that the future is already here. In the last days of 2006, economist Thomas L. Friedman wrote: “We reached a tipping point this year — where living, acting, designing, investing and manufacturing green came to be understood by a critical mass of citizens, entrepreneurs and officials as the most patriotic, capitalistic, geopolitical, healthy and competitive thing they could do…”

The recent world release of the movie An Inconvenient Truth, starring Al Gore, established the problem of global warming once and for all as a current reality, no longer the paranoia of a few scientists and activists. In California, the State has sued six big automobile manufacturers for their liability with regard to global warming. Wal-Mart has announced its commitment to sustainability and, in so doing, has become the world’s greatest organic cotton buyer. It has started a plan aimed at having several of its suppliers sell it products manufactured through sustainable practices, in a term of three years. In consequence, some 40,000 companies are adapting their manufacturing methods to satisfy this giant that has resolved to change the habits of the more than a hundred million clients it welcomes every week.

Everything indicates that the “tipping point” (a term coined by Malcom Gladwell to define the moment when something unique and unusual becomes normal) is very near.

For more than 20 years, another powerful force has grown at a rate between two and three times higher than that of the private area’s economy. It is the global associative revolution: the rise of millions of organized citizens who are working to find answers for mankind’s most urgent problems.

The Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Muhammad Yunus is powerful proof that mankind is accepting social change ideas which –just like microcredit- have little to do with the traditional concept of charity and philanthropy. Through his Grameen Bank, founded in Bangladesh in 1976, Yunus demonstrated that offering trust and responsibility to loan recipients is an efficient way of solving the problem of poverty and of building peace from a community’s foundations. Thanks to this financial system, among many other positive consequences, eight million Bangladeshi people earning less than a dollar a day obtained access to cell phones, which allowed them to be better communicated from their rural villages and to improve their employment possibilities.

Yunus is no longer alone. According to Johns Hopkins University, the total contribution of Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) makes them the seventh largest economy on the planet. They are true armies of people connected between themselves, whose aims are to protect the environment, to fight poverty, to defend human rights, and democracy.

Google’s acquisition of YouTube made headlines worldwide. This union marked the peak of a third phenomenon with the power to accelerate the process of the other two currents: the rise of the participatory media, which for the first time in history allow common citizens to be heard in the world stage. The tool is the Web 2.0. The platform is the Internet.

Time magazine has just chosen as “person of the year” the Web user, the one who, through his or her participation in blogs and sites such as YouTube, MySpace and Flickr, is generating unprecedented economic, social and political changes. In this new model, a Shanghai corporate secretary’s blog can have the same relevance as an Oxford professor’s. The decision as to what is worth one’s while is in the hands of the people.

Internet natives, teenagers between the ages of 12 and 18, participate in social networks such as MySpace and Fotolog, very popular in Argentina; Orkut, with a big following in Brazil; and Facebook, the favorite of American university students. Meanwhile, citizens of all ages are making their own news through blogs or sites such as Crónicas Móviles (“Mobile Chronicles”), where anyone can upload videos filmed with cell phones, showing –for instance- what is going on in the city: from Daniel Barenboim’s concert to the Gay Pride parade.

The advertising industry is already reacting to this change. Companies such as Unilever (Dove), Chevrolet, and Converse have understood the phenomenon: the massive audience that passively received “buy” messages is on its way to extinction. In the year 2006, Dove Canada –through Ogilvy Toronto agency- launched on the web a video entitled “Evolution”, which shows all the steps cosmetics advertisers follow in order to transform an ordinary girl into an artificial beauty for an ad. It is estimated that over three million people saw this campaign of viral marketing through the brand’s official site or social sites such as YouTube and Daily Motion.

But, besides revolutionizing advertising, journalism, and communications in general, Internet users are transforming the concept of citizenship. Chilean students –a mass of half a million youths united through the Web- have used social networks, chatting and SMS to empty all the schools in their country in their demand for a reform of the education system. They put into practice the phenomenon some call “glocalization”, that is, the Web’s aptitude to widen the social worlds of people who are physically far apart (global level) while also connecting them more deeply with the place they live in (local level).

Notwithstanding this, users’ interests are not circumscribed to the public sphere — they are also looking closely at corporate practices. There are a number of consumers who look for corporate information online, conversing among themselves about the products they consume and the history behind them, and reading corporate blogs. In 2005, a blog informed that motorcycle padlocks manufactured by Kryptonite, a leader company in the market, could be pried open with a pen. A few days later, a user uploaded a video to show that the padlocks were really “made of butter”. The company ignored these comments. Days later, the news appeared in The New York Times and an estimated five million people learned about the incident. Kryptonite had to announce that it would change all of its padlocks, at a cost of ten million dollars.

According to a recent Ipsos research, presented in Madrid in November 2006, 39 million Europeans have refused to buy a product after reading a negative opinion in a blog. What will happen with the civil society’s power of action after it has massively adopted these new communication tools?
What will the corporations that don’t progressively adopt sustainable practices do to stop the wave of citizens-turned-activists, informed through the new media?

The tools are out there, within everyone’s reach. 25% of Internet users participate in online communities. Solutions for the future lie in the weaving of virtual networks, united by values such as social inclusion, responsible citizenship, and sustainable human development. The world is moving in that direction faster than we can perceive. The change is here and people are talking about it — online, of course.

