Farewell 2011, welcome 2012

What did you do in 2011

As LinkedIn claims, 2011 was a year of change. Compared to past years, it was a kind of slow paced zen contemplation year, yet full of real stuff: new things, that I’d never done before, visual arts, digital signage, old and new friends, great music. I’ve spent most of the year in new products development:

Designing and producing new digital totems like StandOut for private banking, Almondo, which we installed in the largest retail malls in the country, the limited edition of Lumina and the high-end ZilverBlade. Now they call us “the totem people”…

• several branding and SEO projects (thanks to the good old word-of-mouth “channel”),
• playing old musical instruments and designing a new MIDI controller
• visiting few new countries and islands…
• plus thousands of tiny happy moments in the land of the Penguins.

There was too much contrast, not enough time for close friends and far away destinations. I’ve missed writing, playing music, more travel adventures with an enduro bike, but this will happen after the ski season is over.

Lets hope we’ll find the balance in 2012. Less time on the branding laptop and more creative time at the studio and on the road. More music in the near-field studio monitors and more near-field communication with friends, tablets, totems, allowing us to wirelessly exchange information and make transactions at stores and banks.

It’s worth to do the hard work to figure out how to make life better. Thank you for all creative and corporate presents plus a pile of notebooks to write a handful of goals that seem important

Wish you all a Happy, Healthy and Wealthy 2012 and don’t let your dreams be dreams!

So, what did you do in 2011?

Expo Green Global 2011

Brand Touch, the European interactive kiosk and digital signage totems manufacturer, will present LUMINA™ at Expo Green Global 2011 as a sponsor, exhibitor and digital media partner of the event. The luxurious digital totem will bring totally immersed interactive experience to the visitors and exhibitors at the greenest cruise ship on the planet – MSC Fantasia, where over 120 brands from more than 32 countries will meet to discuss and present their latest green initiatives.

The Power of Dreams

The Power of Dreams

First yellow leaves cause shivers up my “move” passion and dreams. As little kids, we all got those ridin-swimmin-jumpin-climbin wounds and scarves.
Cycling gives you a unique feeling beyond the frame, cycling in the wild moves your soul and personal, open-minded mobility, a guaranteed freedom. Country/ mountain roads are the best, highways/ freeways are the worst…

htc to samsung galaxy how to

HTC to Samsung Galaxy S II

How to move/ sync your contacts, calendar, emails, folders and tasks from your old HTC to your new Samsung Galaxy S II?

Select all records > copy to SD memory card > insert SD memory card > Import from card… Not working? Sure.

Here comes the interesting part / the only solutions, which worked for me: Use your Gmail account as Microsoft Exchange server source to sync your stuff between Windows Mobile and Android. WTF?!

If you try to follow the Google Sync for Windows mobile set up instructions, a lot of details and and screens are missing.

1. Leave the email address as “@”. Uncheck the option to automatically determine Exchange server settings.
2. Tap next and enter your account info: use a FULL email address, including @gmail.com, since you can also use a Google Apps account with your own domain name.
3. Leave the domain field empty. Check “use SSL” and “save your password by default”. If you get “sync None” connection error, check only the boxes to sync Contacts and Calendar.

…and you’re done with 800+ contacts per minute.

Optionally download Kies and enjoy your new Android-friendly Samsung limitless Galaxy. It’s the smartest and lightest phone to date.

…and the Best Global Green Brand for 2011 is…

See ya at the top! Yours, BrandMover

Google guitar best doodle ever

This morning Google surprised us with a great interactive guitar doodle, which you can turn in a polyphonic instrument, strummed by finger touch, mouse or best with your PC keyboard. The 96th birthday of the Jazz legend Les Paul is celebrated in an awesome way. Whether on a 9″ tablet, office PC or a 6-core high-end music studio workstation, playing today’s Google logo is pure fun! Switch on your speakers and the jam must go on!

In few countries, you’ll have even a record button, which can be used to record your performance and share the piece with the world. I just captured my first take. The only suggestion would be to improve the sound latency in the Flash, add/ overlay some keys for percussion and hope we’ll have a great music instrument in 2012!

Our next-generation midi controller UMO1 will be shipping in 40 days

See you in the jazz club tonight

Digital Mall

Digital content creation and management – trends, strategy, technology and tools – digital signage, interactive totems and retail kiosks. Coming soon at your favorite Mall.

Digital Signage 2.0

Interactive digital signage totems and self-service touch kiosks are in the top3 advertising trends of 2011.
See you at Kiosk and Digital Signage Expo Europe 2011!

Digital Signage за модерни банки

white winter. warm synth

A-800PRO MIDI controller: my new -studio, -on-stage and -home friend. Great design and feel for expressive dynamic performances.

• Velocity-sensitive responsive reaction 61 keys with channel aftertouch!
• 45 assignable controls: knobs, sliders, buttons, transport
• 8 Dynamic Pads for finger drumming and MIDI triggering
• Great pitch bend/modulation stick
• Sustain and expression pedals input
• Windows 7 and and Mac OS X Snow Leopard native drivers
• ACT software control maps for Ableton Live, Cubase, FL Studio, Garage Band, Logic, Nuendo, Pro Tools and … yes, SONAR!

