Inma Martinez2013-05-20T14:31:37-04:00Inma Martinezhttp://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/author/index.php?author=inma-martinezCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Inma MartinezGood old fashioned elbow grease.Food-Porn: Tempting You, Tempting Me, Tempting Robotstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.28584542013-03-12T05:54:05-04:002013-05-12T05:12:01-04:00Inma Martinezhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/inma-martinez/Food-Porn. Don't be silly, it is not about arranging food shaped like your private parts, but about the glamourised spectacular visual presentation of cooking or eating in advertisements, cooking shows and nowadays, your own plate.
The term, originally coined by feminist critic Rosalind Coward as early as 1984, is now taking food to the domain and control of the masses. You thought that the first batch of weirdos throwing milk over their heads did it out of the blue? The human mind has imprints from popular culture that sooner or later emerge in newer behaviours. Choosing milk as opposed to paint, or even soda, is not arbitrary, but subconscious. From "9 ½ Weeks" food scene (loads of spilled milk) to Kelis' "Milkshake" the human brain looks and samples food in the same way that it does sex. Why since 2010 the whole world has been taking snaps of food in front of them like a compulsive disorder is the direct effect of technology evolution. The porn industry took off when the videotaping hardware and playware became affordable. Thanks to mobile cameras and social media, the sight of food, one the most tantalizing visual aids of our days to arouse desires, is evolving into a superior realm of human understanding. So much so that even IBM's Watson Robot is into it.
IBM's Watson is an Artificial Intelligence robot that two years ago played American TV show "Jeopardy" against its two previous winners. Beating them to the delight of a bunch of IBMers in the audience, Watson's win was just the beginning for IBM to research further into the human brain and how it makes decisions, learns, and explores life. At the beginning of this month, IBM proudly unveiled what Watson had been working on. In addition to oncology discovery, pharma drugs and other scientific endeavours, Watson has been applying itself to becoming a Chef. Watson's debut recipe, a healthy breakfast pastry called "Spanish Crescent", was served to all attendees to the press conference in San Jose, California, and let's all rejoice, no one ended up with food poisoning.
What started as a Flickr group called "I Ate This" and was followed by a myriad of food blogs and mobile apps is not just a cute consumer trend like collecting Star Wars memorabilia or writing a diary when you are time-rich. We are talking food here. You make it and eat it every night. The digitalization and archiving of food is taking things to a deeper level of knowledge about consumers and what lies behind their behaviours. In the case of IBM, the firm is investing thousands of dollars into Watson learning to be a chef because Artificial Intelligence research has a lot of inroads into human-centric behaviours. The way we construct and deconstruct recipes, not just when we cook them but when our taste buds sample them, when our eyes see delicious food in front of us, sends signals to our brain that "inspire" or "ignite" other deductive and creative neural systems within our cortex. And if performed with emotional values, our brain goes into ecstasy because we release endorphins, the addictive happiness substance.
While the U.S. mobile applications are all restaurant-review focused or foodspotting, Platter, a Wayra UK startup company, is leading the new inroads about food digitalisation: recipe deconstruction and consumer insights gathering around how people feel, think and act about food.
"Food is identity", remarks Will Hodson, Platter's founder and CEO. "If there's one thing we've learnt since launching Platter, it's that almost everyone loves carbonnara (especially in the winter). The other thing we've learnt is that no two cooks make it the same way. Our tagging system reveals the little tweaks and secret ingredients that make dishes personal."
On a macro level, Platter's tags, which Will and the team are expanding from ingredients to cookbooks and suppliers, flag new trends as they emerge in kitchens across the globe. This, above all things, is what the market, from food publishers to other corporates in the cookery industry, have been trying to unveil for decades. While watching cookery programmes is mostly a passive enjoyment, only a small percentage of the viewers end up trying to cook the recipes, food preparation and re-creation of food recipes is revealing the platterazzi's, platter's universe of home chefs, creativity, the drivers of their hobby. At grassroots level, entering private kitchens in action allows product designers and concept creators in the food industry, not just supermarkets, to understand better their customer target in order to keep their innovation ticking.
