I’m always interested in experiences. How people perceive and interact with objects, websites - anything really. That’s probably why this video and article about Grant Achatz’s haute cuisine and work at his Chicago restaurant Alinea caught my attention so quickly.

Seriously, it’s 7 minutes of your life that give you an entirely new perspective to what exactly is “innovation” in something you’ve been doing since you were born - eating.

The video also includes Achatz talking about his ultimate aim: to use food as a kind of artistic medium to give individual diners an emotional experience. “If you can get past the soy sauce on chocolate, you will enjoy it and feel a certain way. It’s a journey where your heart beats a little faster.”

All this only goes out to prove how much of an impact carefully crafted experiences actually have in people. Seeing Grant Achatz (whom I’ll admit never having heard of before today) talk about his craft was, at the very least, inspiring.

The relationship between innovation and geography seems like an ever returning meme in the New York Times. Today, they’ve published an article called “When it comes to Innovation, Geography is Destiny”. It would be useless for me to try and refute the theory again, because I’ve been there and done that time and time again - so here are the cold hard facts about life outside the valley:

• Less concentration of creative people - Less people to tap into about a new idea or new product. Less networking possibilities, as few places and events gather the creative minds together to build a culture of ideation.
• Less experimentation - There’s more of a culture of “use” than there is one of “create” - this is a problem particularly grave in europe when it comes to the web and technology.
• Less capital - naturally the VC eye is over the valley and little over India and China. Other places get only a small percentage of investment when it comes to technology-oriented innovation efforts.

Case study: ourselves

We’re a small company that’s grown out of opportunities started in the valley, but we’ve established ourselves in Portugal (where our whole team is from) for several reasons, mostly of a personal nature. The majority of our clients is however (you guessed it), between San Francisco and San Jose.

It sometimes feels claustrophobic to have the ideas and not the space or environment to put them into practice. We haven’t really found a solution to that problem, but I keep thinking about it. Not having VC readily available makes you try harder and bootstrap efficiently. Not having people to tap into around makes you work harder to engage in global conversations.

Embracing constraints applies perfectly to our position. We use the distance to produce better work. After we’re done setting the vision for a project (where communication is essential), we’re in our own space, alone although always reachable, creating towards a final solution. It involves trust (to overcome the distance), and it involves creativity - but aren’t those two key aspects of any project?

Conclusions

I’m an optimistic, and I like that idea to blend into the image of Webreakstuff as a team. As such, not being in the valley is an annoyance, but not a show-stopper. As long as we have the energy to keep working with our clients or on our own projects, the valley’s always at an airplane-reach. And so is everything that’s good about the place.

You know it’s a good day for science when Steve Jobs writes about his (probably changed) opinion on DRM and asks for it to be put to a stop. Thats exactly what he did only a few hours ago at the news section of Apple.com (hey - you people should get a blog).

In a somewhat long text, Steve addresses the reasons why Apple implemented FairPlay in the first place, the state of the music industry, and pinpoints three possible alternatives on what to do next. Finally, he delivers what we needed to hear:

The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat.

Unfortunately we all knew it would take someone with a bigger hammer to actually dent DRM. Given how the technology itself is presented as a “solution” by the music industry, there wasn’t much the “little guy” could do to counter the ongoing trend of DRM-everywhere. Fortunately, Steve Jobs (and Apple as a whole) can make a difference through the iPod and iTunes.

You don’t need to be a fan-boy to realize the importance of this move. I’m looking forward to the music industry’s reply.