I’ve always been amused by the language of wine. Many reviewers pile adjectives on top of one another with repetitive monotony. This might be due to the professional necessity of writing while tipsy (despite claims to spit and not swallow.)

Jon Bonné and Lynne Char Bennett’s list of 100 Best Wines in the Sunday San Francisco Chronicle, modifies ‘cherry’ in no less than 17 different ways when describing red wine:

…red cherry, crushed raspberry and spice…
…vibrant cherry, plum and berry fruit that’s laced with subtle sweet oak shadings…
…toasted cherry and a leafy hint…
…musky red fruit - strawberry, dusty cherry…
…baked cherry and raspberry…
…radiant red cherry, highlighted with cranberry, candied orange rind, oregano and fir cone…
…bright with thick cherry and citrus zest…
…ripe black cherry and subtle plum, with a mineral overlay and a juicy, salty profile…
…cherry, blackberry and cedar…
…rich pile of black cherry, nuanced raspberry and blackberry, coffee, toast and a full box of exotic spices…
…dried cherry and oolong…
…dried cherry, pebbles and black tea aromas…
…coffee, vanilla, mint and plush back [sic] cherry…
…rubyish cherry and cranberry fruit…
…roasted red cherry, warm oak to round the edges…
…tree bark and cherry lozenge…
…raspberry and cherry scents, with slight mushroom and mineral…

Ray Davies was right on the money back in 1970:

I met her in a club down in old Soho
Where you drink champagne and it tastes just like cherry-cola
Cee-oh-el-aye cola
She walked up to me and she asked me to dance
I asked her her name and in a dark brown voice she said Lola
El-oh-el-aye Lola la-la-la-la Lola

Lola - The Kinks

Entrepreneurs must not only be able to invent the next new thing, they must be able to communicate about their innovation to the world. Otherwise, as marketing guru Robert Middleton says, no-one will even know you exist.

Many people underestimate the difficulty of communicating about a new idea or product. In an age of instant gratification and shortened attention spans, we measure our successes and failures on ever-shorter time scales. In large corporations the life-span of a Chief Marketing Office averages less than two years. The temptation is to market nanotechnology in nanotime.

This was not always the case.

Consider the case of Robert Chesebrough. Who? Read what Luke Johnson’s excellent Entrepreneur column in today’s Financial Times has to say:

Take the case of Robert Chesebrough. He was a British-born chemist who patented petroleum jelly, which he discovered in 1859 at the age of 22 in Titusville, Pennsylvania. It took him 10 more years to perfect the compound, and even then no one wanted to buy it. So he became a travelling salesman, giving away free samples of his product, which he named Vaseline. He even used to inflict burns on himself to demonstrate the soothing powers of his miracle gel. Eventually the public took to his invention, and he became a wealthy industrialist, with operations in dozens of countries. His persistence, self-belief and positive thinking paid off.

Do you have what it takes to market your product? Are you ready to feel the burn?

I’m sitting here in Nantwich Library with my Mum & Dad. Showing my Dad how to write a blog entry which will be published on the Internet for anyone in the world to read.

So this is the message I have composed on Friday November 2, 2007. This weekend it is Bonfire Night in England when everyone celebrates Guy Fawkes trying to blow up the Houses of Parliament.

A mash-up from Manhattan: Dylan+Ginsberg+Adi Da. What fun!

Jackie Wullschlager’s review of British Victorian artist John Everett Millais in the Weekend Financial Times brought me face-to-face with one of the essential elements of my heritage: the suppressed yearnings of the patriarchs of the UK at the height of their power for virginal innocence.

On the one hand Industrial Britain was all about iron & steel, grit & determination, mad dogs in the noon-day sun and gunboat diplomacy. The British in the 19th Century imposed their will across continents. They were men of action whose deeds brought them prosperity and the certainty that God was an Englishman.

Yet, as Wullschlager comments, Millais’s paintings illustrate how the Victorian sensibility was “obsessed with preindustrial innocence” which found expression, above all, in an infantilism which art celebrated by “arresting childhood on canvas.”

We’re talking little girls; sultry portraits of sweet things “whose ruby lips, longing gaze and flowing burnished hair make today’s teen models look chiselled and chaste by comparison.” Yearning virgins with a “subterranean sexual charge”.

But what possible relevance can the repressed sexuality of an imperial power obsessed with foreign adventures and fraught with fundamentalist alarm about moral codes have today?

I can’t possibly imagine. Can you?

One of the more interesting things about my job at Hewlett-Packard is meeting customers in the Executive Briefing Center. Sales teams from around the world bring customers to HP’s headquarters for a variety of reasons - to close a deal, discuss the latest technology with engineers or develop relationships with key executives.

Many of the meetings kick-off with a company overview and I’m one a number of HP employees called on to give the the ‘HP Today’ presentation.

