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Love, love, love this video! It’s a compilation of interviews with creative and cross-cultural people from all over the world.
If you’re reading this in an email or RSS feed, and want to watch the video, click the title of this post or go straight to NationlessWorld.com.
ABOUT JIE-SONG ZHANG
Jie-Song Zhang is a son of Beijing, and a pupil of New York. He, like yourself, has inherited this fertile moment in human history, its massive breaking and re-building, its possibilities and responsibilities.
As Halloween has increased in popularity in Chile, it has become more than a good day for kids and candy manufacturers. The Chilean media (El Mercurio, LUN, Teletrece, etc) reported a very peculiar Halloween crime. At the Casino Monticello, a 27-year-old man dressed up as a clown, assaulted a cashier, and stole a bunch of money.
Sorry, no picture of the clown suit! Photo via emol.com
The following is a translation of an article in El Mercurio, November 1, 2011.
One subject took advantage of the Halloween celebration to perpetrate an assault on the Casino Monticello, in the Sixth Region, using a clown costume.
The act occurred close to 4:30 in the morning, in the game salon on the premises, where the individual intimidated one of the bingo cashiers and obtained $6 million pesos (about 11 976 U.S. dollars.)
Later he fled through an emergency exit and dispersed a few shots with a blank gun to prevent them from following him.
The act caused fear among those in attendance, though no one was injured.
Following the attack, police, in coordination with the venue’s security personnel, detained the suspect, who was transferred to the commissary of Graneros.
According to Casino Monticello, the entire stolen amount was recuperated.
I saw on TV last night that the clown-thief is a 27-year-old father of two, severely in debt. He blamed his bad economic situation as his motivation for the crime.
Happy Halloween! I picked up this devil wig on the sidewalk here in Santiago. It made me insanely happy. Here´s to the spirit of self-reinvention, on Halloween and every other day of the year!! xx
DO: Host a pumpkin carving contest among your employees.
Duarte Design, the global leader in presentation design and training, hosts a pumpkin decorating contest every year. Founder and Principal Nancy Duarte answered a few questions about the contest in an interview with Geetesh at Indezine.
Geetesh: The Pumpkin Contest that you folks at Duarte conduct every Halloween has become an annual tradition – tell us something about how this evolved? And was it always so much fun?
Nancy: We started the pumpkin contest when our firm was in a small office above a Starbucks and across from a Dentist office (this was LONG before the internet existed). The dentist would send their patients across the hall to cast a paper ballot for the best pumpkin. We also have had to put some rules in place so employees don’t cheat.
We had a gal that worked here who was relatively famous in the Philippines and her pumpkins always seemed to get 100 times more votes than anyone else’s. So we put a rule in place that you can’t tell anyone which pumpkin is yours. Decorating the pumpkins is a blast. Each year, I feel all crafty carving mine and patting myself on the back confident I would win and then I bring my pumpkin and all my hopes are dashed. The creativity from the team is so CraZy I’ve NEVER won.
This one is my favorite from this year’s series:
Sick of Pumpkin. My favorite pumpkin from the 16th Annual Duarte Pumpkin Contest. Image via Duarte.com/Halloween
Go to http://www.duarte.com/halloween/ to vote for your favorites!!
DO: Integrate the best holiday of the entire year into your email marketing campaigns.
This is a screenshot of an email I received from SolidWorks, an unfamiliar company. I am not sure how I got on their list. But I found their email so fabulous that I decided to share it with you anyways! Yay for using fun Halloween "problems" to articulate the value proposition of your business!
DON’T: PhotoShop a child’s face onto your costume package without permission, no matter how cute she is!
Marc van der Chijs, who introduces himself as “A Dutch entrepreneur in Shanghai, over 10 years in China. Chief Evangelist of Spil Games, co-founder of among others Tudou.com and UnitedStyles.com, and angel investor in Chinese Internet and tech start-ups,” found a Halloween surprise. When his wife Grace was shopping at Carrefour, she found a costume package featuring a photo of his daughter, Elaine! The costume company had (badly) PhotoShop’d a photo of her on a not-that-cute costume. Marc posted about this in detail on his blog. I’ve decided against posting any photos of his adorable daughter or the misuse of her photo on the packages, because that might place me in the same category as the costume company. But I think you should read his posts!
