Either the iPhones or the people holding them are not right in this picture.

Said that, the thrill was to wait for the big day and see in which way Telefonica would shatter Apple’s halo. It looks like a tough job, especially when you’re launching the most desired gadget of all time, but nothing is impossible for Telefonica.

Here’s a checklist with ten things to do to completely screw the launching of the iPhone, damage Apple’s reputation and while you’re at it, treat your customers like dirt.

1. Allow 200.000 potential new customers to register in a crappy flash website knowing that you’ll never meet the demand and don’t do anything about it
2. Tell everybody that you’ll be distributing the iPhone in over 1.500 stores all over Spain when you know you won’t even have that many iPhones (no link to the stores, the darn web is in flash!!!)
3. Let people to form lines of hundreds in Barcelona’s main store when you know you won’t even have 25 iPhones available
4. Don’t train employees on how to activate an iPhone. Rely on savvy users that have read about iPhone activation in blogs to guide the poor employees
5. Announce that iPhones will start selling at 10 A.M. and don’t open the stores till well past 10:30 A.M and TV crews have covered the event
6. Profit from the free iPhone publicity to open a new 3.000 m2 flagship store in Madrid, a crappy copycat of an Apple Store with a castizo twist, and tell people that you do it to boost iPhone sales
7. Make a stupid old-school pre-launch presentation for politicians and VIPs in Madrid that look like The Night of the Living Dead. Ever seen a Steve Jobs keynote?
8. Ignore that there’s a thing called Internet where fiascos get blogged and twittered reaching a worldwide audience in minutes (you should’ve learnt the lesson from ErneX when he uncovered the iphone.movistar.es website way before the Telefonica-Apple agreement was announced)
9. Tell the world it’s Apple’s fault
10. Be Telefonica

Next thing on my To Do list: wait until the iPhone is sold free directly by Apple which could be by the end of the year.

And by the way, any band that features me in their acknowledgements if of course the best band in the world.

See them tonight in la Sala Monasterio

Read about the concert I saw by La Banda here.

Xinacittà’07

We’re still alive…
The 5th edition of Xinacittà is back with all its wit and machinery at the end of June with three magnificent programs. The title is The Art of Getting By: migrations, utopias and inventions. Also, starting this year, we’re packing our bags and going on tour to show our festival all over the world. We’re not leaving Barcelona, but we are moving to a new square: bigger, with more room to lie down and roll around with the joy of seeing our films.

Take note, because if you miss it you won’t survive.

Date: June 28, 29 and 30, 2007
Time: 9:30pm
Place: Plaça de la Mercè. (New location!)
Price: free (yes, everything for free!)

All the info at xinacitta.com

Some “killer” features of this website:

1. No DOCTYPE at the beginning of the document
2. Page is laid out using Tables!!
3. Some parts of the are not rendered in Firefox
4. Contents font size is 10px wich makes the web hard to read in any decent resolution monitor
5. Usage of GIF for titles and section headers instead of correct XHTML markup
6. No titles for individual pages. All pages are titled adg-fad.org which is an acronym and the URL

Online concert agendas, e-flyers, some SMS, the band’s MySpace and a great post on this blog were the only publicity for the event and yet, Magic, the Cavern-like joint, was packed with an enthusiastic crowd (even though they were counter programmed by the Telecogresca concert with life acts such as Def-Con-Dos and Antònia Font).

OK, I know, the members of the band are nice people who have lots of family and friends. Add some freaks, two Dutch tourists and blogger celebrity DJ Phil Musical and you get the full house. Nothing new there.

But the fact that many in the audience knew most of the lyrics of a band that doesn’t have anything recorded, nor an mp3 on MySpace nor a Torrent to pirate from, led me to think that it wasn’t the first time those people saw the band perform, and let’s face it, with internet, playstations and p2p who goes out to see a friend’s band a second time? People were there because they enjoyed the band’s power-pop and were repeating experience. Neat.

The first highlight of the night was when me and my friends got into the club and bumped into the band’s singer Polo Sur, who I happen to know. This allowed me to impress my buddies by showing how well connected I am with the Barcelona’s creative scene. Of course these days getting to know the singer of the band doesn’t score as high as if you knew the resident DJ, but still a good start (you probably don’t want to know Magic’s DJ anyways).

After having found a lost guitarrist (there’s always one), Polo Sur welcomed the audience with a cool: “Let the melting begin”, and the gig started to the chords of “Parte Alta” (Uptown), a picture of the posh world of uptown Barcelona which I bet was too familiar to more than one in the audience.

After that, the Sisa-Derribos-Arias-Golpes-Bajos-Antón-García-Abril influenced power-pop filled the joint for the next 40 or so minutes, while the crowd was busy singing along and snapping pictures with their digicams and mobile phones, in a truly multimedia experience in which old analog Fender onstage met Sony on the dance floor (get this Bono!). Some even danced, but those are still in the 1.0 version of modern collaborative concerts.

The concert reached its climax with “2001 Entrando Por La Ventana 72” (”2001 Entering Window 72″) a theme you would think it’s based on the events of the 11-S. I’ve read the lyrics many times and I couldn’t be 100% sure, although the fact that in the live act the lead singer was shouting “Oh my god it’s the other tower” might point in that direction.

All in all, good pop, good life act with no drum solo, and witty lyrics that read from bottom to top would also make sense.

