For this reason last summer I decided that I was going to found a start-up, a small creative studio focused on web experiences founded  as a home of curiosity and ideas sharing with my friend and colleague the same vision of what makes a project great: Less rigidity, more innovation and more creativity. Recognizing the opportunity, we left our jobs and joined forces starting out in the Caribbean’s. The rest of our adventure is history in the making.

Everyday you read on newspapers articles about start-ups that made it big, or burned, and I always like to think, we can fail or we can do better.
If we didn’t appreciate the challenge, embracing this high-stakes game, gambling with our time as well as our money we wouldn’t achieve what we did. A start-up environment can be fantastic, if you’re willing to take the risks.

I would like to share with you what are the main highlights of this particular career path:

Everyme is a special place for you to be the real you. No one wants to share everything with everyone. With Everyme, you can share like you do in real life, in intimate Circles.
Create Circles for your family, your coworkers, your best friends, your high school buddies, your significant other and more.

A Circle is a private news feed between you and a group of people. It’s private and secure, so you no longer need to worry about who sees what. And because a Circle is created from your address book, you don’t need to convince everyone to sign up for yet another service in order to receive your stories, it just works.

via Everyme.

The city is well known for it’s International Film Festival and is the world’s biggest annual awards show and festival for professionals in the creative communications industry.

I planned on having a relaxing vacation and walking a long with Cannes’ palatial hotels lining palm-shaded on boulevard de la Croisette made my stay perfect.

Here are my personal suggestions:

Hotel Intecontinental Caltron: InterContinental Carlton Cannes is located near the beach in Cannes and close to La Croisette, Palais des Festivals et des Congres, and Cannes Harbour. If you’re looking for real luxury and exquisite of service this is the place to go.

Hotel 3.14: Hotel 3.14 is a unique design hotel located in the heart of Cannes, just 55 yards from La Croisette. It offers luxury accommodations with a rooftop spa and a panoramic pool.

Each floor of the hotel is individually themed to represent 1 of the 5 continents.

La Croisette: The Croisette is known for the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès, where the Cannes Film Festival (Le Festival International du Film de Cannes) is held. Many expensive shops, restaurants, and hotels (such as the Carlton, Majestic, JW Marriott Cannes, Chanel and Martinez) line the road. It goes completely along the coastline of Cannes. The boulevard lights up in different colors during night time making it the place to be if you’re looking for a romantic walk long the coastline.

Adobe Touch gives me all that I require to do the minor edits I usually do with travel photography, and does an excellent job creating a fast workflow.

While playing around with the App today, I decided to create a very simple and quick tutorial to obtain a vintage effect on your photos.

I hope you find this tutorial useful and that it will help you understand the power of the brand new Photo Editing app by Adobe.

What you will need

• An iPad 2
• Adobe Photoshop Touch
• Snapseed
• A Camera
• Apple iPad Camera Connection Kit
• A subject

The Process

1. After importing your photos with the Camera Connection Kit, open Adobe Photoshop Touch and select the photo you want to edit.

2. From the Adjustments panel, select Levels. Levels is a tool in Photoshop and other image editing programs which can be used to move and stretch the brightness levels of an image histogram. Add some contrast to the photo moving the sliders to the edges towards the center. Once satisfied, press Apply.

3. From the Adjustment Panel, this time press Curves. The Photoshop curves tool is perhaps the most powerful and flexible image transformation, yet it may also be one of the most intimidating, this is way you need patience to play around with this tool to master it’s full power. To gain a vintage look select the blue Channel and higher the position lower-left slider and drag down the top-left one. My suggestion is that you experiment tweaking with the other channels as I did with the green one as shown below. After a few tries you’ll see that you’ll master this tool without any difficulties.

4. Crop the image to enhance the composition of the photo. I decided to give more focus to the top of the pen using the golden spiral method. 

5. Save the photo as a Jpeg and open it in Snapseed.

6. Apply a Tilt-Shift filter to add even more focus to the top of the pen.

7. Snapseed’s built-in Vintage filter look great but in my opinion are too strong. Lower the intensity of the one you choose to use to equilibrate the look and feel of the photo. Save and exit.

8. Open the photo saved from Snapseed in Photoshop Touch again. This time create two empty layers. Select the first empty layer and from the “&” top menu select Fill&Stroke.

Select a dark-beige color and from the layer menu found in the bottom-right of the screen set the Layer blending mode to Darken and lower it’s opacity to 25%-40%.

9. Repeat the same process on the second empty layer but this time select a dark blue/purple color and se the blending mode to Lighten  and lower it’s opacity to 40%-45%.

10. Sharpen the image from the filter menu and save your work and enjoy your faux-vintage photo.

One of the most common questions young (and older) people who know me or with whom I work with is: “How do I defeat procrastination?”.

Trough experience I find that treating your self with a price is the best way to hack procrastination.

Your mind is like a kid, if you want it be good you need to treat it with candy or gifts.