Technology startups are entering an industry that is bound to be not just huge, but exponentially longevous because food preparation is a universal act of love, eating is as powerful as sex, and being an explorer of new tastes is as tempting and exhilarating as peeping into what a good looking 30-year-old man by the name of "NoshableAdam" or an Spanish brunette called "estheramigo" cook for dinner somewhere out there tonight. Yes, full circle, we have gone back to sex. That's why Nigella is such a hit. Stick a fork in me, I'm done.]]>Lookk-Out: Fashion Retail Is More Nuts and Bolts Than Pixelstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.27101042013-02-18T07:51:14-05:002013-04-20T05:12:01-04:00Inma Martinezhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/inma-martinez/Lookk, the London-based fashion tech startup invested by the big and the mighty, has gone out of business after 4 years. Its CEO exited in August declaring that, while they succeeded in creating a nurturing community of fans and designers, they failed at creating an e-commerce market place. Though this may surprise the Silicon Roundabout dwellers, it is hardly news to the fashion insiders for the pieces of the puzzle to solve if tech startups want to disrupt and improve the Fashion industry, are a lot more than just "discovering" labels.
What makes Fashion a multi-billion dollar global industry is above and beyond discovery. Discovering new designers is not the gap to solve because thousands of media professionals, bloggers and stylists are at it 24/7 on a worldwide scale. While thousands of students graduate from fashion schools, only a few have real 'genius' worth backing financially. The creative industries, namely film, TV, animation, special effects, even source code writing, have tough recruitment requirements: only the best make it. Same as the restaurant business: discovery is not the major pain if the chef is a true artist. Anyone who has travelled to El Bulli or Thomas Keller's The French Laundry will confirm how out of the beaten track these Michelin star temples are, yet their reservations list is booked up six months in advance.
Any industry that turns creativity into a business makes it or breaks it because of other 'unsexy', 'little known' background factors, namely production deadlines and deliveries. This is why the fashion insiders can't stand Mary Portas and their stomachs churn at the mention of Hollywood pearls like Devil Wears Prada or Zoolander. Profit margins in the pre-a-porter or couture are tough or almost impossible to achieve, so the big houses build pyramids of product lines that allow them to create EBITDA at group level thanks to scalable and cheap to produce "lower entry products" such as accessories and fragrances. The esoteric formula creates a brand promise sustained by the genius and aspirational elements of the top line products, in order to successfully sell at higher volume their leather goods and perfumes. It is as fragile an ecosystem as an orchid garden. It requires perfection, genius and obsessive work.
Financial backing for a fashion label is not just about financing talented designers. While one is funding a creative genius that sometimes dictates collections based on costly fabrics and artisanal processes, this is just the pre-production side of the business. The bigger hurdle to conquer is to secure infallible supply-chain and manufacturing mechanisms like only the Spaniards at Inditex, MANGO or Textil Lonia (CH Carolina Herrera) know how to conjure up. And then, if producing a collection every six months was not straining enough, there's the deliveries of merchandise, something that deprives all retailers of sleep and profit margins, as the revered Burton Tansky, CEO of Neiman Marcus Stores declared at the Annual Vogue Retailers Breakfast in Paris.
"Designers need to recognise", Mr Tansky pleaded to Anna Wintour, a fashion editor of true vision and a real mentor to many designers, "that the worldwide demand for their products is expanding at a rate that even they themselves don't understand, so they are not keeping up with the production as demand is (currently) outstripping supply." Mr Tansky was not talking about amateurish designers from up and coming labels that are learning the ropes. He was referring to the heavy-weight houses in luxury prêt-a-porter. His angst was a torrent of despair. "We are waiting longer and longer for deliveries, and these mostly come at the back end instead of the front end of the delivery process". What Mr. Tansky unveiled is that discovery is really not the point: "Fashion is fun and we all love it, but with the ads out there in the media and no goods to sell..." Bingo. Here is your Lean Canvas's Problem to solve for all of you Google Campus crowd that want to get into Fashion by way of coding software.
