CMN Video: Cocktail Hour - Holiday Cachaca Cocktail We are back at Rayuela on the Lower East Side with The Liquid Chef, Junior Merino. Junior shows us a fun and colorful holiday cocktail using Cachaca and Black Sambuca. A production of The Culinary Media Network. www.culinarymedianetwork.com Less

innovation, R&D, EMC Wade Roush wrote: How does a giant company like EMC build an image as an innovator when it employs only a handful of full-time researchers, has a reputation for acquiring rather than inventing new technologies, and sells some of the unsexiest boxes in the IT back room—file servers, disk arrays, and other backup systems that, if they’re working properly, no one ever has to think about? Holding a two-day innovation conference open to all 42,000 employees, and getting 1,000 of them to attend either physically or virtually, might be a good start. And that’s exactly what EMC (NYSE: EMC) did in Franklin, MA, last week. It was the second time the company has hosted such an event, and it attracted more than twice as many participants as the 2007 inaugural version (which Bob chronicled here). I attended the first day of talks and discussions, which culminated in a science-fair-like “Innovation Showcase” where 30 teams of EMC employees—winnowed down from nearly a thousand entrants—gave poster presentations to a panel of judges. They were competing for trophies, cash prizes, and, more importantly, the resources and attention that could help their ideas blossom into new products. The winning poster: a concept for bringing cloud computing into consumers’ homes, developed by EMC employee Manu Fontaine, a senior director of marketing and business development in EMC’s Washington, DC, offices. Fontaine proposes selling inexpensive, networked storage devices that make creative use of peer-to-peer networking to store users’ data for life. Of course, you aren’t likely to see EMC selling these devices right away. (Although one of last year’s winning ideas, for a sort of automated bibliography service for business documents stored in EMC’s object-based Centera archiving system, is already being piloted with customers.) The point of the innovation conference and the showcase, according to Jeff Nick, the Hopkinton, MA-based company’s chief technology officer, is to get EMC employees thinking about products or services that might cut across existing business units, and to highlight ideas that deserve to be nurtured further by his office or by EMC’s Centers of Excellence, a cluster of advanced technology development groups in Brazil, China, India, Ireland, Israel, and Russia. “There isn’t enough money to take all of these ideas and turn them into major, funded programs,” Nick told me in an interview between presentations. “We don’t have the capacity to do that, and it would be irresponsible. But if you can seed these ideas with just enough water and nutrients and light, with the joint support of the Centers of Excellence and the corporate CTO office, you can incubate them to the point where we can take [and develop] the ones that appear to be the most fertile.” The message seems to be that EMC can make do with a grassroots approach to creating attractive new products that help customers manage digital information, carving out resources here and there when needed. (The way Nick sees it, by the way, EMC is in the business of “not just storing and optimizing and managing and protecting information, but enabling the derivation of value from information…technology can be commoditized, but information cannot.”) Nick calls this bottom-up strategy “targeted idea incubation.” But he admits that the model is “still in its formative stages.” And given EMC’s recent history, incubating any kind of innovation has got to feel like an uphill battle. In 1999—the year Joe Tucci was appointed president and COO–EMC was named as the New York Stock Exchange’s “Stock of The Decade,” in recognition the company’s phenomenal growth in the 1990s as it pioneered a series of new storage systems for minicomputers, mainframes, and corporate data centers. But under Tucci’s leadership, EMC has been far more aggressive about acquiring smaller companies—including Data General, Documentum, Legato, VMware, SMARTS, Rainfinity, Captiva, nLayers, RSA, Infoscape, Avamar, Berkeley Data Systems, Voyence, Pi Corporation, Conchango, Iomega, and more than a dozen others—than about building new products inside its own walls. Its biggest seller, the Symmetrix line of storage servers, dates to 1990 (the first version stored a then-massive 24 gigabytes). As the company has diversified into software and services in recent years, nearly all of its major new product releases have hailed from acquired subsidiaries. Unlike Microsoft or IBM, moreover, the company has no dedicated research and development organization charged with scoping out the future and making sure EMC has products customers will want five or 10 years down the road. The closest analogs with EMC are the …Next Page » Comments | Permalink | Share |  E-mail UNDERWRITERS AND PARTNERS Less

