In April this year the 59 year old fashion designer Alber Elbaz died of Corona. Only a few months earlier Elbaz had launched the new fashion label AZ Factory. This first presentation was developed in collaboration with Borre Akkersdijk, the innovative Dutch knitting pioneer.

Elbaz is seen as an innovator in the fashion industry. He was born in Cassablanca and educated in Israel before he got a job at the fashion house Geoffry Beene in New York. His next move was to Paris where he worked for Guy Laroche, YSL Rive Gauche and Lanvin. Many celebs got dressed-up his designs, including Beyoné and Rihanna. Elbaz rejuvenated Lanvin and entered into a collab with H&M in 2010. But the fashion house sacked him five years later.

Rumor was that Elbaz would take the place of Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel, but instead he took a few years off. Then he decided to launch his own label AZ Factory, under the umbrella of the Swiss luxury conglomerate Richemont. His first new presentation in Jan 2021 was welcomed with enthusiasm. And then he died.

But that is not the end of this story. The fashion industry paid hommage to this delightful designer with a dedicated show at Paris Fashion Week. The event Love Brings Love was inspired on Théatre de la Mode, a 1945 fashion show that brought together more than sixty French couturiers as an expression of creativity and solidarity in the wake of World War II.

Digitale infrastructuur dempt economische corona-terugval

Met een goed werkende infrastructuur voor ICT kan het effect van de economische terugval door de pandemie gehalveerd worden, stellen economische experts die afgelopen zomer deelnamen aan een roundtable conference van de ITU.

Verkoop webcams stijgt met 254%

Logitech meldt een toename in de verkoop van webcams met 258% in 2020. De vraag naar thuiswerk-apparatuur is spectaculair gegroeid sinds er wereldwijd lockdowns zijn aangekondigd, met als gevolg dat de verkoop van toetsenborden en muizen explodeert. Voor 2021 verwacht Logitech een groei tussen de 35% en 40%.

Vierde industriële revolutie in hogere versnelling

De lockdown heeft de investeringen in smart production en supply-chain improvements sterk gestimuleerd. Productiviteitscijfers in de VS over het tweede en derde kwartaal tonen een opvallende stijging, volgens McKinsey. Noord-Amerika en Azië lopen bij deze transitie voor op Europa, waar de overheid bestaande bedrijven (grote werkgevers) beschermt en zo creatieve wederopbouw vertraagt. Europa heeft dankzij haar sterke overheid wel weer een betere infrastructuur dan Azië en Noord-Amerika, en een hogere online participatiegraad bij de bevolking.

Business App Downloads omhoog met 132%

Niet games en entertainment apps werden meer gedownload in 2020, maar vooral business apps en medische hulpprogramma’s. Met name in het de eerste helft van het jaar waren zakelijke gebruikers in Europa massaal actief met het downloaden van online communicaton- en collaboration-tools.

Digitale isolatie neemt snel af

Het aandeel consumenten dat geen gebruik maakt van digitale diensten in Europa daalde van 19% naar 5% in corona-jaar 2020, een afname die drie keer zo groot was als in een normaal jaar, zo stelde McKinsey vast op basis van onderzoek onder meer dan 20.000 mensen. in Duitsland steeg digitale deelname met 28%, in Denemarken nam het slechts 5% toe. Nederland zat met 15% in de middenmoot.

Hallo Thuis

De stichting Philadelphia steunt mensen met een beperking. Een deel woont bij de landelijke instelling, andere mensen verblijven er overdag. Die laatste groep werd zwaar getroffen door de lockdowns, want nu waren ze ineens de vertrouwde regelmaat en kring van lotgenoten kwijt. Philadephia had binnen drie dagen een alternatief in de vorm van het webcast-kanaal Hallo Thuis (met zijn eigen webdomein). Aanvankelijk opgezet met videoproducent Scripta, maar afgelopen najaar in eigen beheer ondergebracht bij Philadelphia. Begin 2021 is het gereduceerd tot een uitzending van twee uur, op alle gewone werkdagen ’s middags van drie tot vijf. On-demand te volgen op Youtube bovendien.

DingTalk

DingTalk, de mobiele werkplek van de Alibaba Group, wordt door meer dan vijf miljoen bedrijven en instellingen gebruikt. Het eerste kwartaal van 2019 telde DingTalk 47 miljoen gebruikers; een jaar later waren dat er 288 miljoen. Een groei van 513%. In India zijn DingTalk en AliExpress sinds november 2020 geblokkeerd, omdat de overheid Chinese dominantie van de app-voorziening wil tegengaan.

