Reconsidering Gartner’s Cycle of Hype http://t.co/gLoclTJ2 via @ThisIsSethsBlog
How Sitting All Day Is Damaging Your Body and How You Can Counteract It – http://t.co/4aNLzpxa
We are always getting ready to live, but never living (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
Add “adventurer” to your Twitter bio. Then become one. http://t.co/aZitihPA with 99 other tips by @julien
How IBM’s Sam Palmisano Redefined the Global Corporation http://t.co/DphzbjT5

As we approach the Christmas break, most technology blogs are publishing their personal lists of what really mattered in 2011. I just tweeted TechCrunch’s Top 20 iOS Apps, where I fully agree on the first position given to Flipboard and I decided to give Snapseed a try.

That’s the essence of it: end-of-the-year lists give you a chance to appreciate the good things you got and to catch up with what you missed.

However, I believe it’s also important to look back at the lessons one has learnt the hard way. Perhaps 2011 will be remembered as the year when people started truly realizing the unsustainability of an economic system where Asia buys the debt of Western countries to keep them consuming beyond their means and purchasing products made in Asia, in a meaningless race that is trashing the world and making us feel increasingly unfulfilled.

I don’t know if we’ll still have a Euro currency in one year’s time, but either way I hope we’ll be able to start tossing out the unhealthy excesses that globalization has brought to us.

I’ve written about The Story of Stuff before. Today I’d like to follow up by pre-embedding The Story of Technology, focused on the market I love and where so much could be done to protect our only world… without missing any of the great fun we’re having!

As a teenager I briefly entered the world of competitive swimming with relatively little success. Most notably, I quit without breaking the wall of 1 minute on the 100 freestyle and I then rarely swam in a pool for the following ten years.

That’s why the assessment of my last five years of Master Swimming (2006 – 2011) goes beyond any expectation: I haven’t simply broken all my previous personal records and swum 100 freestyle in 56 seconds. More importantly, I’ve found the experience of being a late achiever incredibly rewarding and motivating.

Triathlon is the next challenge I want to take up.

It’s a far tougher one, with two disciplines (especially cycling) sitting completely out of my comfort zone. The fact that I’d like to progressively move all the way up to long distance events doesn’t help either, because even in swimming my best performances have always been in the area of 100 / 200 meters. I need to completely reset myself as an athlete… or perhaps to turn into an actual one. I can’t help myself though: I’ve got the bug!

A brand-new Tumblr blog called “The Tri Bug” will be my online mirror of this new path. Its latest posts are shown in the right column of this web site, some more are hosted on this page of my web site and the complete archive is accessible at TriBug.tumblr.com.

First of all, no worries: I won’t dare turning the elegant iPad into a vulgar and busy download machine. In the age of the cloud there’s plenty of bandwidth and processing power up there for us to leverage…

A few weeks ago I subscribed to Fetch.io, a cloud-based downloader whose purpose is to speed up file fetching jobs from a number of online sources. Although still young and not exactly flawless, the service is quite effective and ultimately proved to go far beyond my expectations, thanks to a relatively hidden feature: media transcoding.

Let’s see then how to get a perfectly optimized video for your iPad out of a common Torrent feed, without using other device than your beloved tablet.

1. Find the video you’re interested in, for example through Torrentz.eu, and copy the Torrent file address. Please be mindful of intellectual property rights.

2. Create a premium profile on Fetch.io for just $4.95 and login. Then press the ‘Fetch’ button and paste the URL of your Torrent as copied before.

3. Once the video file has been entirely downloaded (you can check the progress in ‘Transfers’), go to ‘Files’ and tap on the file name. A new page will open and try to play it for you, but that requires Flash and won’t work on an iPad. However, on the right hand side you will see a small menu.

4. Tap on ‘Encode this video’ and select the iPad format. This will go into a queue and take a few hours, so plan it in advance if you’re planning to carry some movies with you on the iPad for that long flight across the ocean…

5. Once the job is done, Fetch.io will contain an optimized version of your video in ‘Files’, with the same title as the original and a final suffix such as _iPad. Just download it from the browser of an app like Downloads HD (Safari won’t allow it) and you’re ready to go! Oh… I was almost forgetting: in the age of the cloud, of course Downloads HD will use iCloud by Apple to make the same video seamlessly available on other iOS devices. Your iPhone will easily play the iPad-optimized format, making your life just that easy… if you belong to the growing army of Apple’s loyal customers!

Articles and talks about an alleged new Internet bubble are increasingly common, and sometimes encouraged by the creation of companies whose business model is easily summarized in one sentence: “we’ll figure it out!”

However, no one can argue that the Internet is just a trend for geeks any more.

As brilliant start-ups are founded every day, the gang of four (Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google) keeps crunching every growth forecast and changing our lives in unprecedented ways. Yes, final users are still at the very centre of this revolution.

The numbers below, beautifully rendered by the guys at Go Gulf, talk by themselves…

I’ve got far less time than I wish to keep this blog updated with new posts… so I was delighted some months ago to discover the WordPress plugin Fresh From FriendFeed and Twitter.

