A Source Of Inspiration

Sorry for the triple edit on the latest Beowulf post, but with 3 hours of sleep it’s hard to review titles or use spell checkers.

The reason is quite simple: Sapo Codebits, the programming contest i was in the last 3 days, helping out a Prt.sc team last night.

Master coders and blog mates, Samuel and Luis (photo by JPAntunes)

Our project “Sapo Boa Vida” (Sapo Good Life) was a winner in the Mashup category, an idea of social recommendation based on geo data and Sapo webservices.

Time to get some sleep now.

This is the first post on my brand new Macbook. I’m still loading this beauty with apps, so if you have suggestions, feel free to drop a list of your favourite application, tips and tricks in the comments.

With this laptop i’m currently switching between Ubuntu (home desktop), Windows XP (office) and OsX (home).
Next step: install Windows Vista. Ok, just kidding :)

I’m in New York for the next 3 weeks, working at the DRAFTFCB NY office.
For those few 1.68% new yorkers that visit my site, maybe we can get in touch and share some “inspirations”.
For regular readers, i’m not sure how often i will be posting, but you should expect some NY related stuff.

This is an unusual football post, but as a huge fan of SL Benfica it’s my main source of inspiration for today: Freddy Adu is heading to Benfica !

© Associated Press

Besides being a rising star that luckily will be traded with profit in 2-3 years, he’s also a cashcow in merchandising, with his Benfica jersey representing good sales in the States (he’s captain of US National Team).
Last year Kikin fonseca was the cover for Fifa07 Soccer game, and this year another high profile american player is signing. For a global brand such as Benfica, it’s a great move, and if football (soccer) reaches more audience/viewers in the US in the next years, it will be nice to know that my club has built such a big brand awareness.

Actually, this post might not be totally off-topic since Freddy is kind of an Internet phenomenon, with his YouTube videos with more than half-million views and having his own website.

I don’t know if it was the above video that convinced the team to sign him off, but it surely had importance.

Which brings me to some final questions: how do scouts and sports teams use the Internet? Could YouTube replace global scouts? Should player agents invest heavily on Internet PR?

If you have interesting thoughts or examples regarding the use of Internet on sports PR, please drop a line in the comments.

Tomorrow i’ll be speaking at Take Off, a tech event on entrepreneurship and innovation. Alcides from ideias3 had the kindness of inviting me and i’m delighted to meet such an inspiring audience, with some fellow bloggers from Planeta Asterisco, and learn from the other great speakers.

I’ll do my best at the panel “Advertising 2.0″, trying to close the gap between marketing and technology, and looking forward to get some positive feedback since the event is set a bit like Barcamp.

So here’s the schedule, in Portuguese:

For those of you who’d like to take off on a inspirational Saturday, come to Coimbra and let’s share some great insights.

- More info at http://takeoff.ideias3.com/

Today is a sad morning. My club just lost yesterday to Espanyol Barcelona at the quarter-finals of UEFA Cup, so i started to look for something positive about Benfica to cheer me up, and nothing better than announcing that Benfica has their own fan club at Second Life !

According to the sources, this is the first major football/soccer club to have a presence at Second Life, with some virtual merchandise to see or chat with other club fans. And this was all created by 2 loyal geek supporters, although the Marketing Department of the club is already in talks and looking at ways to be a part of it.

Second Life surely is a great opportunity to sports marketing, with their inherent fan based culture and passion about their other selfs. In a way a club fan is having a second life when he goes to matches or gathers his friends to have a beer while watching the match on TV.

While Benfica is not as global as Manchester or Real Madrid (although it is officially the club with most associates), if they manage to create a great experience at the virtual fan club, with clever product placements, merchandising, memorabilia and links to the online store, it might be a great revenue source - maybe next year we could pitch Saviola or Ronaldinho :).

Oh, out of curisity, the anagram for Benfica is SLB (Sport Lisboa Benfica), as in Second Life Benfica.

Good things come to those who wait.

Besides the web/advertising related posts, i evangelize a lot about Arcade Fire so it’s rewarding to see that they’ve just reached #1 in several iTunes charts.

The only thing that i miss is the chance to see them live, but it seems that they’ll be in Portugal at SBSR festival so hope remains. After Paredes de Coura fest 2 years ago, i miss that ethereal atmosphere on AF concerts.

Since September 2006 i began posting on a quite regular basis so let me share a bit about myself and this blog, celebrating it’s 100th post.

A bit about me … I studied Business and Management at UBI, where the only thing i was fun of was Marketing and Computers, so it kind of makes sense my career twist as a digital marketing professional. In fact, one of the first companies i worked for was named Digital Branding, a dot-com that burst with the bubble. With the trend of integrated/full-service agencies i ended up working in Foote, Cone & Belding, that later became FCB and now is merged as DraftFCB.

I’m Head Of Interactive, planning and developing interactive solutions and online marketing campaigns, with several technologies (mainly Flash/Actionscript). Searching the blog by “Shameless PromoTion” you’ll find some samples of my work, and also some sites by fellow bloggers and friends from PorTugal (hence the PT … PromoTion). I know it’s a lame copy but i’m not a writer.

The blog … the idea for “A Source of Inspiration” came up in early 2005, when i did more than 200 bookmarks a month, and wanted to share my browsing adventures with friends (later i discovered social bookmarking). The bookmarks were placed on a folder named ASourceOfInspiration, so when it was time to create a blog that was one of my first naming choices. The Source part because it has a bit of programming/interactive stuff and the Inspiration part because it deals with creativity and design.

The numbers … if you’re into metrics here’s a few of my stats until February 2007.

• Technorati Rank: 85,181 (82 links from 44 blogs)
• Feed Subscribers (on Feedburner): 90 (month average)
• User Location: USA(31%) and Portugal (24%)
• Most popular browsers: Firefox (48%) and IE (34%)
• Most Popular Post: Multi touch Driven Computer Screen

So, enough about me and A Source Of Inspiration. To all of the anonymous readers out there, do comment this post and let me know what do you think of this blog and how i can improve it to inspire even further.

And thanks for your great conversations.