Carlos Domingo - Un poco de todo

El proyecto CP Labs acaba de anunciarse públicamente hoy (post de David anunciándolo aquí). En el pasado Campus Party de Valencia algunos os preguntaríais que de donde salía una area como de chill out con tiras negras que estaba en uno de los pabellones donde ponía CP Labs (ver foto). Pues bueno, era el primer teaser de un proyecto con el que llevábamos tiempo discutiendo con el verdadero artífice de todo esto, Paco Ragageles, fundador y alma mater de la Campus Party. Al poco de entrar en Telefónica, hacia finales del 2006 dos personas con las que sintonicé inmediatamente (Patxi y Alejandro, los insiders de Telefónica ya sabéis a quien me refiero) me comentaron que tenia que conocer a Paco cuanto antes. Nos pusieron en contacto y al poco lo visitaba en sus oficinas de Madrid y me ametralló con su visión de Internet, ideas, propuestas, y mil cosas para hacer conjuntamente y lo que me quedó claro desde el primer momento es que la comunidad de campuseros con Paco al frente (y Beli, Alejandro, David, Richard, y los otros miles de asistentes, no nos olvidemos del resto) eran una comunidad super innovadora, llena de ideas, de energía y de ganas de hacer cosas con la que nosotros, como representantes del área de Internet y Multimedia de Telefonica I+D y cheer leaders de la innovación en Telefónica, nos teníamos que relacionar mas profundamente. Nuestra primera colaboración surgió ya en la Campus del 2007 (modesta, sacada adelante gracias a la iniciativa personal de algunos de mis compañeros) y este año haremos mas cosas y mejor (Alberto y demás compañeros, es vuestro reto). Poco antes ya discutimos el proyecto que ahora se anuncia de CP Labs, la creación de una plataforma que una a la comunidad de campuseros mas allá del evento de cada verano en Valencia y que les permita articular las muchas iniciativas innovadoras relacionadas con las nuevas tecnologías para ver cuales se pueden sacar adelante. Vamos, open innovation en estado puro. Arrancar esto no ha sido fácil pero se ha conseguido convencer a las personas adecuadas y el que Telefonica I+D este oficialmente apoyando esta iniciativa me alegra muchísimo y demuestra los cambios que se están realizando en la compañía. Felicidades a toda la gente que ha hecho de este proyecto una realidad y ahora, a hacer de esto un éxito. De momento se empieza con unos concursos para animar a la comunidad a empezar a participar con ideas sobre temas concretos, unos foros, los open labs para testear productos (espero pronto meter alguno de los nuestros) pero vendrán mas cosas así que apuntaros cuanto antes. Esta semana he estado cenando con Paco y a parte de los CP Labs está llevando el concepto de Campus Party por el mundo, este año ya arranca en Brasil, Colombia, Grecia y por supuesto sin olvidarnos de Valencia así que a ver si el CP Labs tiene el éxito que ha tenido Campus y se extiende también por otros países, en las manos de vosotros, la comunidad de innovadores, está el hacer de esto una realidad.

CD

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One of the most interesting events from last year 3GSM conference in Barcelona (now renamed Mobile World Congress) is back in the city. The Mobile Monday Awards are going to be held on Monday 11th of February at 2:30pm in the brand new Espacio Movistar. Many thanks to my colleagues from Telefónica Móviles for sponsoring and providing the venue and to Rudy and the team for putting together an excited program, I hope that this becomes a tradition. This year the format will be slightly different but I do not want to steal the thunder from Rudy so just say that Mr. Pekka Ala-Pietila, former president at Nokia Corporation and currently chief executive officer of Blyk Corporation, a virtual mobile operator in the UK, will be one of the keynote speakers together with Luis Jorge Romero, the director of Innovation and Standard at Telefónica Spain. Like last year, I will be at the jury of the awards so if you want to get to know the hottest mobile startups (finalist are now being picked in each city) please drop by and say hello.

CD

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In the web, there is something known as a the "digg effect". It means that one of your blog posts gets  lots of diggs and makes it to the digg home page, suddenly you see a huge increase in traffic. I was having dinner with Pablo and both have just experience what I now call the "Ciberpais" effect. We got  featured in an article in El Pais section El Ciberpais and we have both experience a huge growth in traffic since the article mentioned our blogs and web sites and provided the URLs. I am in the middle of migration my blog from carlosdomingo.blogs.com to www.unpocodetodo.com (the article mentions the title of my blog and provides the new URL at the end). Since a vanity Google search on my name provides my old blog as the first hit (my new one comes 6th at the moment, I see this changing quickly), I have actually experience large traffic growth in both URLs. So an interesting new local phenomenon.

