Last week T-Mobile, the fourth largest wireless carrier in America, launched T-Mobile@Home, an offer that will provide its customers with landline phone service for 10$ a month, a cheaper then Vonage price.

The service is based on a WiFi router that lets users use special mobile phones provided by T-Mobile that can route calls over the mobile network (when out) or via WiFi when at home (using a VoIP technology called UMA that tunnels voice traffic over the Internet to T-Mobile’s backbone network), additionally T-Mobile@home customers will be able to plug their old landline phones to the router and enjoy the same unlimited local and long-distance calls included in the offer. T-Mobile@home is available to existing T-Mobile customers who have mobile subscriptions costing at least $39.99 per month and have a broadband connection at home.

Thanks to WiFi and VoIP T-Mobile can compete with AT&T, Verizon Wireless, and Sprint Nextel and their “all you can eat” plans on a lower cost basis. In Seattle and Dallas, where T-Mobile has first tested T-Mobile@home, they say that 45% of users of the service had switched from other mobile operators.

NTRglobal a Spanish company based in Barcelona and one of Europe’s biggest SaaS players with more than 12,000  customers has recently closed a €22M round of financing, one of a largest rounds of VC funding for a SaaS venture this year. Congratulations to Luis Font, CEO and co-founder of NTRglobal, who is running a very successful global business from Spain.

NRTglobal is growing faster then most of their competitors, providing on-demand solutions for remote support, access, online collaboration and IT system administration to more then 12,000 small and large corporations in 60 countries. The investment from international investors Kennet Partners and Atlas Venture will fuel NRT expansion in North America, UK, China and Japan, and will help the company further develop their NTRsupport, NTRadmin and NRTconnect products. Existing investors Debaeque and Elaia Partners also participated in the financing round.

Image via WikipediaMy readers know that I believe that the Bush Administration record on world affairs is pretty bad. Still for the sake of fairness there´s something positive to say about President Bush as he prepares to leave the White House and that is how well he and his team have managed North Korea. And nothing more dramatic than today´s footage showing North Korea´s nuclear reactor in which its atomic weapons were made being blown up. It is clear that military power supported by diplomacy as in the case of North Korea works much better than military power alone as it was the case in Iraq. It seems that medication plus therapy is a better treatment for brutal dictators than…lobotomy.

Image via WikipediaFON Japan recently announced it will provide wireless LAN access point information to Sony Style’s PetaMap, which provides social mapping services to Internet connected devices including PSPs, PCs and navigation devices, based on data provided by users and partners. This is a really useful feature that will let FON Japan users search for FON Spots on the go, even without Internet access.

This collaboration allows Sony users to find FON Spots near any point of interest. This service also allows users to find the nearest FON Spot without Internet access, by downloading PetaMap information to their PSP in advance, and using a mapping software.

Is America really under attack to the point that the life of American citizens has to be so hard? This morning I had the horrible experience of taking my son Tom to renew his passport to the American Consulate in Madrid, and ordeal that took three hours and it´s not finished. My son is a US Citizen and his passport had just expired. My son is also a Spanish citizen, so I have recently been exposed to the process of renewing both his passports and I am sorry to say that the American system is both awful and humiliating.

First of all, the access to the American Consulate in Madrid is a mission impossible in itself. Forget about WiFi access at the consulate. Not only is there no WiFi there, but there´s no phone usage because the Americans are so terrified of terrorists that they don´t allow you to bring any electronic devices into the consulate, not even a Nokia phone. Moreover, once you come in, Americans and non Americans are thrown into one small room –that is probably unsafe in case of fire– in which consulate employees only appear as animals in the zoo out of glass cages. I wanted to photograph or film this crowded for my blog, but, of course, I couldn´t as that in itself would constitute a security threat so there´s no way the overcrowded conditions can be reported other than by my description.

And once in, what you have to do to renovate a simple expired passport is out of this world. In the case of my son we failed to get his passport renewed because my presence, his presence and his expired passport –which was of course all that was needed in Spain to renew his Spanish passport– was not enough. The American Consulate requires that his mother had to come as well, that we had the social security card and birth certificate and both his mother and I had to swear in front of a consul (who is behind the thickest bullet proof glass that I have seen in my life) that all we said was true. This American swearing thing just drives me nuts. Why is just signing not enough?

In the meantime, the application for the passport renewal is very confusing itself. Nobody helps you to fill it up. All embassy employees are in glass cages so they cannot see very well what you have if you show it to them and there are so many people waiting that the whole place feels like a crowded subway that is not moving.