It takes 2 minutes to plug the USB cable, load an old subtractive synth VST with my favorite filter-response morphing – Pentagon I. That’s not a sound design „attempt“ at David Gilmour’s guitar tone from Pink Floyd’s Sorrow. It’s to explore the continuous MIDI controller possibilities of the new A-800 PRO by Roland/ Cakewalk. After all, it‘s a piano version, not a guitar sound, sent through a ton of Boss sustain, chorus, big muffs and SPC filters.

With just 4 simple oscillators, 2 LFO filters and powerful modulation you get a generic mid 1980s tone, routed through a digital multiband EQ, compressor, delay and convolution reverb. Setting the first filter to HP and the second to LP, with cutoff higher than the HP cutoff, you get a band-pass response with independent ADSR modulation and most importantly the response to velocity, keyboard pitch, aftertouch and mod wheel with independent VCA, each with an AHDSR envelope for real time morphing. You can try the amazing vocoder too. The parameters are tied to the dozen of A-800PRO MIDI controls with the ACT/ MIDI learn function.

Feel the warm phasy, vintage, harmonics/ portamento and formant-rich sound? I still miss a lot of expression for my music, so this month along with the web projects, the always postponed “MIDI controller of my dreams” design project is on the short-to-do-list.  Stay happy and tuned

Best CRM 2011?

Greetings to all the “best CRM” fans these days – the CRM’s spring peak is back with lot of interesting projects. Should I use an in-house or hosted solution, how to integrate our ERP, the Asterisk call center, helpdesk, our email marketing center, RSS feeds and 30 social media profiles?… The old myth about ”the magic CRM software, which “the management installed last year” is dead.

Welcome to the social CRM cloud!

Few friends manage their sales transactions, campaigns and lead tracking progression from their smartphones/ iPhone or Android-based PDAs.  Skype and even Seeismic and TweetDeck are main tools – that’s how they like to streamline interaction, maximize sales and customer satisfaction. Most of the folks I meet are happy to practice CRM with their Excel 97 spreadsheet or MS Outlook with Business contact manager. Nostalgic users of ACT, Maximizer or GoldMine lately are moving to online contact managers like SalesNexus and Zoho. For end-customer shops we use efficiently InfusionSoft, customers with bigger shops and several websites/ brands / language version in Europe use Magento with CRM extensions.

SugarCRM led the open-source way in the last 6 years with a flexible one-hat-fits-all solution, yet for huge projects with dozens of users and specific modules with custom workflow you need the enterprise edition or a more sophisticated, yet open platform – we had great experience with the CRM-in-the-cloud platforms VTiger and openCRX. Enterprise-wide multilingual coordination of sales generation, fulfillment, product structuring and pricing, real-time issue tracking and drill-down dashboards with pipelines are not a bread-and-butter task. Which is my favorite CRM beast? Salesforce.com of course, but it comes pricy when you grow, so for SMBs we stick to customized SugarCRM, vtiger or openCRX implementations. What about SAP CRM or Oracle Siebel? They are out of reach for most of the local companies, plus we are fans of scalable platform-independent and vendor-neutral open-source solutions, aren’t we?

CRM is just a database tool to collect, manage and present data to optimize and meet your goals. The software is not the solution – the focused definition and execution of the business strategy and objectives is the roadmap for success. Self-service portal and social marketing integration is much more important than the system itself. There is no “top” or “best” out-of-the-box CRM. As a CRM implementation consultant I always try to understand and help customers to define the brand challenges and strategy, to tailor every aspect of the CRM experience from the start. The right opportunity management solution comes a month later. The perfect – 2 years later. Understanding your own business and introducing features to your staff makes the difference.

Back in 2008, CRM 2.0 was still beta, today it’s a >$3 billion business. More SocialRank than PageRank, more customer insights and social media  analytics than noisy spam. Go social (2 billion web users worldwide) and Mobile (1 billion mobile workforce worldwide).  90% of organizations will support corporate applications on personal  devices by 2014 so grab your iPad or tablet and mash your perfect CRM deck on iGoogle, CoTweet, Pardot, Facebook, Foursquare… you name it. Compose a more experimental, Twitter-like social CRM for emotionally high-touch customer engagement.  See you in Gartner’s Social CRM magic quadrant!

If you have any questions, feel free to comment or contact me. Join the cultural transformation, get closer to the customer and keep walking!

Merry Christmas & Happy Brand New Year!

Happy Brand New 2011

Dear friends and partners,

Whether you are home or oversea,
may the spirit of Christmas bring you Peace,
the gladness of Christmas give you Hope,
the warmth of Christmas grant you Love.
all the new year through.

See the whole world bright!
(Batteries not Included

Screen time: 16h a day diet

screen time increased 2 times for the last 3 years

Leisure time? Screen time is getting close to 72% of the pie. According to few research studies released this month, on average we spend:

• 3.2 hours a day on social networking, microblogging and video sites such as Facebook and Twitter
• 2.5 in front of traditional TV, timeshifted DVRs and online video
• 4.6 with PCs and mobile devices at the office and home