Lesson three: Web 3.0 Radical transparency, Collective intelligence

2007-02-02T08:06:00.000-08:00

You are not alone, there is a community "out there" of participative individuals, I call them "Wikiduals" always online, willing to help.

Tap The Hivemind:
"Throw everything you've got online, and invite the world to look at it. They'll have more and better ideas that you could have on your own, more and better information than you could gather on your own, wiser and sager perspective than you could gather in 1,000 years of living -- and they'll share it with you. You'll blow past the secret-keepers as if you were driving a car that exists in a world with different and superior physics. Like we said, information used to be rare ... but now it's so ridiculously plentiful that you will never make sense of it on your own. You need help, and you need to help others."
via collision detection for upcoming Wired feature: "Radical Transparency"

Chapter four: The new heroes

2007-02-01T04:50:00.000-08:00

Social entrepreneurs are essentially individuals who have decided to face by themselves the answers to problems afflicting their communities, and to do so by applying the same vision and determination for achieving goals that characterize businessmen and –women.

Bill Drayton has accurately defined those people as “persons possessed by an idea, who, by means of unquenchable determination and revolutionary ideas, are solving problems around the globe.” Like himself. Like Rodrigo Baggio, Iqbal Quadir and Fabián Ferraro, who transformed football into a tool for the social inclusion of kids from low-income neighborhoods.

Bill Drayton: “The most radical change”

“How do you intend to put your initiative into effect? How will you manage to make others join you? How will you do it?” How, how and how. The kind of question theorists hate, but which obsesses Bill Drayton and all entrepreneurs of his kind.

Drayton, an American, studied in Harvard, Oxford and Yale and was a member of President Carter’s administration in the EPA. Almost thirty years ago, influenced by Gandhi, the American civil rights movements, and his own travels in India, Indonesia, and Venezuela, he reached the firm conclusion that everywhere in the planet there were people who thought that their ideas could improve the world significantly. It was the passion and enthusiasm expressed by those people that persuaded Drayton that every one of them was a social entrepreneur, a catalyst for large-scale social transformations. And this is what he had in mind when in 1980 he revolutionized philanthropy by eliminating the words “non-profit” and “donations” from its vocabulary and creating Ashoka, the organization of which he is both president and CEO.

During its twenty-five years’ existence, Ashoka has supported 1,700 people in 62 countries – people Drayton defines as social entrepreneurs, using the latter word to signify their ambitious, competitive characters, which one would rather expect to find in the business world than in this area.

“Magical opportunities are out there for everyone willing to face the challenge and go for a social solution,” he affirms, adding that “if we allow people the deep satisfaction of being able to contribute, of feeling they are total citizens, they will love it, because it’s contagious. We are nearing that end: if we multiply the number of change-makers from 1% to 20% in the next fifteen years, that will be the most radical change ever witnessed since the agricultural revolution.”

Rodrigo Baggio: Everything started with a dream

A dream in which slum kids transformed their reality by means of informatics. The year 1993 was drawing to a close and the dreamer was Rodrigo Baggio, at the time an employee of IBM and bound to be featured a couple of years later on the cover of Time magazine as one of 50 youths likely to change the world in the Third Millennium.

Baggio created the Committee for the Democratization of Informatics (CDI), an entity that currently has branches in 10 countries and has already introduced more than 500,000 youths to the use of new technologies.

“How can we use information technology as a means for transforming our society into a more just, equitable, and free one?” he asked himself at the beginning. In 1994 he started the first computer-donation campaign Latin America had ever seen. “We received the computers from companies and delivered them to low-income neighborhoods in Rio de Janeiro. But then I started thinking about a model school of informatics and civil education.”

What Rodrigo immediately realized was that, in order to make a real change, he needed to replicate the school he had created in one Rio de Janeiro neighborhood in the hundreds of other slums or low-income areas of the region. Aware that he clearly couldn’t do it on his own, he decided to work jointly with the communities, creating a simple franchising system that could be autonomously developed in different parts of Brazil. It was then that he made the fundamental decision of trusting this project in the poorest areas of his country and gave local leaders the responsibility of making the schools work.

“We believe that through our schools we help young people help themselves,” Baggio says.

Meet Rodrigo Baggio

Iqbal Quadir: “Connectivity is productivity”

Thus the motto of this entrepreneur who grew up in the rural areas of Bangladesh. A motto that in 1997 led him to seek answers for the telecommunications problem of his country, where one had to wait over ten years to have a phone installed, and that at a cost of USD 450, one of the highest in the world.

Combining state-of-the-art digital wireless technology and the Grameen Bank’s experience in granting micro-loans, Quadir created Grameen Phone and launched the Village Phone program. His aim: to increase the non-urban, low-income population’s access to communications, by means of the introduction of mobile phone terminals managed by rural operators, preferably women.

Community telephones have been installed in 40,000 villages since the program’s inception, which means that 50 million peasants are connected.

Telephones are used, among other purposes, to exchange information about health issues and product prices. “Not only is the program socially beneficial, it is profitable as well. It has also represented a significant increase in the Bangladeshi communities’ economic activities, promoted commercial exchange, and created new sources of income,” Quadir explains, adding that “the economic impact is also relevant with regard to the person managing the telephone service: rural operators are usually women who, thanks to their jobs, can be the source of about 25% of their homes’ income.”

