According to their site, and a chat with their VP of Operations Paul Barbaro, their holidays are geared toward 18 – 39 year olds with a massive focus on entertainment. They take over entire resorts and cruise liners and build an part filled holiday with heaps of activities, a plethora of options to relax, and whole bunch of people to party with. I’m hooked!

About Paul barbaro

Paul Barbaro also known as DJ Paul Barbaro has been an entertainment & marketing consultant to the hotel & hospitality industry for over 10 years, helping rejuvenate hotels in Australia, Indonesia and Dubai. Not just content with consultancy, Paul went on to design, build and manage some of Dubai’s most luxurious Hotel Bars, Clubs & Restaurants; most notable is the world renown 360degrees situated in the Jumeriah Beach Hotel.

Up until this week, you could almost have called me a Brand Champion, a Skype Evangelist, a VOIP hero if you will. I’d happily convert other non-skype-using nomads whom I pass on my travels; almost taking pride in the fact that I was able to introduce them to such a great product.

That was until I was forced to experience their levels of customer service (or lack there of), over the last two weeks. An experience that seems to be frustrating users by the thousands, as reflected in their forums.

This blog was initially created with a focus on Design, Brands, Trends & Traction. We tend to write about achievements in design, discuss the positive happenings of a given brand or outline burgeoning trends. Almost always, we attempt to keep things positive.

Occasionally however, a brand beckons the request to be called out on how poorly they are handling an aspect of their conversation with their customers. I mean, isn’t that precisely what branding is all about? Your specific persona, the way in which your product or service is perceived, and in today’s marketplace – the conversation and experience your current and prospective customer base has with your brand.

Skype – with claims of great value calls to anywhere in the world, fail to inform you; of how poor their customer service is. Nor, how many weeks you may have to wait for a response to your support inquiry (if they respond at all). Don’t be so quick to think that a Telecommunications company like Skype, actually has a Telephone number you can call; in fact, I dare you to try and find one on their site. It is non existent.

As aforementioned, I have been an avid user for quite some time – spending a great deal on both personal & business calls as I travel. This week however, when attempting to make a rather urgent call to a disgruntled customer of our own (see, we actually have a telephone number), I was confronted with this screen.

My initial thought was that there had been some sort of billing error, had my credit card expired? Did my last auto-recharge via Paypal not work? After a little investigation, I came to realize that in fact; there was no billing error, no issue on my part, my account is in good standing & furthermore; I have an abundance of prepaid credit on my account.

So what gives? I best contact Skype’s customer support department I thought. If I could find it. After weaving through a minimum of 6 different areas of their website, and ‘finally’ finding the place to submit a support ticket when your account has been blocked; I submitted my request & I waited. And then I waited, and I waited – and some two weeks later; 4 support tickets later, and a bunch of posts on their forum. I am still waiting. The only correspondence received, in over two weeks; has been auto responder emails, as below:

Thank you for contacting Skype Support!

This email is confirmation that we have received your request and a Customer Support Specialist will be working to get back to you with an answer as soon as possible.

Because the majority of requests require research to resolve, it can sometimes take us up to 48 hours to respond, though we make every effort to get back to you as quickly as possible and most queries are answered within 24 hours.

Though we will do our best to respond to you as quickly as possible, sometimes the best way to get immediate answers is to search our knowledgebase at http://support.skype.com where you can find answers to questions like:

• How to Use Skype
• Skype In/Skype Out
• Skype Voicemail
• Skype Privacy & Security
• And many other questions

You can also find helpful step by step User Guides at http://www.skype.com/help/guides/ that will help walk you through things like:

• Getting Started Using Skype
• Installing Skype
• Adding a Skype Contact
• Making a Skype Call
• And many more

We hope this is helpful and again, thank you for contacting us. We’ll be getting back to you as soon as possible!

Sincerely,
Skype Support

Please do not reply to this automated email,
we will reply to you directly from your support request.

What I would like to know, is how on earth Skype can claim to offer a business grade service? Nobody responds to your emails, nor your support tickets, there is no telephone number to call; and by the looks of the support forums & a quick google search – there are several thousand people with the same problem.

