The revolution will not be televised (How YouTube saved me from boredom and la gripa del marrano)

Click here for Nielsen's full report on The Global Media Landscape (PDF; 5MB)

Just 3 weeks ago, Mexico City was under high sanitary alert due to the spread of the H1N1 flu virus (formerly, the swine flu or "gripa del marrano" in Spanish). One of the measures taken by the local Government here in Mexico City was to ask everyone to remain home as an effort to stop the epidemy.

At first it seemed kind'a cool, I gotta say. Working from home does have certain benefits such as not having to wear a suit and tie (but rather shorts and flip-flops), skipping all the traffic (which is ridiculous here in Mexico City), being able to wake up a little bit later and so on.

Almost as an instinct, I turned on the TV, left it like that for most part of the day and figured something interesting would be showing. Well, guess what... NO HAY NADA EN LA TELEVISIÓN!! (there's nothing on TV) Incredibly enough, I do have literally hundreds of channels and there was nothing I actually was interested in!!

During those days, one of my friends from the office sent an email about a global conspiracy to distract people from matters such as the crisis and unemployment. The email included a link to a movie in YouTube.

The rest is history. I clicked the link and saw the movie... I was able to stop it whenever I wanted, rewind, forward, NO ADS!! Then I figured that I could look for more movies and guess what?? I did find tons of great material that I was actually interested in. I saw movies, documentaries, funny ads, music videos, photoshop tutorials, you name it.

Now I barely turn on TV. I'm trying to figure where would this approach to communications would be of most value. Any ideas?

On January 24th Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh

Let's say you want to create a new revolutionary personal mobile device that competes with the iPod. How would you do that? Most likely, your first impulse will be to base your design on the curren iPod knowing upfront that it does work (you've already seen it working). But how would that measure against the original one? My bet is that it won't get that far... your customers will realize that your design is just a copy. Apple did not create an MP3 player to compete with Sony's Walkman; it created a new category!! Was it risky? Yes. Was it worth it? You tell me!!

A conversation with Erich Schmidt (Google's CEO)

When talking about innovation, Google is the first thing that comes to my mind. It started out as a plain textbox and a Search button (or so it seemed)... who would have figured!!

About 3-4 of years ago I got an invitation to use Gmail, then I found out that Google Maps does have the geographical information for Mexico City (my beloved home town) and it is loaded right into my iPhone, then I moved to iGoogle, blogspot and now I'm trying to figure how to take advantage of the could computing platform their putting out there (Google Docs).

This is a very good interview that a McKinsey Director had with Google's CEO.

Jump to McKinsey Quarterly to see the interview

(once there, click on the "Launch interactive" link)

Day 1

Well, this is my very first own blog and I would like to dedicate it to a subject that really attracts me: innovation. I hope this space becomes a hub for useful ideas and experience exchange.

Back in the day, when I was even younger and finished High School, I had to face one of the most important decisions in my life: what would I major in through College? I did explore a bit of options ranging from professional tennis player (cool, hum?) to medicine (who doesn’t want to cure people?) to mechanical engineering (sounds like important) to IT.

I did stick to IT; why?

I’ve always been a bit of a geek with a high sense of wanting to help people. Becoming a systems engineer, would allow me to help people to their work faster, cheaper and with a high level of reliability… and all of that just by the click of a button!! It is cool, it does help people and it sounds important :)

I do like my job a lot; I’m currently working as a Project Manager (PM) for a “Big 4” on the Enterprise Business Integration (EBI) division. Our mission is to help organizations to collaborate as smoothly and fast as possible in order to be more efficient. There is a set of different disciplines and technologies that, if architected strategically, will allow for this to happen.

“Architected strategically”… here comes innovation!!