Patrick C. Price

Archive for the ‘Zurich’ Category

Pretty cool concert by the Bosshoss yesterday. A german country band from Berlin.

Nope, can’t talk about it …

This week was my birthday again and ever since I’m 20 I don’t work on my birthday, but rather take the day off and do something special to reflect. This year I went sailing on the Lake of Zurich for 3 hours to refresh my sailing skills. What a great day it was!

Yesterday was the Keith Jared concert in Zurich. I had gone with a friend, with whom I had gotten to know the “Köln concert” (listen) by Keith Jared.

Jared is an pianist who improvises most of his concerts. So there’s a lot of tone-finding and experimenting going on, while he’s playing. So it was unsure what to expect during the concert.

I realized, that other than with most concerts I’ve been to, you normally know one or two pieces of music atleast and can be looking forward for them to be played. Well, with improvisations that’s a different story.

The concert was in two segments of each approx. 40 minutes and each segment consisted of 4-5 individual improvisations. The concert was recored and will be made available as a CD. Of all the parts played, I personally only enjoyed 3.

Non-the-less, it was fun to see, how Jared stands up and silenty sings along as he plays. One could get the impression, in his head, he’s a a way larger concert and it’s just the piano background, that the people in the audience get to hear.

And I must point out, it’s a great thing, he doesn’t sing any louder, than he does. He might be the greatest piano player ever, but at the same time, he’s the worst singer ever.

Another strange thing was, that after leaving the stage for the 3rd or 4th time and returning for an encore, someone seemed to take a picture of him and he happened to see the red light of the camera and went off, as “this being the rudest thing in 61 years of playing the piano…” asking the person to appologize and calling him an asshole.

Well, Mr. Jared, although I have complete understanding, that you do not want your music show up on platforms like YouTube, etc. you might still want to change your approach to the problem.

You might want to come to an understanding, that people want to take home a photograph or a sound example to show their friends and tell them, how great the concert was. Not granting your paying audience this wish, is about as rude as vice-versa.

So why not take a more pragmatic approach by offering a deal to your audience à la: “Ok, I understand you want some pictures and maybe even video, sound, etc.” so here are the first three mintues of the concert, that you can film, take pictures of, share on you social networks, etc. and give them a “released to the public” concert opening. Then after 3 minutes, stopp, ask everyone to turn of their phones, cameras, etc, and shut up and enjoy the concert with no more interruptions at all. I’m sure it would be of way greater value to you, as it would virally spread your concert and be like a free preview to your CD. Think about it. Calling your audience “asshole” is not the finest thing to do.

Recently I was at the Museum für Gestaltung, where there’s a exposition of Michel Compte, who is one of the worlds most renouned photographers and a Swiss citizen.

Here are some of the pictures that where ehibited. If you have a chance to go there in person, you should do so. It’s really interesting.

War dieses Wochenende zuerst an einem Geburtstagsfest und anschliessend bei Freunden Pokern. Am Sonntag morgen, um CHF 30.- ärmer… gings zurück zum Auto und da konnte ich mir nicht verkneifen, das letzte Bild des Herbstes einzufangen, bevor es dann gänzlich Weiss wird hierzulande.

Fun weekend. It was Streetparade in Zurich again!

Streetparade as developed from a techno-festival to one of the coolest summer events in Switzerland. With nearly 1 Mio. people attending, dressing up and reinventing theirselves for one day, it is a party of friendship, tolerance and openness. And a bunch of fun!

Zum diesjährigen 1. August Fest lud ich viele Freunde zu mir an den Strand ein. Ein glattes Fest, auch wenn der erste Teil des Nachmittags durch den Regen etwas getrübt wurde.

Ein Highlight war jedenfalls das Fondue, dass ich für die Deutschen Besucher aus Berlin zauberte. Hat schon was, in Zürich am Strand Fondue unter freiem Himmel zu essen!

Sollte man wieder machen

Oh, my…. so it’s been a very long time, since I last blogged, it seems… Not quite so, I have recently launched and blogged on my own “TechCrunch for Switzerland” Swiss Internet Blog website netznews.tv.

Just came home, from having dinner with one of Switzerland’s leading online classified websites. Very interesting “historical” conversation. So on my way home, I thought of my “historical achievements” with Scout24.

I guess one of them might have been to introduce the term “WhiteLabeling” to the Swiss Internet Market. In August of 2002, Andrew Mueller and I, were given the Task of building up the “leading real estate platform of Switzerland“.

One of our fantasies was to build a network of premium online websites catering to an opposing targetgroup of partners, to deliver great value for money experience (that expressing user-experience).

So we had to come up with a term for this type of new product. As my Dad had been a scientist and provided me with tons of ideas and models on how things work and where to research them, I stumbled across the therm “white-label drugs”, being medicine being produced for 3rd party companies, to be resold under their brand. These products where delivered with blank white-labels, so that 3rd parties could print what ever they intended on the “front-end” of the product.

My dinner colleague had an opposing view of the term “white labeling”, as his understanding was, that whitelabel meant, everything in your colors (but our structure), but mainly the ability to have an individual “back end”, thus being filtering and enrichment of content.

Same term, different understandings… WhiteLabeling rules… My “historical achievement…”

What to learn more about WhiteLabels?

Another wonderfull dinner in Zürich. If you ever want a real original Rahmschnitzel und Nüdeli, you must go to restaurant Da Terea in Zürich. A Montalta-Berger recommendation. Exquisite!