THINK / Musings

Time to go home

My one and half year old son calls a phone a “Hi”. When you answer the phone in the US you usually say Hi or Hello. Here in Italy you say “pronto” or “ready”. I remember when I was young hearing a story that in France there were people who thought you had to say “allo, allo” when you answered the phone to make it work.

At around 5.30am a duck flew into our bedroom window. I got up and there was a crow perched on the side of the balcony watching the duck jump up and down smacking itself into our window. Every so often the crow would screech, as if he was yelling take a look at what this duck is doing.

This will be interesting, I remember a long time back that Ebay as an AOL partner didn’t want to integrate IM features for fear that buyers and sellers would start to trade independent of the platform.

Click up or shut up

Just arriving in EuroTelcoblog’s inbox one minute ago was confirmation of Skype integration into 14 categories on eBay, selected on the criteria of “Skypeâ??s ability to positively impact the transaction.” The categories are:

Automotive GPS devices
Camera and photo lenses and filters
Wired networking routers
Skype devices
VOIP / Internet telephony
Diamond solitaire rings
Real estate (residential, commercial)
Manufacturing and metalworking
Beds
NBA basketball cards
Silver coins
Lost in Space collectibles
Radio control toys
Cars and trucks

Apparently, eBay considered that these were categories where “instant communication can greatly facilitate trade, such as those with high average selling prices, complex products, or new technologies that can generate a high volume of…

Read the rest of this post from EuroTelcoblog

We were driving up in the hills near a small town called Mezzegra yesterday. Outside of a villa there was this small cross with Mussolini's name it. Someone had placed flowers by it. As the photo's of Mussolini on wine bottles suggest he is far from demonized. A wikipedia search turns up that this is where Mussolini and his girlfriend were executed before he was taken to Milan.

Note, he was caught in Dongo on his was to Chiavenna where he was trying to board a plane to Switzerland. Weird, this is so close to Switzerland, he could have driven or walked from Dongo or Mezzegra.

 
Living here in Italy has made me consider what defines the boundaries of local and how my concept of local is changing.     Here everything is very local - local to a degree I hadnt appreciated to date.  By local I mean within the region we live in Italy (Lombardy) and more often than not the 20 sq. km around us.   People here think local, produce is local, relationships are local.   Many of the people who live in the tiny village we are in have never left Lombardy.  Very few have ever left Italy.  Most people dont speak a word of any language other than Italian.   Considering that we are 15 mins away from the Swiss border, 45 mins from Milan, 3 hours from Florence, this surprised me.    
People seem to relish how local life is here.   Last week someone was explaining to me that much of the milk that we buy here is from cows about 15 mins up the road.   Some friends told us that each year they pick olives from their olive trees and take the olives to Lenno where a local producer of olive oil (great oil btw) weighs them and gives them bottles of oil in exchange for the olives.   There is a trade off made between choice and quality.    There is often little choice, each item comes in a flavor determined mostly by what was available.  What is fresh.   But while daily choice is limited there is more variety.  

There are vegetalbles that we have never seen before.   One day back in Feburary my wife bought at the market a green vegetable that was somewhere between asperagus and an artichoke. Often we cant even get the name sorted for some of these items — different people seem to call them different things — the name for this one was erbetta, another one is called la barba dei priest  (the priests beard).   In the US there seems to be a need to replicate experiences, a need for consistency (are these needs or are they artifacts of a culture of consumption that makes us think they are needs?). Here there is little need for this.    Life maps pretty tightly to the seasons, one month its brocoli the next its appargus and thats about it.  It strikes me that is a lot more texture to a life lived like this.  

Down the street there is a butcher who sells among other things butter. His butter unlike anything I have tasted before. I cant really explain it.   The combination of the texture and the taste is unbelievable - its butter like nothing i have tasted.   Made just up the road.   Maybe I dont pay enough attention to taste — I never thought there could be so much diversity in a thing like butter.  I thought butter was butter, now I differently, so do my kids, they will ask us, butcher's butter please.

 Brands here are hyper local.     Go to a resturant and order sparkling water — what you get wont be Pelligrino,  there is barely a Pelligrino bottle to be seen around here.   Its local carbonated, spring water. And pretty much every restaurant we go to has a different brand.   Go the the supermarket (let alone the local aliementaire) and pretty much everything is local.  Not only produce, the basics — kitchen paper, trash bags, wine, drinks, yoguts etc. etc. most of them are Italian brands.   Glad bags, no can do,  wrigleys gum, no such luck (try Happydent, fabulous branding.) …  Maybe Italy is too small a market, non english spearking etc. for the multinationals to have paid it much atttention.   Most of the trade barriers have been levelled with EU membership.   But local is what people want, its what they trust. People spend a lot of time in their communities and so much is done just the way it has always been done.  

If you expand the concept of local to include a local online community I wonder if this is more what markets will look like in the future.   Another way of thinking about the tail vs. the head, but the tail vs. the head analysis is about how the tail is becoming more accessible from a cost standpoint.  Here the trade off's that are so compelling re: scale and efficiencies have not been made.