blog de notas de juan freire

Mayo 7

Living in the New Metropolis, un proyecto del fotógrafo Martin Roemers (artículo):

… In this project, “Metropolis,” I am documenting the megacities of our time — places with populations in excess of 10 million. Every megacity is a theater, and every city has a different stage and different actors.

My question is, how can people live in cities that are so immense? Crowded cities in India like Mumbai and Kolkata (formerly known as Calcutta); Dhaka, Bangladesh; Manila; Jakarta, Indonesia; and Karachi, Pakistan, have traffic jams all the time…

Abr 7

How to Make a Region Innovative, strategy+business

Ernest J. Wilson III. How to Make a Region Innovative. strategy+business, issue 66 Spring 2012.

To foster economic growth, innovation clusters need to draw on the power of an interrelated “quad” of sectors: public, private, civil, and academic.

…

Dic 14

La innovación barata emerge - E País

… reverse innovation, este modelo invierte el proceso habitual de creación y comercialización de productos de una empresa, lo que implica desarrollar productos en y para los mercados emergentes y adaptarlos después a las economías más avanzadas.

…

“La reverse innovation es el proceso contrario a la glocalización, que parte de una concepción global de un producto para adaptarlo después a un mercado local y que es lo que se ha estado haciendo en Estados Unidos y Europa. Ambas estrategias son necesarias en el seno de las multinacionales porque cada una responde a nichos, situaciones y oportunidades de negocios y mercados diferentes. Es necesario que convivan”

Nov 22

Adidas Set To Launch $1 Shoe In India - PSFK

Mar 12

Media Piracy in Emerging Economies

About the Report | Media Piracy in Emerging Economies | A Report by the Social Science Research Council

Media Piracy in Emerging Economies is the first independent, large-scale study of music, film and software piracy in emerging economies, with a focus on Brazil, India, Russia, South Africa, Mexico and Bolivia.

Based on three years of work by some thirty-five researchers, Media Piracy in Emerging Economies tells two overarching stories: one tracing the explosive growth of piracy as digital technologies became cheap and ubiquitous around the world, and another following the growth of industry lobbies that have reshaped laws and law enforcement around copyright protection. The report argues that these efforts have largely failed, and that the problem of piracy is better conceived as a failure of affordable access to media in legal markets.

“The choice,” said Joe Karaganis, director of the project, “isn’t between high piracy and low piracy in most media markets. The choice, rather, is between high-piracy, high-price markets and high-piracy, low price markets. Our work shows that media businesses can survive in both environments, and that developing countries have a strong interest in promoting the latter. This problem has little to do with enforcement and a lot to do with fostering competition.”

Major Findings

Prices are too high. High prices for media goods, low incomes, and cheap digital technologies are the main ingredients of global media piracy. Relative to local incomes in Brazil, Russia, or South Africa, the retail price of a CD, DVD, or copy of MS Office is five to ten times higher than in the US or Europe. Legal media markets are correspondingly tiny and underdeveloped.
Competition is good. The chief predictor of low prices in legal media markets is the presence of strong domestic companies that compete for local audiences and consumers. In the developing world, where global film, music, and software companies dominate the market, such conditions are largely absent.
Antipiracy education has failed.The authors find no significant stigma attached to piracy in any of the countries examined. Rather, piracy is part of the daily media practices of large and growing portions of the population.
Changing the law is easy. Changing the practice is hard. Industry lobbies have been very successful at changing laws to criminalize these practices, but largely unsuccessful at getting governments to apply them. There is, the authors argue, no realistic way to reconcile mass enforcement and due process, especially in countries with severely overburdened legal systems.
Criminals can’t compete with free. The study finds no systematic links between media piracy and organized crime or terrorism in any of the countries examined. Today, commercial pirates and transnational smugglers face the same dilemma as the legal industry: how to compete with free.
Enforcement hasn’t worked. After a decade of ramped up enforcement, the authors can find no impact on the overall supply of pirated goods.

Mar 28

Ayn Rand move over: In Pune, India, shantytown residents 'design by consensus.' / The Christian Science Monitor

Two Stockholm-based architects visited with shantytown residents in Pune, India, last year to build lower-income homes based on ‘design by consensus.’ What would Ayn Rand think?

Oct 7

URBZ » MUMBAI

URBZ MASHUP Mumbai explores, challenges, subverts, questions and celebrates Mumbai’s ideas and practices of heritage enshrined in its colonial (pre and post included) architecture, arts, culture and politics.

The MASHUP activities cover the oldest neighbourhoods of the city. Girgaum, where Khotachiwadi – the much threatened and celebrated trophy heritage habitat exists – exists just a stone’s throw away from Chowpatty beach which is one of the most historic sites for social dissent and free expression. A fifteen minute walk from there takes you to Crawford Market – Mumbai’s oldest and favourite shopping destination. In between lies a maze of dense streets and bazaars that testify to the city’s numerous communities who made the city what it is, a city of shops, markets, dreams and collective aspirations.

In this maze lie stories, images and ideas of a city that provide newer definitions of what it means to be a Mumbaikar, through the many languages the city speaks in, the many cultural practices it invents, its changing and evolving built forms, its bazaars and markets that are as vital and dense as the air the city breathes – making the question of its identity richer than anything the city officially celebrates. Way richer than the imagination of its political leaders and much deeper than the possibilities framed by its most conscientious citizens.

The URBZ MASHUP welcomes participants from Mumbai, India and the rest of the world to use their skills and imaginations and dive into streets, walk into homes, converse, make images, play, then reinterpret, examine, and recreate newer imaginative frameworks that do justice to the city’s layered, dense and complex life.

Jul 17

Innovative Service Design for All | Re-public

The papers included in this special issue present a great variety in any respect, ranging from theoretical explorations of the industrialisation of services to outlining new university programmes focusing on service design; from waste management in Bangladesh to dyslexia-friendly classes in Greece. The rising importance of services worldwide suggests that the creation and renewal of services will constitute in the years to come a major stake for societies in general and specifically for the design community. Speaking from a Greek perspective, service design will be of crucial importance in countries like Greece where both multicultural challenges and environmental issues have only recently come to the centre of public concern. It is expected that this special issue will enrich the local discourse on the transformation of services. Last but not least, it is also meant to be a contribution to a more refined and specialized terminology which is necessary for this discourse to expand and develop.