Global Neighbourhoods

Lost in the Translation

Marco Montemagno
Originally uploaded by shelisrael1.

I am in Rome as a guest of the US State Dept., who has set up three days of conversations for me with Italian entrepreneurs, most of them involved in the social media. The people I have met have been superior for giving me a crash course on what is going on in Italy right now. The executive summary is—a great deal, but I’ll deal with that in a few days. The Jolly Hotel Via Vendito, an otherwise great hotel, charges 10 Euro an hour for WiFi connection. Yes, I said an hour.

But I thought the price was worth it in this one case, so I could share with you how much I enjoyed making an absolute fool of myself live on national Italian TV last night.

It all started with Marco Montemagno, the bright, passionate founder of Blogosfere, Italy’s largest blogging network. Blogosfere and b5media seem to be alike in a great mant ways, except that ours speak in English and theirs, of course, in Italian.

Marco has the heart and soul of a blog evangelist, so we immediately hit it off, and when he invited me to join him for dinner last night, then to be interviewed by him on the air at 10:30 pm, I thought it was some sort of videocast and I agreed, thinking I was doing him a favor. It turned out that the reverse was true.

Marco’s show airs weekly on Sky TV, Italy’s third largest and most independent TV network. Sky is a global player, with a worldwide network of news gathering affiliates. While his program Sky TG 24 Reporter Diffuso, looks at new technologies, Marco often interviews prominent entertainers and public officials. For example, next week he’ll be interviewing Italy’s minister of information who has a blog.

In addition to it’s on-air slot, Reporter Diffuso is also made available via streaming video, his blogs and Youtube. Through this mix of new and traditional media distribution, Marco reaches over a million viewers, a much larger audience than I’ve previously sat in front of.

Marco told me language would not be a problem [heh], because they had an inhouse Italian to English interpreter. On air, Marco would ask me questions I Italian. I would ear them via ear bud in English, reply in English and my answers would be translated into Italian on air.

We arrived on the station, my 7th visit as an interviewee this year and was impressed with everyone and everything I saw. This was a tight operation, yuet everyone seemed relaxed and happy.

Marco and I were placed on the set more than 10 minutes in advance, which helps relax you. They gave me my earbud, and every 30 seconds or so, my interpreter would make like the Sprint guy in the ads. “Can you hear me now, “ he would say and I would say yes.

Then we went live. Marco swung into an intro that I assume was nice. He then turned to me an speaking in Italian asked me his first question. I assume it was a good one, but I wouldn’t know. The earbud had gone dead. I was on national television. Marco was sitting and waiting for me to answer a question and I did not have a clue what he had said.

There was a long moment of “dead air.” Marco’s eyes got wide, as if to say “Well? Say something! Say something now.” I kept waiting for the translation but it never came.

Finally, I mumbled, “the translator is not coming through.” This was becoming the nakedest of conversations and it was being held in front of a national Italian audience.

Marco never lost a beat. He proclaimed “then I will translate.” He proceeds to ask me a question, in Engkish then tell the audience what he said. I would then answer and he would then tell the audience what I said. At one point I noticed in the monitor that I was leaning so far back in my seat that it looked like I was trying to slip under the desk to hide. Not such a bad idea. This was perhaps the longest 20-minute interview in recorded history.

When it was over, Marco and I broke up laughing. We knew that we had just shared an experience that we would never forget. I was worried however, that this might have hurt my new friend with Sky.

A few minutes ago, Marco’s director called him. He said that he had just viewed it and thought it was great video.

Go figure. At least on TV, a naked conversation, with a little improvisation may play pretty well after all.

On the Edge of old neighborhoods

Yesterday was not your average day.

Rick and I chatted with Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves. Later in the day, after Rick left for Canada to deal with some unscheduled business, Allan Martinson, an Estonian VC and our superhost met with former Prime Minister Mart Laar. Then I flew to Berlin, where I walked drizzly streets to the Brandenburg Gate, once the site of Checkpoint Charlie, the former barbed wire enclosed military turnstile between East and West Berlin.

