CircleMe friends and fans celebrate the new look for the “made in Milan” app

Last week I attended the launch party of the 2nd Generation of CircleMe products for web and mobile devices. CircleMe is the “made in Italy” social network that allows you to share your passions for culture and media with a network of trusted people who share your interests.

Situated alongside one of Milan’s canals, the site of the former Richard Ginori porcelain factory, which dates back to 1830, now plays host to a cluster of creative businesses, including the Italian headquarters of CircleMe. (The company also has a London branch based in Silicon Roundabout in the City). The completely redeveloped Richard Ginori complex, which covers an area of over 60,000 square metres, also houses companies such as Strenesse, Momo Design, Della Rovere, la Fornarina and MDF as well as communications agencies and photographic studios.

Il Circolino, a chic bar located in the ex-Richard Ginori centre and a favourite haunt of CircleMe staffers, provided the perfect setting for an evening of relaxed chat with CircleMe users and friends and the chance to discover the new Second Generation apps for PCs, tablets and phones.

With the mercury hitting 36C on the hottest day of the year so far, we sipped complimentary ice-cold drinks and enjoyed an excellent barbecue from Il Circolino’s budding chefs. The CircleMe team mingled with guests at the venue, which features a glass floor through which you can watch the table football matches taking place downstairs.

Making it new
CircleMe has completely updated its interface and introduced a new user-experience that builds on the app’s existing ability to curate your passions and share them with a network of people you can “trust” (CM's equivalent of friending). The app now boasts 1 million interests that you can “love” (by clicking on the famous CircleMe heart icon). Over a thousand stories and new content items are added every day from 6,500 sources and two hundred thousand interest groups.

A brand new feature of the CircleMe experience is the Calendar, which allows you to access a customised calendar featuring all the nearest events linked to your unique set of passions. There are already 55,000 events in over 4,500 locations mapped onto the CircleMe Calendar.

As Giu D’Antonio, CEO of CircleMe pointed out as he demonstrated the new app on a widescreen Mac to guests at the party, you can flick through a virtually endless feed of stories, news and updates relating to your passions – anything from your favourite bands to the latest must-see movies. A new feature is the categories menu bar than you can swipe in from the side. This allows you to refine the view to specific groups of passions based around particular media, such as Music, Books, Movies, etc

As Startupbusiness reported recently when the network’s Android app went live, CircleMe has signed an agreement with Kiver to distribute music online in mp3 format, which users can download according to their passions and their level of activity on the network. The downloads on offer include music from leading artists. (For example, glancing at the app, I see I can download free tracks from artists such as Katy Perry, Lana Del Rey, The Killers, Queen and The Rolling Stones, etc.)

Users can also benefit from a tie-up between CircleMe and moo.com, the UK-based online business card printing service, which rewards users with 50 free cards personalised with their passions.

CircleMe has been growing steadily. According to WiredItalia it is strongest in the UK, US, Italy, France and Brazil.

Niche and easy does it

While CircleMe has expanded considerably and added a wealth of new features it remains something of a niche product in the face of the “big beasts” of the social networking world: Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, etc. However, as Giu pointed out, the aim of CircleMe is not for users to simply grow ever-larger networks of contacts, but rather to deepen and enrich the experience of sharing passions within a trusted circle of like-minded people.

I personally think CircleMe could do more in this area to build on the existing functionality of its apps, especially the ability to “plant” a passion by adding geo-location data and its under-utilised “To do” option. As I explored in an earlier post on this blog, I also think CircleMe members could have a more pro-active role in curating information and content, which uses a “push” model to provide an updated feed to users’ devices based on their passions. I would like to see more of a physical community developing around CircleMe – and I think one way they could achieve this is to have more live events, such as this excellent party, as well as providing opportunities for users to meet up at gigs and special screenings of films they have "loved". There are considerable opportunities for combining CircleMe’s ability to gather and share cultural passions with a more face-to-face experience, which would involve users and allow them to be more active.

A night to remember

So, overall this was a great evening and a nice chance to meet the lovely CircleMe team, who are all passionate and committed about their app. I’d like to say a special thanks to Giu, Elena and the CircleMe team – as well as the excellent Il Circolino – for their hospitality.

Looking forward to seeing you all again at the next event!

#bewhatyoulike

Incidentally...

“Los Olvidados” (“The Forgotten Ones”) is a film shot in Mexico in 1950 and directed by the great Spanish visionary, Luis Buñuel, who in 1929 had made the haunting, dream-like surrealist film “Un Chien Andalou” with Salvador Dalí. “Los Olvidados” is a kind of social realist picture, at times almost like a documentary. The story concerns a group of street kids subsisting in a desolate, crumbling Mexico City. The main characters are El Jaibo, an anarchic Jack the Lad who is basically amoral and his gullible sidekick Pedro, who actually has a conscience.