Smartronaut of Arogneut?

Van Kooten & De Bie zagen de thuiswerker in 1986 al aan de horizon. De Clichémannetjes waren hun tijd 35 jaar vooruit.

One way to stand out in a crowd of marketers and sales experts is to label your own approach and make it look unique. When I first read about the Megadeals discipline it seemed to be yet another sectarian buzzword bingo with some Swedish gurus on the stage. We all know the drill. Spreading free e-books and online workshops to bait followers and hook them with paid services.

But then I understood there is some method in this madness.

Megadeals is an approach for people that sell large projects with a long runway and high complexity. The value of these deals is usually in the tens of millions and sometimes even billions. To get involved in such large deals you need to orchestrate not only your marketing and sales activities, but probably also your financial services, your operations and your public affairs. When working on megadeals you are not interacting with individual decision makers or a simple decision making unit, but with whole ecosystems.

Many Stakeholders

An example is the hyperscale datacenter that Facebook wants to build near the town Zeewolde. There are so many stakeholders involved – builders, consultants, lawyers, regulators, politicians, journalists, activists and the general public – that Facebook tried to hide its involvement by using a firm named Polder Networks as its vehicle to get permission. Facebook knows these datacenters are received with mixed reactions, because Google has recently announced not to continue with three of four datacenters that it agreed to build in Middenmeer.

Hiding is not what the Megadeals advisors (here is the book) suggest. If you are aware that the stakes are high and your project involves many people, you are advised to create a cloud of content around yourself and your projects. Not only to make sure that your side of the story is being told. But also to pick-up early warning signs when there is opposition against your plans.

This content needs to be orchestrated too. For most sellers it is not difficult to aim information at the experts, the first line of buyers who speak the same language as you do. But it is harder to also involve the wider circles around these buyers, including the top decision makers and all the outsiders who might play a role in the final decision. That requires a kaleidoscope perspective, highlighting many different facets of your project.

Events in your Content Cloud

In these so-called orientational messages you should not focus primarily on yourself or your offerings. Instead you could address matters that interest and involve different audiences in the ecosystem. Try to be diverse.

We would suggest to think beyond the usual articles, blogs and whitepapers, but also include photography, art and a wide range of media and moments. We are convinced events should play an important role in your content cloud. Discuss matters in a conference, invite key players to a talkshow and organize an exhibition to show how artists view your plans. Ask kids to make drawings and sponsor a podcast about the different perspectives. Dare to be creative!

Events are not only a unique platform to share your vision, your experience and your case stories. They also offer opportunities to meet with influential’s in the ecosystem that you are dealing with. And another big plus: events are often a platform to share the content that you already published in articles, blogs and whitepapers. A great way to amplify your messaging.

Worldwide shut-downs to prevent a pandemic crisis create shockwaves in the economy and society in general. Suddenly we are depending on smart communication to work, talk to friends and family, shop or go to church. In the SmartCom Summit on June 30 different experts discuss the current shapeshift society and enabling technologies.

Smartcom is technology that enables online collaboration and communication, allowing us to lead our lives without having to travel to work, school, shops or schools. We have become cloud-commuters.

CPaaS is a range of services and building blocks that make it possible to add communications into online consumer services and business applications. Not just in webshops or patient apps, but also in collaborative design tools that enable engineers to work together when developing a new airplane. Or in a bookkeeping program.

Work from Home

Some 36% of the western workforce can work from home > Looking at labor statistics and recent job ads Norwegian researchers concluded that some 36% of all employees could work from home, some jobs more than others. Researchers at the University of Chicago came to a similar percentage for the USA when they looked at survey data from the Occupational Information Network.

• Clerical support workers — 67%
• Managers — 52%
• Academics — 52%
• Technicians and associate professionals — 43%
• Service and sales workers — 29%
• Craft and related trades workers — 21%
• Skilled agricultural, forestry and fishery workers — 0%
• Plant, machine operators, and assemblers — 0%
• Elementary occupations — 0%

PWC: Dutch can save almost four billion euro yearly when working from home > Research done by PWC (report) shows that cost savings add up to 3,9 billion euro if half the Dutch worforce of 9M people work from home one day a week. Employers would save some 1,7 billion on office costs; employees would gain 1,1 billion on travel costs. CO2 would be lowered by 602 kiloton, an extra gain! A potential risk is reduced team spirit, which could affect innovation.