It is completely evident, that Skype, whom are owned by Ebay, have absolutely no regard for their customers. The savings I have made over the past several years by using their service – do not account for the time I have wasted, and frustration that has accumulated over the past two weeks; as I try and get in contact with ‘anyone’ from within their company.

They never explained in their slick marketing messages, that cheap calls, would amount to pathetic levels of customer service. When ebay purchased skype for $2.6Billion back in 2005 – did they not allocate a budget to a customer service department?

Can any of our readers suggest an alternative? I’d happily take my business elsewhere.

Miniaturization continues unabated, a ream of consumer products getting smaller and shrinking down to previously unthinkable new sizes. Our latest and slightly kind of amazing new example is the projector, that heavy, fan-blowing noisy thing you see hanging from the ceiling of a University classroom or sitting on the desk in a boardroom. Somehow, now, again, without any damn notice, there’s one that fits in your pocket and hooks up to an ipod. What the hell?

It’s the Optoma Pico, which hooks up to iPods, PSPs, Digital Cameras, and the like. If you’re an ad agency on the go and need to fire up a presentation to a client while you’re sitting in a bar, forget both crowding intimately over the screen of your iPhone. Pull this out, hook it up, and amaze everyone with an image on the wall.

The New York Times’s David Pogue, resident technology-for-the-masses guru, had an exclusive look at this device and wrote up a review of it, back on election day.

it produce[s] an astonishingly bright, clear, vivid video or still image. That’s right — from a projector you’ve pulled from your jeans pocket.

The minimum distance for this projector is eight inches from your “screen”; the maximum is 8.5 feet away, at which point you get a 65-inch image. And it really, really helps if you dim the lights or use a properly reflective movie screen.

Even so, the Pico projector is the first of its kind — other micro-projectors are on the way — and over all, it’s awesome. When it goes on sale in two weeks, it will give parents a completely portable backseat-of-the-minivan movie theater for the kids. It will let photographers display their portfolios with much greater size and impact than they’d get with a scrapbook — right from the digital camera, if need be. It will permit spur-of-the-moment demos or pitches for corporate presenters or independent filmmakers, wherever they happen to be, without having to set anything up or reserve a room.

Whether the consumer market will feel an urgent need for a pocket-sized projector is another thing: it’s easy to fall back on excitement and look past the notion of whether or not such a product is actually useful. But I’m sure it is–the very notion of miniaturizing projectors will eventually lead us to that golden, shining moment in the future, the moment wherein we’ll walk up to a touchscreen, press a button, and a tiny beam of light we can barely see will project some kind of spinning image of our dreams, right in front of us. Why is it that all my expectations of future technological direction can be traced back to 3 or 4 movies?

Getting back to the projector, though: it’s the versatility of it all that’s incredible. I think this is a ridiculous moment, overall, for the amount of new technology that is suddenly being crammed down into small spaces. We’ve got a full-fledged HDTV camera with interchangeable, pro-level lenses in the new Canon EOS Mark II 5D, the juggernaut that is the iPhone, a netbook revolution, and 3d Printers that don’t take up a room but rather just some space on your desk. The amount of time between these innovations keeps shrinking exponentially. What seems to be different this time is we’re not looking at leaps and bounds in say, processing speed, but in the physical nature of things: product size, digital imaging, incredibly small but still-usable products.

When the launch of the new Macbooks gets a video detailing the exact industrial design process as a crucial launch component, there’s some kind of new object-design era at hand, no? It’s a fun time to be buying stuff.

For some reason I’ve been seeing a lot of mention of Miroslav Sasek around various websites recently. What he’s primarily known for is the series of books called This Is…, which provide a children’s introduction to various cities, but also work as charming guidebooks/introductions to readers of any age.

His idea came from noticing that parents, when on various trips with their children, tended to stay absorbed in their various surroundings, leaving the kids to figure out exactly what the hell is going on for themselves. Writing from a child’s point of view, his books please everyone through sheer charm alone. The illustrations explain, from the first time you see them, exactly why these books aren’t just pedestrian stuff for your kids, but rather bewitching illustrative glimpses of each city they profile.