Fabián Ferraro: “The wonderful thing is to see the changes”

“… and see how kids start changing their personal appearance, their way of acting, their vocabulary – how they respect each other, want to improve their lives and start having hopes. It is with these kids that we have to work, because it’s them who are going to make the changes,” says Fabián Ferraro, who lives in Chaco Chico, a densely populated neighborhood in the Buenos Aires suburbia where many of the 6,500 residents are unemployed. Like many Argentinean young men, Fabián had played football since he was a kid, and soon after started playing it professionally. It was around this time that he began working with street kids. And then, convinced that football could be a powerful tool for social change, he decided to quit professional playing and create the Asociación Civil Defensores del Chaco (“Chaco Defenders”) club.

Says Fabián, “in 1996 we formed a team and started working with fourteen youths. As the club started growing, we began teaching the older ones how to train the younger.” Like Rodrigo Baggio, Ferraro had also grasped that giving responsibility-involving tasks to young people who grew up marginalized and undervalued by their environment could have a real impact on their personal development.

The organization Fabián leads uses street football as a method for social inclusion, violence prevention and informal education for youths in “risk situations”. For some 1,500 children and teenagers, its offices have become a space for having non-competitive fun, for teamwork and collective construction.

Meet Fabian Ferraro

In the words of its founder: “Defensores is no longer a dumping ground. These sports fields and this club that we built jointly with lots of entrepreneurs are a school without walls. This is a space for education, where human values are intensely transmitted.”

Ideas in action

The sheer variety and quantity of social organizations formed by these and other entrepreneurs is glaring evidence of how far these people are from traditional relief organizations focusing on charity: they have new, distinct work methodologies, new concepts – they develop a management style in accordance with their aims and their members are people with very different qualifications and profiles. They are joined by a central idea: that solidarity is not enunciated but practiced; that one must not give away the fish, but teach how to cast the nets; that the common good is everyone’s good and we have to act now.

Chapter three: A Global Associative Revolution

2007-01-31T18:10:00.000-08:00

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has”.

Margaret Mead, anthropologist

“Be irritating. If you ever think you’re too small to be effective, you’ve never been in bed with a mosquito.”

Anita Roddick, creator, The Body Shop

A Global Associative Revolution

“This is the most radical structural change I’ve ever seen. Once millions of people enjoy the freedom to generate a change every time they see a problem, who is going to stop them? If a person is frustrated, there will be hundreds of others looking at that problem in that community and looking for a solution. One of them is going to find it,” affirms Bill Drayton, founder of Ashoka, an organization identifying and supporting men and women who develop new ideas aimed at social change. And he knows what he’s talking about.

With a growth rate that’s between 2 and 3 times faster than that of the corporate sector and the rise of thousands of citizen organizations, a real boom has taken place within the last twenty-five years: that of the social sector. And, in every case without exception, the phenomenon is linked to a new reality: the sustained growth of the organized private initiative of citizens working to find answers for the most urgent social issues.

Signs: The boom of the “dot-orgs”

You may remember that, some time ago, talk of the dot-com boom was everywhere; but the interesting question is, did anyone notice the boom of the dot-orgs?

In Brazil, the number of citizen organizations jumped from 5,000 in the early 80s to more than a million in 2005.
In Bangladesh, the greatest part of the country’s development is a direct consequence of the work carried out by 20,000 NGOs, most of them created within the last 25 years.
In Canada, the number of registered citizen groupings has increased over 50% since 1987, reaching a figure of around 200,000.
India boasts more than a million civil organizations.
In the United States, the number of citizen groups went from 64,000 in 1990 to 1,1 million twelve years later. It is no less striking, given the long history of citizen and civil movements in that country, to find that 70% of registered groups were created in the last 30 years.
Between 1988 and 1995, in the former communist countries of Central Europe there appeared 100,000 civil society organizations.

Chapter two: Sustainability, New media and social revolution tangle together.

2007-01-30T08:02:00.000-08:00

A Brief Timeline

Man gets to the Moon and the feat is transmitted worldwide via the television. Shortly before, May 1968 in France had defined the ideas of a whole generation. After the publication of Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring, the first ecologic organizations, such as Greenpeace, are born, together with the first environmentally-aware brands: Patagonia and Natura.
Some time later, Anita Roddick creates The Body Shop, a pioneer in responsible marketing. With the birth of Ashoka, in 1980, the transformation of the social sector begins. That same year there appears CNN, a 24-hour news channel. And, a year later, MTV and a new visual language. IBM launches the first PC to the market.
The accident of the oil tanker Exxon Valdez has the effect of allowing the ecologic movement to be taken seriously. Marketing begins to massively adopt “green” messages. Activist Chico Mendes is murdered in the Amazonas. The Berlin Wall falls and democratic systems gain footing in Latin American countries, allowing for the creation of citizen groups. The AIDS epidemic also encourages global cooperation in order to fight it.
During the ‘90s, companies such as Shell and Nike face problems for their way of producing, and must render accounts to society with regard to their behavior. Anti-globalization activists get the world’s attention in Seattle. Internet is growing fast and advertising companies begin to investigate online advertising.
The new century begins with the bursting of the dot-com bubble. But, shortly after, the “long tail” paradigm arises. Google makes it possible for small sites to be as important as the big ones. It reaches the whole of the Web, not just the center or the head, but also the ends. Blogs and free software, open to collective participation, are born.
During the terrorist attacks on the London subway, pictures taken with cell phones and promptly uploaded to Flickr, a software for sharing images on the Internet, surpass traditional media coverage both in speed and quality. It is the birth of citizen journalism. Towards the end of the period, Google buys YouTube for 1650 million dollars. Less than a year after its creation, the site created for everyone to upload homemade videos to the Web receives 100 million visits a day. WalMart, the world’s largest supermarket chain, announces its commitment to sustainability.
And the world keeps changing.