A song I wrote in 2002 for a friend of mine, Emma Howell, after she drowned in Brazil. I made this recording in a neighbor's basement studio, and it benefits a lot from that—it's much cleaner than the stuff I was recording myself at that point, and he had the good sense to keep me honest about not settling for a take I wasn't happy with on any of the instruments. Even six years later, I think it's one of the better recordings I've made. I'm not sure how I managed to not post it before. Emma was a poet and a dreamer and seemed to be or at least to want to be 18-going-on-40 for as long as I knew her. The two of us weren't especially close, but she was a kind of social glue among some of my very good friends, and a charming and charismatic being in her own right—a sort of nexus, not just for me I think but many people moving through that time and place in Portland. When I spoke at a memorial reading for her in the last year or so, it struck me how narrowly she managed to miss the era of social internet ubiquity—she had no internet paper trail; googling turned up very little about her other than some obituaries and news about a posthumous volume of her poetry. This, I guess, will be on of those little signposts in the road, marking out her life and death. Less

El objetivo es alinear entorno a la visión de la marca Telefónica, la comunicación de todas sus marcas comerciales. Brasil es el primer mercado en el que se ejecuta el plan. Tras realizar un concurso entre su pool de agencias Publicis resultó ganadora de un ambicioso proyecto que responde a la necesidad de Telefónica de comunicar [...] Less

Can't see the video? Watch this video now in a browser or download this video now. Boing Boing tv's global coffee correspondent Kyle Glanville is looking for the perfect bean, and you're invited along for the ride. You may recall his earlier appearances on the show when the 2008 US World Barista Champion introduced us to coffee roasting and espresso brewing at Intelligentsia. Today, we debut a series of episode featuring Kyle on a world coffee tour, and we join him as he visits plantations to learn about the growing, harvesting, and processing techniques of Intelligentsia suppliers around the globe. In this first episode, Kyle visits the Fazenda Conquista plantation in Minas Gerais, Brazil where Ipanema Coffees grows, dries, and roasts their goods, with lots of weird gadgets and machines you probably haven't seen before -- some low-tech, some high-tech, but all really cool to watch. This plantation is one of the largest in Brazil, with 12 million coffee plants spread out over about 25 square miles of varying terrain. One of the most fun things about producing BBtv is working with people like Kyle, who share their expertise and life experiences with us in video through their own eyes. I learned so much watching this first installment with the BBtv team -- I especially loved the giant machines that look like AT-AT walkers, lumbering through the neatly trimmed rows of coffee plants. Also, for someone who drinks as much espresso as I do -- how did I never know that coffee beans are surrounded by an edible, sweet fruit, that when dried intact with the bean, make the flavor richer? Oh, and you have to check out the aerial tour of the plantation, which you can do in Google Maps or Google Earth: Link to Fazenda Conquista / Ipanema Coffees .kmz. Get ready for more of these java adventures with Kyle -- we're working on more, as he wanders the planet, looking for the perfect bean. Previous BBtv episodes featuring Kyle Glanville's Coffee explorations: * A Morning at Intelligentsia Coffee Part 2 * A Morning at Intelligentsia Part 1 Less

For the current MeFiMu Challenge, here's a song in a language I don't speak. This bit of Portuguese proto-rap is a longtime standard in Brazil. I actually first learned this little fragment of samba poetry when I was living in Boston, around the year 1978. I had a duo percussion band with a Brazilian guy named Junior Homrich, who taught it to me. I've been doing it off and on, on occasion, over the years: dropping it in spontaneously in improvised music situations and so forth. But it wasn't until this Challenge came up that I thought about recording it. And in fact, I didn't ever know anything about it, other than that it comes from Brazil, and that most Brazilians I've met (and tested it out on!) in the ensuing years seemed to know it. Anyway, web searches reveal that it's been performed and recorded by LOTS of Brazilian singers over the years. A search for the tune on YouTube will bring up plenty of results, some good, some not so good. My favorite version among what I've found on the net is this mp3 by Jair Rodriguez. If you listen to the linked mp3 by Rodriguez, or any other version, I reckon, you'll note that this curious little song features the "rap" section as well as a sung part. I've left off the sung part for my cover version. I've also done it not in the usual samba feel but with a vaguely capoeira-like rhythmic feel, complete with faux-berimbau. The "berimbau" I'm using for that 2-note rhythm bit is a Cambodian two-string fiddle (though I'm only using 1 string!) that I bought just this past weekend at a flea market here in Tokyo. It's one of these: a tro. Obviously I'm not playing it with a bow, but rather with a stick, berimbau stylee, and pulling on the string to get the 2nd pitch. Other instruments in use are WaveDrum (on a customized tabla patch), onboard clavinet, wooden rattley bell, a little battery-operated fan gadget playing a piece of metal, hand clap, and a kind of vocal bass line. Less

Includes coverage of surfing the internet in Brazil via internet cafes, the popularity of Google's Orkut social network in Brazil, Brazil's electronic voting system, how Brazil's children are using technology and the internet plus the digital divide in the country. (BBC) Less