Allan accompanied us to the Presidential Palace, where we passed two rigid military guards, up spiraling marble steps and into the presidential suite, where we sipped coffee for 30 minutes with President Ilves. The recently installed professorial president described how 50 years of Soviet suppression had retarded Estonia's natural emergence. After the empire crumbled, Estonia burst forward, using technology to leapfrog ahead. "We went from one revolution into the next," Ilves told us. "Poor little Estonia was working faster than other countries, including the US." The liberated little republic was using technology to give its people access to government at home and ideas from the rest of the world. Ilves is clearly enjoying his largely ceremonial job. He was just back from attending ceremonies marking the 50th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution against the Soviets. He also gave us the impression that he would also be happy reading a good book and listening to classical music by the fireside of his country home near the Latvian border. a title="Photo Sharing" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/shelisrael/278572423/">

Two-time Prime Minister Mart Laar, a cherubic history professor who recently received the Friedman Award for his economic reforms and driving Estonia into the the European Union (EU). We met in the womblike, ancient cellar of a coffee house. Laar began by telling me an historic vignette that happened in the neighborhood where we were sitting. In feudal times, a landlord executed a peasant from the town below apparently for no good reason. When the landlord went down into that town, he was tried and executed for murdering a peasant. This incident shook Medieval Europe where most lords thought they could just do what they want. His point, I think, was that democracy is in the Estonian DNA.

He has twice served as prime minister and is generally considered the architect of the country's amazingly efficient, transparent and popular e-government. features include a flat tax (23 percent for everyone, very few deductions) and ubiquitous free broadband access for just about all Estonians. he bristled just slightly when I asked him if Estonia wasn't a bit like Singapore, a country I visited a few years back, where computerization is also very high and e-government is a word I heard in nearly all conversations i had with government officials.

"It's not about government delivering information to the people, but people delivering it to the government. We have the ability to vote from home, which changes who votes and the results. You can change your vote if you change your mind. Our e-government is a blueprint for a direct democracy where the people can decide major issues as they arise." These direct votes could happen every week or as needed he told me.

Of course a direct democracy would eventually eliminate the need for a Parliament, which impressed me since Laar is currently under consideration to become prime minister for a third time. The prime minister actually runs the country and is selected by parliament.

I then hopped onto an Estonian Airways flight to Berlin taking a window seat. Two Estonian teenager sat next to me. This was their first flight ever and they nearly smothered me staring out of the window for their first aerial view. This trip was about access for them, access of a different sort.

In Berlin, I wandered down streets that were dramatically modern and wide by contrast to the preserved 12th century Estonian neighborhood where we had stayed. There was the Brandenburg Gate, a magnificent edifice, once scarred by an ugly wall that kept the people of East Germany sequestered from freedom, where President Reagan had stood and declared, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall."

I strolled freely into what was once the East Berlin where people 20 years ago faced machine gun fire in an attempt to leave. I had Weiner Schnitzel and beers at the Einstein Cafe, where most of the crowd looked like they had strolled out of the movie Cabaret.

I took a taxi back to my hotel. The driver was so fat that his belly rubbed the wheel as we drove. He told me he was East German and was 25 in 1989 when the Berlin wall was torn down. He was hungry when he got to the West. He hasn't stopped eating since then he told me as he bit into a chocolate bar to emphasize his point.

It was an amazing day, with a recurring theme about the most tangible sort of global neighborhoods. Estonia and Berlin are dramatic examples of how different life can be for people in different neighborhoods. Mart Laar was so obviously right when he told me, "Access is what makes the difference."

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Sten Shares Skype Vision & Strategy

[Skype's Sten Tamkivi talks about the future.  Photo by Shel.]

Rick and I were both impressed with Sten Tamkivi, Skype’s 28-year-old head of operations, who spent an hour with us in a far-ranging and candid discussion on his company’s strategy and vision.

The core of that strategy, according to Sten, is Skype ’s intention to increasingly derive revenue from non-telephony services. "We view SkypeOut and SMS to be the kind of telephony-related revenues  that we see fading away in the long run, even though they have a very healthy growth rate today. What we are looking into are new things like PayPerLead advertising, which we're doing together with Google and Yahoo, SendMoney, etc.

This is of course necessary because it's core telephony service is free and will remain so. This shift is allowing the company to thrive.  Revenue in the last reported quarter was equal to revenue in prior fiscal year. The company continues to grow at a phenomenal pace, acquiring 250,000 new users a day.

He said he pays no attention to new challenges from upstarts like Jajah and Rebtel. “Very few VOIP services do not compare themselves to Skype." That means they are positioned to follow not lead. "Skype is more focused on staying ahead by focusing on its own opportunities,” he told us..

Instead, “the biggest threat to Skype today is not being able to develop non-telephony streams of revenue. There is excitement in eating our own revenue streams,” he told us, adding, “The notion of counting minutes is technologically obsolete. It’s impossible that calls will be paid for by minutes 10 years from now."

He declined to discuss statistics, on the record, but told us that the acquisition by eBay was highly successful from a financial perspective.  As Rick pointed out during the meeting, eBay sellers were increasingly using the “Skype me” button feature to close deals, a tactic that was met with cynicism when the acquisition took place last year.