Part 1: Elaine’s Picture Used Without Permission On Chinese Halloween Costumes
Part 2: Elaine’s Picture Removed from Halloween Products — The Chinese Way!
Part 3 (added 10/30/11): Elaine’s Story on Front Page of China Daily. The China Daily reporter did some investigative research on the case. The manufacturer, Beijing’s Xinxin Jingyi Gift, gave the following explanation:
“We did not put the girl’s face on our package on purpose -we don’t have a visual design department and we outsourced the design project to a man surnamed Xiao, but we did not know how he got a picture of the little girl,” said Yin.
Xiao, the designer, said he found the picture from nipic.com, a website for sharing visual design materials.
“The job outsourced from Xinxin was just a part-time job, because I work in a printing studio so they asked me to print something with a foreign girl’s face,” said Xiao.
Xiao said he did hesitate when he used Elaine’s face, but considering the girl might be thousands of miles away and would not be recognized in China, he just went ahead and printed it on the packaging.
“I feel quite sorry for what happened,” said Xiao. [more]
So, that’s your handy digest of Halloween advice for your company. Remember: DO carve pumpkins, DO write creative emails, but DON’T use pictures of kids without permission.
Happy Halloween! Best holiday of the year!!! Yay!!!
The three main performers massaged each other and made jokes before starting the bike tricks.
My parents and I had the great fortune to stumble into an experimental bicycle circus while visiting GAM, the new Museo Gabriela Mistral that opened last year on the Alameda in the middle of Santiago.
GAM. Image via www.lunasuite.com
The show featured three main performers, a musician, and a master of ceremonies. The wife of one of the performers and her adorable son greeted us at the door of the tent. Later we found out that she was the choreographer.
The troupe is called Circo de A’Onde. The performers made all sorts of jokes in mime, and rolled around the tent, and climbed on top of one another, playfully. Then they brought out a customized bike and began to do tricks. The entire crowd was hypnotized. Even hyper little kids!
The show stopped abruptly after about an hour, and the performers started a feedback session. One performer’s two-year-old son ran up to the stage and started playing the drums and demanding daddy’s attention. Very cute.
“Great work.”
“Amazing show.”
At that point they explained that the show was all about the challenge of being a man in the modern world. And it took place in a lighthouse and on a ship.
“Hmmm…could you make the story a bit more explicit, so we can see the beginning, middle and end?”
This was a beta version of the show. A more complete version will premiere this summer.
I thought of the show when I read Jeff Jarvis’ essay “Beta Think” in the book End Malaria. Here’s Jarvis’ short post about the project:
Beta-think and ending malaria
Amazon, Seth Godin’s Domino, and other good folks collaborated to come out with a book of essays whose proceeds go to buy mosquito nets to end malaria. My essay for End Malaria Day is actually the topic of the next book I was going to do until I got all hopped up on publicness and privacy and wrote Public Parts. The essay is on beta-think. Here’s a snippet from the start:
* * * Voltaire was half right. “Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien,” he said: The best is the enemy of the good. The best is also the enemy of the better. Striving for perfection complicates and delays getting things done. Worse, the myth of perfection can shut off the process of improvement and the possibility of collaboration.
That myth of perfection is a byproduct of the industrial revolution and the efficiencies of mass production, distribution, and marketing. A product that takes a long time to design and produce is sold to a large market with a claim of perfection. Its manufacturer can’t have customers think otherwise. The distribution chain invests in large quantities of the product and can’t afford for it to be flawed. Mass marketing is spent to convince customers it is the best it can be. Thus perfection becomes our standard or at least our presumption. But perfection is delusion. Nothing and no one is perfect.
The modern cure to Voltaire’s paradox—and a gift of the digital age—is the beta: the unfinished and imperfect product or process that is opened up so customers can offer advice and improvements. Releasing a beta is a public act, an invitation to customers to help complete and improve it. It is an act of transparency and an admission of humility. It is also an act of generosity and trust, handing over a measure of control to others.
Bravo to Circo de A’Onde for releasing a beta version of their bike circus, open to audience feedback. Jarvis is right: this is a public act of transparency, humility, generosity and trust.
Not to mention a highly entertaining show!
To see Circo de A’Onde in action, check out this YouTube video of a different show:
I'm Leslie and I connect entrepreneurs in Chile, China, California, and beyond — especially through translation, training, and trade. More about me.