Here is what I usually do when I understand that I’m not that willing to complete a task and I start procrastinating:

1. Find yourself a treat, i.e. something that you cannot resist a day without. Like opening Facebook, Tweet, reading your favourite website, smoke a cigarette, or watch a video on Youtube.
2. Embrace the Pomodoro Technique. Set a timer for 25 minutes, and keep working on your tasks with no distractions at all. Once the timer goes off you may stop.
3. At this point you can treat yourself with an activity of your choice found in point No. 1 for 5 minutes. Once the 5 minutes are over go back to point No. 2 and start working again. Every 4 breaks take a longer one (have lunch for example).

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

– Aristotle

Walk and think of how those little changes have caught your attention, making your day different.

In that precise moment you discover that the power of creativity lies in the wonder that grows in you when you see the usual things from a new perspective. Effective communication envelops you, knows how to conquer you. Sometimes, it does it with ease and imagination, sometimes with revolutionary ideas that change us forever.

Our agency is not looking for perfection we are chasing a dream. A dream to take over the world and paint it in different shades of colours. We do not want to invent a colour that does not exist, but we want to mix up two colours we love in a way that the result will create an even more unique experience to be viewed. We want to abandon our origins without ever forgetting them.

Ideas, you should not be afraid to live them fully, pursue them and to listen to them. We’ve worked for years with big names, but it is not this that makes us special. What convinces us to continue on these great adventures is the fire of passion in the eyes of those to whom we want to offer our services. Those who speak for themselves, those who their business card represents the passion that moves their existence.

Only by following these guidelines we have learned to work with curiosity through worlds that we really wanted to know and make them our own. We have always found passion in what we do and have often followed a road that was not the easiest, but at least it was our own.

AlmaCreativa was born by only two individuals and our world is our study subject and sandbox. We were born to fight without fear. We love discoveries, evaluate things and situations with our eyes, get involved and take risks, laugh for no reason and stay up late thinking of an idea that we could give birth to without any rational logic but with only pure inspiration. We love everything that enriches us and changes us, makes us think and changes our path. We love the unexpected and impossible challenges. We like the element of surprise.

By the way, we take care of communication and we are a company dedicated to creative and artistic direction, Social Media Marketing and media production. Maybe we should have spoken about it earlier but we wanted you to know our values and what makes us different. We are passionate about what we do, and we’re good at it, at least that’s what others say.

Our team’s past clients have included industry leaders in entertainment, technology, advertising and design, including Adobe, Google, Mercedes AMG, Volvo, Sky, Eni, Disney Channel, Mini, Vodafone, Mediaset, Discovery Channel, Tisettanta and many more.

We are the change that you want to see in the world. We are AlmaCreativa.

You may even stop and glare and the reflection of the sun on a tall skyscraper or the architecture of a flower placed on top of a table of a bistrot.

For a moment, a blink of an eye, all your attention is focused on that detail, that person. Your mind starts wondering, you start randomly asking yourself: “Why is that man acting weird? How much of the life of that splendid woman was improved because of her beauty? Is she sick of succeeding only because of her appearance? What is that kid imagining while playing with such a simple material? Why that flower has that specific color, where does it come from, how did it get here?” And as fast as these thoughts arrived they immediately disappear, like a breath on a window.

Everybody travels, everybody loves to see new places, it helps us confront the place we call home with other destinations. How many time did you ask yourself: “How my life would have been if I were born here?”. You question yourself in a passive way. And end up by not getting to know who actually lives there, and can answer your question in the best of ways.

I always travelled, since I was born, I have been very lucky to have this privilege. And I love travelling. But I recently understood that I was just a spectator, of this beautiful show that’s called “World”.

Today, on the 2th of October 2011, I was sitting in a bar in Santo Domingo waiting for my flight to Madrid, talking with my friend and colleague Luca about this vast topic.

We had the same will to travel, asking whatever questions we thought about to whoever we encountered, discovering the hard way to live in a specific place, adapting ourselves, questioning ourselves every single moment, discovering, looking, living.

It’s a simple task, just look around yourself, see a person or even a simple object, a chair. Ask yourself: “Why is it built that way, why in those colors, who created it, is his life changed once he projected it?” Wouldn’t you be intrigued of meeting this person, get to know him, try to understand is brain and work flow.

I love to watch documentaries, but I always felt a passive viewer and it always frustrated me the fact that I couldn’t ask my own questions or live on my own skin the experiences they were describing.

It’s been a while now that I have this fixation, when I travel, to depart with no information what’s so ever on my destination. In this way I can truly experience a land, asking people to live there what to see and do(if I’m on vacation), and maybe get to know so much somebody new that he will be my own Virgilio during my trip.

Talking with my friend Luca, we arrived at the conclusion that life should be more like a RPG, something like Final Fantasy VII (if you don’t know what it is Google it up, buy it, play it and finish it before continuing, it will be worth it).
In an RPG you can live a story, but at the same time you are willing to discover the more as possible to fully enjoy the experience of the game. You start looking for secret treasures, you bump in to NPC(non-playing-characters) wondering what kind of information they will give you, maybe they’ll tell you a joke, maybe they’ll give you an important detail on a side quest. You want to know everything. And once it’s finally over you’re left frustrated since you are so attached to that world and experience that you would like to continue to discover new adventures and talk with new characters.

