Tag: adaptation

Nuestro nuevo site en algobueno.es

Va pasando el tiempo y vamos acumulando proyectos, clientes y experiencias que hemos querido registrar en nuevo site en castellano dirigido a empresas, organizaciones y gobiernos interesados en invertir en sus procesos de investigación e innovación.

Hemos recopilado algunos de los servicios que hemos venido prestando a diferentes entidades, a través de encargos puntuales, proyectos, investigaciones de largo plazo y sondeos puntuales, para presentar herramientas más accesibles a todo tipo de organizaciones comprometidas en dar un paso hacia adelante bajo los actuales cambios del mercado, el consumo y las comunicaciones.

El entendimiento del momento y el mercado presentes, así como la proyección a futuro de conceptos, retos y nuevos paradigmas, se presenta como una tarea interesante y a la vez necesaria, en el mar de transformaciones que suceden en el mundo actual.

Nos alegra ofrecer un site cada vez mas participativo, cargado con noticias y documentación de libre disposición donde todo el mundo pueda consultar, preguntar, aportar y debatir temas de actualidad en cuanto a tendencias, innovación, investigación y comunicación cultural.

Nos vemos allí para comentar y debatir! http://www.algobueno.es

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Market Revolution or Revolution vs Market? part II

The powerful internet  consumer and the vulnerable citizen

Internet citizens, digital natives and teleworkers have discovered a new habitat where a new society and community agreements can be built and lived. Privacy, anonymity and lack of physical danger have empowered many of us to expand our identities, express ourselves , socialize and develop our hidden talents. This new habitat has provided new spaces and dynamics for many subcultures and ideologies fully or partially repressed by the mainstream , conventional media and public policies. At the same time new markets and possibilities of exchange have grown opening opportunities to both entrepreneurs and customer to find satisfaction to their dreams and wishes online.

Online retailing and service providing has broaden the number of professions in a way, that no industry or employment policy in the world has ever reached. Free exchange and contribution has reached high levels of relevance as much as online stores, online education and content consumption via streaming. All this changes the way we buy and sell, but most of all changes the way we make decisions about it.

Control mechanisms have been created to follow and understand all sources of information, paths, tracks and the digital print all of us leave behind when online, this way governments companies and big corporations keep control of the flows of information shared, sold and offered in the net. So we can practically know almost everything that people do or think when online, assuming they do not ever lie.

Are the new generations becoming the new rebels for a digital nation or is the digital environment educating them ?

Access vs property (for everyone?)

This week Apple announced the release of its latest operating system. This time it won´t be possible to buy it at any store but exclusively online. Amazon has launched it program to rent text books to scholars instead of selling them, someone called this a sustainable initiative. What will happen when computers, can only operate if they are connected to the web and when would it become illegal to avoid digital surveillance?

Access to contents, cloud computing, interconectivity and the possibility to be “always on” means that a lot of information, resources, software and applications will be available for many people, to be used even free of charge. But also means everything we do in that environment leaves a track, a statistic that makes databases grow and become more and more efficient. Optimizing this databases provides hints on what people, like, do , approach, enjoy and need and also allows marketeers, governments and power circles to control and direct information, reactions and scenarios in the digital world. Property (specially intellectual property) becomes and obsolete idea under the slogan of sharing and collaborating.

One amazing thin about cool things is mutation. As soon as cool is identified it mutates into something unexpected, something new, something unreachable. That will be the circle of the future markets, permanent change and permanent adaptation, multiplicity and rebellion. Slippery creativity that mutates as plants and animals do, when the weather changes. A permanent survival.

Is the market ready for this revolution? Is it ready to change and adapt at this pace ? What are communication and advertising agencies capable of offering in this environment? or will this revolution transform our actual concept of markets and trade?

In the next part: Is there a future of Money?

The Music Biz : Burgers vs Gourmet food

Consumption in the music biz has created massive fast food for hungry fans, Bands that look good on stage and in the pictures and repeat beats for a year or two. We are still open for solid projects able to hold themselves creatively and in a couple of years when world music is not interesting to anybody can come along with fresh gourmet food for starving audiences.

