Elisa Reyna, CEIBS students and some of the guests students from the EADA MBA business school

She also spoke about her previous venture “pet a porter”. They are a brick and mortar chain in Spain that broke with the traditional concept of the dark, humid, dirty pet shop. Pret a porter enjoyed 60% profit margin and customers as David and Victoria Beckam and the Spanish royal family. She sold the business at the highest point because one of the investors wanted to push the business further and open many stores and she thought it was not a good idea. Pret a porter still exists and for her, it’s like visiting an ex boyfriend because they still have her picture in the shops and her biography on the website.

Petuky, the Spanish community for pet lovers

Unicode domains are not very attractive. There are two reasons, on one hand they are not easy to type on the keyboard. Do you know how to type ✈.com in your URL bar?. On the other hand lots of computers don’t have support for Unicode characters, at least not a full set of grihps. The consensus is that Unicode domains are not practical for domains.

However things are changing. New computers and devices speak full Unicode. Nowadays most of the time we don’t type URLs but follow links. As Internet expands to people living on countries using “weird” languages, more and more people will be able to type comfortably Unicode domains. Most of the Unicode character set for Hindi, Thai, Lao, Tibetan, and Arabic languages is still free.

I registered a Unicode domain as experiment. I’m the proud owner of ௫.net. ௫ means ’5′ in the Tamil alphabet. I always loved ௫ because it looks like a reversed at symbol (‘@’). I used this domain for two months for a personal installation of a URL shortener. I used this domain to share links on twitter and facebook. You can test it, this article is shortened as http://௫.net/j. The results of the experiment? The domain is inconvenient to use. Many twitter clients fail to display or recognize the links. It is different. It’s a piece of art.

Unicode domains don’t have any commercial interest. Yet. Maybe they will never have it. Meanwhile you can register those domains for fun, to inflate your ego, or as investment. For the price of two cups of coffee per year, you can be the sole owner of a domain like ✈.com, ✆.com, ➀.net or ❤.org

Go to the list of Unicode characters in the Wikipedia and look for your favorite character. At this time most of the Chinese characters are still free!

Street Art with Unicode domains. (Via ♥.tk @ Flickr)

Littlefield simulator factory

The simulation run online updates every 20 minutes for 4 real days. Every 20 minutes in real time advances one complete day in simulation day. It better to study the factory and the demand and predict when you will need to take decisions so you don’t need to be all day checking the status of the factory. The decisions you can take are the acquisition of more machines (capacity), change how your product flow in your factory (balance capacity), and buying raw materials (reorder points).

Once with the initial data in our hands, we calculated an strategy and stuck to it till the very end. One problem with the OpsSimCom simulation is that the user interface is really slow and the data is dispersed in many different places. To overcome this limitation I developed several scripts to collect all the available data, display it together in a table and graph real time charts of the situation of the factory.

This is how my data collector look like

Monitoring the simulation comfortably on the TV

Even if the simulation is simple, there are many variables and it is very difficult to create a model for maximum profit. Our proved to be correct because we followed the path of the leading teams but we failed miserabily on the implementation, accidentaly buying raw materials we didn’t need and taking too much time to buy extra capacity at mid game. We finally finished on the position 22 out of 140. Ouch!

We collected the standing data during the last 180 days of the competition and created graphs displaying the progression of the different teams. You can download a complete set of charts in high resolution (SVG and PNG files, 30M) and also download an XLS file with the partial financial standing data (The collector missed to get some data points around day 225)

Chart of partial results of the simulation with the top5 teams highlighted.

She described some of her projects, for example in 2007 she twittered for two months in morse code for the Brooklyn museum. For another of her projects (‘Status update’) she sent postcards with a limitation of 140 characteres to the museum in New Haven. The museum exhibited the postcards in a wall with a configuration similar to twitter’s life stream.

She also showed what other people are doing, for example Marina Abramović’s performance art in the MOMA. This new form of art is accessible to anybody in the world, you don’t need to anymore to be living in New York, Paris, London or Berlin to become an artists. More important, the emotional message becomes bidirectional. When you visit a traditional museum you normally spend seconds looking at the art pieces, but in this new form of art the performer invites the his audience to play with the art piece, commenting about it, manipulating it and changing it into new forms. This new form of art is originated in the mid of an artist but it is not controlled by him but by the crowd.

This form of expression uses Twitter and Facebook. An Xiao asked the audience what will happen in China. Will the Chinese Artists use a VPN to reach people out of the Chinese Firewall? Will they use Chinese social media tools? Will the government allow this form of expression? The audience answered timidly, but they agreed the Chinese artists will not use Chinese social media tools.

I didn’t understand why at that time, but I do now. This same week Ai Weiwei, one of the most popular Chinese artists and the most active in twitter (here his english twitter) has disappeared. In China is difficult to set a line between artists and political dissidents. Furthermore the Chinese social media tools are closely monitored by the government. For example Ai WeiWei’s Weibo (The Chinese twitter) account was deleted hours after his owner disappeared. Social Media Art movement has not flourished yet in China because the artists tend to be politically active so they cannot use Chinese social media tools and if they use twitter, which is blocked in China, their visibility is zero.

Going back to the topic, An Xiao introduced her current perfomance. She seats in the configuration you can see in the picture. She has several barriers between her and the person. First, an intimidating gesture, second a table, and third a computer that records everything that the person do. The person in front of her communicates with An Xiao using social media messaging tools with their cell phones.

She said that in previous perfomances the communication she had with the complete unknown people had a very high level of trust and intimacy. People told her about their lives and problems in a transparent way. She thinks those communications would have never taken place in a normal conversation with a cup of coffee.

The performance reminds of the conversations we have when we talk with people that are physically close to us using social media tools instead of our voice. Far from the perfomance itself, I think it has also interesting applications as it can be an interesting way to accelerate the therapy of people with depressions as they are able to transmit what they are really feeling in an easier way.

This is a video of her presentation in Los Angeles:

An Xiao / Art Under the Influence… of Social Media @ Mindshare Los Angeles

Dianping.com HQ

Some remarks:

• They have 1000 employees. Thay plan to have 1800 by the end of the year. I was really surprised when I heard those numbers. Everything in China is scaled up to the limit, this is an internet company but they hire people by the thousands. Labor in China is very cheap, but I do not really understand why do they need so many people. Twitter a couple of years ago were just 25 people and they are still less than 400 today.
• They do not have resources to develop and maintain and Open API for third parties, but they want to have it in the near future.
• They receive 30% of the traffic from mobile devices. They are full focused on mobile because they see the numbers are increasing very fast. They expect to have 70% of traffic from mobile devices by the end of the year. Their Android application comes pre-installed on 70% of branded android phones in China.

Many thanks to the e-business club at CEIBS for organize this visit.