When you are a buyer at a retailer, meeting amazing genius at the fashion fairs is really not the problem: the real pain is to find labels that can guarantee a certain stock of deliveries so that when you spend thousands of dollars in shooting ads showcasing their new collections, the products can be put on sale as soon as possible to cover your investment and cash exposure.
Enormously talented designer labels coveted by clients and industry have gone out of business because of deliveries. Even when they had funding for a given collection, it is the manufacturing, the supply-chain what makes or break a fashion business. Sourcing materials is as hard as getting a place in the queue of a reputable manufacturer. Successful labels use the same production lines, believe it or not. Ask Luxottica, the Italian eyewear manufacturer that in addition to its acquired brands (Oliver's People, Ray-Ban) produces the entire eyewear collections of PRADA, Dior, Chanel, FENDI and pretty much the whole world of couture. A good supply-chain executive can help an up and coming label get into the production line of a top reputable name in manufacturing, but it is done in the gaps in-between the big names. And if the big names have their own production troubles, guess where your place in the queue goes if something gets delayed. Lookk may have created a phenomenal fan base for your collections but you cannot supply their demand because you've been delayed by a major name out there.
The Fashion world does not need more designers to be discovered: it needs more high quality goods manufacturers that can produce and supply on time and in flawless condition the sizes and pieces that a collection has been paid to deliver to retailers; it needs shipping companies that can price their fees still leaving margins for the labels, with logistics that reduce costs and reduce time; it needs governments that reduce taxes on artisanal businesses that employ local people so that the labels do not outsource to third world countries where women and children are exploited. The latter is what has allowed the Spaniards to cost-cut and oversee quality at close range.
I am hugely annoyed when the tech media calls tech fashion the businesses of ASOS, Yoox, Fab.com, who are simply helping out getting rid of excess inventory. This is not innovative and this is not the business of Fashion: it is called "outletting". It is like putting Poundland in the same vertical of Waitrose. Let the stylists, the bloggers and the press discover creative talent. If you really want to help transform the Fashion industry, don't showcase emerging talent that cannot supply or produce proper collections. Fashion is not the Art world in need of curation.
Fashion is big business, it is part of the GDP of many nations, and it is a business of talent and perfection in the background. When this week London held its Fashion Week, the average collection run through is about 12-16 minutes. The rest of the seconds, minutes and hours towards and after that moment is a clockwork industry of talent and precision. That, the behind the scenes, is what needs your entrepreneurial innovation.]]>Bio-Slavery: The 2032 Factory Worker Is Likely to Be a (Plant) (Triffid)tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.25349012013-01-23T13:03:04-05:002013-03-25T05:12:01-04:00Inma Martinezhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/inma-martinez/Professor Carole Collet, Reader in Textile Futures at the University Of The Arts, and founder of the Textiles Futures postgraduate degree course at London's Central Saint Martins College, elegantly approaches the stage in 5inch heels. Within two minutes of her French accentuated presentation, the audience is in complete owe of her charm, her many scientific titles and her undeniable depth of know-how on the subject: sustainable biofacture. This is the blonde, sexy scientist that any film producer would like to add to the cast of X-Men. Only that she is for real, very real and very serious about her research: to genetically modify plants so that they sprout enhanced edible produce and weave... textiles in factories.
To illustrate the wondrous Brave New World that she can't wait for us to enjoy, she shows the audience a video animation of the biofactory of the year 2032. A visionary and futuristic 3-D rendered model shows a factory where thousands of strawberry plants grow shiny black berries and weave incessantly something that looks like a mesh, an intricate Irish lace of the future. The soundtrack to these images is a kind of 'insect sounds overture' that makes me imagine a future where these blue-collard plants will be more akin to John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids than to Willy Wonka's happy singing Oompa-Loompas.
