I’m so proud of my wife :-)

Of course I would say that anyway. Everyone would; but Angelica has been up to something special recently and it’s going to launch tomorrow.

Despite her regular work on our IT Decisions company in Brazil, where she is working for several clients including a couple of different US-based publishers and additional work – like commenting this week on entrepreneurs in Brazil for the Commonwealth Secretariat – she is about to launch a new venture.

It’s called Gift Brazil and before even launching she has collected together 3,600 fans on Facebook – all of them are people who just love the idea even though they still can’t buy anything.

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Gift Brazil is a collective of artisans in Brazil all using this channel to sell their products. Angelica has her own products on there, but she is also offering the platform to other artisans. It really is connecting very remote rural artisans with the globally connected world… connecting the new and old.

I think this venture is tremendously important. It’s not just about making a few quid from selling gifts, there is so much more to this and this is why I’m so proud of what she is already achieving with the venture.

• So many “gifts” from Brazil are T-shirts featuring toucans (often not even printed in Brazil) or a new pair of Havaianas flip-flops. This collection of gifts is handmade by rural artisans and curated personally by Angelica and her team – so the buyer knows that they are going to get something genuine and unique.
• This creates jobs in remote rural communities where traditionally these artists have only ever been able to sell to passing tourists – now Gift Brazil lets them sell to the world – using English (and at no charge to the artist at all).
• This preserves cultural traditions that have existed in these rural communities for generations. If people can make a living from their art then they will not be forced to abandon it in favour of regular jobs – as many have been forced to do.
• This promotes digital inclusion as artisans who can use tools like email are already helping out those who can’t and Angelica has some specific plans already in place to fund training sessions – helping people in remote locations get more from the Internet.

I think this is a great idea. Angelica’s idea will create rural jobs in Brazil and create opportunities to sell globally where none existed before – and it gives better products to the buyers with an interest in Brazil. Everyone wins!

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I’m really proud that she put this entire project together – with help from her mate Flavia. It already features hundreds of individual items from dozens of artisans and will launch tomorrow (Dec 3rd) at the National Handicrafts Expo in Belo Horizonte – a trade fair with an expected attendance in the region of 165,000 people!

So please take a look at Gift Brazil. Go and Like them on Facebook and please consider buying something from the site. It’s not just about lining the pocket of a big retailer – this cash is heading directly to help out rural Brazil by creating opportunities for these people to trade with the world.

Angelica can be found on LinkedIn here if you are a journalist or blogger and interested in writing about what she is doing with Gift Brazil.

And do take a look at her Instagram too – it’s packed full of the items they are selling and looks fantastic!

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O que é a Gift Brazil?

I’m now a company director in Brazil

I’ve been running IT Decisions with Angelica since I arrived in Brazil. We have been building a really good audience considering we started from scratch and we have spent nothing on marketing or advertising…

All we started doing was writing in English about what IT decision makers are doing here in Brazil. Not what the IT companies are doing or selling, but what the real company bosses with big budgets are up to.

A few months down the line, we are regularly seeing over 10,000 views a day on the site… over quarter of a million views a month on the stuff we are writing about Brazil in a foreign language. Just incredible – we are very pleased as you can imagine.

One of the attractions of the site is that we don’t carry advertising or vendor content. So it’s squarely focused on what buyers are up to and because there are no ads, we don’t have to keep any advertisers happy or skew the content in a particular direction.

That also means there is no income yet. That is about to change with the research network just launching. So we formed a limited company to handle the accounts of the research company. It’s a much more involved process than back in the UK, but despite the complexities of getting it all off the ground, I think that it will be easier to run the company on a day to day basis and I will be paying less corporation tax than I would be in the UK.

Many people complain about the bureacracy involved in starting companies in Brazil, but once over the initial hurdle of paperwork that all needs to be signed, the tax and accounting rules all seem much more straightforward to me. For instance, getting taxed on revenue (rather than profit) seems a negative step, but if the tax rate is reasonable and the process of accounting becomes much simpler then it seems like a good thing to me.

I’m now officially a director of a Brazilian company. Now I’m focused on creating the first million reais!

Help the Biblecodes get to the Feis

Remember the old Fleadh festival in London? Well, these days it’s the Feis – the biggest festival featuring Irish and international acts with a Celtic flavour.

Promoter Vince Power has put together a line-up that includes Van Morrison, Bob Dylan, The Cranberries, Christy Moore, Hothouse Flowers, and The Undertones… the line-up looks great.

And there is space for another act, but it’s being decided on by social media. The Supajam system features a load of acts who want to be on stage with Van and Bob, but I’d like to ask you – my friends – to go and offer some support to The Biblecode Sundays.

All you need to do is to add a comment of support, or vote on the songs they have uploaded – just a click or quick comment is enough to help them get the gig.