Skype will also continue to migrate its telephony services from the computer to handheld devices, preferably embedded into phones as it is doing with the Netgear Skype phone. First, the penetration of cellphones is huge and second, people prefer ease and mobility of handhelds to being tethered to computers. In short, they will go this route because that's where the people are.

He told us that the number of Tallinn-based employees doubled last year to about 270, overwhelmingly technical. There has been extremely low turnover since the acquisition—perhaps 5-6 people. One problem that is emerging is that the technical talent pool in little Estonia, of 1.4 million may get tapped.  Proportionally, Skype's 250 Estonian engineers would be equivalent to a US company employing about 250,000 engineers.

Sten told us that Skype has begun to look elsewhere, attracting people from 33 other countries, mostly in the EU.  He’d like to tap in to the rich and available Ukranian and Russian talent pools but the government is reluctant to issue them visas.

Why? “When you have been occupied for 50 years you want, you just want to keep some people out.”

Still, there are advantages to operating in a small country, where everyone seems to know each other on a personal basis. “When I have trouble with a labor law, I can just call the prime minister.”

Skype's story was in Naked Conversations because it grew through word of mouth at the fastest rate iin history. Conversations are still driving the company's growth even though the company has begun to use some traditional marketing efforts.  Sten has PR people schlepp Skype executives periodically to meet the press, for example.

Skype will now be part Global Neighborhoods for another reason. Skype has made international conversations easier, and cheaper letting some people talk more than they could previously have afforded to do and allowing others to speak internationally when they previously could not have done so.

[NOTE--Several changes have been made o this posting, based on clarifications in additional conversations held through email with Sten.]

connection

She was sitting there in the doorway of an Estonian home built perhaps 800 years ago, ignoring the rain, intently staring at the screen of her Apple PowerBook. I'd like to think she was having a conversation with someone in a far off place.

But this juxtaposition of a computer in the old part of Tallinn somehow seems to me to tell the story that Global Conversations will try to tell, about how social media and culture are colliding, with the results creating things that surprise us a great deal.

Not only that, but I really like her boots.

If it's good enough for Queen Elizabeth...

[Room #8 at Three Sisters Hotel, Tallinn, Estonia. Photo by Shel]

Estonian Venture Capitalist Allan Martinson, is playing host to Rick & me for our two-day visit to Estonia. He offered to make our hotel reservations, which we thought was a nice courtesy.  Little did we know that he would book us rooms in the Five Star Three Sisters Hotel,where Queen Elizabeth stayed during her visit last week.

Now the Queen may have pickier tastes than Rick and me. While she was sleeping in Buckingham Palace, Rick and I have stayed at a Travel Lodge and an aging airport Golden Tulip in Brussels.

We were wonderfully greeted, then escorted into through a wonderful, ancient cobblestoned courtyard, into our respective wonderful and unique rooms.  Mine has one wall of exposed wood that is clearly several hundred years old.

This isn't a travel blog, so I won't wax on. But if you ever find yourself in Tallinn, Estonia, which appears so far to be a pretty good idea, Three Sisters Hotel, seems to me to be the place to stay.

Day off in Stockholm

[View from the park, in central Stockholm. This channel makes this portion of the city an island and takes you out to the Swedish Archipelago.  photo be Shel.]

Rick and I took a well-need day off. I have seldom needed it more. In the morning we took a pleasant hour's train ride from Nykoping, through forests, farms, fjords and assorted waterways into Stockholm, which turned out to be one of Rick's favorite cities.

He's right about the place.  It is charming and near the waterways, downright beautiful, particularly, this time of year, when the tree are turning very much like they are in New England at this time of year.

Rick took me to the Vasa Museum.  I can see why it is his favorite and why he has come here so many times. The Vasa was a 17th century 50-gun ship of the line, built as a weapon in Sweden's war against Poland. The problem is that it was built top-heavy and foundered and sank before it even got to open seas, drowning at least 50 of its crew.

It remained underwater until 1957, where an incredible four-year effort raised it and brought it to shore where the museum was built around it. What a remarkable place.

I'm sitting in the airport now, waiting for the plane that will deliver us to Tallinn, Estonia, which promises to be an absolute highlight in a trip filled with an abundance of highlights.  We will be meeting with the current president and former prime minister, the CEO of Skype along with several other notables.  I'm also getting to visit a first grade classroom in session.

This trip has exceeded my very high expectations. We have met so many interesting people, gained so many insights into the ironies of how much people are alike and how cultures colors us differently. Sometime today, I started to see the book. It's about how the world changes when culture and technology intersect. More about that later.