Since many customers come from across the country and around the world this can often be as much an update on Silicon Valley as it is specifically about HP.

In the last couple of months I’ve spoken to Catholic priests from Korea; MBA students from China; Japanese bankers; spies from Sweden (OK, “signals intelligence operatives” from Sweden) and bureaucrats from Britain.

I’m struck by the fact that for many visitors to Hewlett-Packard the experience of seeing how business is done in Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area must be as strange as, say, a trip to Haight-Ashbury was for Midwesterners in the Summer of Love, 40 years ago.

The visiting delegations are homogeneous: Chinese engineers come from China; Koreans come from Korea; middle-aged Caucasian males come from IT departments across the USA.

They fly in to one of the most ethnically diverse, cosmopolitan, mongrel areas on earth.

Silcion Valley’s competitive edge is that it is a unique habitat for innovation and entrepreneurship. It all started with Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard tinkering in their garage in 1939 and the pace of change has been relentless ever since.

Unlike many regions, companies in Silicon Valley have access to a high quality and mobile workforce comprised of talented people from around the world. No one racial group is in a majority. This ethnic diversity fosters an equality of opportunity startling even by American standards — 39% of all residents were born in a foreign country. In contrast to the more rigid social hierarchies of Europe, the Valley operates a results oriented meritocracy where talent and ability are king. The region’s merit-based system of rewards encourages the best and brightest to knock themselves out in hopes of being part of the next new, new thing.

What is remarkable about the Valley is the lack of an identifiable landmark. Unlike instantly recognizable symbols such as the Eiffel Tower in Paris; Big Ben in London; Times Square in New York or the Ginza district in Tokyo, there’s no building or street which symbolizes the place. As Po Bronson remarks in his amusing book The Nudist on the Late Shift, it’s not the buildings or physical surroundings which distinguish Silicon Valley, it’s the people. And they are sometimes as wacky as the hippies in the Haight in 1968. There really was a programmer in one Silicon Valley company who chose to work the night shift so he could sit at his computer au natural.

Walk the corridors HP, or any company in the Valley, and you’ll hear as many accents from Asia, Europe and Latin America as you will from the United States. It’s something the visitors to the region would do well to notice. For it’s an undeniable fact that immigrants to the area are responsible for much of the wealth. Sun Microsystems was started by a German engineer getting together with an Indian businessman; Google billionaire Sergey Brin came from Russia, albeit at the age of six; dozens of other Silicon Valley companies were founded by Indian and Chinese immigrants.

Pascal Zachary argues persuasively that diversity defines the health and wealth of nations in today’s world. What he calls ‘mongrel’ mixes of people fare better than regions other regions, such as “the great monocultures of Germany and Japan.” Whereas Germany does have immigrants, they are mostly kept outside the mainstream, as guestworkers. The Japanese remain uneasy with the idea of absorbing outsiders into the mainstream.

There’s an amusing story when, back in the Summer of Love, Grey Line (aptly named!) started bringing mid-western tourists through the Haight to gawp at the hippies, the flower children held up mirrors to the bus windows. The mirrors reflected back upon the tourists the wonder, shock or fear they experienced when they saw the free thinkin’, free lovin’ tripped-out voyagers of the new culture (some of whom, like Cap’n Crunch, inspired Jobs and Wozniak; others like Stewart Brand were early into the web.)

It may be that, by visiting Silcion Valley, businesspeople from elsewhere have a mirror held up to their own culture.

Moving quickly on from my novice experience with Facebook, I’ve now discovered Second Life (SL).

I heard SL CEO Philip Rosedale present at the Stanford AlwaysOn Conference. This was remarkable because he used his SL ‘avatar’ (the descended incarnation of a deity - or the persona you create to represent your SL ‘presence’) to conduct a tour of the virtual reality. Thanks to some nifty translation software he was able to chat with Japanese vistors to SL (only 30% of the 8+ million people who’ve registered are from the US). He also mentioned 5,000 IBM employees have a presence on SL and use it for virtual meetings. Other companies like Dell and Sun Microsystems have online stores. More to the point, there are people making thousands of real dollars selling virtual things to others in SL. Sounds like the early days of Ebay.

So, off I went to check it out. There’s a number of steps to set up a basic free SL account. The first that tripped me up was choosing a name for my avatar. Shouldn’t be a big deal - just find a unique name and off you go, right? Well, SL only allows you certain last names such as Akina, Back, Ebbage, Price. Some odd, some ordinary. I eventually chose Fouroux since it sounded French but when twinned with the first name ‘Three’ had a certain wit. Then my wife suggested mimicking the way phone numbers are given out in the UK, and so I switched to Double3 Fouroux (as in 3340, geddit?).