The film is pretty depressing actually. Most acts of kindness or humanity are met with indifference or lead to tragedy and overall the movie paints a picture of life as nasty, brutish and short.

Now, I don’t intend here to explore the various themes of the film and Buñuel’s cinematic treatment of his subject (although I will just mention the surrealist dream sequence that seems almost out of place in the otherwise bleak realism of the film). Instead, I just want to draw your attention to one little scene which is almost inconsequential but highly memorable. A man has two dogs dressed in little costumes with hats, which he takes around the slums to entertain people with and earn a few pennies. The street children go crazy when he comes and all shout out “the dancing dogs, the dancing dogs!”. You then see a few minutes where the camera is basically held on these bizarre, absurd but poignant dogs dancing for the crowd.

I’m sure academics and film historians have written very significant interpretations and analyses of what this scene means. (It is, in fact, one of several references to and actual appearances of dogs in the film.) It is an interesting bit of cinema verité: obviously, the filmmakers must have seen the dancing dogs while they were shooting or perhaps they knew the owner or just ran into him. However, the thing that struck me most about this scene was the fact that it was really quite incidental. It just happens to be there and doesn’t really add  much to the plot. In fact, once you’ve seen it you just remember it as the bit with the dancing dogs, even if you can’t really say how (or where) it fits into the film.

There are in fact a lot of scenes, characters or things that just happened to get included in films largely at random and which don’t really drive the plot or mean much more than themselves. But somehow they stick in the mind simply because they are strange or poetic. Perhaps they function as symbols or metaphors, but often they are really just opportune (and opportunistic) bits of footage where the director of the film just thought they worked.

Here’s another one. In “Stromboli” (also made – coincidentally – in 1950), Ingrid Bergman plays Karin, a displaced Lithuanian woman who finds herself in an internment camp at the end of the Second World War. She conducts a romance with a Sicilian fisherman through the wire fence of the camp and ends up marrying him. They return to his home village, which is tiny and religiously conservative, on the island of Stromboli, near Sicily. The local women are very unimpressed by Ingrid Bergman and her free-spirited attitude to life. (At one point she is sent to Coventry and impugned for her lack of “modesty” after she decorates the fisherman’s cottage with a mural.)

Like “Cleopatra” (1963) starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, "Stromboli" is more famous for what happened off-screen than on. Bergman fell in love with the director, Roberto Rossellini, and they had an affair while they were making the film. (The US was scandalised when Bergman gave birth to Rossellini’s son – they weren’t married – in the same month as the film’s release.) The couple tied the knot later (in Mexico) and went on to have twin girls – Ingrid and Isabella. Isabella Rossellini, of course, is the woman whose main credits include her role in David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet” (which also relaunched Dennis Hopper's film career) and the fact that for many years she was the face of L’Oréal.

Now, again, this isn’t really a critical study of "Stromboli". I will just note that it’s a strangely wooden, halting piece of storytelling that never really gets going on an emotional level. Instead, what you remember when you watch it are the incidental, “background” set pieces, which include actual footage of the volcano on Stromboli erupting at the end while Ingrid Bergman is clambering over the rocks on her way to freedom. The most powerful scene, however, is where all the men of the village go out fishing. They row out to sea (at night?) and when they arrive at the fishing ground they spread out a huge circular net – and wait. This is a village where fishing is de rigeur and it’s communal. It’s also for men only (although the impudent Karin rows out to join her husband, much to the surprised delight but also social embarrassment of her husband). Eventually the fish arrive and then the men start heaving the net upwards, with all the biggest fish thrashing around as the haul nears the surface. The men sing as they work and they all (literally) pull together. Once the fish are at the surface the men then set about clubbing and spiking them in a truly horrific scene, which the uninvited Karin/Bergman is also forced to observe – along with the viewer. (This is definitely one of those films you want to watch after you've had your dinner - especially if it's tuna.)

As with the dancing dogs, once you’ve seen the Stromboli fishermen you’ll never forget them. And again, this is really an opportune bit of documentary reportage spliced into a much weaker movie. The power of the scene comes from the fact that you’re not watching actors but real people at work doing what they have been doing perhaps for centuries. In fact, although this kind of real-life scene is common in post-war Italian neo-realist film-making, it’s always surprising when you actually see it. You get the same frisson as from looking at old photos where people stare out at you from the past as if through aspic. Or when you see something personal and poignant in a museum like a child’s doll or a pair of gloves with a hole in one of them. It’s really something human, not artificial or contrived. It’s like hearing someone scream or cry: it bypasses the intellect and the rational mind and hits you in the stomach or touches your heart.