The Right Way

I am at the Blommenhof Hotel, a part of the Best Western chain. I think we are in Nykoping, Sweden, but I'm not absolutely sure.  We are south of Stockholm, where we will go tomorrow for a play day, in which we plan to cover a few museums and see the sights.  What's important is that the wifi is strong and free. After my sporadic and often frustrating and costly experiences elsewhere, I am eternally grateful.

I've also enjoy the comfort I've felt in Brussels today and now here of being a passenger in cars that drive on the right-hand side of the road as the good Lord intended them to be. Driving or being a passenger in Ireland and England is disconcerting for me, occasionally terrifying. Drivin in the left seems to me to be a crime against the natural order of things.

I know this is true. If you observe people on the streets of Dublin or London, Cork or Brighton as I so recently have done, you will observe that they keep to the right. When people self-organize they follw this pattern.  When they conform to laws, they drive on the left.

If this is Friday ....

...than this must be Belgium.  This is the first full hour I've had to sit in one place. I am overstuffed with food for thought and I won't have it all digested for some time to come. The pace has been such that I have not had sufficient time to blog and any in depth writing is probably going to have to wait until the travels are over.

This post is sort of an executive summary trip report, trying to summarizes some of the thoughts this trip has generated so far.

1. Learning should be joyful, but generally, it is not.

It is about tests and tenure, tickets to the next grade.  It is not about discovery. I have known educators over the years and they are like the same good folk I worked with in government.  They start filled with passion and a belief that they will make some small difference. But, over time, it all get eroded and they become complacent.  Their work becomes redundant, the students just become faces. The classroom doesn't change much from year to year or even generation to generation. They call it "chalk and talk."

I found hope that this could change during my 30-hour visit to Edinburgh and Glasgow, where Ewan McIntosh introduced us to all sorts of people who care and have introduced social media to an increasing number f kids and instructors. I was particularly moved by Don Ledingham, the educator who entertained Rick & me along with Ewan in his home. 

Here’s a guy who came up through the public school system and one would think he would be an enforcer of administrative policy. Instead he is a disruptor and he is inserting social media into the Scottish school system.  We met kids who blog, chat nd podcast.  Teens who talk to people on other continents. Flash forward ten years to when these kids enter the workforce and you see a different level of global connectivity in the Scottish culture.  Flash forward still further and maybe the difference in Scotland will spread to other national educational programs as well.

2. Cork is a special place.

Everyone in the city of 400,000 seems to know everyone else and the local neighborhood is becoming a global neighborhood. The traditional culture is changing as the native Irish move up the vocational food chain, being replaced in manual labor and service jobs by growing communities of imported labor, who in turn, are reshaping Cork into a more globally connected community. There are lots of good people with lots of good ideas and I am hopeful that Cork's rapidly developing ecosystem will soon flourish.

Despite all this promise, this is not yet the case.  Ireland has traditionally been a hard place to live and there remain barriers to rapid development as a new media player. First and foremost is that Ireland lags badly in broadband adoption.  At about six percent, it lags behind all other EC countries, except Malta and perhaps Greece.  Second, is that the determined entrepreneurs that are popping up at an accelerating rate are starved for venture funding and without it have to bootstrap too much. There are also doubts that that they can penetrate affluent markets such as the US. I think this last one will go away in time.  One of the Cork social network will break that barrier and others will follow.

h Rick and I met with some great start up guys. I'll write more about them later. The absolute highlight was a blogger dinner, hosted by my client and good friend Pat Phelan, who not that long ago was the chef at taste of Thailand where we gathered and consumed massive quantities of great Thai food.

3. Dublin is to Cork as New York is to San Francisco.

There is a decidedly big city feel to Dublin. Rick and I were there for a period too brief to make any enduing judgments.  We spent a day sequestered in a meeting room at an SaaS conference sponsored by Enterprise Ireland who had invited us there.  We met several promising startup execs all of who are currently focused on Internet-based services to large organizations. This is not my area of personal passion, but still I was impressed by who and what we saw.

My personal highlight was in a two-hour walk in and around Trinity College, where some of the greatest English writers of the past 300 years. I lunched at a Pub where perhaps James Joyce began his long sojourn into death by excessive drinking, to be followed by another Trinity alumnus Brendan Behan. Perhaps the bench where I sat on campus, was the same one where Becket began to sketch out Waiting for Godot.

3. Fergus Burns is an awesome dude.

Dublin was the first to spend some time tripping around Dublin by night with Fergus, founder and CEO of the very promising Nooked.com, a company that provides companies like Ryan Air  customers Really Simple Shopping through RSS feeds. Like Tom Raftery in Cork, he's just downright likable.

