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I love, love, LOVE this!

I was recently asked by Penguin to put together a story for a project they are doing in the UK called We Tell Stories, a series of short stories by six different Penguin authors, told over a period of six weeks. Each of us had to come up with something based on a Penguin Classic, and each story was told in an interesting way online somewhere or somehow.

My brief was to come up with a story based on Hard Times, the Dickens classic which illustrates the growing pains of the industrial revolution. My story was to be about the growing pains of the information revolution, the subject covered in The Pirate’s Dilemma. If that wasn’t an intimidating enough way to enter the world of fiction for the first time, the story also had to be told as an ‘info-graphic novel’, using mostly statistics and numbers, mirroring Mr Thomas Gradgrind’s (the main character in Hard Times) obsession with cold hard facts.

I didn’t end up writing a story at all. Try as I might, I could not get my head round creating a piece of fiction that worked in this way, using mostly numbers, that would somehow be comparable to the work of Dickens. That’s kind of a tough one. Instead I took some of the numbers and quotes from Pirates and tried to tell a factual story of change and revolution using as few words as possible. I was lucky enough to work with designer Nicholas Felton on this, famous for his incredible annual reports. Nicholas put the information together as a slick-looking statement, describing some of the changes we are currently experiencing as a society. It’s not the greatest thing I’ve ever written by a long shot, in fact it was more a case of quote and stat-pulling than actual writing, but I think Mr Felton’s sharp design looks pretty cool. You can download or view the finished article here. The other stories (which are all actual stories) are well worth checking out.

Current TV just put up an interview I did a few months back with Brooklyn producers John Carluccio and Mark Kotlinkski - They dug up some cool slides I haven’t seen before. Mark also has a production outfit called 88 Hip Hop which does some great stuff - look for his film The Mural Kings about legendary graffiti artists TATS CRU - which is well worth checking out.

I did an interview for Booz Allen Hamilton’s strategy + business magazine with Edward Baker - you can read it here.

Regine Zylberberg

I was intrigued by this post I came across via PSFK on how to open a nightclub. They missed one point which is key to opening a great club, but also to creating any kind of brand; you need to have a good back-story. Nobody understood this more completely than Regine Zylberberg, one of the world’s first DJs, and a pioneer of what would become the modern nightclub.

Born in Belgium in 1929, as a teenager Regine had spent part of the war hiding in a French convent before reuniting with her family in Paris, where she began working as a hostess at her father’s bistro. “That was where my ambition began,” she recalls. “It was a working-class Jewish cafe with all sorts of people passing through. I said to myself: I want a place where I get to choose who comes in. I wanted counts and dukes - people with titles.”

After a spell selling bras on street corners and working as a scullery maid, 23 year old Regine began working at one of Paris’ first discotheques, Whiskey á Go-Go, in 1953. She quickly earned a reputation as a “fast-living, fun-loving girl about town. She could dance and sing, and she had great legs” the BBC’s roving eye later observed. Her enchanting presence attracted Parisian playboys, princes and members of the Rothschilds banking family, and she quickly became the club’s main attraction.

But she wasn’t just a pretty face. She had some ideas for the club, and began to experiment. “I laid down a linoleum dance-floor, put in colored lights and removed the juke-box. The trouble with a juke-box was that when the music stopped you could hear the people snogging in the corners. Instead I installed two turntables so there was no gap in the music” she recounted to AFP years later.

Regine became so well known that when Whiskey á Go-Go opened a second venue in Paris’ Latin Quarter, locals referred to it simply as ‘Chez Regine.’ She intrinsically understood how to make a club feel special. Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton highlight one example of her flair for innovation in Last Night a DJ Saved My Life: “When a new Whiskey club in Cannes began to slump, Pacini sent his bright young hostess to save it. Regine knew the value of hype. For a month she would dutifully open the doors at 10.30pm and promptly put up a ‘DISCO FULL’ sign. People were regularly turned away as the empty cacophony of the club echoed outside. The day she opened for real, the place was mobbed.”

Regine struck out on her own in 1958, when her pals the Rothchilds financed her first official Chez Regine venue. Princesses, socialites and those who wanted to rub shoulders with them flocked to the place. Bottles of liquor were sold at a premium rather than just single cocktails. The cast of West Side Story breezed in one evening, and taught France the twist. “One night, I got a call at home from the Duke of Windsor,” she told New York magazine. “He wanted me to come to his house, to teach him the twist. I told him, ‘No. You come to my club - I teach you there.”

Regine knew her reputation and exotic stories were her brand, so when the stories spread across the world, she soon followed. In 1975 she packed a reported 200 pounds of Louis Vuitton luggage and 800 pairs of shoes onto a steamboat, and headed for New York. She opened a Chez Regine on the ground floor of the Delmonico hotel, now known as Trump Park Avenue, and lived luxuriously in a suite eleven stories above. Before the club was anywhere near open, she had sold more than 2,000 membership cards (which were gold, and came in Cartier cases) for $600 each.