Advantages of adopting sustainable practices.

2007-01-28T11:24:00.000-08:00

"Because I think that the most important thing to happen this past year was that living and thinking ''green'' -- that is, mobilizing for the environmental/energy challenge we now face -- hit Main Street.
We reached a tipping point this year -- where living, acting, designing, investing and manufacturing green came to be understood by a critical mass of citizens, entrepreneurs and officials as the most patriotic, capitalistic, geopolitical, healthy and competitive thing they could do."

As Thomas Friedman defines in his December 2006 article in the The New York Times, a new set of new behavioral changes are coming.
As in Surf, those who anticipate and prepare for these changes will benefit. Surf is about anticipating changes in the sea, it requires patience and focus on the horizon. Waves come in sets. The best surfers are those who anticipate the wave sets, they row towards the income sea masses in order to position themselves at the “ break point” and “drop” for a great ride. Those who don't, either experience a “wipe out”, or are driven to the shore by the braking waves.
Likewise, with the upcoming changes that a new sustainable conscientious consumer will impose, many farsighted companies are looking to adjust their practices to adapt to these behavioral changes.

Some will be in the right spot when changes occur, some won't………

Farsighted

Followers: The next one.

Refusal

Fotos: Carlos Zúńiga www.surfotos.cl

Chapter one. Welcome the most paradigmatic changes in the history of humanity

2007-01-27T15:59:00.000-08:00

Rodrigo Baggio is a Brazilian social entrepreneur who has brought informatics schools to the favelas (slums or poor neighborhoods in Brazil) and has already introduced 500,000 people to the digital world through Internet.

American Apparel, a United States company, has achieved a 900% increase in sales in only four years by manufacturing cotton garments without logos, using organic products and paying the highest salaries in the garment industry, which is one of the most competitive.

Iqbal Quadir implemented the Grameen Phone program in Bangladesh, which granted access to cell phones to 8,5 million peasants earning less than a dollar a day. These, in turn, sold the public phone service to their neighbors, and have thus multiplied communication in rural areas over a 100%.

Natura, a Brazilian cosmetics company, has experienced a 32% growth in two years (as opposed to its competitors’ 20%) by centering its strategy in environmental care. Its brand value amounts to 113% of its annual sales, a figure to which giant L’Oréal’s mere 33% barely compares.

The above are just four stories – of individuals whose ideas changed the lives of many others, and of companies that found their competitive advantage in respect for the environment, employees, and consumers, and were rewarded by rocketing proceeds. But there are hundreds of other stories.

Two years ago, we started working with advertising agencies, media, companies, foundations, NGOs, and social entrepreneurs, in an attempt to better understand the tendencies that are transforming the world we live in and the changes they are making in corporate behavior, in governments, and in our lives.

We traveled to Mexico, Brazil, Chile, the USA and Europe to interview the CEOs of a number of companies, several of which are in the communications business, and we set up an Advisory Board consisting of scholars and businesspeople.

We thus detected three currents that converge in the same historical moment and have the potential for generating one of the most paradigmatic changes in the history of humanity:

- The revolution of the social sector: the rise of millions of people, organized in foundations, NGOs, and other associations, that are working and searching for answers for the urgent problems of our societies.

- An arising sustainable development conscience: a new consciousness vis-à-vis the planet, companies and governments, and our way of consuming, producing and living, which is optimistic about the possibilities the former involve, but has and will have a significant impact on corporate action and communications as we know them.

- The participatory media: where audiences no longer wait passively to receive information, but interacts, creates networks and communicates. Internet is today their platform par excellence.

We perceive a type of person that is beginning to see these tendencies, people who aspire to be global citizens and realize that these currents can take them towards the goal they are striving for. People who act responsibly, without ceasing to be “ordinary citizens” – who cooperate in social issues without being activists.

People who actually expect companies to stop “selling” to them and start dialoging – who want companies to be where they are, and to speak their own language, that of the participatory media. People searching for relevant contents to construct a personal history, to be informed, to learn and participate.

We know what these people want. We have the tools and speak the same language. We can communicate. We are no longer “Out There”.
We are here.

Lesson3: Do what you love, but be damned sure it’s profitable

2007-01-26T13:53:00.000-08:00

Lesson 3: Do what you love, but be damned sure it’s profitable. If you do work you love, but it doesn’t generate income, your business will fail. If you do work you hate, but it generates income, your health will fail… and your business along with it. If you can’t do what you love and make it profitable, you’ve either got a hobby or a headache, not a sustainable business. Don’t settle for anything less than passion and profit.
By Steven Pavlina

Lesson 2: Think for yourself.