I’ll just add a third and final incidental scene from another black-and-white post-war classic. This time it’s Vittorio De Sica’s 1948 “Bicycle Thieves” (“Ladri di biciclette” in Italian) which like the other films is a story of ordinary people trying to survive in a bombed-out, post-traumatic world of concrete rubble and shattered ideals. In “Bicycle Thieves” a young married man with a small son living in Rome has the possibility of getting a job putting up film posters for the newly-resurgent movie industry – but only if he has a bike. He and his wife knock their heads together trying to think of how they can come up with the money needed. Eventually, she decides they have to pawn (or hock) their linen. Again, it’s one of those scenes that creeps up on you without warning and then sends you reeling with a sensation of shock and pity with historical fascination and poetry all mixed in.

The pawn shop is huge. It’s basically a warehouse and when the woman hands over the bundle it gets taken through a huge stack of towering shelves and carried up a ladder onto a perilously high rack. There’s linen everywhere – thousands of uniform bundles all packed onto shelves and waiting to be redeemed. Indeed, this one really is symbolic – the shock of the scene is partly that you could never have imagined such a huge pawn shop – but also historical in the blow-to-the-stomach way described earlier: it seems as if the entire working-class population of Rome have pawned their belongings (which they probably had). I suppose the place must have been well-known to the film-makers (I haven’t really looked this one up) or maybe they just heard about it as they were filming. Anyway, the effect it has on the viewer is devastating – and, although it happens in a different way – so is the ending, which of course you will have to watch for yourself. (Let me just say here that it’s one of the saddest endings of any film ever made – so have some Kleenex handy; you’ll need it.)

Well, there you have it. I’m not really sure what these scenes mean – or if they were consciously intended to mean that much, but they are all equally memorable and although you can’t imagine these films without them they don’t really function as indispensable narrative devices. In fact, that’s partly what them makes them so interesting: they’re just there. They simply sit in their respective places and will forever jump out at an unsuspecting audience or viewer and have the same or at least very similar effect for ever.

I think this is a topic I’ll be returning to – not necessarily from films, but from novels, paintings and other media. I like the idea of having a collection of memorable but inconsequential moments; of people, animals and places that just happen to have been included in a larger narrative; of odd, vivid memories that seem both random but significant and suggest a life beyond that of that the immediate film or book and its characters.

(c) Robert Dennis 2014

Incidental but memorable: dancing dogs from “Los Olvidados”, the fishing scene from “Stromboli”  and the pawn shop from “Bicycle Thieves” 

Note: I checked a few facts while writing this post (mainly dates), but I haven’t re-watched the scenes described to ensure that I have recalled them exactly. However, the emotional impact they make is unmistakable – so in this sense they’re like other trace memories in life: a feeling that stays with you, even if the exact details are slightly fuzzy.

Words in the media: Crunch

If you’ve been reading the British press over the last few years, and in particular the coverage of the global financial crisis, there is one phrase that you will have found keeps cropping up: the credit crunch.

The term “credit crunch” relates to the lack of available credit, particularly the reluctance of banks to lend to each other (a practice known as interbank lending). Credit crunch is a suitably dramatic-sounding phrase that works well on TV and in newspaper stories, especially in headlines (where it can be simplified to just crunch when space is limited).

The word crunch lierally means to crush food between the teeth as when you bite into an apple. It can also suggest a sudden, powerful movement, such as the violent, metallic grinding sound produced when a car driver tries to change gear suddenly (known as crunching the gears). There is, I suppose, a cognitive similarity between this and the sudden shift in normal banking practice that caused an important mechanism in the economy to instantly seize up.

A large number of financial English phrases depict money and capital as a liquid (liquidity, currency, cash-flow, cash injection, etc). The image, then, of this liquid suddenly not flowing (as, for example, when we talk about funding drying up, or turning off the tap) or becoming solid (as in freezing someone’s assets) suggests that the financial engine of a business has stalled; there is an interruption to the flow of capital that it needs to keep running. Likewise, the credit crunch is both a metaphor for the sudden malfunction of the banking and finance sectors due to the absence of liquidity; and, of course, it’s also a description of the impact this has had on the wider economy as companies, in particular retailers and manufacturers – and consumers – are suddenly unable to operate because the machinery of financial institutions and markets have ground to a halt.

There are a number of ideas associated with “crunch”. The most common of these is that of eating something crunchy, such as an apple or a slice of toast. In order to crunch something it has to be hard to begin with but is then physically broken down by the action of one’s molars crushing it. Compare this to chewing, which is similar, but which involves a slightly different process. When you chew something, such as chewing gum or nougat you grind it between your back teeth, but instead of destroying or transforming its structure you are simply softening it while it retains its essential integrity. For example, if you chew a piece of meat it’s still a piece of meat when you swallow it. A bolus (the “ball” of food you make with your mouth) of apple or toast on the other hand has lost all its original texture (otherwise you would choke as it went down).