At Chez Regine in New York, even more extreme elitism was enforced. So tough was the door policy, the State Liquor Authority thought about suing her for social discrimination. People were thrown out ruthlessly - the wife of a former Indonesian president tried to sue Regine for $4m after being kicked to the curb for knocking over some wine glasses. She eventually won one French franc.

But the tough policy worked wonders, and Regine was a hit. Her decadent reputation had preceded her and Regine capitalized on it, befriending the jet-set and networking faster than a speeding Concorde. Michael Douglas, Ivana Trump, Julio Iglesias, Bridgette Bardot, Rod Stewart, Joan Collins and Salvador Dali were just a page worth’s of the VIPs in Regine’s little black book. The Jaggers and Onassis’s pow-wowed with the Kennedy’s, while Jack Nicholson and John Gotti partied with Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia. Andy Warhol was showing up every night to tape everything, and he later painted Regine’s portrait. Federico Fellini gave her with a twelve-foot boa constrictor, which she kept as a pet.

Chez Regine became a spiritual home to 1980s greed and hedonism as celebrities and hangers-on flocked to her opulent theme nights. At her famous white party, a spotless carpet as pure as the driven cocaine was rolled out, blanketing the sidewalk in luxury. Stories of Chez Regine spread beyond the velvet rope, and this was no accident - it was a branding exercise. Its exclusive walls and the mysterious French glamour-puss who held court within were perfect tabloid fodder. “Order a drink and be prepared to close out your bank account” a 1982 guidebook advised. “Once, I flew with her to Paris on the Concorde, and she was the only person I ever saw who didn’t have to show her passport at Customs,” Diane Von Furstenberg told New York magazine. “It was just, Bonjour, Madame Regine.” The New York Post crowned Regine ‘the queen of the night.’ The title stuck.

But Paris and New York were not enough. Regine wanted the world. She expanded her empire until she had 25 franchises on three continents. By the early 1980s there were branches in Rio de Janeiro, Saint-Tropez, Santiago, Cairo, Kuala Lumpur, Monte Carlo and London, not to mention cafes, a clothing label, three fragrance lines, a magazine, dancercise classes and Regine-sponsored cruises on the QE2. At her peak, the queen of the night was grossing $500m a year. Regine became a celebrity in her own right, landing acting roles in Hollywood and recording a version of Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I Will Survive,’ which was a smash hit in France.

But as the eighties wore on, Regine’s star began to fade, and the empire’s shoulder pads began to sag. Studio 54 and its topless waiters promised even further extremes of sex, drugs and rock and roll, and the crowds at Regine began to dwindle. By the time Gordon Gecko had been arrested and the early-nineties recession hit, Regine had closed its doors altogether. Her sparkle eclipsed by a changing world, the queen of the night returned to France.

Of course, she survived just like she said she would. The empire was chopped up and sold off long ago, but Regine is still releasing albums, appearing on French TV and writing memoirs. She still operates Jimmy’z in Monaco, where celebrities and Eurotrash to this day clamor to enjoy cocktails starting at $40 a pop.

The queen of the night has an important lesson for us. If sharing is going to take over the world, and everything is to have a free substitute, the only way to compete is on the strength of your story. When Regine took over Whiskey á Go-Go, it was one of several boozy Parisian jazz bars. Because she created a story behind the name, the name lives on today. Using the same formula, countless businesses trade in luxury and illusions of grandeur.

Regine sold exclusivity. She made it perfectly clear her brand was the best of the best, strictly for the elite, but she sold this story to everyone. She understood the cult of celebrity a long time before the rest of us, and used it to build an empire. But the celebrity game changed. She can today be seen mucking in on Celebrity Farm, France’s most popular reality television show.

Celebrities aren’t quite as glamorous as they once were, because it’s easier to become one. They no longer seem a world apart like rock stars did to punk bands. It is clear the power is with us, the consumers. We buy ideas from people like Regine who become brands, to tell a story about who we are as people.

Brands have become central to our lives, but what we buy is the stories that come with them. Nightclubs sell experiences, but these days, so does everyone else. In a world of free substitutes, meaning is the only way to differentiate. We need door policies. We need good stories. We need people like Regine.

The Pirate’s Dilemma: A Kung Fu Trilogy in Four Acts – Act 1: The Remix

Today is the day The Pirate’s Dilemma comes to a book store near you – a day I’ve been looking forward to for the last eighteen months, and it’s going to be a long one. I’ll be on The Brian Lehrer show at 11am, then doing lots of book signing around NY, and probably a bunch of other stuff I haven’t been told about yet, but it’s all good.

We’ve had a great run so far. The book has already received a 9 out of 10 review in Wired, was named one of Fast Company’s top five ‘Smart Books of 2008’, and BusinessWeek’s ‘Innovation of the Week.’ It’s been featured in local and national press up and down the country and there’s plenty more coming over the next few weeks and months. It’s been on all kinds of great blogs, featured everywhere from The New York Times/Freakonmics blog to streetwear site Hypebeast to U.K band Hadouken’s weblog. Seth Godin, the world’s biggest marketing writer, called it “stunning.” Frans Johansson, one of the planet’s finest innovation writers, called it “remarkable,” and Jeff Chang, one of the greatest music journalists of all time, described it as “a series of leaps of imagination (that) always lands with style.”