4. Much is happening in Brighton, England.

Yesterday was a three-country day.  We woke up in Dublin, took plane and train to Brighton, then flew on to Brussels for a day being arranged by some hospitable Microsoft folk.  It was grueling travel but worth it. A group lunch put together by Clearleft's Andy Budd was just awesome.  I had no idea how much is going on in this beach-fronted city of 250,000 at England's southern tip. It has more free wifi than any community in the the UK. There is an annual new media conference that keeps outgrowing its venue.  They use a mail list of 500 to share information and technical knowledge. The folks I met are as well informed, optimistic and energetic as any I've met, even in Silicon Valley. I hope I have an excuse to get back there and learn more than i could get in my three-hour visit.

5. Unlikely Connections happen.

I recently posted about a computer chat store in Swords Ireland.  It turns out that my client Pat Phelan, who had hosted our  Cork blog dinner is friends with the guy who owns it, and is doing a project with him. I guess Swords, Ireland is more part of his global neighborhood than mine.

Well, I've just blown my free hour gotta go.

The Swords Connectors

Rick and I are in Swords, Ireland, a town that most tourists don't quite catch.  We are here because of its proximity to the Dublin Airport, where we have yet another ungodly early flight--our 6th in seven days.

We ate at the Old Schoolhouse Restaurant, where the food and anmbience was terrific and  figuring out where the actual old school house existed before the building was modified is downright impossible.

We strolled back through the town. In the center--if you could call it a center--was a video store.  Some of the shelves stock videotapes.  But what caught our eye and motivated us to go in were the two rows of computers--maybe 20 in all--lined up. Each had a Logitech camera and each had headphones. Over half the computers were in use--for an hourly fee one Euro or $2.50 USD. The youngestuser was about eight years old and the oldest was maybe 25.

What was going on was that these folks were video chatting, we heard at least three languages. Most faces were filled with the joy that people have when they are away from home and talking with a loved one.

As we strolled back to our hotel, Rick told me, "this is what we are out here to learn about. This is what we had to come here to see." He's absolutely right.

I've been learning about call centers in part from my Cork-based friend and client Pat Phelan, who through a remarkable dinner in our honor two nights ago. I'll tell you all about that later. 

Right now I have this strong urge to talk to my wife Paula.

Scotland: Social media & the Kids

[Edinburgh Silhouette. The city isfilled with visual charm. Photo by Shel Israel]

People everywhere are concerned about their kids, always have been and that is the way it should be. I have no children in America's public schools but share a concern with most of my fellow citizens that the quality of education in the States is going to Hell in a hand basket.

I've been thinking about that a lot in the two days since Ewan McIntosh ushered Rick & me on a whirlwind tour that gave me just a shallow glimpse of what Scotland is doing with kids and social media. I've already written about Don Ledingham, who is in a position to make a difference in educating Scotland's kids.

In subsequent meetings we learned and saw so much more. We talked with:

• Mark Pentleton, the kind of teacher you wish your kids had.  For the past 6 years Mark has used multimedia with languages students and since one-click publishing has produced some of the most well-known languages podcasts and student-produced media (video and podcast) on the European web. He brought along three of his current and former pupils;ls who told us about their experiences in the program including chatting with kids in outlying portions of Scotland.  One of them had done a Japanese language videocast that was a perfect imitation of the TV dating game. These girls showed me how social media are just essential to the way they live and communicate. They also made two messages resoundingly clear.  Social media can make learning more fun and effective if it is aloud to permeate into the classroom and social media will be braided into the lives of these girls as they go through life.
• John Johnston is a primary teacher from Sandaig Primary School. He has blogged and podcast with 6-12 year-olds and has helped Ewan organize the first DemoCamp for educators. My short chat with him reinforced the two key messages from Don's students and added the thought that social media as a teaching tool should be used early in primary school education.
• Sean & Katie Farrell, a remarkable couple who have become globally active in using Second Life, the 3D virtual reality community site, as an effective teaching tool.  We discussed a recent project where a virtual reality project was used to build confidence, socialization and even entrepreneurial skills among inner city kids in Brooklyn as well as kids in Amsterdam and Scotland.

        [Sean Farrell. Educational Pioneer, yes... but why did he bring an orange to            dinner? Photo by Shel.]

You might wonder what all this has to do with Global Neighborhoods. The answer is a great deal. As Rick commented the other day, "If you want to know what the future looks like, then look sat the kids. Get data points, on their habits and the you can look forward a few years to see what the world might look like in a few years."

{note: To see my complete Flickr Scotland photo set, click here.