Bica Coffee House

Coffee treated as if it were great tea, in an austere, functional Bauhaus setting, hundred yards from Rockridge BART Station. A 24 inches mac display fully devoted to trains real time departures and arrivals. No comments on musical ambience. A horizontilly mirror, 4 feet by 10 feet. 6 tables inside, 2 outside, 2 bar seating areas (one very nice in front of a glass wall.

The big short

Here there is a great map about Michael Lewis book. Short investment has become a great game after the invention of CDSs. First, it has produce enormous value to the private investors that have played the game, and second, it has made a great contribution to transparency, performance and market organization. The Big Short has been a good reading to me.

Playing with my new Leica... great

USA Banking performance: Credit quality improving?

Credit quality has been improving for a few quarters in a row -however, USA mortgages are not expected to improve anywhere soon-. CFOs' of some banks are "optimistic" about their assets quality... while they may be more nervous about new regulations and "de-intermediation" -reduction of people willing to use their services-... so, the optimism looks shallow. There are no interesting proposals coming from bankers about restructuring financial services industry... except consolidation, and that pathway drives to the wrong place: criminal complacency and legalized unethical compensations  "... don't worry, we are too big to fail".

Service Mapping

To map services requires a set of distinctions out of which maps are going to be build. Geographical maps are build based in share conventional distinctions such as latitude and longitude, curves of level, and color coding among many others. Good powerful maps are based in sharp distinctions that allows us to observe, assess and take relevant actions. Here there is a collection of service mapping intents. Many of them are based in symbolizing "things" people encounter when experiencing a particular service on ad hoc bases. They also provide a larger context  - a service process- in which it is possible to appreciate  how customer's experience of the service takes place and how one particular event may be related to a previous one. There is a more structured set of distinctions to map services, such of those used by New Scale or Vision Consulting. These approaches have two main advantages. First, they allows to track specific actions that are delivering value to customer. Second, they map critical roles that are both, the source of stability for the process and the possibility for change and innovation.

Educational environments and emergent virtues

Jane McGonigal thinks the opposite of games and gaming is not reality, but depression. In ten years from now, playing games in synthetic environments (MMORPG) will become a skill that new generations will perform at a virtuoso level. As a result of that a new range of dispositions will be available for that generation: urgent optimism, social fabric, blissful productivity and epic meaning. A whole new educational environment of planetary scope has emerged in a decade, with enough force to tackle our "real" contemporary challenges.

The emergence and collaps of a market: CDO/Collateralized Debt Obligation

... or sub-prime mortgage credits (triple-B-rated) packaged in bonds (triple-B-rated), and then packaged in CDOs (triple-A-rated... the magic leap)... that may also become components of new CDOs (triple-A-rated)... against which mortgage default swaps were issued... swaps that became the exclusive component of the synthetic CDOs (triple-A-rated)... then Mr Wing Chaw - and many, many others- advising institutional investors (big pocket, risk averse, only triple-A-rated assets) to buy them... a systemic failure in making risks assessment.

Financial Services

Peer2Peer lending in China. Great.

Engineering based innovations

I was writiing a paper for the Chilean Legislative Commision for the development of the National System for Innovation Based Competitiveness. We were struggling to make the distinction between sources of innovation (science and generative theories; engineering and technology; emerging cultural turns) and innovation itself. I come across this Dean Kamen's interesting TEDtalk about engineering addressign human concerns and resignations...and opening the possibilities to load a new product with tons of services.

tips 4 tweet

Here some.