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Entrepreneurs and Sailors have some things in common: the most relevant one, may as well be THE key to success.

Sailing Anarchy has this awesome picture about a 4y old kid sailing. Who’s not into sailing may not even understand scale here: that boat is an Optimist, a very small boat: that kid is reaaally small!

“The look” is a great title since it represents the focus on the wind and surrounding elements. The kid has it, and entrepreneurs must have it too. Like sailing, building a startup is all about understanding the elements before anybody else, taking choices that edge your position, trimming things to detail toward making the most out of very little and being basically relentless, keeping relentless along the way.

Do you have “the look”?

Image from Sailing Anarchy

Sunday is a good day. Beside wrapping up some random tasks that take too much hassle during the week at InfluAds, you can think and look back. I was recently talking with someone that sent me back to 1992-1995, when I had my first 2 projects.

Selling snails to buy a hot-shot mountain bike when (i was 12 or 13y old)

My first one was catching snails and sell them. For those who don’t know, in Portugal and a few other countries, people eat snails. In Portugal they are mostly small snails, most of times served outside of normal meals… It goes great with beer

The objective was to get 55,000 of the old escudos (around 270€) which at the time would allow me to buy an awesome mountain bike.

That was my first biz and my first experience with scaling a non-scalable business.You usually catch them by hand. That doesn’t scale. A friend and I got a scheme where we would go to some small but deep hills full of high grass, where we would hit the grass and let the snails fall all the way to the bottom, where we had a big bag (somewhat like people do when catching olives). We would then remove any grass and small snails to get a high price for them. We rocked, and we would carry huge bags in our back to one old lady that would offer us cash for them…

Selling t-shirts on a motocross track (i was 16y old)

A few years later I spend 400€ (huge money for a teen back then in Portugal),  to print 80 t-shirts themed “SuperCross 95″**.

I was an incredibly shy guy selling them on a motocross competition, with friends stopping by and all. I’m not a sales man and wasn’t back then. I ended up selling a few but came home with lots of them, selling them to friends & family which made turnover possible. Everybody on that family had a t-shirt like that, maybe even today

One of the shirts had one guy in a motorbike, seen from behind, saying: “If you want to be second follow me”. Even today I love that shirt…. Gotta frame one of those to hang at the office some day.

** Note to self, back them: Don’t create a name that is bounded to one year

When you sail respect for nature becomes something that you naturally respect (well… most do).

For all other people too distracted to care about “her”, only being interested when something affects their personal comfort, watch this.

Storms in NZ called the “Southerly buster” come fast and with little warning. WoW…

Madeira Islands (Portugal) had recently a cathastrophe where it rained like hell for a few hours and everything came down with the massive amounts of water. Years of human development layered stuff into places where they probably shouldn’t.

There is nothing like assuming one little thing: We are small & insignificant on this planet. The last 50y or recorded data won’t predict future behaviour of nature. Be conservative and assume that nature is just a huge mass of elements that fights for balance. Sometimes that just means huge reaction of elements, because that’s the way it is.

(found in SailingAnarchy)

Wow… Great talk about a great brand and car that will change the we see cars.

Great stuff on how UX goes into designing a car with a 17 inch monitor.

An SDK to allow third-party to develop apps for a car…. amazing

Just didn’t understood one statement “Gramma can get into the car an she can drive away.. [due to the familiar elements] and turn the volume up”

Who the heck has a car like this and let gramma take the wheel?????

The chat goes into technology in another talk.

[EDIT: It uses Adobe Air, less 50 miles to power it up ]

(Via @danmartell)

Pure genius of a video…. A nuts turned into a leader, under three minutes. No comments

Via @joshk via TED

Tomorrow, America’s Cup 33, is starting. Two monster boats, built by two spoiled rich dudes, will race on some terms that are not really made for those boats.  This time, following the boats will be so difficult that even the empires will have to run fast to follow 30+ knots speeds.