Crunch also suggests the act of biting into something (as in the expression to crunch into an apple), while chew implies that you have already either bitten off a piece or cut up something which is now entirely inside your mouth. (Think of the English expression to bite off more than you can chew.) If you were eating something which is chewy but too large to put in your much all at once (such as a Curlywurly, a popular sweet (confectionery) in Britain circa 1975, which consisted of long plaited strips of toffee dipped in chocolate), you would still have to bite off part of the Curlywurly before you could chew it.)

On the subject of confectionery nostalgia, the Double Decker (does it still exist?) consisted of a crunchy chocolate biscuit layer with a chewy soft nougat layer on top. The whole thing was coated in milk chocolate and the TV advertising that accompanied it (inevitably accounting for more than half of its appeal) featured legendary bearded political satirist and whimsical humorist Willy Rushden insisting that the Double Decker was alternately chewy and crunchy. (I suppose you really have to be British to appreciate this; it’s similar to listening to Italians discussing exactly which sugo (sauce) you need to have with farfalle (bow-tie pasta) in order to get exactly the right taste-texture sensation – the narcissism of small difference writ large?)

Crunchie, a honeycomb bar covered in chocolate, was (and indeed still is) crunchy. It’s classic advertising slogan “Get that Friday feeling” neatly combined the exploited worker’s alienation from his / her labour (you’re only happy when the weekend is nearly here) with the consumer’s ever-present desire for (and belief in) instant gratification (Why wait till Friday to feel happy? Have a chocolate bar now and it’ll cheer you up, even though it’s Monday morning.)

The expression number cruncher, which means someone who works with figures, usually statistics, is a slightly derogatory way of describing a person who only focuses on calculations and quantities, perhaps at the expense of imagination or creativity. (A similar prejudice is demonstrated by calling an accountant or book-keeper a bean counter.)

Crunch can also mean “important” or “critical” as in the phrases crunch time / moment or a crunch vote in Parliament or the US House / Senate (a decisive vote). Perhaps here, the underlying idea is that something is irrevocable and the players are under enormous pressure. I have the image of rocks being smashed together under an intolerable force, violently producing a dramatic result. I seem to remember something from school geography about metamorphic rock (marble?) being created this way (as opposed to igneous or sedimentary rock).

It’s also reminiscent of the car crunchers (or crushers) that were obligatory in every US police or detective show of the 1970s. In a scrapyard (junkyard, US) an outsize Ford or Thunderbird is grabbed by a huge magnet at the end of a chain hanging down from a swing arm. The car dangles in the air, swaying like a condemned criminal dispatched on a gibbet. Finally the arm swings round and the electro-magnet is suddenly cut. The car falls into the demonic jaws of a crusher, where it is pounded and buckled into a compact metallic cube, which the machine spits out onto a conveyor belt. A multi-layered symbol, the car crusher stands variously for:

• an immediate threat (quite often the driver would still be in the car, at the mercy of the mob boss waiting to give the signal – a raised cigar – to the crane operator)
• the brutality and callousness of the disposable consumer culture, chewing up and spitting out not only used cars, but also surplus Motown labour and dwindling natural resources
• a stand-in for the destroyer god in polytheistic religions (such as the Hindu divinity Kali). The feeding arm and the hydraulic jaws suggest a powerful (and hungry) being that must be propitiated, like the Minotaur. This seems to play on our deep-seated fear of becoming someone else’s lunch (and the unintentionally terrifying promise of overbearing Jewish grandparents that “Oy, I could eat you!” which their diminutive descendant may not realise is actually metaphorical)

The car crusher is invariably stopped at the very last moment by the hero (literally) putting a spanner in the works. (A device used in countless Hollywood films, including perhaps most memorably the Coen Brother’s Art Deco critique of American capitalism, The Hudsucker Proxy.) The gears crunch, the grinding jaws are suspended in a quivering, twitching vibrato that lasts just long enough for the potential victim to escape, followed immediately by the resumption of the screeching and growling of metal against metal (although with a slightly different twist in The Hudsucker Proxy – watch the DVD). Just so with the economic recovery, the anticipated resumption of business as normal – the newly-lubricated wheels of industry are starting to turn again. Capitalism may be a bad thing but the effects of a financial system coming to a halting, crunching end (with little sign of a revolution to follow) seem a lot worse. (Perhaps a case of the devil you know…).

On a final alimentary (food) note, the word crunch in Anglo-Saxon FMCG (Fast-Moving Consumer Goods) marketing seems reserved for products made from nuts (including crunchy peanut butter) or for (sweet) biscuits. It is not normally applied to savoury things, such as crisps (patatine), which, however, in Italian are considered “croccante” (crunchy). Crisp in English suggests a certain brittleness of texture, while crunchy implies that something would bear at least several bites – i.e. it would have a certain durability or resistance (like a nut) not present in something as insubstantial as a crisp.