Shapeshift Economies

Corona-app served by Belastingdienst > Dutch Health Authorities are testing their corona-app with bug bounty hunters. If the app passes these exams the new service will be managed by the Dutch Taxes, as Belastingdienst has experience with large-scale rollouts.

Chinese commuters prefer cars > On the streets of Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, mid-May morning traffic was higher than 2019 averages while subway use was well below normal, according to data compiled by BloombergNEF. Volume on Beijing’s metro system is 53 percent below pre-virus levels. Subway usage in Shanghai and Guangzhou is down 29 percent and 39 percent, respectively.

Yandex >Putin rules the Russians, but during the corona-shutdown the country is run by Yandex. The local internet giant started in 1997 as a search engine (one year ahead of Google) and over time the company has expanded as a shopping platform, a delivery service and a taxi company. Yandex also markets meal kits (a la Hello Fresh) and its cloud service facilitates Russian knowledge workers. The fast growing popularity of this internet platform is now a huge worry for Putin. The independant Yandex news channel is censored since 2018.

Remote Education

90% of all public schools in Madrid and the surrounding regions started using Microsoft Teams to connect teachers with students, during corona lockdown in Spain.

Lil Kleine launched an one year online education for wannabee entrepreneurs under the label Street University. Students get weekly college by the rapping professor or someone from his extensive network in music and business.

Chatter on the Job

Deliveroo > The British delivery service Deliveroo has 2,500 employees (most of them riders) that drop-off food from over 80,000 restaurants to thousands of customers every day. The company connects its stakeholders via a customized platform based on Slack.

E2E > Zoom will include end-to-end encryption from mid-July.

Huddle Space > New office designs include huddle rooms, or separate video conferencing corners for smaller groups.

API for healthcare > KPN API Store selected four API’s that could help hospitals and other healthcare institutions to improve their services. Videocalls are enabled with WeSeeDo Direct API. A choice between voice or video is possible with Kandy WebRTC API. Another recommendation is Parley Secure Messenger API. Last but not least KPN mentions Nexmo SMS API to send messages to groups of clients, patients or staff.

Employee Engagement

MAKRO > With seventeen megastores in the Netherlands, Makro is a major supplier to small and medium enterprise. More than 3500 employees ensure that Makro brings daily fresh food, but also non-food, even computer hardware and consumer electronics to the customers at its stores.

Few of these workers have deskjobs, so getting messages through the ranks was a bit of an issue. Until Makro connected all its employees to Facebook’s Workplace. Turns out this communication platform is a bit of a game changer. The info does not only flow from the top down, but feedback finds its way up too. Furthermore many new horizontal connections enable improved team work, sharing experiences on functional levels and better connections between colleagues.

WWF > Preparing for WWF’s Annual Conference the network communications department decided to invite all 100,000 employees and volunteers to connect via Facebook’s Workplace. Idea was to spread the word and improve engagement. The result: 200% more online participants to the event. And many after-effects.

Workplace is now also an online management meeting place at WWF: fifteen international directors use this platform to discuss policies and improve decision making. For project managers it is the preferred collaboration platform. Plus: thousands of employees and volunteers find each other in shared interests and activities worldwide.

Message Mills

Amber Alert > Has multiplied its sender capacity with Messagebird. It used to take four to five hours to send one million messages about missing children; now that takes only 10 minutes. In 2019 the service sent out 35 alerts. In 31 cases the child was recovered. Most alerts (22) were sent in the Czech Republic.

Subway > With more than 40,000 shops worldwide, Subway has a lot of appetites to satisfy. It’s callcenters use Amazon Connect because cloud callcenter technology saves costs.

Video Society

70% UP! church visits online > Protestant ministers observe an upward trend in church visits since they moved their services online. In a Dutch survey that included 250 churches, 70% of protestant clergymen noticed an upward trend online, while amongst catholic priest only 20% mentioned larger audiences online. Another predictable find: recorded sunday services are also watched on other days of the week. Even God has a long tail.

ING Bank 1500 video-calls per week > ING Bank in the Netherlands will close one quarter of its current 170 local offices. Customers have switched to video-calling their bank since corona. Ten years ago the bank had 280 offices and 500 service point; by the end of this year that will be 128 and 250.

Inmates on video >Prisons across the US have suspended in-person visits for family members of inmates amid the coronavirus outbreak. Video chatting has been available to many inmates, but these remote visits can be expensive. Only one state – Pennsylvania – is using Zoom to provide video visitation to its inmates. More than 20,000 Zoom video visits have occurred in the state between March 19 and mid-April. (Business Insider)

Funeralcast > The crematorium in Amersfoort has a live connection for family and friends that cannot attend funerals.