Some thoughts from his official website:

This is London is the second This is book and undoubtedly one of the best. Sasek concentrates on the things he likes best: people, costume, transport and local details that somehow come together to form a whole impression of the city that still seems quite accurate today.

Here’s a review of one of his titles from no less than the Times Literary Supplement:

The pattern of M. Sasek’s books is now firmly established. It would be difficult for him to introduce innovations, and these would not be welcomed by his admirers, who delight in the fixed conventions of his unconventional portraits. It is the more remarkable that each book is pure Sasek and at the same time each catches the characteristic atmosphere of his subject…

This is Venice has many of the artist’s gentle digs at tourists and at the vendors who feed on them. It shows, too, that M. Sasek is primarily an architectural draughtsman. His drawings of churches, palaces and odd corners are brilliant simplifications which never depart from the essential truths of building. That he draws buildings not in noble isolation but surrounded by the mess and muddle of a living city — washing on the line, telly-aerials on the roof — endears him more deeply to the reader.

His art style renders the cities immensely appealing to every reader, and these are some books that you’d do fine getting any kids or travelers in your family this year. His images are funny, and poke at the gawking tourists and the general things touristy families like to do (or feel terribly obligated to do) in each city.

He also did some other books not entirely focused on cities but sites, including This is the United Nations and This is Cape Canaveral (now called Kennedy), which are gold mines. Check out his great UN book here, and the Cape Canaveral image below.

While it’s only November, it’s always useful to collect various links in the endless lead-up to Christmas, in case you need some ideas for thoughtful, interesting gifts. As each Christmas passes, I always find myself increasingly obliged to find gifts for various kids in my extended family, and since I don’t have much experience with toy stores any more, and can’t buy children’s clothes to save my life, I generally try to find gifts that seem timelessly appealing and unique enough to mean something. Sasek’s books fit perfectly into this category. They’ll thrill any parent too.

I’ve taken a big interest in public/street art recently, but most of the instances that I’ve happened upon and enjoyed to any degree are various modifications of the landscape that serve to provoke and confuse. As I still see it, street art generally tries to do the following three things: present art where it’s least expected, comment on the use of public space, and tries to be extremely clever.

But one thing that I haven’t seen this discipline do so often is actually make positive use of that public space in a way that, say, a city planner could appreciate. No problem–that’s not the artist’s job by any means, but surely there are a few street art projects out there that don’t just try and screw with the perception of the urban landscape but instead actually improve it, even in ways that conservative, committee-constrained planners could approve of and maybe even embrace?

I don’t mean big, cool paintings on the side of old buildings–go to any city with a modicum of artistic spirit about it (Montreal, for example) and you’ll find tons of that, all generally city-approved or at least tacitly endorsed by the fact that the best of them stay up for years. No, this is smaller scale, along the lines of the street art we’ve seen over the last few years, those exhibitions of “urban play” that trip up expectations and tweak common elements to new effect.

Enter Joshua Callaghan, who has done just this, and remarkably, he’s done it within the confines of a city-approved project. We all know about those power & utility boxes present on our streets, usually painted in an unremarkable, military-green. They’re ubiquitous and hardly appealing, but thankfully ignorable enough. After seeing Callaghan’s work, though, I’m starting to notice their stark uselessness in the landscape more and more, these big green boxes of electricity that occasionally contain some posters and flyers but more often than not do absolutely nothing besides what’s required of them to keep our telephones and traffic lights running.

The LA neighbourhood of Culver City decided to do something about them, and comissioned Callaghan to cover several of their boxes with large vinyl prints containing photographs of the landscape, or carefully chosen shots designed to somehow “blend” with the surrounding colours in a pleasing way. And they work as more than that, since the illusion is broken when you come up close and realize that hey, it’s just a normal old utility box with a big sticker all around it.