I immediately installed it, thus the home page has been constantly updated with my latest tweets ever since. Unlike other plugins, this one doesn’t simply show a feed somewhere in a widget, but creates a constantly updated WordPress post.

However a couple of minor bugs, in an otherwise excellent piece of free software, felt like the proverbial “pebble in the shoe”:

- a weird text such as O:16:”SimpleXMLElement”:1:{i:0;s:6:”picker”;} shown as author name rather than just my nickname “picker”

- non-working permalink in the generated post (also when clicking on the title)

I tried to fix them a couple of times, but my PHP skills are honestly amateurish: web sites were still static when I worked as freelance web designer years ago! So I resolved to give a try to Elance, an online marketplace for digital professionals which I first heard about when reading a great book: The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss.

For the cost of a dinner in London, I hired a young PHP developer from Bangladesh and he managed to fix the plugin in a couple of days. It’s the magic of currency exchange, so I even felt good by supporting a bold entrepreneur in the developing world.

Of course the outcome is available to any interested blogger: click here to download the fixed plugin.

I’ll try to inform the original author, whom I’ve not been able to talk to so far, so hopefully this fix will help him publish an officially updated version of the plugin on WordPress Extend.

In the meantime, I hope this helps!

I’ve been reading The Story of Stuff by Annie Leonard, an eye-opening (and eye-watering) book that I would immediately make mandatory in every school program around the world: with an informal yet compelling style, it’s able to dramatically change one’s misplaced assumptions and to show how badly our global economic system is currently run.

A 20 minute video by the author will be a better introduction than any further word.

Among the many interesting stories the book brought me through, I was especially impressed by one about Coltan, a mineral essential for the production of most consumer electronics devices. Around 80% of its world supplies happen to be in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Well, in 2000 the price of Coltan started dramatically soaring, mostly because of the huge success of Sony’s PS2 game console, causing in the order:

- thousands of Congolese to rush into the area to get at the metal, destroying national parks and killing gorillas and other wildlife in the process;

- both official and rebel armies to follow suit, kill or enslave the Congolese above and exploit children and women’s work with the most brutal methods of coercion (the UN reckons that about 45,000 local women were raped in 2005 only).

All of this ultimately happened to let other children play with their game consoles. But how could be blame them? They’re just at the opposite end of the perverse production-consumption-disposal chain that we’re letting screw the world. And although those kids’ quality of life is arguably better than their Congolese counterparts, they’re victims as well to a certain extent: it is proved that our consumerist lifestyle is not making us happy at all. The United States is the richest country in the world, but ranked 150th out of the 178 countries considered in the last Happy Planet Index. Want to know which country is constantly in the top positions year after year? Costa Rica in Central America, which:

- no longer has an army since 1949, when the government shifted the previous military budget to fund worthy internal projects;

- has combined its ministries of Energy and Environment and achieved an astonishing 99% of energy production from renewable sources;

- has assigned all the money gained from a carbon tax to fund the local communities effort to protect forests, triggering an impressive reversal in deforestation.

I use to read and write about information technology and I feel constantly amazed by the way it’s changing our lives for the better. As both a passionate product manager and an enthusiastic consumer, I’m proud to be a small part of this revolution, but as a citizen I’m increasingly worried about its impact over our planet and the people who live on it.

It doesn’t look impossible to make the whole cycle more sustainable though.

Let’s consider for instance Apple, one of the world’s most admired companies. Thanks to a disruptive entrance in the handset market a few years ago, they are currently gaining around half of the industry profits with less than 5% of market share! I’m as impressed by these results and hooked to their amazing products as most other people, but I’ve got a question: given those remarkable margins, why do Apple need to produce its electronic gadgets through some of the Asian manufacturers least known for their respect of either human rights or the environment? The corporations’ relentless and blind race towards unlimited growth and (apparent) wealth is actually turning this world, slowly but irreversibly, into a miserable and unfair place.

Seth Godin has recently wrote about a huge opportunity called peace dividend, that we all wasted around 20 years ago when the Cold War was suddenly over: we could have re-purposed military spending and technology to improve our quality of life, just as Costa Rica had done long before. We didn’t. Seth’s provocation therefore is: are we going to do the same with the technological dividend coming from the digitalization of so many processes and the resulting increase in efficiency and opportunities?

There is good news here: as citizens and consumers, this time we have the means to influence such an outcome in an unprecedented way, thanks to a former piece of military technology escaped to the sad destiny mentioned above: the Internet.

That’s how we can write a happy ending to The Story of Stuff: by triggering a new generation of direct democratic participation, thanks to the amazing reach of the Internet. The big organisations responsible for most of the aberrations the book talks about can lobby and corrupt governments around the world, but how will they be able to do the same with each of us?

Annie Leonard is the perfect example. She didn’t need any big budget to start a web project called The Story of Stuff, to film clips like the one above and publish them on YouTube, to write and publish a great book with the same name. Yet she’s influencing many people like me, who are actively recommending her work and planning to make their part to change things.