2 skippers: One is rich and apparently will race his own boat, the second a match-racing genius.

2 boats so fast that “close” in “close racing” doesn’t mean the same anymore.

Looking forward to what it life.

Photo from SLAM

A fun experience always yield more results: check the video below.

There may be one problem with this though. It doesn’t always scale well!

Can you imagine a big city full of these? Well, kids could see if as a fun experience but at one point the surprise factor stops.

The same happens in different subjects: I recently watched this amazing guy talking about new ways of thinking sustainability. He argues against the “less bad” thinking that has driven carbon-trading and other initiatives on global warming. Instead, we argues about driving radical innovation trough imitating nature’s way of doing things. Some of them are truly amazing but on different occasions I kept thinking about the fact that, for instance, a bamboo house cannot be scalable because raw materials and skilled workers would lack or because human life is simply not ready.

How to avoid this? If scaling in quantity doesn’t work, scale variety, innovation and uniqueness… Radical innovation always drives different branches of thinking that will eventually lead to solutions that reach the same effects while being able to scale.

Make sure you visit this: thefuntheory.com

After years of depressive opinions that no one supported, I got one right. An insightful comment immediately got a very down-to heart response from @twitter himself.

Thank you as in “Thank you for noticing that, you really suck at that and I’m getting pretty annoyed with you deleting misspelled posts …” (they just have a limit in characters as you know, so Thanks is enough)

Morten Lund claimed his trends (and hopes) for 2010.

Guess what: i haven’t told my trends for 2010 yet.

I believe there’s a lot of the same when comparing to 2009 but found 3 relevant trends follow:

App stores

The app store fad is in. Desktop Apps (Intel, Twitter Apps (OneForty) or Business Software (GetApp.com) they all race after the gold ruch, which in my opinion is more like Led. Apple made wonders when they introduced the App store because they simplified the way people had access and bough music, iPhoneApps,… But Apple controls the platform (ie, the iPhone, the iPod, etc…). Beside Google and the Android Market or Amazon and the Kindle no one else controls it (even Google is more open). This only means 3 things:

You build yout platform: Audible is trying to do it, maybe going against open formats(?)

Fees will be minimum since users can by directly from the App owner (the same is happening and already happened to some extent with the music and gaming industry: being middle man when you don’t control distribution channels or other forces in the supply chain  doesn’t pay off)

The only value they can add is based on how much extra exposure they can add to the apps: basically they become another point of sale the if the extra exposure created is enough, app owners may be able to. Some hype may keep the fad for a while though and some opportunities may be squeezed while the gold rush lasts (and everybody knows while the gold rush lasted, the only guys making money where basically the ones selling the pick and shovels ).

Simplicity

Web 2.0 is reaching a stability phase. Features will move toward integrated functionality. Real-time and Geo is still growing and experimental. The real deal will be driven by integrating these different geek features into things that make people life’s simpler. Twitter and Foursquare/Gowalla are breakthroughs but the real value out of it is still to come. It like the vinyl players that someone tried to squeeze into a car: the true meaningful innovation was portable music, which arrived with the k7 player. Too many features spur creativity and experimentation: they certainly drive unique stuff but more money generating ideas will arrive from the maturation of it.

The third one

There is a third one and it’s linked under different levels to the two above, while focusing on reducing cost to users (real and perceived cost). But I’ll ride that wave before someone notice it

TIP: TrendWatching.com has some good macro-trends that may be worth to take a look at

Why? Teechnology, that’s why…. Technology grows faster than my ability(xFocus x …) to learn Danish.

Not convinced? Check it bellow. Now Google Translate automatically recommends me to turn on automatic translation. Is this technology advancing on internationalization or is Google mind-reading me and knows that I suck reading that (in this case it was Blur.se, a Swedish site about sailing: but bare with me on the little differences between Svenska and Dansk).

[EDIT: Cant wait to have in on my Gmail!!!]