Tapas in Madrid (anytime)

Here are three recommendations for a tapas trek in Madrid. Pursue at your peril as they’re based on my personal tastes and the years of my youth spent living in the city. If you’re staying at the Tryp, don’t forget to take a stroll in the Plaza de Oriente before pursuing any of these routes. You might also decide to stay in that area and opt for a quiet dinner in the Cafe de Oriente with spectacular views of the Palacio Real and the Teatro Real.

 

La Latina – Austrias. The true Madrid castizo

Start at the trendy and progressive El Bonanno (Plaza del Humilladero, 4) for a beer and then head down Almendro street, riddled with tapas bars, towards Taberna Almendro, 13 to have some huevos rotos (broken eggs) and porra antequerana (a much thicker and very tasty kind of gazpacho with some iberico shavings). In the streets Cava Baja and Cava Alta is where most of the tapas bars of the area are located, as well as legendary restaurants like Casa Lucio or El Viejo Madrid. A very animated neighbourhood, muy castiza. You can also climb to the top of three story restaurant El Viajero, head towards the animated Delic, on Plaza de la Paja for a mojito, or stroll down to the Basilica of San Francisco el Grande and have a digestive orujo at Las Vistillas, in Calle Bailen, over a view of the Cathedral of La Almudena.

Almudena Cathedral

Plaza de Santa Ana – Madrid de las Letras

Plaza de Santa Ana (Cervantes lived a couple of streets away) is the center piece of what has become known as the Barrio de las Letras. It’s just off Madrid’s geographical center, the Puerta del Sol and it’s a pleasant and animated square. There you can eat good tapas in historical venues like La Moderna or Cerveceria Alemania. For great views try the Penthouse Bar & Terrace on the Hotel Melia Reina Victoria, also on the square. Stroll around that neighbourhood down Calle Huertas and head to a more sophisticated seated diner experience in the cozy East47 or simply walk around the small bar filled pedestrian streets of the neighborhood and get a glimpse of the very lively Madrid theatre district. 

Plaza de Santa Ana

Retiro – a stroll in the park and great food discoveries

If you find yourself anywhere near the more up-class Barrio de Salamanca, do not miss Taberna Laredo (Calle Menorca, 14) and La Castela (Calle Doctor Castello, 22) for some of the most extraordinary tapas of the city. These are classic venues which will be packed. Just find a spot as close to the barra as possible and enjoy the fantastic wine choices by the glass and their very articulate and well executed tapas selection. Before you may want to take a stroll in the Retiro park, which is just across these two great venues.

Retiro

Consumer Ethnography [and the secret desire]

As far a I know, a consumer is any organism that cannot produce its own food and must, therefore, get its energy by eating, or consuming, other organisms (or so says the nwrc). It’s also, and more close to my point, a person or organisation that purchases good or services.

Ethnography, in turn, is the part of Cultural Anthropology concerned with the descriptive documentation of living cultures. A kind of fieldwork focused or empirical model of researching and understanding people in their daily life and all dimensions of it.

In this light, marketeers are increasingly turning to a qualitative research technique called Consumer Ethnography which, according to Bain & Co. “uses a variety of methods to study behavior, attitudes and culture to better understand what customers want and how they make their purchasing decisions”.

Accordingly, it escapes the traditional focus group approach and instead uses researchers -trained in ethnographic fieldwork- to observe people (openly or secretly) and interview them where they live, work, play and shop. A detailed analysis of observations reveals consumer motivations and interactions with brands and products, enabling companies to discover new segments, design more satisfying offerings or more effective marketing campaigns.

Ethnography is viewed by a growing number of experts across industries as a core marketing competency and an alternative or supplement to traditional focus groups. This kind of calls close as I studied Cultural Anthropology. But still leaves me wondering how it can manage to identify unmet needs which not even the customer is aware are… well… unmet. The kind of efficiency or utility deficit that you don’t identify until someone more creative or audacious imagines and describes for you…

They’re open: mission future

On September 8, 2008, Mission Future will bring together visionaries, innovators and creative entrepreneurs from diverse disciplines to explore and drive the impact of the sharing-economy on society and business.

Under the theme “We’re open: How open minds and open industries are shaping the world” will focus on open innovation and open economy by contributions from guys like Joichi Ito, Technotari’s VP of International and Mobility Development, Issac Mao, director of the Social Brain Foundation and Gerfried Stocker, director of the Ars Electronica Center.

The event commits itself to the principles of open source, where attendees are active participants and the boundaries between expert and participant are fluid. Mission Future’s goal during this day is to advance pathbreaking projects guided by open principles. It’s in Linz’s Art University

The future-teller of the classifieds industry

Jakob Nielsen

In September of 1997 Jakob Nielsen wrote a post in his useit library where he stated the following about classified ads and why they are the most suited form of advertising for Internet – but are terribly inefficient in print:

They are a classic pull medium: customers seek out the classifieds when they decide to look for a used car or when they want to hire a house-keeper; most people don’t leaf through the pages just for fun

They are well-suited for computerized searching and sorting: you may want to look only for used BMW cars that cost less than $5,000 or are less than 3 years old, or you may only be interested in a red Z3

They are time-sensitive, but not on a day-to-next-day basis: you want to see all open offers, no matter whether they were posted today or yesterday, or even earlier. As soon as the advertised offering has been sold, the ad should be pulled and not shown to any more customers (a static listing wastes both parties’ time)

Sellers can type their own entries directly into the ad database since they know what they are selling.

Using the hypertext feature of the Web, ads can link to as much background information as necessary; cryptic but space-saving abbreviations go away (hard disks are cheaper than newsprint)
multimedia features can save both buyers and sellers time by allowing potential buyers to learn more about the offering before contacting the seller (just how cute is the puppy? – well, see the photo, or even the movie)

That was 11 years ago. Talk about having a good eye for the shape of things to come. If you want to see an empiric example of this, look at this material on the Schibsted Investor Relations page

Image courtesy of andybudd