What scares me the most is that Professor Collet's project is a cheap deal to finance: just around the $100 million according to what an entwined biogenetics laboratory in Denmark has already budgeted for and confirmed to her. In the world of corporate innovation funding, the prospect of having textiles produced by workers that one will never ever pay wages to sounds like a bargain. Workers that will produce 24/7, without going on strike or taking paid holidays. Workers that will not defect to a competitor or take maternity leave to bear the next offspring of future workers.
I can see why professor Collet is excited. I can foresee why, this spring when she takes this sci-fi show on the road to the Espace Fondation EDF in Paris to take part in "ALIVE: Designing With Living Technology" some banker or two will salivate at the prospect of investing in the industrial revolution of the future. The benefits will be endless, not just cost-cutting: "Biofacture promotes the convergence of biological living matter with inert nanomaterials", Collet confirms. "It will be possible to attach gold nanoparticles to a sample of live DNA, thus rendering the DNA conductive, (...) opening the doors to designing biotechnically enhanced smart textiles". Some people in the audience must also show the long- horsy face that I myself must have been displaying since the video kicked in. To this, professor Collet throws an olive branch of appeasement: "With living technology comes a whole new set of ethical concerns", she adds knowing that if biofacture takes place on a larger scale many of us will question the rights of plants to be left alone the way God created them. Moreover, that some of her peers in the scientific community will feel concerned knowing that performing DNA alterations in living organisms will have to be operated in controlled environments to perhaps avoid that these lace-making berry plants may one day decide to jump off their plot and chase humans down the road. Worse: that the fabulous, anti-oxidants loaded strawberries may continue mutating human DNA when consumed. This is a scientific way to argue that this whole biofacturing may not be such a great idea after all, but that is not the concern I have.
My impulse to leave the room and write this article is motivated by my refusal to condone societal attitudes that continue to exploit living organisms, in this case plants. I can accept that the Dickensian times of women and children industrial exploitation was motivated by a society that justified a class system of the rich and the poor and hence the understandable emergence of a Marx and an Engels, of the Suffragists, as the immediate rebuttals to counterbalance this very unfair code of industrial practice. But it is still a long road and a hard rock to crack, still some 100 years later. For it will surprise many that only in 1992 the female population of Appenzell in Switzerland was allowed to cast their vote in local and general elections. For it continues to be a cause worth fighting for if you are a female so much so that even a couple of days ago, during his acceptance speech, President Obama still reminded the nation that women should be equally paid for their skills. Unbelievably, the early years of the twenty-first century seem to continue carrying some of the shameful issues that are still latched to our backs from the previous decades. But thirty, fifty years from now, one should expect that the New Millenium human civilisation will have finally come to realise that the human race has no God-given right over the lives of the animal and the plants kingdoms.
Human progress as a society is not solely a path of scientific endeavour. Along the way we have learned to appreciate that what makes us human and not just smart homo sapiens that send men to space is that we care beyond utilitarian and rational practices. That we do not abandon our disabled or weakest offspring like a pack of wolves, but we take them to hospitals and care for them even more intently. That we create laws that protect animals, whether they are pets, working livestock or destined to an abattoir to become steaks. That more and more cosmetology laboratories are abandoning animal testing. That less and less rich ladies want to acquire fur coats to display economic superiority.
Science is a challenging path of proving that humans can achieve innovative endeavours. What I disagree with science in the year 2032 is that it will still continue to exploit other living creatures because it can, not because there won't be any other ways to produce the same. If in the year 2050 the chemical industry is not able to weave for me a beautiful, futuristic Irish lace made of some non-organic material, it will be because someone in the year 2014 gave professor Collet $100 million dollars. I surely hope the future is not such bleak prospect of enslaved plants but a life where we all commune with what's around us, perhaps singing "Oompa, Loompa, do-ba-dee-doo, I've got a perfect (planet) for you". Fingers, paws and stems crossed.]]>'Kiddie-Hack': Primary School Developerstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.23308642012-12-28T19:00:00-05:002013-02-27T05:12:02-05:00Inma Martinezhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/inma-martinez/
She is programming a dancing robot project in Scratch, the programming language created by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. She is not a geeky kid with a rocket science IQ: she is a typical little girl that dreams of ponies, watches X Factor on Saturday evenings, and begs Mum to allow her to wear nail polish.