That out of the way I soon downloaded the app and was off to my first experience of virtual reality. It is like being reborn - into an environment where you have to learn to walk, run, sit, fly, turn, speak and so on. Somewhat frustrating, but the compelling presence of other novice avatars keeps things amusing.

Once the basics are handled (in an environment called ‘Orientation Island’) then one can teleport to other areas of SL. Somewhere in the 30,000+ people online at any one time are fascinating people I can chat to. Somewhere there are instructive conversations, presentations and people with expertise to share. But there’s also a lot of porn, trivia and timewasting. Not much different from RL (Real Life) in that regard.

It’s lilely that SL will appeal to some and not to others. People who communicate for a living (professional speakers, trainers, consultants) should find it a valuable way to extend their RL relationships. And, who knows, when Avian Flu hits, a virtual meeting place might have compelling advantages.

Up to now I’ve kept my postings on Professionally Speaking walled-off from my day job as a speech writer and member of the Corporate Communications team at Hewlett-Packard. But, since this this blog is now listed on HP’s website, and there’s a ton of cool stuff happening in the communications area at Hewlett-Packard, I figure I can tear down the wall from time to time and share some HP material.

One aspect of my job involves presenting the HP Today Corporate Overview at the Executive Briefing Center in Cupertino. Visitors to the center are often there for a full day of briefings on specific HP products and solutions. My job is to give them a preliminary 45-minute overview of the company. Given that HP is now the largest computer company on the planet with 156,000 employees and $100B in revenue, this is no small challenge.

I like to break away from the PowerPoint slides and show videos which illustrate some of HP’s major growth trends. One trend which HP sees of increasing importance is for the static, isolated use of technology to be replaced by Always Connected, Mobile Experiences (perhaps paralleling the move away from onanism to relational enjoyment most of us experience as we mature sexually?)

The computer market is evolving toward what CTO Phil McKinney calls ‘liquid’ media - where content moves from the desktop to the laptop to the hand-held device. This frees people from having to be in a certain place at a certain time to enjoy things (and we all remember what a bummer that was when we lived at home with our parents.)

Take computer gaming.

The stereotype computer gamer is a pudgy teenager sitting on a couch playing videogames with the only exercise they get being stronger thumbs. Soon to be history, if HP’s vision of mobility shakes out.

The R&D being done at HP Labs has resulted in radical innovations which allow creative, immersive experiences to take place in city streets, galleries, museums and public spaces. These ‘Mediascapes’ allow teenagers the freedom to escape from the confines of the couch when they play video games and exercise their whole bodies, not just their thumbs. A Mediascape blends digital images, video, audio and interactions with the physical landscape.Take a look at the 90-second video Roku’s Reward to see one implementation:

This is not yet a product from HP. But if you want to experiment with the technology and build your own Mediascape, go to www.mscapers.com to download the free software and have at it!

My favorite FT columnist Harry Eyres writes in the Weekend Edition (subscription required) about the tragic lack of diversity in the modern world. The march to a monoculture extends from crops (all maize all the time) to literature (all Harry Potter all the time) to language (all English or Mandarin all the time).

Language loss is a topic addressed anthropologist Wade Davis at the wonderful TED Conference. His 2003 talk on endangered cultures argues language isn’t just a collection of vocabulary and grammatical rules. In fact, “Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind.” The languages of the planet are being lost at the rate of 6 a week - 50% of the world’s 6,000 languages, he says, have disappeared in our lifetime and “are no longer being whispered into the ears of children.”

This lack of diversity removes different ways of making sense out of the world, forever. Whole networks of living relationships disappear. Those of us left inhabiting the vast monocultures of English, Spanish, Mandarin and French must work harder to capture different ways of seeing. Different cultures create different realities. Different realities of lead to different discoveries.

A monoculture sows and sees the same thing, everywhere.

Eyres concludes by quoting the Emperor Charles V, who on seeing the cathedral his architect had constructed in the middle of the great mosque of Córdoba, stated “You have destroyed what was unique to replace it with what could be found anywhere.”

So what differentiates your discoveries?

Wonderful story in the San Francisco Chronicle this week about the small Welsh town of Hay-on-Wye. You have to love the town for its name alone. A name to conjure with: Why-oh-why in Hay-on-Wye? And who woulda thunk that in May, Hay was twinned with the Malian city of Timbuktu?

Why-oh-wye indeed.
The town is a now famous destination for book lovers from around the world. The annual literary festival attracts the likes of Al Gore, Bob Geldof, Cate Blanchett, and Elvis Costello. Bill Clinton called it a “Woodstock of the Mind” (claiming, no doubt, that he browsed but did not inhale). It’s a quaint British market town with forty bookstores and as many pubs. Sounds wonderful.