Anyway, since I am talking about the article, let me self quote me (in Spanish) since I love this sentence that Tomas picked for the article: " Telefónica es una multinacional que no puede contentarse con ser una fast-follower, un segundón que hace seguidismo diligente de lo que inventan otros. Tiene que liderar la innovación y sabe que ha de contar con gente nueva que se ha enfrentado a otras culturas, mezclar perfiles, que haya nuevas ideas, que no castigue el fracaso cuando se toman riesgos…"

Another funny anecdote that happened tonight with Pablo is that after dinner we went to a bar and had a very heated discussion about whether in Imagenio you should move more processing and intelligence to the network or you should enhance the processing and storage power of the set top boxes. This is a very interesting discussion that I should write about when I get some time. While having this discussion, a guy approached us and asked why we were talking about Imagenio and we said that we work at Telefónica R&D and were involved with the product so we were having a discussion about their future (yes, Pablo and I are true weeks that go out drinking on a Friday night and ignore all the girls around and discuss about the future of Imagenio). Then the guy recognized Pablo and mentioned his name so I asked him why he knew Pablo. "Because I work at Telefónica R&D Barcelona" he said so I asked whether he also knew me. He first said no and then it took him a while to realize who I was and recognize me. Apparently because I was wearing jeans and a jumper and not a suit and a shirt like at work he just did not recognize at first….

CD

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Not that long ago, few years ago, when I was very much involved in data analysis and data mining, talking about terabytes was talking about a lot of data and most people did not even know what a petabyte was. Now, you can buy a terabyte of storage in consumer stores (just saw it in Bic Camera in Tokyo) and Google is processing 20 petabytes of data per day!!! Think that from one terabyte to a petabyte is one order of magnitude bigger, which means a lot bigger. No matter how long I am in this industry, the pace of change and evolution will never stop amazing me….

CD

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Hola, mi amigo Vicente del11822 me pasa por Facebook esta iniciativa que me ha parecido suficientemente buena y original como para diseminarla aquí. Están construyendo un coro para felicitar la Navidad cantando juntos La Marimorena y recaudar 11822 euros para el Proyecto Proniño de la Fundación Telefónica que lucha para erradicar el trabajo infantil en Latinoamérica y lograr que estos niños además se puedan educar. En Latinoamerica, más de 17 millones de niños y niñas trabajan en lugar de ir a la escuela y ante esta situación, Fundación Telefónica ha puesto en marcha Proniño y esta iniciativa se une para ayudar al proyecto. La idea es que se tiene que conseguir que 11822 personas suban su foto al coro que se ha creado en la URL www.elcorodelas11822voces.com y cuando se consiga donara 11822€ al proyecto. 

Yo ya me he unido así que haz lo mismo  y nos vemos en el coro de las 11822  voces!!!!

Felices fiestas

Carlos

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Time to write a business plan so I can be like those guys!!!

Very funny, certainly there is a bubble when you see this.

CD

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The Open Research Day that we organized this week at the Telefonica R&D center in Barcelona was a huge success, here you have the Expansion article (I could not find the online link) and two links to the El Pais article and to the TV3 Telenoticies news story on TV. Enjoy and make sure next year you are coming to see us!!!

El Pais news story about ORD

TV3 Telenoticies video clip

CD

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Originally uploaded by Un poco de todo by Carlos Domingo.

I just visited Apple in one of their buildings in Cupertino and they have some fun names for all conference rooms, they were using either recent TV series (Lost, 24, …) or music related names (U2, Coldplay, Sinatra,…), pretty cool.

CD

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Out of all the invited guests and speakers to last week innovation event at Telefonica, the one that I liked the most was Aram Bartholl. He is a media artist from Berlin that specializes in real world installations that manifest things that happen in cyberspace. So now that there is so much talk about convergence, he is actually making converge the cyberspace back into real world by taking some things that are familiar in the online world like chatting, the red pins from Google Maps, the names on top of characters that appear in games like World of Warcraft so you can identify the carachter (my favorite) or 2d tags that are very popular in some countries like Japan to use with your mobile phones, and then manifest them back into real, everyday life situations. I recoded part of his presentation that you can see below as a YouTube playlist (there are 6 clips) but just search for Aram Bartholl in YouTube or go to his Web site here. His work is very interesting because it makes you realize how some of the online conventions that we are so used to look totally out of place in real world (the WOW naming) while some others actually make a lot of sense and can be quite useful (the West/East Berlin for example).

CD

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The picture on the right is from a sticker I found in a toilet at the Grand Hyatt Hotel while attending the Mobile 2.0 user conference. In case you cannot read well the text, the sticker advertises a mobile web site where you can check where is the closest clean toilet The sticker was literally in the wall of the toilet (which was pretty clean, btw) so you could see it while you were peeing. Probably a bit too late to use the service but certainly a good place to promote your service since anyone there, will, eventually, go again to a toilet in some other occasion and might decide to use what I think is the silliest location based service I have ever seen. Not surprise to see this startup being acquired by Google to add to their local offering…Seeing this is what makes me think that anything is possible in Silicon Valley.

CD

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