Thanks to Scratch, she has also learned about something called 'software' and what she can do with it. Around the world and sharing projects on a common website, thousands of youngsters are programming imaginary endangered species that live in magical landscapes, desktop games, season greeting cards with gifs and music tracks, projects that turn their creativity into interactive digital dimensions.
Scratch provides kids with an exciting environment to create and share computer applications. Applications in Scratch are built around what are referred to as Sprites; these could be animals, objects, people and so forth. Using simple drag-and-drop programming, students can control their actions and interactions. In the process, they are subtly exposed to basic programming concepts such as conditional statements, iteration, variables, and event triggers.
As a parent of primary-school age children, Daniel Appelquist, co-founder of Over the Air hack days and currently leading product management for BlueVia in Telefonica Digital, was horrified to learn that his kids' ITC lessons were kind of a "crash course into Office" and nothing else.
Appelquist approached his children's teachers to encourage them to incorporate computer programming, specifically using Scratch, into their curriculum and agreed to teach two classes of 30 10-year-olds. The result of his 'stunt' bore a beautiful fruit: the kids were uniformly engaged and excited about the subject and they had fun working through the simple examples that Appelquist prepared for each class and even going beyond.
In West London, the Hammersmith Academy is the first secondary school for 11 to 18-year-olds with specialism in creative and digital media and IT. Its chairman, Tom Ilube, a serial tech entrepreneur who has worked alongside Sir Tim Berners-Lee and founded schools in the UK and Africa, also started cutting his teeth programming at a young age. "For many young people, learning to program is as satisfying as learning to play an instrument" he says with a beaming smile.
ICT skills are presently taught at many primary schools in many countries but the curriculum is basically consistent of (scream now, if you will) how to use office applications, and here is where both Appelquist and Ilube draw the line and encourage curriculums where computational skills are not solely taught as a vocation. "Software writing is a creative process. The first time you write a truly elegant piece of code that does exactly what you wanted it to, you feel a real sense of achievement", Ilube recalls. Learning how to write code and how to build and run a programme is one of the most creative intellectual challenges a person can do alongside writing music and literature.
When developers talk about the beauty of a programming language, one could easily believe that they are discussing Byron or Hemingway: PEARL developers pride themselves by recalling the "poetic" essence of the code; Drupal developers relish in the joy of writing in a language that is the Swiss Army knife of php based CMS. In real terms, what developers enjoy and fall in love with are the various properties of each programming language: how smoothly and easily its syntax supports the clear and structured flow of ideas.
"I would greatly encourage any parents who have some background in computer science and computer programming to get involved with their kids' schools in this way", suggests Appelquist. In the meantime, and perhaps this is how things should pan out, by creating a critical mass of parents that want to make a difference in the educational system, Appelquist advocates that parents looking to get involved should check out Code Club which provides a lot of resources and a kind of "after school club in a box" for teaching Scratch.
Scratch is a first step of discovery but an important one to allow children to find an environment where other disciplines like Maths and English creative writing will come into play. Mathematical knowledge allows the scripted language to have marvelous 'short cuts' to express very complex equations that words would only make very cumbersome to enunciate while writing with flare and no typos in a programming language is the perfect symbiosis of merging Maths with literary prowess.
Once those skills are mastered, developers tend to allow their personalities bloom and emerge in their code and their attitudes. 'Hard-core' developers add to that an uncanny and brave disposition for challenges: they are undeterred when confronted with an impossibility to solve. System administrators are meticulous, database developers are able to create worlds within worlds and connections that compare and match objects within contextual scenarios. Every single developer is unique in how they approach projects and come up with the goods. Proof of this is the plethora of mobile apps that have been uploaded by developers worldwide.
