During our trip to the Big Apple, we met B-Reel, a design studio in downtown SOHO. Over the last year, they launched several amazing online projects and entered FWA’s Hall of Fame.
Alaa Mendili (Flash Developer), Seth Weisfeld (Creative Director), Niklas Lindström (Executive Producer) [as seen on the picture above] accepted to share their experience at B-Reel and their best practices. Here are a few reasons behind their success: creativity, hard work, a good cultural mix and a great team. We were aware of their great talent but were very impressed by their simplicity, their open-minded attitude and by how down to earth they were. Let me tell you: this is the kind of company you wish to work for! If only they had an office in Montreal…
Here are some of their projects:
This is a studio to watch very closely, they are the artists who bring emotions to technology. You can follow then on Twitter or visit and enjoy: http://www.b-reel.com/
Marty Allen is the guy behind Marty Stuff, a new web 2.0 art concept. Marty creates sock puppet portraits and creates a MySpace profile for each one of them. Isn’t it the perfect gift for a geek friend? You can visit his website to buy your own sock puppet portrait. We met with him at the Union Square market in Manhattan.
Brooklyn Label is a modern american bistro located in Brooklyn that brings together everything Brooklyn stands for: diversity, art, culture and community. It serves very good food at a very reasonable price and on top of that it’s a bring your own wine! To give you an idea : we where seven people, and the check only came to 125$ with tips.
There is many coffee shops in Manhattan, but I really fell in love with the Cake Shop. It’s a Coffee & Bar shop with drinks, coffee, cupcakes, Wi-FI and a really nice indie decor. Can I really ask for more?
The cupcakes are awesome, the WC look awesome, the music is great (we heard some Black Mountain while we where there) and the place is also a venue for indie rock shows. During the day, you see mostly locals working with their laptop enjoying the good music and ambiance. I really wish we had a place like that in Montréal!
Island Burgers and Shakes is really THE place to eat burgers in Manhattan (in Hell’s Kitchen). The menu includes over 60 types of burgers and churascos (chicken sandwich). Make sure you get there with an empty stomach before you attack these huge and delicious burgers:
Cheryl is a social entrepreneur and the President of Echoing. This global nonprofit company has awarded more than $27 million in start-up capital to over 450 social entrepreneurs worldwide since 1987.
While interviewing and selecting entrepreneurs she applies the pressure test:
-Passion threshold
-Show us your battle plan
-Idealogy vs pragmatism
She also shared a few skills to develop in order to be a good social agent:
- Core identity formation and aligment: mean it
- Focus and ability to execute with alacrity: going to execute and build on your own business mission
- Solution oriented: solving problems vs idea generation
- Ressource magnet: human capital is key
- Deep foundation of believing
Seth Godin, CEO of Squidoo and bestselling author & blogger spoke the 99 Percent conference. He started the conference dressed like a priest saying: “You don’t need to be more creative, all of you are too creative”. Then he started explaining that you should always be in a shipping mode in a project. If you are proud of what you deliver and you follow the schedule, you will succeed and you will enjoy doing it. You simply need to ship and not being creative. It’s all about finishing and not starting.
He also presented his concept of the Lizard brain, that little voice that talks to you all the time (the left brain).The Lizard is always in a surviving mode, The Lizard’s brain is afraid, and wants to sabotage projects for self-preservation. “Don’t get more creative… Make your Lizard brain more quiet!” said Seth Godin. He also explained that the futher you get to the end of a project, the worse gets the resistence. In order to be efficient in a project, we really need to think, plan and discuss the most at the beginning, and hence reduce the pressure and resistence.
Meet, Photo | vdesrosiers | 
May 27, 2009 12:10 | 
Comments (0) 