If you came to the last tweetup I hosted in London, or came to my last birthday party, or came to Angelica Mari’s book launch, then you will have seen how good these guys are. Do them a favour and add a comment so they can get up on the big stage with Van the Man…

My wedding, on the BBC…

BBC Technology Editor, Rory Cellan-Jones, is launching his new series on Radio 4 today. Titled ‘The Secret History of Social Networking’ it is a three-part documentary exploring the origins of social networking, going back to the 1970s.

The programme starts with my wedding to Angelica, and there is a trailer film on the BBC website today promoting the radio show and featuring several minutes of film from our wedding day!

Click here to watch the film

BBC Radio 4: The Secret History of Social Networking

BBC Technology editor, Rory Cellan-Jones, is launching a new radio series on BBC radio 4 on January 26th titled ‘The Secret History of Social Networking.’ It’s a view on how far social networks have come, where they came from, and where they might head to in future.

What is particularly interesting for me is that my wedding in Ealing on December 3rd last year features right at the start of the series, as an example of just how far things have come… I used Facebook to invite guests to the wedding and communicate the agenda for the day.

Facebook was useful because almost all my family and friends are on there. It’s true, there are some Facebook refuseniks and I had to update them by text message, and some partners of friends are not always on my friend list, but on the whole I managed to update everyone using a Facebook event.

It was an amazing day and I’m fortunate enough to have arranged a repeat of the day out in São Paulo soon. The BBC radio crew filmed a large section of my wedding in London for use in website trailers for the radio programme, so I’m going to edit together footage from their video and arrange my Brazilian wedding inside an old city centre cinema. We can watch some of the London footage and repeat the ceremony in front of a cinema audience before getting an old London Routemaster bus to transport us across the city to a restaurant for a bit of a post-second-wedding-party…

I’m looking forward to hearing Rory’s programme, though we had consumed a fair amount of Champagne by the time he started recording questions so if any of it sounds slurred then please forgive me – he should have recorded the speech parts early in the morning!

Bem vindo a brasil

I’ve just moved to São Paulo in Brazil.

December 2010 was quite an amazing month for me. I got married on the 3rd to Angelica, and she had just launched her new book on the 1st and 2nd with two big parties, immediately followed by our wedding. I sold my house in Muswell Hill. I moved out of my rented place in Ealing and lived for a while in the Kings Arms pub near Ealing Broadway. I arranged to ship all my belongings over to Brazil. I closed down several of my work contracts, just keeping those that are quite easy to work on remotely. And after enjoying Christmas with my family, I moved to Brazil to be with Angelica, who had gone ahead of me to find a house.

Now I have a house in the Sumaré district of town – a nice area featuring plenty of cafes and bars near to where I live, as well as having Italian, Chinese, Brazilian, and Mexican food all available within a minute of walking out of the front door.

The house is quite large for just the two of us, but we are both writing and so we are using what would usually be two bedrooms as two offices. I have the entire basement of the house as my office and once my drum kit arrives at the end of this month I should have my workspace here with a couch, drums, books, stereo, as well as a desk to work on.

Since I arrived on the 29th, I have spent a bit of time exploring the beaches of São Paulo, madly rushed around shops getting furniture for an empty house, and chased around town to get all the papers I required for my visa application. The police checked my permanent residency application today and it all looks OK – so in a couple of weeks I should have my ID card and be a resident of Brazil.

And so here starts a new adventure for 2011…

 

Reboot: The Book Launch on Dec 2nd @ Waxy’s

There is a great blog post here by Rod Trent of 1e that outlines the book launch planned for Angelica’s book on December 2nd in London. It’s going to be a great party and a great way to launch the new book. You can see Angelica’s video invitation here. If you are still not sure about coming then think about this:

• The first 50 people to arrive get a free copy of the book
• Everyone gets a free EP of music from the BibleCode Sundays
• The BibleCode Sundays are playing live
• We are taking over the Church bar in Waxy O’Connor’s right in the middle in London -and the bar is free thanks to 1e.
• The food is also free thanks to JD Marketing (they do the marketing for Betfair, who feature in the book).
• There is a £100 Amazon voucher for whoever uploads the best social content from the evening, tweet, photo, video, blog…
• 1e are giving away goodie bags full of pens, squeezy polar bears, mints, and various other things, though the bag itself might be the most useful item to carry all the other freebies!

As if you needed any more reasons to party, me and Angelica are getting married the next morning. Yes, launching a book on Thursday and getting married on Friday… and Angelica leaves the country to move to Brazil on Sunday, so this might be your last chance to say goodbye. She will remain as an associate editor of Computer Weekly, but she is entering the realms of virtual working. So you won’t see her often back in London – or me for that matter!

Click here to go and register for the event on LinkedIn…

Reboot sees the light

How appropriate that the very first copy of Angelica Mari’s new book ‘Reboot: Leading IT in the Information Age’ should be shown off at the UK IT Industry awards… here you can see how pleased Darrell Stein (CIO of Marks and Spencer) was to find a cartoon in the book that resembles him!

You can find out more about the book here…

Another book on the way…

It’s not mine, but I’ve spent a lot of time helping Angelica Mari produce her new book. It’s her book, but I’ve been helping with the mechanical process of getting it from the word processor to a book available in retailers.