  Formed in 2003 in São Paulo by a group of friends with an unquenchable thirst for good times and indulgence in all things pop and art, CSS rose to notoriety with the help of a thriving creative community, underground club scene and a little thing called the internet. Pulling together their numerous talents, the band drew legions of international followers entranced by a universally accessible, albeit original and off the wall, look and style. The first South American band to be signed to the label, their debut album Cansei de Ser Sexy (Portuguese for “Tired of Being Sexy” – something Beyoncé Knowles once said she was) was released on Sub Pop in July of 2006. Danceable electro/rock songs littered with pop culture and sexual references translated with ease from the virtual online to live audiences, making CSS one of the most in-demand live shows from Europe to Japan.  In November of 2007, the band began to craft their follow-up album, Donkey, from which this song it taken, in their São Paulo studio. The band are touring Europe at the moment, check their MySpace page for details Download | Subscribe | Subscribe in iTunes | Subscribe to All Links csshurt.com myspace.com/canseidesersexy Spread It Around: Hide Sites Less

  Formed in 2003 in São Paulo by a group of friends with an unquenchable thirst for good times and indulgence in all things pop and art, CSS rose to notoriety with the help of a thriving creative community, underground club scene and a little thing called the internet. Pulling together their numerous talents, the band drew legions of international followers entranced by a universally accessible, albeit original and off the wall, look and style. The first South American band to be signed to the label, their debut album Cansei de Ser Sexy (Portuguese for “Tired of Being Sexy” – something Beyoncé Knowles once said she was) was released on Sub Pop in July of 2006. Danceable electro/rock songs littered with pop culture and sexual references translated with ease from the virtual online to live audiences, making CSS one of the most in-demand live shows from Europe to Japan.  In November of 2007, the band began to craft their follow-up album, Donkey, from which this song it taken, in their São Paulo studio. The band are touring Europe at the moment, check their MySpace page for details Download | Subscribe | Subscribe in iTunes | Subscribe to All Links csshurts.com myspace.com/canseidesersexy Spread It Around: Hide Sites Less

The international special of the day is indie power-pop from Brazil, heavy on the moog and sweet audio butter, primarily influenced by such bands such as The Rentals, Cardigans, and Weezer. Wonkavision sings half their songs in Brazilian Portuguese and the other half in English, fluctuating vocal duties between bandmates Will and Manu. Their first release, Wonkavision received a national award in Brazil for best indie rock album in 2004, and in 2007 they signed to the Tokyo based label PowerPop Academy, releasing an English version of that album in Japan. Currently they are not touring as Manu and Will have moved to London this year to get their masters degrees, but to make up for it The Wonkas have been releasing a single a month through their MySpace and at least one other online social site. Their main hope is to be able to put these singles together into a full length release by years end. The Portuguese album can be purchase via their official website, while the one in English can be purchased on iTunes. There are lots of free tracks at Last.FM and their English MySpace as well, although I’m not 100% sure if this song, O Ímpar Perfeito, has been translated over from its native tongue quite yet. [cs] Download | Subscribe | Subscribe in iTunes | Subscribe to All Spread It Around: Hide Sites Less

Sao Paolo activists open Bicycle Plaza As every cyclist knows biking creates community. Instead of sitting in a tin can, cyclists are out in the world, reacting to their surroundings and interacting with the friends and strangers they meet along the road. Imagine the effect of even a small Critical Mass ride in a country that has been stultified by dictatorship for forty three years and robbed of its civil society? In another in a series of podcasts from the Towards Car-free Cities Conference in Portland, we attend a talk by Brazilians Thiago Benicchio and Eduardo Green about how it is to ride a bike in their country. The slide show that accompanied the talk can be seen here and here . Apocalipsemotorizado is in Portuguese but you can see the babelfish translation here. Download the mp3 orsubscribe to Bikescape in itunes Less

Final part. Chris Hofmann talks about Firefox's market share in Brazil and the community contributors of the project. Recorded at Golden Tulip Plaza, São Paulo - Brazil. August 2008. Cast: fczuardi Less

Chris Hofmann on Intellectual Property of the submissions to the Mozilla Labs Concept Series and the importance of open and reusable ideas for innovation. Recorded at Golden Tulip Plaza, São Paulo - Brazil. August 2008. Cast: fczuardi Less

Recorded at Golden Tulip Plaza, São Paulo - Brazil. August 2008. On this first part, Chris talks about Mozilla Labs, the concept series and how they relate with the main products and releases. Cast: fczuardi Less

La división latinoamericana de la firma firmó un contrato con Ricardo Izecson dos Santos Leite (Kaká para los amigos) para promocionar la “experiencia HD de Sony” (alta definición por sus siglas en Inglés) en todo el mundo. El mejor futbolista del mundo, comienza a hacer valer sus goles y su carisma. El objetivo del acuerdo es [...] Less