Some superfluous data about the band that should give you an idea about their world:

• They don’t have any mp3 on their MySpace
• 107 entries in Google for “La Banda Municipal del Polo Norte”
• 40 pictures in Flickr
• A search on en.wikipedia.org yields results for the Municipalities of the Dominican Republic
• The first result of a search on es.wikipedia.org is Coronel Oviedo
• A search in YouTube for Polo Norte Music yields the video Meniños Cantores - Eles non poden ver, a Galician version of Coolio’s Gangsta’s Paradise
• The guitar soloist name is Dimas, the 7th Dimas in the family line, and he’s damm good

La Banda Municipal del Polo Norte, the band that doesn’t have any mp3 on MySpace!

More info in La Banda’s MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/srsrapanda

Zoomap is Googlemaps + a Wiki. Yet another project based on the infamous Google API. But this one is fun to use.

In plain English: you can pinpoint any spot in the world and upload your picture and add some text to the database creating an image tagged location. Once your tag is created Zoomap provides a direct link to it for you to enjoy.

A good and fun use of the Google Api and probably of the Wordpress blogging platform. The closest project I’ve seen to Zoomap is Wikimaps, a plugin for Wordpress that turns your blog into an open wiki based on google maps. Not sure if Zoomap is not using Wikimaps.

Update: Via Dani Julià one of Zoomap creators: The system is programmed from scratch. No Wordpress and no wikimaps underneath.

Check my avatar next to the França Railway Station site of the Audiovisual Institute of the Pompeu Fabra university where sometimes I am and sometimes I’m not.

I attended the Mobile Monday Peer Awards held in the Espacio Movistar in Barcelona where I was invited by Rudy de Waele from m-trends.org (along with my digital camera and my Flickr Pro account). This edition of Mobile Monday takes place during the 3GSM mobile telephony congress held this week in Barcelona even though it’s not part of it.

You can find all the Mobile Monday pictures I took here.

Finalists had 3 minutes to explain their project to the audience who voted for the best projects via SMS.

Finalists were:

• Bangalore: mChek
• Bangkok: CryptoGraf
• Barcelona: MyStrands
• Beijing: Silk Road Telecommunication
• Boston: Skyhook Wireless
• Brussels: Ontrack Navigation
• Delhi: Wirkle
• Geneva: Plazes
• Germany: GoFresh
• Helsinki: UpCode
• Istanbul: Done
• Italy: Barefoot Software
• London: Reporo
• Melbourne: Locatrix
• Paris: Realeyes3D
• Silicon Valley: Mobile Complete
• Singapore: Tagit
• Shanghai: mInfo
• St Petersburg: Jamango
• Tokyo: Naviblog
• Ukraine: Nival Online
• Vancouver: RX Networks
• Washington, DC: Rave Wireless

And the winners were:

• Audience Award: Geneva: Plazes
• Mobile Monday Chapter Award: Silicon Valley: Mobile Complete
• Jury Award: Paris: Realeyes3D

By the way, the picture at the top is Movistar sponsoring my website at the Espacio Movistar.

I went there and I was astonished to see the implementation of the site. It made me think of the things you shouldn’t do in a project like this.

1. Don’t put fences to data.

Why just accept the self called creative people from Barcelona? Accept people from all over the world and let them give their procedence. You’ll have much better data and still have the creative people from Barcelona.

2. Flash?!?

Why use flash to create hyperlinks when there are already HTML hyperlinks? Why hide URLs? Why break the page navigation? Why render the browser’s backbutton (the most used button in a browser) useless? Why render cut & paste useless? Why hide from Google? Do I need to go on?

This approach to the web was wrong since Flash was used for other than animation many years ago. Even more so in 2006.

3. Loading? Loading what?

Another relic of the past that still bugs users. As a rule of thumb: you see a loading page, hit the back button and go somwhere else.

4. Choose language splash screen.

Don’t make users tell you twice the language they speak. They’re already telling you with their browser’s language so why ask them in the first screen? (After the loading!)

5. Don’t call a social network a database

A database where you sign-in to and post your profile to get in touch with people with your same interests? Sounds like a social network, doesn’t it?

6. Don’t change interface conventions

Don’t make the user learn how the interface works at every click. Don’t design just for fun or just to impress your customer. Impress the user by sticking to standards.

7. Don’t use unreadable fonts

Why still follow the fad of small fonts which can’t be enlarged according to the user’s browser settings? Probably short-sighted people can’t be creative so why bother.

8. Don’t use animations to get to data

People want data, but you are convinced they’re wrong and insist on showing the same slow animation every time they try to access some contents.

9. Don’t ignore RSS feeds

If you’re a member of a social network you’re most probably interested on who joins in. You probably would like to subscribe to the RSS feed to keep up with new memberships.

10. Don’t use the .org just for the sake of it

Using the .org domain won’t make you cooler or more web 2.0ish just because every cool project in the web 2.0 is open source and uses a .org domain. If your website sucks hiding behind a .org only makes things worse.

11. Don’t reinvent the wheel

There are already many social software networks. Linkedin, Openbc or MySpace. It’s already there and with a user base of millions. Probably many of the people in terminalb.org are already on some other social network.

Or maybe not if they’ve ever used a real social network.

Worst of all is that we’re all paying for this as the Catalan Goverment is sponsoring this project that gets nowhere near other free, open-source, peer2peer, social networks. Had they consulted me I could have made big money just pointing them to MySpace.com. They would have got a much better service and probably for half the price.

See it for yourself at http://www.terminalb.org

As every new year’s day the patrons from the Barceloneta club go for a swim at noon. The cold sea, a sunny day and a bowl of hot soup help you get started with the new year. And yes, the Mediterranean is very cold in winter!

Happy new year to all!

The telepheric tower behind the Barceloneta swimming club.