There’s a ton of possibility here: find an historical photograph from 50 years ago of the exact same spot, and put it on the utility box, creating a fleeting look back in time where one might least expect it. It’s also one excellent way of getting some commissions for your work: if you’re a young street artist, out filling the city with your highly original designs, you might just get a call from a city authority that isn’t about fining you or trying to foot you the bill for however much it cost to clean up your art project. Here’s hoping more planning departments see the light.

If you’ve stumbled across any other examples of urban/public art being used in an official context, condoned and approved by the authorities, fill us in!

Not being very fanatical about cars, I always assumed those beautiful red Ferraris were designed by an in-house team of skilled Italians, toiling away up in Turin and emerging once in a while to speed around the Italian countryside in a ridiculously nice, fast car.

Turns out, though, that a lot of the classic Ferraris, plus several other cars (Alfa Romeos, Volvos, Maseratis, even Fords) are sometimes designed by a famous Italian company called Pininfarina. And now they’re entering the electric market.

Tons of electric cars have recently been announced–the Smart EV, the Renault Cleanova, the Nissan Nuvu to name a few–and now this Italian company, who have never before manufactured, but have designed a ton of cars, is entering the fray.

Teamed with a a French company called Bolloré, Pininfarina is priming the first production car entirely under the Pininfarina brand, and it’s 100% electric. It’s also called the B0 or B-Zero. That acronym, obviously, has no unfortunate second meaning in Italian like it does in English. ‘B.O.’ translates as puzza di sudore, which doesn’t really work for a car anyway.

Seinfeld also wasn’t syndicated in Italy, so there’s another reference lost. Regardless, they’ll probably change the name for the North American market just to keep us from making too many jokes.

Anyway, back to the car–it’s coming to dealerships at the end of 2009. Claiming that the battery can be recharged from a domestic main socket in a number of hours, the car should get 250km on a single charge, and will have a top speed of 130km/h. There’s also a fast 5-minute charge that’ll be enough for 25km of city driving.

This is a fully electric, zero-pollution car (as in it produces no pollution itself–generating the electricity to power it is, as we all know, another matter), with solar panels on the roof and hood to power some components and aid in the recharge, plus capacitors that do the same by drawing on the energy created as the car brakes.

It’s not going to be cheap at the outset: €25,000 ($33,600) when it’s released in Europe, the States, and Japan. That’s alright–new concepts are rarely affordable at the very start. The car is dedicated to Andrea Pininfarina, former chairman of the company, who died suddenly this summer after a Vespa crash in Turin.

A few months ago I stopped into the kind of store you can find easier in Paris than anywhere else–full of old advertising art, vintage posters, and ancient maps. Next to nothing cost under 100 euros, and if I were rich, I would decorate 20 houses with the posters I found in there. I’m not rich.

I did still manage to find some beautiful prints around Paris, though. The great thing about all the green-stalled vendors that line the Seine is the variety of their stuff; they don’t have the exact same posters and cards that their neighbour has, and a lot of it is a step above the mass-produced vintage reprints more widely available. I bought a ton of it and it’s still all over my walls.

For those of us, however, who no longer have a fast train connection to Paris, there are other ways of decorating with some of the best old illustration and cartography available. Sure, you can order about 17 billion different prints online, but the minimum cost for a poster is often above $20–a quick glance at the “Italian Maps” section of barewalls.com shows an amazing 3/4 map of Rome, and it costs $31.50. Not the end of the world, but not ridiculously cheap either.

I recently spent some time back in my native Canada, and figured that on my return to Europe I’d hit whatever old, dustry print shops I could find (there are really 17,0000 of them in every big European city) and get to decorating my new walls. I didn’t expect to find much in Ottawa, but as I was wandering around a paper shop I suddenly saw a beautiful, faux-aged vintage map of Rome. Then I saw another hundred copies of the same map below it. They were hanging over a little bar, nestled in among other big pieces of paper featuring small dogs and various forgettable patterns. The price? $3.95. I’d just found my new, cheap-as-hell decorating source: wrapping paper.