2007-01-25T13:56:00.000-08:00

Unplug yourself from follow-the-follower groupthink, and virtually ignore what everyone else in your industry is saying (except the ones everyone agrees is crazy). Do your own research, draw your own conclusions, set your own course, and stick to your guns. When you’re just starting out, people will tell you you’re wrong. After you’ve blown past them, they’ll tell you you’re crazy. A few years after that, they’ll (privately) ask you to mentor them.
By Steven Pavlina

Sustainable Development Communication: Why is it so difficult?

2007-01-24T14:53:00.000-08:00

Its a New Paradigm.

People need to see the world from a different perspective.

Until glass was invented people could not see under water.

Glass made things easier, it changed.. or rather it created a new perspective.

So will New Media. It is a matter of time..

Best Q&A in the world

2007-01-24T14:09:00.000-08:00

Q: How does the site plan to maximize revenue?

The CEO answered as follows:

A: “That definitely is not part of the equation. It’s not part of the goal.”

Q: How did the site arrive at $10 for real estate listings, Schachter asked.

A: “Ten dollars sounded like a nice round number,” Buckmaster answered, totally deadpan, as the crowd laughed.

Q: Is the company considering hooking up with Google for AdSense ads?

A: “We’ve had the numbers crunched for us,” “The numbers are quite staggering.”
"But, no, the site wasn’t interested. since users have been requesting that we take out the ads, so for us, that’s the end of the story,” he said to the befuddlement of the crowd. “If users start calling out for text ads, we’ll listen.”

In what turned out to be a culture clash of near-epic proportions, Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster spoke to the investment community this morning at the UBS global media conference in New York.

Via Mediapost

Best Advice Best video

2007-01-23T15:46:00.000-08:00

Lesson 1: Chris Anderson

2007-01-22T16:23:00.000-08:00

I'd love to explore the lesson that television can learn from the music industry, which is now being forced to adopt a range of revenue models (from subscription to advertising) to compensate for the decline of the old pay-for-product business.

via Chris Anderson.. The Long Tail Blog

Not a Lesson, a principle

2007-01-20T17:07:00.000-08:00

Stop waiting…..

Until your car or home is paid off
Until you get a new car or home
Until your kids leave the house
Until you go back to school
Until you finish school
Until you clean the house
Until you organize the garage
Until you clean off your desk
Until you lose 10 lbs.
Until you gain 10 lbs.
Until you get married
Until you get a divorce
Until you have kids
Until the kids go to school
Until you retire
Until summer
Until spring
Until winter
Until fall
Until you die…

There is no better time than right now

Via brian of zaadz

2001 El Eco Challenge

2007-01-19T17:35:00.000-08:00

Nota Diario La nación.

Naked?

2007-01-18T17:51:00.000-08:00

Translation: "My kingdom for a pair of pants"

The following items are prohibited here

2007-01-18T17:48:00.000-08:00

Pretty Close...

2007-01-17T17:54:00.000-08:00

Translation: "This is how the banks will be in the 90's", Published in Ambito Financiero a couple of decades ago.

FIFA World Cup, Germany 2006

2007-01-15T17:58:00.000-08:00

Running across the Atacama Dessert

2007-01-01T06:02:00.000-08:00

Marketed online by an organization with an ambitious name,Racing the Planet , it seemed an impossible quest: “From earth to Mars” “An ultra marathon of 250 Km across the desert of Atacama. Seven marathons in seven days, self supported you will attempt to cross the Atacama dessert, the Valley of the Moon and the Valley of death, considered the driest places in the Planet.” They had definitively caught my attention, I had participated in the Eco Challenge New Zealand two years earlier, and the thought of desert seamed like a perfect balance to the Aussie mountains. “You will receive only a daily ration of water, NASA scientists, while testing equipment for their missions in Mars, were unable to register any signs of life along certain locations of the course… It went on….never have rained in the history of mankind.
...extreme temperatures……participants will suffocate during the day and freeze at night.”

Although it seemed irrational to even consider it, a week later, together with Carlos Lamarca and Fernando Mayorga, my inseparable adventure companions, we were registered as the only argentine participants. The name of our team: Espiritu Argentino.
On the freezing morning of July 4th 2004 , 66 competitors, representing 21 nations gathered near the town of Machuca at 4100 mts over sea level.
There, under the direction of a Yatiri, a chaman of Incaic rituals, accompanied by the music of half a dozen local atacamenian performers, led us to worship the Pachamama, name the locals give to mother earth. After the blessing, intended for a safe trip, we obtained from the Inca leader some coca leafs to chew during the first stages of the race. The coca leaf is used by the Puna people to reduce mountain sickness, fatigue and hunger.
That first day we ran a complete marathon, the running was tough, not so much for the distance, but mainly due to the altitude.