Next time you sit on your sofa tapping away on your tablet, realise that his is only possible because thousands of developers have put theirs skills, passion and enormous love for good code writing into developing the apps you can't live without. Your children want to be creative, not apply for a job at an accounting firm. Don't kill their mojo so soon. In a not too distant future, you may well take your kids to their football practice or to a hackathon, or to both.]]>'Eco-doom': Silently Trending on Teens Virtual Networkstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.21663732012-11-20T13:21:03-05:002013-01-20T05:12:01-05:00Inma Martinezhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/inma-martinez/
Her painful message delivers a calm but blatant exposé of the double-standards that adults use to justify how carelessly they are destroying the future of all species. Loose ponytail, sweaty hands but steady, her gaze looks directly into the eyes of every adult in the audience. Unfortunately for Severn Cullis-Susuki, her call to arms is delivered in the pre-social networks society, failing to reach out to the millions of teenagers that could have seconded her plight.
However, as Samuel Adams once said: "It does not take a majority to prevail... but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen to set brush fires of freedom in the minds of men". In April 2008, a Kuala Lumpur blogger loads Severn's speech as "The Girl Who Silenced the World for 5 Minutes" - a very appropriate Stig Larsson's title, and her act of valour is watched by 25 million people.
Severn's fears, legacy and 'fighting' disposition are today running deep within the minds and hearts of teens playing in a digital network near you. If you thought that your children were clubbing with Penguins or feeding livestock on a digital farm oblivious to the threat of ecological disasters, smell the coffee that organisations running such networks have uncovered.
The first report emerging in 2009 in the United States conducted by Discovery Communications, a powerhouse in the nonfiction broadcast media, brings to attention a sample of 500 American preteens 56% of which worried about the planet becoming a blasted heath or at least a very unpleasant place to live. 28% said that they feared animals would become extinct. In the same year, a separate study of UK children found only 11% of those surveyed to be carefree, or free from worry. The research involved interviews with 200,000 children aged 6 to 14.
While the natural disasters broadcasted by the media worldwide have created a widespread sentiment of hyper-locality amongst adults, the teenage mindset has put its own spin on it: it wonders to what extent global warming is to blame for it, and rippling from it, it feels impotent and puzzled at the thought of adults destroying nature as if it was a means to an industrialist end. In 2012 children, empowered by the same technology that makes them participants of the global disaster spectacle, are also turning to the web to find their power and let their voices be known. Enter the 'MiniMonos' island.
Founded by Melissa Clark-Reynolds, a passionate eco-activist very close to Al Gore and his endeavours towards ecological awareness worldwide, MiniMonos - little monkeys in Spanish, captures the desire to "do something for the planet" felt by a growing number of children worldwide. "These kids are learning to equate positive actions with positive feelings: fun, delight and accomplishment", reveals Melissa. "Our aim is to have a million children taking real-world eco-action as a result of playing on MiniMonos."
The site's virtual world is a digital safe haven for children who love the planet. Merging both digital and offline life, children get rewarded for their participation in real eco-projects and share their own local eco-initiatives with other children on the MiniMonos blog. MiniMonos, with over 1 million teens playing on the site from over 150 countries, also conducted its own survey. Only this time, the children apeaced their global warming fears by carrying out eco-friendly behaviour - recycling (38%), picking up litter (16%), planting/protecting plants and trees (6%), protecting wildlife (5%), saving energy (5%). When asked why they liked helping the environment, their answers ranged from "feeling good" to "having fun doing it" and "liking helping others".
Twenty years on, Severn has ignited her audience. Only this time, it is her teen peers the ones getting into action, the ones fighting for their future in their daily lives and alongside a mini monkey or two in a digital world called the web.]]>