The company that makes these maps is Cavallini & Co., they have a sizeable line of them, and they’re all worth a look. Sure, it’s just gift paper and obviously not as strong as a real poster, but that’s the whole point–you can buy 4 or 5 of these for the price of a single poster. And there’s actually something about the texture and consistency of the wrapping paper that serves the vintage theme rather well.

Most of these are 20″ x 28″ sizes, which you know is just fine for your wall. There are also several selections of vintage advertising illustration, some of which I received half-wrapped around some recent books I got–my friend didn’t even tape the wrapping paper, she just hastily placed the books inside and treated the gift-wrapping as a gift in itself. It’s on my wall as a result.

You can find the Cavallini & Co. wrapping paper online here, here, or here.

And here are a few other examples of gift wrap that can easily double as posters, and cost nothing:

The French Paper Company also has a ton of quality wrapping paper that can be used for other stuff too, and Whimsy’s Dude Wrap “Paper Invaders” edition is awesome as well.

There’s something about the simplicity of a motorino that’s irresistible: it’s a culture entirely different from that of the motocicletta or motorcycle, which involves shifting gears and straddling the bike like a horse; on a motorino you sit like you’re having dinner, with only a simplified spedometer and a couple of lights on your display. People from 14 to 85 drive them here, and hopping on a scooter is about as natural as going for a walk.

A couple of years ago, Piaggio introduced a new line of their famous Vespa scooters that, while not exactly re-creating the perfect heavy lines of the old Vespa frontpiece (for those you need the just-cancelled Vespa PX), comes pretty close. It’s a happily backwards-looking design similar to Fiat new’s cinquecento, the closest a lot of people will get to ever owning one of Fiat’s old masterpieces of a car.

Vespa Canada (yeah, we do drive some vespas in Canada, even if they’re prohibitively expensive and our scooter season outside of Vancouver is far too short) recently commissioned some great print ads that simultaneously introudced the new Vespa and harkened the arrival of spring. The theme is butterflies, close enough to the original meaning of the word Vespa (which would be wasp) and a little more appealing than that annoying insect when we’re talking about heralding in a new season.

The thematic unity of the butterfly/scooter concept left the designers free to incorporate elements of different design eras into each particular ad, with splendid results all around. I especially love the 1970s-themed design with its concentric lines and perfect colour scheme. Beautiful stuff.

Our final scooter-related find is this set of stunning high-end helmets from the Parisian designer Les Ateliers Ruby, which top any helmet I have ever seen anyone wearing anywhere. They’re lush, shiny, and thematically perfect for anyone buying a scooter for more than just a convenient method of transport.

I once saw a dude on a vintage vespa in Paris, sporting white converse, good jeans, a perfect vintage button-up shirt, and smoking a Gauluoises–which wasn’t hanging out of his mouth, mind you, but resting there in that inimitable ‘this took me 3 seconds to do but would take you a damn lifetime‘ French style. If he’d had this helmet, we would have our winner in the coolest man ever to ride a scooter. He’s probably already got one, the bastard.

Owners of hybrids and highly fuel efficient vehicles are feeling the love all over the world. Hybrid car drivers can already get preferential parking spaces at IKEA stores. The Logan International Airport is offering free parking for hybrid drivers. Los Angeles has been offering free parking all over the city for the past three years to owners of hybrids and cars that get over 45 miles per gallon. Even New York is now considering letting hybrids off the hook when it comes to parking meters.

In Ontario, Canada’s most serious Earth-offender, they are considering a three-tier green program for hybrid and low-emission drivers. Their government is working on a “sliding scale” pricing system to determine which cars are the most environmentally friendly and therefore will get the most perks. The more fuel efficient your car is, the less you will have to pay for things like registration and parking. Canadian eco-friendly auto consumers can also qualify for an “eco-license plate;” a green plate which will entitle them to special eco-perks which have yet to be determined.

Many think that although some rewards, such as a fast ride in the carpool lane or reduced registration rates may be warranted, some perks like free or preferential parking are not. The argument is that no hybrid car owner is in more need of preferential parking than someone in a wheelchair or a pregnant woman. So far California and Colorado have both approved the use of the carpool lane for single occupancy hybrids. However, most major cities in those states have condemned of the idea.