Carlos, Paco and self before the race

At 4100 mts there is 40% less oxygen that at sea level. We had arrived to Atacama only 36 hours before the race and had not had the sufficient time to acclimatize. We were paying the consequences. Every effort was extenuating. With nausea, headache and corporal fatigue we covered the first 42kms over an Inca trail, a rocky footpath that dated over one thousand years old. While our lungs got accustomed to the thin air and our feet adapted to the rocky mountain terrain we ran the distance that separates Machuca from the settlement of San Bartolo.
At sunset we arrived at a camp set on the margins of the Rio Grande River, a small watercourse that guides the melting snow of the high Andes down to its inevitable evaporation on dessert plains below.
We were greeted by our tent companions Kevin and Paul, two ultra marathon runners from Taiwan and Singapore. They handed us our water rations and guided us to some fires where we could cook our food.
Our rations were simple caloric and lightweight: dehydrated pasta, jerky, cereals, candies and dry fruits. Our carefully selected food rations proportioned exactly 2000 calories per day. Mindful of the weight of our equipment, this was considered the minimum intake to keep us going for a week under extreme conditions. Our daily caloric consuption surpassed 8,000 calories.
That night as enjoyed a cup of tea with Fernando around the fire, surrounded by several experienced dessert racers that had completed similar events in the Sahara and Gobi, we discussed our strategy for our next stage. Carlos, affected by mountain sickness had cocooned in his sleeping bag for the night.
The second stage was even longer, 47 km, mostly to be covered inside the canyon waters of the river, which due to erosion, were enclosed by overhanging cliffs.

The constant immersion in the gelid waters, sometimes up to our waist, not only slowed our pace but caused what we feared the most: the appearance of the first blisters on our feet.
That night after eight hours of hiking, we arrived to the campsite, this time set on the northern border of the Salar de Atacama.
While we prepared some macaroni and cheese powder for dinner we noted that the dessert temperatures at night were lower than those we had experienced in the mountains the night before. Our water bottles froze as our navigation watches recorded minus six degrees centigrade.
Next morning we traveled 34 km south, drawing an imaginary line that divided the desert from the shadows of the great Licancabur Volcano (5916 mts) arriving at our third campsite near a defying village called Toconao, a dry oasis that overlooks the huge salt plain. Exhausted and dehydrated we collapsed in our bags and attempted to maintain a strategy discussion for the next stage of the race, the 42 km of one of the most desolate and dry places in the world: the first leg of the Salar Desert of Atacama. The strategy we defined was as simple as one foot ahead of the other.
I think it was at noon of that fourth day when I entered the doors of the inferno.
The temperature of the dessert reached 37 decrees centigrade, and as we ran out of water, we became dehydrate. Boyd Matson and amusing American that trailed alongside us began urinating blood due to the lack of liquid.
The horizon was beautiful but hostile, identical and barren for miles in every direction. The fact that we would be probably the first humans to cross it on feet didn’t feel very encouraging.
We realized that if nobody had attempted it before, it was probably for the exact same reasons that we were experimenting in our own flesh.

On occasions our feet would break throw the thin salt crust and sink into the damp subterranean broth. Not the best medication for our bleeding blistered feet. It took all our energy to make the camp that night. Trapped in the dark gelid night of the Salar, several competitors had to be rescued by the organization. But the horses, the only means of rescued, sank due to their weight, and could only move on once the subterranean waters froze late into the night.

Over and over I have been asked to explain reasons that compel me to go through these expeditions. I have been asked to describe the fountainhead to the strength needed to complete such demanding contests. That night in my sleeping bag I pondered the same questions.
The answer came to me the next day during the toughest stage of the event: 80 km non-stop through the remaining salar dessert and into the Valley of Death.
My feet had blisters over blisters and no matter how I taped them, the dust, the sweat, and the irregularity of the terrain produced additional wounds over the existing ones.
My back, sore by the weight and friction of the backpack, was as blistered as my feet. My muscles suffered extreme fatigue product of the enormous effort and the inadequate calorie intake.

As we hiked, I struggled to abstract myself from my body pain. To do this I tried to fill my mind with diverse thoughts and memories.
Once I could identify and concentrated on a precise thought, I examined it from different angles in order to make it last as long as possible. In doing so, I avoided the connection between my conscience and the agony my body was experiencing.
I imagined I carried an jar full of all my memories, thoughts and dreams and whenever I wandered back to reality, which set off the pain, I extracted from this imaginary jar a new thought, and with significant concentration I was back to forget the pain in my feet. This work well for two days, but as the hours went by, the vase of thoughts began to drain and finally, when we were about to complete the 40 Km on the fifth day it was as empty as the location I was in.

Startled, I realized that my mind was unable to concentrate on any further thought or recollection.
I had drained my mind of thoughts in a way so profound that the interior of the jar was polished clean. I had revised and analyzed the total of my affective, family and work related relationships, all of my dreams and projects. I was experiencing a total absence of thoughts.
I was then confronted with the evidence that I would have to deal with my corporal agony, the dessert heat, dehydration and freezing nights, and as despair overwhelmed me, something extraordinary occurred.
My mind seemed to detached itself from my body, as it became one with it, I achieved a state of absolute concentration, a level of mental clarity I had never experienced before and my sufferings disappeared. I have since read that yogis achieve this state after decades of practice. The dessert had trapped me.
I was trailsetting through a place that nobody had walked before, and probably nobody would ever will. I had been trapped by the vastness of nothing. With no physical pain my only worries turned to food, of which we had sufficient macarrony powder.
Given the great distance to be covered, that night we did not make to the assigned camp and we had to sleep high on the Cordillera of Salt, a group of white mountains west of the salty dessert. The temperature that night was extreme, what was left in our bottle waters froze once more, but amazingly my smile could be measured alongside the vastness of the Milky sky, such was my peace. I had connected my body with my soul. I had accepted my body sufferings as a natural circumstance. They were there to be enjoyed.
It was a profound and intimate sensation that I did not at that time comment with my friends, since I came to believe they had gone through similar experience given that in the subsequent days the three of us only laughed and joked.
As I looked upon the jar once again, I discovered that it was not empty, but full of new, pure and constructive projects. I had deposited in it my dreams, inspiration and love.
On the seventh day we ran distance in record time, and as we hugged at the finish line we committed to repeat this experience in the Sahara desert.

