About the authenticity of the L'OCCITANE cafe experience in Shibuya...

Last Thursday (27AUG09), Julian and I went for the first time in 6 years to L'OCCITANE cafe in Shibuya to have dinner.

We started talking about the authenticity of the experience that was provided to us... As Joseph Pine illustrates in his TED speech, consumers don't pay for the quality of the food or the beverage. They pay for the quality of the experience.

And the quality of an experience is its authenticity.

What does it mean?

Well, if we take Starbucks^(*) as an example, the authenticity of its experience is the taste and smell of the coffee, the sounds of the music, the non-smoking policy, the softness of the sofas, the strength of the tables, the colors of the paintings on the walls etc...

What about L'OCCITANE cafe?

As you may know, L'OCCITANE is a French cosmetics brand, based in Manosque, Provence. (By the way, at BunkerSofa we love their body soaps.)
So authenticity means authentic relatively to the Provence memeplexe, which is based on different types of information: visual, olfactory, gustative, aural etc...

At least, the taste of the bouillabaisse that I had was authentic, which means that the gustative information was correctly rendered, compared to what I used to eat when I was living in France.

But I am afraid gustative authenticity is not enough. Again, you need also visual , olfactory and aural information.

What about using a folk music from Manosque as a background music on the one hand, and the typical furniture used in a house à la provençale on the other hand?
Really, the interior designers could have put inside the restaurant some physical objects like a lavender sickle for example, to increase the level of authenticity.
However, all those elements were lacking. The food was fine but it was the only element that reminded us of Provence...Therefore, a problem there is.

The marketing team of L'OCCITANE Japan should really think about it if they wanna turn the brand into a powerful memeplexe that would be even extremely popular among the most naive Shibuya girls　.



^(*)　The Starbucks experience authenticity does a lot of brain anchoring and my brain is one of their many victims (see the chapter on brain anchoring in Predictably irrational from Dan Ariely)

Bunker Talk - Take 1

A couple of weeks ago, we had that first Bunker Talk with:

Julian ,
Paskal,
Rick ,
Jawaad ,
@Karamoon and
Floyd .

A Bunker Talk is just a few hours chat about various topics, including singularity, computation, memetics, done at the Bunker.

In the slideshow, you can see that Rick is trying to repair my PC. But it's not related to hacking at all...

So don't worry hackers of Tokyo. I am not trying to build a Tokyo Hacker Space competitor, although I don't think that competition is a bad memeplex.

By the way, my PC is still dead...But who cares?

Tokyo, hacker space and disruption...

Hi girls and guys. How are you doing?

This time, it's about the Tokyo Hacker Space (THS). My purpose, again, is not to destroy the object of the discussion but to raise questions to improve the overall thing.

First of all, although I have absolutely no experience organizing and attending hacker spaces, I believe that such a space should aim at creating disruptive things, using the values of the country where it' s active.

So I'd say that a hacker space must generate "Local Disruption".
Hackers, what do you think?

Here, obviously we're in Japan.

From my perspective, there are 3 things that are genuinely interesting in Japan:

1- virtual realities: with in particular, 2-dimension worlds (such as mangas) and video games. You still have Nintendo as a leading innovative company. No need to talk about the manga culture.


2- sexuality: after all, a lot of foreign people (male and female) come to Japan because they are interested in Japanese girls and guys (including me), sex wise. Nothing wrong about it. And it's not specific to Japan, you would say. OK, fine.
But fuuzoku (風俗), gokon (合コン), soap land (ソープ), hosto (ホスト), kyabakura (キャバクラ), and love hotels (ラブホ) are specific to Japan.

And this is an area which has to be explored, in case you are interested in rationalizing sexuality, which I am.

provides people with so much sexual information. We must do something about it, besides having sex., seriously.


3- robotics: I have two companies in mind, right at this very moment.

Cyberdyne and Honda.

Have a look at HAL and Asimo, if you don't know them yet.
Artificial intelligence is something I would love to work on personally but it seems that it requires higher resources than just working on an Arduino.


