Image via IndieWire.com (click to access)
Very little time to write at the moment, but I did have time to read & watch some great content in April. My favorites include a documentary about crowdfunding, which is great in telling some entrepreneurs’ stories before/after they got massive funding from the crowd. There is also some advice for career choices around 30, a great Wired piece about VR pioneer Rony Abovitz or the State of Crowdsourcing 2016 report. Continue reading →
Joseph Francois, French ride-hailing entrepreneur, portrayed in the FT this month (click to read article)
March was an interesting month from a personal standpoint (more about that in a couple of days) but it also had its fair share of great reads!
Some of it is about the platform economy, praised in an article by the Financial Times to break glass ceilings, and some relate to entrepreneurs’s challenges, business funding or laundry advertisements (good ones!). And there is some Donald Trump too. I hope it’s interesting for you. Continue reading →
Damien Henry presenting his work at the “Prix du Mémoire Digital” in Paris, France
My activity leads me to speak to a lot of Masters or PhD students who explore the crowd economy. Actually, at eYeka we receive so many interview requests that I am now sending standard replies with links to the most common answers (Why do brands crowdsource? Why do consumers participate? etc, for which a lot is available online and in academic literature). But some research projects stand out as really original and interesting. After sharing a good Masters thesis of a student of mine who worked on women’s pro sports, this post is a Q&A with a French designer, Damien Henry, who completed his thesis (not under my supervision).
Entitled “Crowdsourcing: Can Graphic Design Become Uberized?“, his already award-winning thesis is a rare piece of research that explores the pros & cons of crowdsourcing from a designers’ point of view. While I do not endorse all his findings or POVs, I believe it his work is worth being shared beyond the French-speaking world. So I’m translating a slightly edited English transcript of our conversation (images and links have been added by myself). Continue reading →
This was a special month here in Paris, especially the second half, with the terrorist attacks and the start of the COP21 climate conference shrouding the city in a very particular atmosphere. Much more security, armed forces on almost every street corner, helicopters, heads of state… it’s not the usual Parisian life. But nevertheless, the earth keeps spinning, people will not stop going into bars and cafés, and I won’t stop sharing my favorite inspirations neither. Here are some tweets about entrepreneurship, marketing, creativity, crowd labor and Paris (of course). Make sure to look at the short video about Google’s “Alive Memory” project in Russia. Continue reading →
In a time where Europe sees increasing news coverage about migrants both inside (ex: Paris, Calais) and outside its borders (ex: Syria, Lybia), there is a worrying uptake of public hate speech on the internet and attacks on refugee shelters. Yesterday evening, in the German television news program Tagesschau, broadcast on the German public-service television network ARD, Anja Reschke made a 2-minute, important statement on German public TV: “Open Your Month, Show Attitude.” While anyone can have an opinion on the way – and the extent to which – countries should receive and help migrants, there a universal, important message in what she said. Here it is in English (links and bold passages added by myself). Continue reading →
Image via Short Film Corner Cannes
Stay thirsty for creativity, “Creative Marketer of the Year” Heineken said at Cannes Lions this year, where Senior Global Brand Director Gianluca Di Tonda said the brand was “in the business of connecting emotions” while Global Marketing Executive Director Soren Hagh added that great creative work is often made by “people who take risks.” In this post, I share some links about the good & the ugly of creativity, about eYeka’s community members, about scaling a business in a country where there is little or no internet access. You’ll also find two links about failing crowd-based businesses – Quirky and Homejoy – and about pretending to be big when you’re not. Continue reading →
Image via “Office of Ben Barry”
Here are 10 tweets from the month of May, which I found worthwhile sharing again. Two of them are about architects and their attitude towards competition(s), one is about corporate branding and design (see the image on the left), others just share some nice advertising. I also enjoyed reading this AdAge article about Google’s battle against click fraud, which costs online advertisers its customers $6.3 billion a year, according to a study by White Ops and the ANA. It nicely reminds us that every internet service has a cost – in this case it’s combatting abuse – which impacts both the bottom line of the company and that of its users. Gaining trust in online environments is crucial, which is why Google went “public” with this article, a nice PR effort to position itself as an industry leader.
Yannig Roth / This is my personal blog 