Angelica was keen to use Lulu.com to publish her book and as I’ve published three books on there now, I was fairly well placed to advise on how to format the documents and cover.

This has, once again, got me thinking about the future of business books. So many people churn out books about their industry, declaring themselves a ‘guru’ on the cover. But most business books are out of date by the time they hit the shelf and can’t be regularly updated. So after a year of being on sale, you might be reading text that was written over two years earlier.

I have an offer from a big publisher to do a new business book and I’m stalling on it, unsure if it is really of any value today. I know of a very senior CIO who has a similar offer from a publisher, though his is part of a 2-book deal. The publisher wants something and he is not sure if he wants to commit thoughts to print because the format of the old-school publisher just doesn’t work anymore.

I know that Angelica was still editing and changing her book a week ago. From the final tweak to the book launch and physical copies being in the hands of punters will be under one month. And she has had it professionally edited and proof-read during that time.

So what value does an old-style publisher offer?

Not much. They do spend money on marketing and trying to place the book in retailers in a way that will sell more copies, but lets face it, for most business books the market is not a casual browser in Waterstones. Lulu makes books available on all major retailers, including Amazon. And the author takes 80% of profits after printing costs… compare that to the 15% of gross sale price you might expect from a traditional publisher.

I’m still thinking about whether I should do the more traditional book, but I know for sure that my next two books will be on Lulu. I have the ideas in my head already and the plans sketched out. I want to write them and see the books out there, not wait a year for a publisher to work on the text…

Leaving the BCS ELITE…

I’ve been on the the main committee of the BCS ELITE group for the past couple of years, but I just resigned my position.

I do like the BCS, I think they have a role in helping people map out a career in IT. I know a lot of people in the industry think the BCS is pointless and detached from reality, but I’ve loyally been a member since the 1980s even when it meant nothing to me, though in the past few years the management of the BCS has started focusing on helping people to build an IT career.

The BCS itself is more relevant than ever and after the recent drama of an emergency general meeting, where some members were questioning the agenda of the society, I think the society is now through the storm and ready to start making a real difference.

To those who don’t know anything of ELITE, it “is the UK lead forum for IT Directors and Senior Managers to exchange experiences, views and expectations on how information systems should be managed to achieve business objectives.”

In short, it’s a group for BCS members who are of IT director level or above – the senior management of the British IT industry. I was elected onto the committee with a mandate to offer a few modern ideas, get some new research published, and influence the events that ELITE runs… getting real industry leaders available for debate.

But things never really worked out like that – though I tried. ELITE is like a gentleman’s club for people who work in IT. Events are a success if they break even – rather than if they add to the body of management knowledge – and publications are torturously slow to materialise. In an era where companies need to be planning for every quarter and using modern-day communication systems to ensure rapid decision making, the ELITE culture of cigars in Pall Mall clubs grates somewhat… and how annoying is it to find a committee of IT experts who cannot use any scheduling tools (beyond mass emailing) to arrange meetings?

Take a look here at the forthcoming events organised by ELITE. Well, actually as you can see there are none. And even those that you can see arranged in the past hardly have any appeal for any CIO level management I have worked with. The last management level event that was organised was an audience with Michael Dell back in April 2009. That’s if I’m not including the dinners in Pall Mall clubs that are so important in setting the future strategy of the British IT industry.

Even then, does anyone really want to pay to listen to Dell anymore? Perhaps back in the mid-nineties yes, but what would a present-day CIO get from listening to former industry greats, apart from hearing some old war stories? When I once suggested getting Jimmy Wales to talk about Wikipedia, I had to explain to the committee who he actually is.

Or how about the management publications? You can see them here… A report from three years ago and a survey from five years ago. Cutting edge stuff…

Surely a group priding itself on independence and access to senior level IT managers should consider why it exists? Why should the group exist in the first place? If it is for producing independent research and comment, and offering high-level events and networking opportunities, then why not schedule some of those reports or events? It seems logical.

Instead, the meetings are dominated by a dogmatic adherence to committee politics that are reminiscent of ‘Wolfie’ Smith organising politics in Tooting. Some committees need structure and rules, but when the structure and process becomes the main topic of meetings then there is something seriously wrong. The events and publications timetable speak for themselves anyway.

I’m not detaching myself from the BCS in general. I’m still a member, and I’m cooking up some ideas with the head office in Swindon, for some work that should help promote the BCS and stimulate debate on IT careers in the future – I think the BCS does have a lot to offer. And I think the current management team have a clearer view than ever of what the BCS can achieve – there is a bright future ahead for the society.

It’s just a shame there is not more that the BCS offers to the thousands of senior IT executives in this country. There are already some people out there working with this community. The Computer Weekly CW500 club does a great job with monthly events always featuring a CIO speaker and regular publications, CIO Connect has a regular magazine and events… the IT management community is busy, but there must be room for the BCS to be doing something that addresses their needs to constantly be learning about their own industry.