But, let's go back to the topic of this post. Last Thursday, I went to the first barbecue of THS. It was nice to see such a large place. But I couldn't see people with a special expertise in 1-, 2- or 3-.
Probably I shouldn't be too much demanding right, from the first day.
But more importantly, I couldn't see any people that wanna disrupt things in the good way. If there are no disruptive leaders to follow, how on earth will you be able to construct new things and how on earth are you going to have fun, really?

However there are core members, and the Shannons (Lauren-san in particular) are among them.
Without them, there wouldn't be even any physical place.

Yet, I believe that core members are not enough. You need a bunch of disruptors (Karamoon is one of them.)
Otherwise, the place will become a kinder garden or a bar, very quickly...


I may be wrong but I wanted to give you my take on that.
Again, as we are used to saying at BunkerSofa , memes are selfish and shameless. We do not criticize the creators. We criticize their creations.

Please tell me what you think. Cheers.

Freakonomics of Tokyo Garden Party

Today is the 6th time for Tokyo Garden Party (TGP) to take place

I went to the 3rd one if my memory goes well and it made me skeptical.

There are so many parties going on in Tokyo and what made me interested in TGP was the fact that at least it had a remarkable concept = Beer, Garden, Green and Rooftops which anchored the thing in my brain.

But in fact, these keywords do not correspond to the reality at all, except #Beer.

It is rather:

Garden= at the best, synthetic carpet.

Green=synthetic green carpet or trees?

No, I want to argue here that TGP should have been called YAGJDPR:

Yet Another Gaijin male- Japanese female Dating Party but on Rooftops.

Again, it is not about criticizing the team behind TGP, but their memes.

And I want to prove that mathematically, using data and logics, using the same methods developed by Steven Levitt in his book: Freakonomics

And below is the intended proof.

Among the current 81 confirmed (at the time of 3pm, on its Facebook page) guests there are:

-36 caucasian ♂ (including myself)

-35 japanese ♀

-5 asian or japanese ♂

-the rest is misc.

From the probabilistic view, such a parity in the number of causian ♂ & japanese ♀ is very unlikely, so much so that it cannot happen unless it follows a hidden deterministic rule:

And this rule should be: ♥ TGP is in reality a dating event between gaijin ♂ & jp ♀ ♥.

What do you think about this reasoning?

Any flaws? Please tell me if you discover some.



Post-scriptum (02SEP09):

Just to give you an idea of how almost impossible it is to have a proper conversation related to business in a such a noisy and alcoholic environment. no offense :)

Books as software for the mind...

What is the software for the human brain?
This is the question I am trying to solve here.
But I know, I cannot solve it within just a blog post. It's not so easy to hack the
human brain... So I will just illustrate, by a short video, a belief, my belief, the
belief of BunkerSofa that books are in fact, software for the mind.
I actually believe that I upload information from books by using images recognition
through my eyes, decode that into linguistic information and then extract eventually the concepts that will comprise the newly created patterns, which will
modify the wiring of my brain. That set of patterns can be regarded as a new software, for my mind. At BunkerSofa , we read a lot of books with 3 of them being essential.
3 books, 3 theories that are fundamental for the innovation at the Bunker.
Memetics with "The meme machine", Technological singularity with "the Singularity is
near" and Computation with "a new kind of science". (Although I am skeptical about this one.) Also, BunkerSofa is interested in rationalizing sexuality　, including man-woman relationships and even more...but this time nothing about it. Sorry girls and guys...

Why not falling in love with a cat?

Human-feline love temptation...

(this is a collaboration between Julien and Floyd. The photograph was taken by Pascal.)

Cat and computation

This time I want to try to embed a video instead of a photograph. This video was taken 2 weeks ago by one of the contributors of bunkersofism.com, Julien Hamonic.

One of the main features of Bunkersofism is to know that the human brain is a computational device. As you may already know, Julien and I (Pascal Hamonic) consider themselves as computers and want to democratize the theory of computation.