Will America one day learn not to be terrorized anymore? Will America learn to stop seeing most people as potential enemies? I certainly hope that Barack Obama not only wins the election, but changes the rethoric of fear of George W Bush that has hurt USA so much.

Nokia, already a shareholder of Symbian, has announced yesterday the acquisition of the remaining 52% it didn’t own for €264 million, along with the promise to make it open-source in two years, with the launch of the Symbian Foundation, where Nokia will be joined by AT&T, LG Electronics, Motorola, NTT DOCOMO, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone.

The Symbian OS platform has 67% share of the “smart mobile device” market and is powering around 200 million mobile phones sold to date, especially thanks to Nokia’s S60 platform used in its popular Series N and Series E phones. Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and NTT Docomo, will unite their Symbian-based platforms in an open mobile software platform available for free to all Symbian Foundation members, in a move that seems a direct response to Google’s open-source (and free for manufacturers) Android mobile platform, while still making economic sense for Nokia (who paid €160M in royalties to Symbian Limited in 2007 alone).

Tomorrow’s mobile business is all about software, Apple clearly demonstrates this with the iPhone. As Om Malik pointed out in a great post, “in this platform game, the winner is going to be the one that can attract the most developers”. So with yesterday’s announcement, a big win for the open-source movement, Nokia is trying to face competition with open platforms like Mobile Linux and Google’s Android, and of course, less open but rich platforms like Apple’s iPhone, in an effort to attract the most and best developers to build mobile applications.

I normally don´t write about my personal life in this blog but I just wanted to share with my readers that I have separated a few months ago from Waya Quiviger and that I am in a relationship with Nina Wiegand.

I consider myself an entrepreneur first and and investor second and this is mostly the case because if I am an investor at all it is because of the money I made being an entrepreneur and not the other way around. And as an investor I have invested in very few companies. I get an investment proposal per day on the average and make one investment per month. But so far my investments are doing well. My stellar investment is not on the internet surprisingly but in alternative energies where I was the first backer of Miguel Salis in Eolia, a Spanish company now worth over 700 million euros only after 3 years from its foundation. But in the field of the internet there have been some exciting developments this week including the sale of Plazes to Nokia, the new investment round of Technorati and now Seesmic´s announcement.

My friend Loic Le Meur’s startup, Seesmic, has raised a new round of financing attracting investors like Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, and Wellington Partners, a well known VC. In this post on his blog Loic tells us the story of how Omidyar and Wellington Partners joined Seesmic. Congratulations Loic!

According to the data Loic made public, Seesmic, a website and platform enabling video conversations, is getting 120,000 unique visitors per month, 69,000 video posts per month and around 3,600 new users. What is especially interesting is how their video comments feature for third party platforms like Wordpress and Friendfeed has proved extremely popular and taken the conversation out of the website and into thousands of blogs. To bring it back together, Seesmic recently launched a new version of their embeddable video player which shows all replies to the post shown at the bottom of the player.

As an early stage investor in Plazes, I’m pleased to report Nokia has just announced the acquisition of the company. Congratulations to Felix Petersen and all the Plazes team!

Plazes, a service that lets you locate your friends and share your location and social activities, is a pioneer  in the location based services segment which is now gaining more and more traction thanks to Nokia’s and Apple’s moves in the market and a bunch of new startups developing new services and applications. In a few month Plazes will be made available to millions of Nokia customers as part of Nokia’s Ovi.com service platform and Nokia Maps. For Plazes and its users this acquisition is a great chance to take the service mainstream, in front of millions of mobile users.

This is not the first of Nokia’s moves in location services, in 2006 the company acquired Gate5, a Berlin-based startup that developed mobile mapping apps. With last year’s acquisition of Navteq for $8.1 billions (soon to be approved by the European Commission), Plazes will be in good company and a perfect fit with Nokia’s strategy for location services, helping the mobile phones giant integrate location based social features in its mapping products.

Nokia will of course keep running and improving the Plazes service (and new users will be able to sign up for the service). The company will still be based in Berlin together with the location based service team from Nokia, previously part of gate5.

Yesterday I was interviewed by Vanity Fair, one of my favorite magazines along with The Economist and Wired, as their Spanish edition is about to be launched. When they asked me what my favorite sport was I replied biking, so they decided to take pictures of me while cycling on the roof of my house.

The pictures I’ve published where taken while I was being photographed.

Vanity Fair Bike Shoot

And here is the video:

There is still a latent antisemitism in Spain. When somebody is rich they call them Jewish now I still have to see El País called Einstein, for example, the famous Jewish scientist. And who am I, the cyclist on the roof?