Atacama

2006-12-10T12:40:00.000-08:00

El aviso lo promocionaba diciendo:
“Racing the Planet presenta: Desde el planeta Tierra hasta Marte”.
“Una ultramaratón de 250 Kilómetros a través del desierto de Atacama.
Durante siete días los participantes deberán autoabastecerse, llevando sus propios alimentos y equipamiento. Sólo recibirán una ración de agua por día en puestos predeterminados. Atravesarán el Salar de Atacama, el Valle de la Luna y el Valle de la Muerte, considerados los lugares más secos del planeta.

En partes del recorrido no se han registrado lluvias en la historia de la humanidad y científicos de la Nasa, al realizar pruebas de equipamiento para las misiones de Marte, no pudieron encontrar registros de vida alguna.

Las temperaturas serán extremas; sofocantes durante el día y bajo cero durante la noche.”

Tentados por ese desafío extremo y con algún grado de inconsciencia, Carlos Lamarca y Fernando Mayorga, mis inseparables compañeros de aventuras, y el abajo firmante, nos registramos como los únicos competidores argentinos. El nombre de nuestro equipo: Espíritu Argentino.

En la helada mañana del domingo 4 de julio, a 4100 mts sobre el nivel del mar, 66 competidores que representábamos a 21 naciones nos reunimos en las cercanías del poblado de Machuca.

Allí, bajo la dirección de Yatiri, un chamán de las etnias incaicas, y acompañados por un grupo de músicos atacameños, realizamos una ceremonia de homenaje a la Pachamama. Tras la bendición del chamán que nos auguró un viaje seguro, los sudamericanos, conocedores de sus propiedades para aplacar el mal de altura, obtuvimos de los pobladores locales unas hojas de coca.

Carlos, Paco y yo antes de largar

El comienzo del primer día fue muy duro, no tanto por la distancia y el terreno sino por el “apunamiento”. A 4100 mts hay un 40 por ciento menos de oxígeno que al nivel del mar. Esto hace que cualquier esfuerzo sea extenuante. Con nauseas, dolor de cabeza y fatiga corporal, y acarreando mochilas con alimentos para una semana, cubrimos los primeros 32 kilómetros de un montañoso camino incaico que tiene más de mil años de antigüedad. Durante todo el día, mientras nuestros pulmones se acostumbraban a la altura y nuestros cuerpos se adaptaban al terreno, cubrimos la distancia que separa Machuca del poblado de San Bartolo.

Video del valle de muerte, en este lugar no se han encontrado indicio de vida alguna

A la hora de la puesta del sol llegamos a un campamento armado en un descampado sobre el Río Grande. Esto estaba a cargo de la organización, que todas las noches se ocupaba de preparar un campamento donde se nos proporcionaba agua y una fogata donde podíamos preparar nuestra cena.

Llevábamos con nosotros raciones que nos proporcionaban aproximadamente unas 2000 calorías diarias, en forma de pastas deshidratadas, charque, cereales, golosinas y frutas disecadas.

La etapa prevista para del segundo día era aun más larga: 47 kilómetros. La mayor parte del recorrido debía hacerse dentro de las aguas del Río Grande, que a medida que descienden hacia el desierto se encajonan en un cañón.

Producto de la humedad constante en los zapatos, este día comenzaron a aparecer las primeras ampollas en nuestros pies. Cubrimos la distancia en ocho horas y media, y esa noche acampamos en la margen Norte del Salar de Atacama.
Entumecidos, notamos con sorpresa que las temperaturas nocturnas del desierto son aún inferiores a las de las montañas que lo rodean. Mientras el agua de las caramañolas se congelaba, el termómetro de nuestros relojes marcaba una temperatura mínima de –6 grados.
Lao Tsu dijo que una travesía de mil millas se inicia con un simple paso. Esta frase, habitualmente citada en los libros de autoayuda, si bien es ciertaexcluye lo que uno puede experimentar en los interminables pasos subsiguientes. En nuestro caso, para
completar el recorrido tuvimos que dar más de 500.000, desafiando en cada uno las condiciones más extremas de la naturaleza. La invitación a la competencia no insinuaba ni advertía el sufrimiento que comenzaríamos a padecer a partir del tercer día. O al menos nosotros, en su momento, no quisimos verlo.

A la mañana siguiente atravesamos 34 kilómetros de arena y rocas, hacia el sur, bajo el contorno del enorme volcán Licancabur (5916 mts), para llegar a las cercanías del poblado de Toconao donde nos esperaba el siguiente desafío: los primeros 42 kilómetros de uno de los salares más grandes y desolados del mundo: el gran Salar de Atacama.