In this video, Julien introduces a new member to BunkerSofa (the lab that uses directly bunkersofism as a philosophy), Floyd , a female cat, and takes her as an example of the fact that all animals are computational devices...

If you think she's sexy please feel free to become one of her fans on Facebook by clicking here.

Poken evaluation from a "temetics" perspective

(The goal of this post is not to kill the Poken. It is to make it evolve.)

Hello guys :) This time, I wanna analyze a second product made by a foreign IT company that wanna spread in Tokyo, the Poken .


First all, there is an ambiguity about the Poken. If you look at the English Wikipedia description, it says " technology that allows the exchange of online social networking data". In the Japanese article, it says "デジタル名刺", meaning literally digital business card.

So the natural question is the following: Is the Poken a digital business card?
Digital? Obviously yes, because it is an electronic device.
Business card? In order to answer this question, you need a simple definition of what we call "a business card".

Definition from a bunkersofist perspective:

"A business card is a device that stores information related to the identity of a person with an immediate visual verification of the information that has been stored".

(I think most people will agree on that.)

Two types of information:

Primary information:

1- name and surname
2- occupation
3- company name
4- logo of the company
5- email address
6- phone number

Secondary information:

7- twitter username
8- other SNS usernames such as Facebook or Linkedin.

"Immediate visual verification" means that you can check immediately, on-site, with your own eyes, the information that has been exchanged. As you know, the human brain is specialized in visual information processing and your short-term memory is not so large. So you wanna associate quickly the face you're facing to the personal information that has been provided by the business card. Right?

Let's see now if the Poken satisfies the Definition.

In terms of immediate information exchange, the Poken only enables you to exchange the following type of information:

a- basic photonic information: the green led --> this photonic information is completely irrelevant for the information exchange; this green light has to remain in the inside, not in the outside; it is an electronic protocol level.

b- frictional information: when your Poken makes contact with another one --> this is irrelevant too since we cannot feel the hand of the person anyway ....this is even not a hand... with 4 fingers!

So nothing among the primary and secondary types of information can be exchanged by the Poken with an immediate visual verification.

Later, when you get home, it s true that you can exchange 1,2,...7 and 8- with an immediate visual verification. But the action is delayed, compared to the moment when you met the person.

And does it record well the information? Is it easy to use? I won't detail that part but I have my own opinion: the web site is buggy and it's not aesthetic at all.

So the Poken is a "buggy electronic business card" that you exchange later....Sounds contradictory. In fact, the Poken totally misses the immediate aspect required by a business card and consequently the Poken is everything but a business card.

All right. It is a buggy electronic device .......but for what

Honestly, I think it's a device that might enable people to start talking to each other when they meet for the first time. It's a pretext to meet new women if you are a male or new men if you are a female. Not bad. But, in that case, it' s not business-oriented. It's sex-oriented.
"Good evening. Do you Poken?" with a glass of beer in one hand, the Poken in the other...and your brain thinking about sex. :)

But is the design cool? I don't think so either. The design is really poor. The "made in china" black packaging makes it even a cheap rubbish.
Is it cheap? No....it's s rather very expensive. At least 2000 JPY ! (By the way, I sold it for 300 JPY on Facebook after buying it for 2000 JPY and using it for 3 days.)

However, does it mean they cannot improve it? Of course not.

A suggestion: why not releasing a display-equipped Poken which can display primary and secondary information within a very aesthetic LCD screen? In that case, the immediate aspect will be satisfied.

I think users can tolerate a high price if the device itself is beautiful. But in that case, it would have to be very beautiful, almost like luxury to compete with potential applications on the iPhone or Android that are likely to be released soon, assuming they are equipped with RFID (ex: Suica card ) or Infra-red chips as the Japanese handsets are.

I had a look at http://mashable.com/2009/05/09/iphone-business-card-apps/ but none of the applications seem to be reliable.

The idea behind Bump technologies seems really cool: detection of the simultaneity of the bumping action of two iPhones, plus the location related information to disambiguate. But is it really reliable? I gave it a try a couple months ago.

Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. Overall it wasn't that reliable. Therefore, currently, I don't know any iPhone applications that fulfil perfectly the role of a business card.

Finally, before drawing a conclusion on the Poken, I would like, briefly, to evaluate it, from a "temetics" perspective. "Temetics" is the study of temes. A teme is a technological meme. An iPhone, a pet bottle, a Poken, a car, a washing machine, a pen, all are temes...And as special memes, temes are replicators. They compete with each other to get control over your brain and body.

- fecundity: I suspect that the Poken is almost only known among IT guys, especially among foreign IT guys. I mean seriously, the design is not adapted to the Japanese market, at all. The design is even worse than the design of a free accessory attached to a 150 JPY pet bottle .

- heredity : At first glance, it seems to be pretty high: you have only one way of using it; you push a button to light it up. But the thing is that sometimes it doesn't work correctly. So people usually push several times. In fact, there is no systematic way of making it work. Therefore the heredity is also low, unfortunately.

- longevity: I think the Poken's gonna last as long there is enough cash to run the marketing campaign. So, low again, unless they have a lot of venture capital supporting them, which is very unlikely.

Therefore, I think that the current Poken is a very weak replicator that wants to compete with the traditional business card. I think its survival likelihood is pretty low, especially in Japan.

Again, the current Poken is a very weak teme that's gonna die very soon, if it doesn't evolve, which is very likely, unfortunately, because of the total lack of flexibility of the team, from what I saw and heard... No joke, no offense either.

Gal and guy flow in Shibuya...

On last Thursday (30^th of July), I went to the Q-front Starbucks to evaluate the "flow" of women and the "flow" of men, circulating in Shibuya.

("women" means any Japanese female from 10-year old up to 80-year old. The same for men.)

A "flow" is simply defined as a quantity of individuals going past a certain point per second, in a given direction. The point I chose is the road direction board just in front of that little corner on the second floor of the coffee shop. The direction I chose is the walking direction from Tower records to the station.

Look at the following annotated photograph to get an idea of the situation: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pascalhamonic/3788608141/

This small experiment is necessarily biased for getting a precise idea of the flow of Japanese female and Japanese male circulating in Shibuya...But at least it will give you a foretaste.

By the way, I count on the extrapolation bias of your brains, gals and guys. :)

So I started counting...but with what? I didn't have any mechanical counter like those seemingly weird Japanese guys sitting around the traffic lights counting cars...So I had to rely only on my visual processing ability. As you may know, the human brain is quite slow compared to current computers, in terms of "clock". The human brain relies on an electrochemical computation carried out by the neurones. Each neurone is 1,000,000 times slower than an average transistor that carries out an electrical computation.

But the human brain has parallel processing. With hundreds of trillions of neurones working at the same time, human brains are much better (at least currently) at visual pattern matching than current computers. Therefore we' re able to recognize precise shapes, colors and motion very accurately and quickly.

I used that ability to distinguish female from male, based on the following main 4 criteria:

1- hair style: generally women have longer hair than men.

2- fashion: generally women have flashier clothes than men.

3- height: generally women are smaller than men.

4- slimness: generally women are slimmer than men.

I measured only one thing: the time elapsed to get to the 100^th passing person. I started around 10:00pm and I got eventually the following results around 10:40pm, after running 2 counting sessions for each gender:

women

1) 2m 14s

2) 2m 19s

men

1) 4m 47s

2) 8m 23s

(of course the more sessions you run, the more statistically accurate the results get.)

In average, to get to 100, I spent: 2m 16s for female and 6m 05s for male.

Let s deduce the average flow: 0.735 women per second and 0.274 men per second.

Therefore, we can infer that there are 2.7 times more women shopping in Shibuya than men, per second. I know. It's a rough inference :) . But at least it doesn't invalidate what I call the "Shibuya equivalence principle" which I will work on in the next posts... Stay tuned, gals and guys!