While America boasts a variety of ‘destination towns’ such as “The Live Music Show Capital of the World” Branson, Missouri, B&B destination Mendocino, California and, of course Sin City itself, Las Vegas I’m not aware of any other UK destination town apart from Hay-on-Wye for books. “What’s read in Hay, stays in Hay”.

Just as Vegas needed Mobster Bugsy Sigel to launch it, Hay-on-Wye needed its don — the improbable anarchist eccentric Richard Booth is the self-appointed King of Hay.

He set up the first bookshop in town in the 1960’s. The well-heeled Oxford graduate bought the 800-year-old Hay Castle and, seeing no apparent contradiction between a belief in anarchism and self-proclaimed monarchism, set himself up as the “King” of the town lording it over an Empire of books. Dusty books. Brown books. Books with broken spines and books of fine vellum. Paperback and hardback. Soft core and scientific. All became part of his kingdom which prospered mightily until it is as it has now become: a rural fastness for bibliophiles.

Expressing an opinion that would get him tarred and feathered in many towns in rural America, Booth states “I feel the right to read a cheap book is more important than the right to bear arms.”

The festival is a marvelous smorgasbord of cross-cultural literary entertainment. Here, in no particular order, are some random snips from a small fraction of the events being held between 24 May and 3 June:

The causes and implications of our terrible war of attrition against the native mammals and birds of England and Wales from the middle ages to the present day….25 years of contemporary Turkish society….bilingual Welsh poet (Perfect Blemish) reads and talks with the Israeli poet, translator and publisher…the charismatic anatomist explores the vital organs and functions of the human body…how recent developments in cosmology and particle physics have led to the remarkable realization that our universe – rather than being unique – could be just one of many universes….traces her heroine’s options for losing her virginity from the Gambia to London, Boston and Mali …the significance of the Prophet for some of today’s most controversial issues…Rugby’s greatest full-back talks about his career with his biggest fan…Nigerian Nobel Laureate…the documentary about China’s building boom explores the idea that the concrete revolution has destroyed more than the cultural revolution…the Indian novelist…the great Welsh-Chinese short story writer…the Super Furry Animals singer-songwriter talks music, politics and the subtle art of being angry…the brilliant Syrian journalist…can Islam and democracy ever find common ground?…Bollocks, I wish I’d said that….the amazing tale of the brilliant and sexually voracious Welsh psychoanalyst…el rhan o ddathliadau penblwydd Radio Cymru yn drideg, bydd gohebydd gwleidyddol y BBC, Guto Harri, yn cadeirio trafodaeth fywiog ar hynt cyfrwng sydd yn parhau i oroesi ac addasu yn wyneb…the Australian polymath…a conversation with three of the greatest stars of contemporary Hispanic literature – Cercas (The Speed of Light), Grandes (The Wind From The East) and Abad Faciolince (Olvido Que Seremos)….the Sri-Lankan-born broadcaster and writer…Vivienne Westwood - The iconoclast fashion Dame…the editor of leading Israeli daily Haaretz discusses how to run a newspaper…the victory of shopping over politics, the collisions of government and people, and the resilience, comedy, cars and greatness of Britannia…the Castillian writers are joined by British actors…DUE TO CHANGES IN THE POLITICAL SITUATION IN PAKISTAN IMRAN KHAN HAS HAD TO POSTPONE HIS VISIT UNTIL 2008…the ancient tales of Prometheus and Pandora, Theseus and the Minotaur, Daedalus and son beg the eternal question: just because you can, does that mean you should?…a series of walks to local farms…Morris Dancers…egocentric writers…the origins of Christian anti-Semitism… The Ghostwriters Séance - The inside track on the great act of literary ventriloquism…he wry comedy of Rhodes’ Gold and the Nigerian-London-Cuban dislocations of Oyeyemi’s The Opposite House…the chaos, corruption and sexual depravity of the 1815 Congress of Vienna…Bob Geldof in Concert…a 100-day, 1500-mile journey with camels from Lake Chad to Tripoli accompanied by a Chinese scientist, a 77-year-old Kenyan rancher, warring tribesmen and Gaddafi’s secret police…Craswall farmers life under the Black Hill…Tamasin Day Lewis…Roy Hattersley…Adrian Tinniswood…Geraldine McCaughrean…Guillaume Canet…Karate princesses, seasick pirates and demon vacuum cleaners…subject to hygiene compliance, visitors may be able to help milk the cows and feed the calves…General Sir Michael Rose examines the parallels between the guerrilla tactics used by Washington against the British in 1775, and by the Sunni insurgents against the Allies in Iraq today…the only overweight gay Bengali GP working the comedy circuit…the Russian novelist…the Yiddish Policeman’s Union…Monty Don discusses his project to engage drug-addicted youngsters in a farming rehabilitation…after the final full-stop.

What other town with a resident population of 1,846 could boast such offerings?