Llegado este momento, ya podía describir el infierno: durante el cuarto día la temperatura dentro del Salar alcanzó los 37 grados, el agua se acabóy, como consecuencia de ello, comenzó la deshidratación. Boyd Matson, un americano que nos acompañaba, orinaba sangre producto de la falta de líquido.
El horizonte era desolador, idéntico y despoblado por donde se lo mirase.

La superficie del Salar era completamente blanca e irregular, similar a la de un campo recién arado. El hecho de ser el primer grupo de personas que intentaba cruzarlo a pie, no resultaba muy alentador.
Este video muestra un paneo de 360 grados del salar. Temperatura 37 grados.

Asumimos que si nadie antes lo había logrado era precisamente por las razones que estábamos experimentando en carne propia. Cada tanto nuestros pies rompían la delgada capa de sal y se hundían en un grumoso engrudo subterráneo. Nada mejor para nuestras ampollas sangrantes que un buen baño de sal. Necesitamos de toda nuestra fuerza y temple para llegar esa noche al campamento. Atrapados por la gélida oscuridad del salar, varios de los competidores debieron ser socorridos por la organización. Pero los caballos, que en este terreno eran el único medio de transporte de, quedaron enterrados por su peso y pudieron salir recién en la madrugada, cuando las aguas subterráneas se congelaron.

Muchas veces me han preguntado qué es lo que me permite seguir y completar estas travesías, de dónde saco la fuerza y por qué las hago.
Aquella noche, dentro de mimi bolsa de dormir , yo me hacía esas mismas preguntas.
La respuesta la obtuve al día siguiente, durante la etapa más dura del evento: 80 kilómetros del escabroso tramo que atravesaba el resto del Salar y el Valle de la Muerte.

Mis pies ya tenían ampollas sobre ampollas y por más que los vendaba, la tierra, el sudor y la irregularidad del terreno me producían nuevas heridas sobre las existentes. Mi espalda, llagada por el peso y la fricción de la mochila, sangraba al igual que mis pies. Mis músculos experimentaban una fatiga extrema producto del esfuerzo desmesurado y la alimentación deficiente. Durante las largas jornadas de marcha -por entonces caminábamos a razón de 5 kilómetros por hora, intentaba incesantemente de abstraerme de las incomodidades de mi cuerpo. Para ello procuraba ocupar mi mente con pensamientos y recuerdos diversos. Una vez enfocado en un pensamiento o evocación, lo observaba desde diversos ángulos para hacerlo durar y evitar así que mi conciencia se conectase con los sufrimientos corporales que estaba padeciendo.
Imaginé para ello que llevaba entre mis brazos un barril que contenía todos los recuerdos y pensamientos que había tenido hasta el momento.Cuando comenzaba a desconcentrarme y sobrevenía el dolor, extraía del barril un nuevo recuerdo y, mediante una concentración extrema, lo utilizaba para pensar y de este modo olvidarme del dolor de mis pies que se asemejaba a estar pisando brasas calientes.
Con el transcurrir de las horas, este deposito de pensamientos se fue quedando vacío y finalmente, a los 40 kilómetros del quinto día, llegó a estar tan desierto como el lugar en que me encontraba.
Ante mi estupor, ya mi mente era incapaz de concentrarse en un pensamiento o recuerdo. No había nada para extraer o utilizar. Los interiores del barril, de tanto que los había raspado, ya estaban pulidos. Hasta ese momento había revisado y analizado el total de mis relaciones afectivas, familiares y laborales, todos mis sueños y proyectos. No había nada más en que pensar. Sin embargo, ante la evidencia de que tendría finalmente que enfrentar el infierno de mis dolores corporales, el calor, la sed, la deshidratación y el congelamiento nocturno, sucedió algo asombroso. Mi mente se desconectó de mi cuerpo y los sufrimientos que éste padecía dejaron de preocuparme. Había conseguido desligarme de mi cuerpo y, como consecuencia de ello, alcancé una concentración absoluta, una claridad mental nunca antes experimentada. Sentí que el desierto me había atrapado.
Debido a la distancia, esa noche no llegamos al campamento asignado y tuvimos que dormir a la intemperie. La temperatura de la Cordillera de la Sal, un cordón montañoso al oeste del Salar, fue la más extrema que experimentamos. Las caramañolas nuevamente se congelaron, pero mi sonrisa logró medirse con la amplitud de la vía láctea. Había encontrado la paz. Había logrado unir mi mente con lo más profundo de mi alma. Los dolores corporales habían sido aceptados como una circunstancia natural. Estaban allí, casi para ser disfrutados.
Si bien por la profundidad e intimidad de lo que me estaba sucediendo no llegue a comentarlo en ese momento con Paco y Carlos, ellos deben haber vivido una experiencia similar porque en los días subsiguientes en el sólo hubo risas, bromas y alegría.
Al observarlo nuevamente, mi barril imaginario ya no estaba vacío: había logrado depositar en él mis mejores pensamientos y estaba lleno de proyectos nuevos, puros y agradables.
El séptimo día corrimos la última etapa de 16 kilómetros en apenas una hora y media, y al cruzar la meta, mientras nos abrazábamos, los tres nos comprometimos a correr a través del Sahara el año que viene.