When I wrote this I thought people would be throwing tomatoes (still in their cans) at me for suggesting piracy is good for us, but I’ve been invited to speak up and down the country over the last few months, and been amazed and humbled by the positive reactions to the ideas in the book. It’s already doing well on pre-orders - I don’t know how many books can say they’ve been in Amazon’s top ten bestselling lists of ‘rap’ and ‘economics/free enterprise’ books at the same time, but The Pirate’s Dilemma is one of them.

Help me get up on that list this crucial first week by getting your copy today/tomorrow/sometime this week. If you have a blog/magazine/speech to make later today in New Hampshire – it would be great if you could get the book in there somehow. Purchase spares for your friends and loved ones, and strangers too. Even if you don’t care about piracy, or how the way we all use information is evolving, or how a nun in the 1940s invented disco, get one anyway. Even if you can’t read, the book is also great for lighting barbecues, stabilizing wobbly tables and eradicating small to medium sized rodents from your property. Do what you will with your copy, but help me make this year the year of the pirate.

One of the most exciting things happening today is the launch of the first of the four videos we made to celebrate/promote the ideas discussed in the book. Enjoy Act 1 of The Pirate’s Dilemma: A Kung Fu Trilogy in Four Acts responsibly above in all its YouTube grainy-ness, and also in full-flash glory here in a few hours. More on these later today and why they’re so different from other videos, but now I gotta sleep for a few hours.

All the best, and thanks for reading and sticking with me this far.

Matt

Download chapter 1 of The Pirate’s Dilemma and win a copy of the first edition through Facebook

The past year wasn’t the greatest in the history of selling dead trees with words printed on them. 2007 was the year the Kindle reared its ugly (and it is ugly) head, a device which may (or may not) do to books what mp3s did to music, which many saw as the beginning of the end. Elsewhere the idea of giving ebooks away for free in an effort to sell more physical copies gained traction. This notion is seen as a harbinger of doom by some, while others don’t think it’s a bad idea at all.

The fact that books will at some point be available on some type of electronic device and be pirated by the thousands isn’t, in my opinion, the big problem here. The real problem is that people have not chosen to pirate books on a grand scale in the western world yet. The real worry is that independent book stores are closing and book review sections are disappearing. Books don’t appear to be as important to us as they once were.

But looking forward, there is an upside to all this which so far I haven’t seen much discussion of. There are so many areas where book publishing and the digital world don’t seem to gel that well, but there is one area where they do. Books are sold by word of mouth, and have long acted as social objects – creating connections between us. One of the most exciting new trends I’ve seen is the ability of books to connect directly to readers through social networks. The future of publishing might be embedded in Facebook.

A few months ago, I started talking to the founders of a new Facebook app called iRead, which allows you to display what you’ve read, what you are reading, and what’s on your reading list on your Facebook profile. You can write reviews, rate books, and it’s very search friendly, allowing you to import your Amazon wishlist directly into Facebook.

iRead is a killer app for readers because it connects you to others with similar tastes. In a world without as many professional book reviewers, networks of readers like this are going to matter a great deal more to authors. But the real upside to all this for authors is they get to test market books before they’ve released them in ways they couldn’t before – they can talk directly to people interested in their books, and get a picture of what their audience looks like before they’ve even released their first book.

iRead have been using The Pirate’s Dilemma as a guinea pig for many of their new functions for the last month, and it’s been great to see thousands of interested readers sign up and find out who I’m talking to. You can download a PDF of chapter 1 here , and we have 20 copies of the first edition to give away to iRead users. As long as there are forums like this where people can discuss and share books effectively and they can continue to spread virally, I think the future of books is safe.

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I’ve had a few requests for my slides over the last few months, but because most of them are pictures, they don’t make a lot of sense without audio, so I’ve thrown a six-minute sample of my stump speech up on slideshare as a slidecast. You can watch the whole thing above, download the audio here, and if you like the music bed I made for it, that’s also available here for download under a Creative Commons license.

More good stuff from the League of Noble Peers. I especially like how they used the grime scene of an example of the future of music without the music business. Good to see some old friends from London in there… Get the full thing in HD or for your iPod here, and don’t forget to make a donation.

The series of viral kung-fu shorts we’ve been working on is almost done. Each film depicts a struggle between two characters facing a pirate’s dilemma and fighting over the best way to use a piece of information. Taking inspiration from Streetfighter 2, anime films, Wu Tang videos, J-horror flicks and drug commercials, the films tell stories about copyright, piracy, net neutrality and the potential of 3-D printing.

I’m really excited about these films and what other people will be able to get out of them. As well as making all the films available under a Creative Commons sharealike license, we’ll be uploading twenty clips from each short, plus all the audio as parts, so other people can use them to make new versions, or use them to make entirely different films. The first one should be up in a week or two, then we’ll be releasing one a week after that up until the book is launched.