Do you believe you don’t have enough time? You can still make a difference with your choices as a consumer, by preferring and encouraging the most responsible products and companies. A first step is to avoid any product made of toxic PVC or packaged in hard-to-recycle hybrid materials. A further one is to use handy applications such as GoodGuide, available on the Internet and in form of iPhone / Android app, to check the impact of products on your health and the environment as you shop. These trends are already influencing the policies of many companies around the world.

And, last but not least… spread the word!

Perhaps it’s because none of my history teachers has ever carried out the program beyond World War II… but as a kid I used to think that we lived in a fair and peaceful era.

Unfortunately we are still very far from that. Today I happened to watch the news on TV (something I had got used to absolutely avoid as I lived in Italy, where the few remaining independent journalists can only write on the Internet), and I found a very personal connection among the following facts:

Internet and the mobile phones have been shut down in Egypt to curb the on-going protests, because most rioting demonstrators had used the social networks as primary means of organization;

British Prime Minister, David Cameron, has defended the austerity measures of his government and urged the whole Europe to follow;

between 18,000 and 30,000 liters of petroleum are polluting one of the most beautiful shores of Sardinia, but most Italian newspapers are not reporting the fact at all. Meanwhile the “usual mighty” are planning to build new nuclear plants and keep pushing the consumption of fossil fuels, in agreement with the government led by a man whose life has been a relentless journey across the Italian Penal Code (the latest allegation being exploitation of child prostitution).

I felt so sad. Internet is the only remaining hope of a young generation which was expected to live in silence and ignorance, to be entertained and misinformed, to pay for the privileges of those who literally burned every possible resource and loaded the public balance sheets with unbelievable debts in the last fifty years or so, and now either enjoy fat and unsustainable pensions or keep leading supposedly democratic countries.

Of course this is true with different gradations across the world. Nonetheless, it’s increasingly clear that even the most enlightened democracies are pursuing interests far from the real needs of their people, because no one dares either touching the so-called vested rights (even when they’re clearly unfair) or leading a real change of course over the way our productive systems are run. The protection of jobs is the usual excuse to safeguard the economical status quo and turn us all into the proverbial boiling frog.

For example, it turns out that within 6 hours the world’s deserts receive more energy from the sun than humanity consumes in a year (source), and that we don’t need new technologies to exploit it (source) but only the political will.

Does anyone believe that the huge required investment wouldn’t be worth it, considered the increasing devastation that fossil fuels and global warming are spreading across the planet?

If you’re reading this article, you probably don’t… But you’re a young person who surfs the Web, which means you’re not part of any majority able to elect governments and run the world.

I’ve recently read Inspired by Marty Cagan, a clever journey across the best practices and most common mistakes of product management.

A lot of thoughts (and resolutions) were blending inside my mind after turning the last page over… well, in a metaphysical sense, for I was using an e-book reader! What I want to briefly share here is the outcome of an interview with Jeff Bonforte, an experienced executive at Yahoo!, that the author includes in the book.

Mr Bonforte basically adds a layer of analysis to the famous technology adoption curve, based on which emotions drive the users of each group. This leads to interesting results, which I think can have a role in helping product managers develop “valuable, usable and feasible” products (to quote Marty Cagan)… or, in more traditional words, to avoid Moore’s “chasm” after the early adopters phase.

Of course these definitions are not innovative and revolutionary by themselves. But we’ll never be careful enough at studying the frustrations, emotions and expectations of common people as we develop new products…

This is among the lessons Marty Cagan reinforced with his great book.

Last week I listened to a nice speech by the “curious journalist” Roberto Bonzio. He talked about his project Italiani di Frontiera and proposed a fascinating list of Italian characters who can boast histories of success abroad.

One especially impressed me for his relentless spirit of enterpreneurship.

Amadeo Giannini was a young independent banker, used to offer small loans mainly to a small community of people with his same Italian heritage. When a disastrous earthquake hit San Francisco in 1906, he started building his success story (and helped rebuilding the city) by making substantial loans to many hard-working people, as opposed to the usual bankers’ policy of servicing wealthy customers only.

This way, Mr Giannini basically invented what we currently call venture capital.

A few years later he was among the main financers of an obscure movie titled The Kid, then helped his creator Charlie Chaplin found a brand-new studio named United Artists.

He kept financing risky projects through his entire life, meeting success and failure… and – I guess – treating these two impostors just the same.

It is told that when Amadeo Giannini died in 1949 at age 79, his personal fortune was relatively modest, but hundreds of ordinary people showed up at his funeral. Meanwhile his bank had become a giant, and is today the largest in the United States: have you ever seen Bank of America‘s logo around?

History says that Silicon Valley has experienced such a rapid growth, from agricultural land south of San Francisco to the world’s center of innovation, thanks to people like Amadeo Giannini: able to spread a sense of urgency for progress and risk-taking. Other examples include Stanford graduates like Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, who started a long tradition of successful tech companies founded in garages.

So, which is the answer to this post title? At the end of his second mandate, Tony Blair flew to Silicon Valley and asked the same question to company executives such as Apple’s Steve Jobs and Cisco’s John Chambers. They made him observe the strict relationship between university campuses and the corporate world, and emphasized their relentless pursuit of meritocracy.

So sad that Amadeo Giannini’s country of origin is still light-years far from that…