What if your life could be like this? Why aren’t we enough curious? Why most of the time we are passively living our lives, watching things pass by, maybe entering a routine that might chain you forever until one day, you will regret that you didn’t see as much as you would have had to. This was the main reason I stopped playing videogames long ago. The world was my sandbox, I only needed to stop reading it’s manual.

We are constantly trying to earn time, just to have more time to work, to sleep. Have you ever asked yourself, i.e., why do you keep sending SMS? To earn time? Time for do what? With an SMS you are actively proclaiming that your time is not worth to spend talking with the person you wrote to. I find it tremendously irritating and not respectful.

If I had to describe how I feel now with a sentence I would define myself as a dot.
A dot that has lost his sentence and has discovered new paragraphs, chapters, other languages, new books, new libraries. I don’t want an easy life, I want to gather all the opportunities that life has to give me and one day, when I’ll be old, I want to say to my grandsons: “I seen it all. For real.”.

My biggest concern now is trying to keep of my tracks. It isn’t easy if you settle down for a while. My mind might stop travelling as my body. So I need to keep moving, keep looking, keep questioning…

AlmaCreativa, my recently founded company, has the aim to help people open their eyes and improve their life by making them enjoy it more, finding solutions on the problems that don’t let people live actively.

In the last months I heard many people define my new lifestyle foolish and with no direction. And I usually ask them why wouldn’t they live how I’m doing right now, normally I don’t get any answers, and I know then that I broke a wall in his mind.

I know my words may seem pretentious to the most of people. But I can’t stop wondering what world it could be if everybody wanted to knew everything and everyone.

I hope to stay this foolish as people say for a long time, I know very well that one day I’ll settle down too, but me sight and my mind will keep travelling with my experiences.

“It’s not about the destination it’s about the journey”

I’m not dead. Infact you may say I never been more alive than now (for exception of a appendix surgery done last week…).

It’s been a long while I’ve not update my works online or took some new photos, this is not because I’ve been sleeping in the last months but because I’ve been working very hard on a project that will change the life of many people.

This blog entry doesn’t want to be a marketing strategy to tease the web, it’s more like a journal entry, explaining what milestones I managed to conquer in the last weeks, in what way they changed my way of thinking and work flow, and most of all, the way they change my way of living.

I spent most of my professional career working for clients that required to reach specific objectives (i.e. increase the sales, create a new image for their brand, make their start-up known online, and so on…). Most of my work was disposable, services that could be use and then forgotten by the masses, a drop in the ocean. For this reason I wanted to express myself more, hoping to leave a mark, leave something to remember, and for this reason I started doing photography.

But this was not enough.

It sounds like a huge clichè but in my mind a question started screaming it’s way out: “Am I changing things? Am I improving the life of people or am I simply intoxicating the world with new forms of advertising?

I had enough. I needed to find a way to use my abilities as a digital communicator and a creative to leave my own footprint on earth.

From this whim I started thinking, taking time off work, brainstorming with my self every day, every hour, and I felt happy, my purpouse made me change the way I lived.

One day I recieved a call from my collegue and best friend Luca Naj-Oleari, asking me if I wanted to spend a month in the carribean to help him out with a complex website he was curating for the italian Goverment. I jumped on a plane and spent my summer holidays in a place that would deeply change me.

I’ll not describe all the details, the only thing I shall say is that I never breathed life so deeply in my lungs. Everyday was lived as the last day in my life and my way of looking ad things mutated forever.

While in the carribean we got in contact with the haitian reality. After all this time, things haven’t changed at all. The hope of a new life in their eyes motivated us to do something for them. How could we help them?

Talking with a building company we understood that it’s very difficult to help Haiti in the rebuilding process, the goverment and burocracy was in always in the way. Money before life.
We had to do something for this.

In a little house on the beach in Cabarete (Dominican Republic), me and my friend Luca gave birth to “AlmaCreativa”. A company with the aim to use digital communication and creativity only to improve the life of the human kind.

Being in the middle of nowhere, enjoying the nature, every single detail of it, getting to know our inner selfs helped us discover a whole new way to generate creativity. Our mind where hacked and run faster, smoother, and started to think big. Crazy ideas, some of them insane, utopic, but as we recall, great ideas…

…and our first projects name was: “Le Rêve – The Dream”.

“Le Rêve” is a ray of light in the Haitian territory.

A new life. A solution. A new beginning. It’s 2 square kilometers of hope, in 22.000 square kilometers of despair. Trough an new donation system that we are creating that will revolutionize the way you can help the less fortunate, “Le Rêve” will give 12.000 haitians new houses, education, health assistance and most important, work. The new donation system will be the main tool of the project, the engine that will make it burst viral, if we do everything straight. It will be quite revolutional, and it will be usable with other fund raising project. I can’t wait to make it public.

This is just the first project of “AlmaCreativa”. We have already prepared much more new concepts. I hope I can share my new sight with more people as possible.

Keep tuned for updates on this and more projects.
I hope that between a meeting and another I can shoot some new photos. I’m afraid my camera will not speak to me again if I keep ignoring her…