There’s also an argument going on about who should qualify for eco-perks. What about the minivan full of commuting co-workers? Is someone who trades in their Hummer for a moped or motorcycle less worthy of a sweet parking spot? How about the Chevy Avalanche? It utilizes an Active Fuel Management system which according to EPA tests saves about 5.5%-7.5% in fuel economy. How are these solutions less worthy of eco-perks than owning a Hybrid car?

A lot of these eco-perks aren’t necessarily enforced anyway, but many think that it’s just the encouragement and recognition that people need to take a step in the right direction for saving the Earth. In order for any special program to have a long-lasting impact, it will most likely need to be backed by a considerable amount of businesses and at least a local or state government, much like Ontario did. Even then, Houston, Texas offered preferential parking up to the public and had only one citizen take advantage of it in a six month period.

So far in the USA, hybrid cars only make up about 3% of our morning traffic. So it’s understandable if there are some Perkonomic ups and downs while we make the switch to eco-friendly transportation. Frankly, the whole idea will be a lot more successful if we focus not only on people who own hybrids, but also on individuals who are trying to make a positive impact on the environment in other ways too. Hybrid cars are wicked cool, but there’s more than one way to offset a carbon footprint.

PERKONOMICS was coined by Trendwatching.com: a full, free briefing on this trend will be published on October 1, 2008.

Back when I biked to work on a regular basis, one of the biggest annoyances about each trip (besides those horrible clouds of bugs every biker occasionally hits) came from my resoundingly inelegant bike helmet. That was back in the mandatory-safety-land better known as Canada, where I felt slightly embarassed not wearing one, and was never sure whether I could be subjected to a fine for going without.

The reason my specific helmet was so damn annoying was partly due to the puffy-yet-thick mess of hair that rests ontop of my oversized head, ensuring no helmet ever looked anything but stupid and silly, but also because, for the life of me, I couldn’t find a helmet I liked to look at. I wanted a matte finish, simple, black, understated, like a skateboarding helmet. “Oh, you’ll sweat like a madman with that,” people told me. I didn’t care. I sweat anyway.

I finally found one halfway to those specifications and figured that was the best I could do. Eventually, I kept thinking, if only due to their increased proliferation, style will have to become a consideration when we talk about bike helmets–otherwise why even bother colouring them, if you’re not going to put some thought into what your head looks like while you’re biking around?

From what I can gather, bike helmets are generally divided into two depressing camps: the light, ugly racing ones, and the heavy, less-ugly BMX ones. Until recently I’d never seen any kind of radical re-design that brought any great aesthetic innovation to bear on the bike helmet, but new Danish company Yakkay has miraculously come up with a god-that-seems-so-obvious-in-hindsight concept that works wonders on the style front. If only they’d existed back when I was biking a lot, I could have been travelling around with what looked like an actual hat, albeit one that happened to contain a small strap coming out the bottom, saving my head from certain injury.

The reason Yakkay’s idea is a little bit revolutionary–and it’s something I’d never thought about before, but probably should have–is because it asserts that the shiny/matte finish of a normal bike helmet isn’t what we need to see. We don’t have to see all the plastic and foam that’s in place to protect our head, because it’s there to protect, not to be looked at. If we fall off our bike, it’s time to get a new helmet, anyway, so why not put some less-than-indestructible material on there to make it look good for the duration?

Yakkay decided the best thing to put overtop of the helmet was a fashionable hat. Genius! And not only have they done it with their wonderful Paris-style helmet, they’ve even gone and produced what they called the Izmir, which looks just like a jockey helmet. I think it’s a sly joke about bike helmets–if you’re going to wear a stupid round black thing on your head, at least look like an elegant, bourgeois horse-jumper while you’re at it.

It’s an idea that now seems ridiculously obvious. I’m sure I’ve seen someone who’s bought an oversized hat of some kind and popped it on top of a bike helmet, and yet Yakkay are the first to take it one step further–streamlining the process, fitting a series of different and stylish hats to the helmets, and releasing them to market. Innovative and simple as anything–love it.