Almost one year of planning, negotiation, confirmations, revisions and last-minute changes were necessary to complete the participation or retroVisor (a Colombia world music band) in Wassermusik 2010.
Wassermusik is a festival created in 2008 by the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin that features music, film, lectures and other artistic expressions around the topic of water. It can be related to the oceans, rivers or life surrounding water landmarks of the planet. The HKW is  a place for international contemporary arts and a forum for current developments and discourse. We have perceived it as an ideal location where contemporary culture can be seen but also be experienced, and music bands may have a place to spread their word and creativity.
Our link with HKW started one year ago at the MMVV a live music market held on Vic, a small town near Barcelona where we use to attend to keep up to date in the local  music business.  There we meet Detlef, who with a very sharp idea about the type of projects he wanted in his festival program talk o us in a friendly and open way, just the way we like it and it looked like the kind of project Algo Bueno loves to be involved with.
By then, our music projects were going slow since the local music circuit seemed to be reduced to a few music halls around Barcelona, that payed very little, based on entrance sales, not very motivating creatively, economically or ¨communicationally¨ speaking.  No interesting musical projects or bands showed in the horizon, all bands and singers were looking, sounding and performing like something we had  seen before a thousand times.
Music had become a little bit of a world of templates were stylish formulas blind the creative minds in search of success. We still wanted to give music a try, but the local music market was not helping.
So again we looked into our friends. retroVisor is a musical project that started exploring dialogs between the colombian traditional music and electronic sounds in a way that seemed very committed to environmental and social issues around he world. One of my best friends from the arts school was involved creating the visuals for the band and exploring a new career in music, so it was the time to be there and lend a hand. In 2008 we signed our first contract with the band to help them promote their work in Spain and Europe, with the purpose to experience the way live and digital music revolution would change the world of communications and culture.
Last year, during a show in Amsterdam , we discovered that the band had signed another contract with a manager in Switzerland. It was surprising since we had not been notified by anyone, but as we were talking friends business here, we had no problem sharing projects and  supporting the band our research of the music biz was intact and growing. It seems none needs anybody in this business since digital distribution have made things easy for the bands to be connected to venues, audiences and fans. Artists can auto edit, manage their shows, sell their music, get live show contracts and get involved in other projects to promote themselves anywhere in the world.
But, is there enough  time and mind to create, be excellent, sell, negotiate, blog, reach the fans, make the biz, and still be committed to ideas or some substance?
We have now discovered why all bands look the same, sound the same and forget their commitments and identity, there is simply no time to do everything or team that can handle it. Either creativity, identity or promotion may fail when a small group of people have to multitask this way. Bands adopt ¨templates¨ to be able to get along with the amount of work they hold in their backs, for being authors, artists, managers, bloggers, look pretty and try to convince the world they are original and innovative. Few of what we have seen during the last 3 years have an essence and a creative proposal that may last long or hold strong with the demands of fans and media.

Few events and festivals care about what the band has to say. Many don´t even have side events like workshops, lectures or artists talks to let the fans get deeper into their artists worlds. The stage seems to be enough. The crisis around musical editions, CDs and DVDs leave just the band´s blog (when updated)  or MySpace profile with a few information about the band´s vision of the world and    the development of their image.
We are still open to projects able to hold themselves creatively and in a couple of years when world music is not interesting to anybody can come along with fresh gourmet food for starving audiences that attend solid festivals like Wassermusik in Berlin.
Consumption in the music biz has created massive fast food for hungry fans. Bands that look good on stage and in the pictures and repeat beats for a year or two. Like Burgers we are loving it, because it widens the space for corporate sponsorship and fast projects to reach huge audiences. But like burgers, we are also hating it because it diminishes the quality of pop music and pop culture around the planet.

artist talk at wassermusik 2010

Everyone’s Hero : A fun adventure on DVD

We had the pleasure to coordinate and verify the dubbing of Everyonés Hero into Spanish, German, Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian and Dutch. here are two covers in different languages.

originalversionWhen we first approached the movie in the summer of 2008 it had already been produced a couple of years ago. It was the last movie Christopher Reeve (Superman) Directed. It seemed like the typical American children´s movie. Including baseball and middle America landscapes.elheroedetodos

The story of Babe Ruth´s bat kidnapping by a child and the many moral lessons it teached the kid trough the voice of Woopi Goldberg. Lots of funny adverntures to bring baack the bat to Babe who seems to be useless without it . AT the end songs and characters are really sweet and the american courage show off all the time. Nice and optimistic.

We had the pleasure to coordinate and verify the dubbing into Spanish, German, Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian and Dutch. here are two covers in different languages.

Dubbing in Europe

Movies have been adapted and dubbed to Spanish, German, Italian, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Danish, Dutch, Russian, Portuguese and soon will be made to Czech, Romanian and Polish. Which made me think about the at least other 50 languages spoken massively in Europe that are not still being considered as Flemish, Catalan, Basque, Latvian, Greek, etc.

This year we have been coordinating dubbing projects for Starz Media, a Division of Sony Pictures. Most of these dubbing works go to television and DVD products to be featured to millions of people in different European countries who wish to enjoy the movies they like at the most.

So it feels like a great responsibility both with the audience and with the creators and producers of each movie to find the right studio, actors and translators that will adapt the story to each country and culture. All countries, all cultures and all languages being very different from each other and from the original context, the movies are produced make it a bit complex to come out with a very accurate adaptation. Nevertheless the great teams we have found, the great translators and actors have made it possible

We have been charmed with Everyone´s Hero, the last movie Christopher Reeve directed, with a talented cast that includes Woopi Goldberg, Robert Wagner and Forest Whitaker, Behind the Mask a thrilling story directed by Scott Glosserman and Dead Space the presecuel of the Space-Horror video game from EA for which we designed t-shirts, standee, and other promotional gadgets

Movies have been adapted and dubbed to Spanish, German, Italian, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Danish, Dutch, Russian, Portuguese and soon will be made to Czech, Romanian and Polish. Which made me think about the at least other 50 languages spoken massively in Europe that are not still being considered as Flemish, Catalan, Basque, Latvian, Greek, etc.

Lots of amazing work for each project has been keeping us busy all summer, working California time in Europe, learning a lot and meeting highly talented professionals. We have loved this project and will keep on doing our best job to stay tuned to new titles.