IOT

Bridges in the Cloud > The province of Friesland keeps an eye on its roads, bridges and waterways through asset management in the cloud. Staf and client relations are managed via HRM and CRM in the cloud. All Office applications were recently moved to the cloud. To make sure all these applications are connected and data can flow back and forth, the Province uses Integration Platform as a Service (IPaaS) Enable-U in the Cloud.

Mobility as a Service > Planes, trams, buses and trains are often connected to local, regional, national and sometimes even global traffic systems. In certain circumstances these systems also include traveller data. How many people are on that bus, in that train?

Crowd data are more important in times when social distancing is an issue. How do existing traffic platforms deal with this next level beyond vehicle data? InTraffic might know. And IBM helps the Port of Rotterdam with the creation of a connected harbour.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0L6AScZwnw0

Remote Meet-ups

TEAMS > The number of daily active users of Microsoft Teams has gone up from 32 million to 44 million in just one week in March, according to a report from Microsoft. The company observed that halfway March many companies shifted to working from home and meeting online. The total amount of meeting minutes went up from 900 million every day to 2,7 billion in March. In April the userbase climbed further to 75 million daily active users. Norway and the Netherlands top the charts when video-usage is considered.

CourtCall > A typical CPaaS presented by Infoware that provides judges, attorneys, law firms and others involved in court procedures to use a remote appearance platform, currently based on Chime developed by Amazon Web Services. The company started as a phone service in het nineties and has handled more than 4 million online appearances in twentyfive years.

Google, eBay en nu ook Facebook: ze experimenteren allemaal met workshops in het land. Do the demo! Blijkbaar zijn events op lokatie een effectieve toevoeging aan online masterclasses.

Onder het motto Boost with Facebook vindt op 11 en 12 november in Eindhoven een workshop plaats waar iedereen kan kennismaken met Facebook en verwante platforms zoals Instagram en Whatsapp om zijn eigen loopbaan of onderneming een duwtje te geven. Facebook werkt voor deze demo samen met lokale partners, in dit geval INretail en MKB Nederland.

Boost is de naam van een wereldwijd programma van Facebook om ondernemend gebruik van het platform te bevorderen, met name gericht op het MKB. Dit najaar opent Facebook de deuren van 17 grote kantoren (ook in Berlijn, Parijs en Londen) om kleine ondernemers in eigen huis te ontvangen en laten zien wat er zoals mogelijk is met zijn social platforms.

Facebook promoot zijn event gebruik makend van Splashthat, een event marketing platform dat zich makkelijk laat koppelen aan Salesforce, Marketo en Hubspot.

Google en eBay

De eigenaar van Marktplaats in Nederland (eBay) heeft een vergelijkbaar programma waarbij lokale winkeliers wegwijs worden gemaakt op het veilingplatform. Met de slogan Retail Revival opent eBay zelfs popup offices waar eBay adviseurs samen met lokale ondernemingsbevorderaars nieuwe verkoopmethoden opzetten voor winkeliers.

Google maakt gebruik van een mobiel schooltje om te demonstreren wat de zoekmachine en verwante platforms (Skype, Youtube) kunnen doen voor kleine ondernemers. Deze mobiele demo Digitale Werkplaats doet de komende maanden Den Bosch, Utrecht, Leeuwarden, Middelburg, Rotterdam en Lelystad aan.

Who are the Anywherians? They can work everywhere, and therefore they can live anywhere. Some are wealthy, others are happy in a basic lifestyle. Being an Anywherian enables them to make these choices freely. Especially since Anywherian banking, anywherian education and anywherian health are available to everyone.

This anywherian fairytale was created (and antidated) for the first smartcom summit in 2019, because we suggested to create a truly unique label. A brand that could tickle the imagination. It was never used. Until it was used. You know who you are!

Folklore speelt een rol in marketing. Nederland is molens, kaas en klompen, maar Nederland verkoopt ook tal van slimme producten en diensten. Smart export marketers maken daarom gebruik van smart event marketing, op belangrijke beurzen in het buitenland en evenementen in de periferie.

De Rijksdienst voor Ondernemend Nederland organiseert komend najaar samen met de Nederlandse Export Combinatie (NEC) een workshop op drie locaties voor startende exporteurs uit het MKB: Amersfoort (2 oktober), Eindhoven (6 november) en Zwolle (13 december). Een nuttige aanvulling op onze basistraining voor smart event marketers die willen deelnemen aan buitenlandse beurzen.