Image via WikipediaBarack Obama did not win the nomination because he is black. He won it because democrats could for the first time in history, forgot that he was black and focused on the key election issues and on the person. Democratic voters obviously also liked Hillary Clinton as well as she had practically the same amount of votes. Those who voted for her forgot she was a woman. In both cases voters felt that an African American or a woman, could be elected Presidents. In general I think that what happened to the Democratic Party is that its demographics are now such that the majority of the candidates, namely male wasps are now a minority of the electorate. And the electorate realized this for the first time in a big way. And as minorities go, Obama represents the most minorities of all the candidates. By now in America…the minorities are the majority. We will see if white males lose dominance.

This article on the declining fortune of Starbucks and its new free WiFi effort shows how important free WiFi can be for a coffee shop chain. How many people have chosen Starbucks over the last years simply because it had WiFi? I met with Howard Schultz and tried to convince him, unsuccessfully, to offer free WiFi through Fon arguing that sooner or later Starbucks would have overcharging people with the expensive T Mobile WiFi offer. People need WiFi as much as they need caffeine, or more

At Fon we built Twitxr as an experiment, with the idea to show what you can do with something like Twitter, adding pictures and geolocalization to the now famous 140 text characters. Twitter has an incredible success, with more then 2 million users all around the world. Twitxr itself is also quite successful, and, surprisingly, just like Fon, it was global from day one. Even though we launched it in Spain, only 20% of the users are Spanish, with US and, again, Japan as the second and third country.

I Twitx (pronounced twitch) a lot, mostly from my Blackberry or my iPhone, especially when I’m in special places like in Venice at the wedding of my friends David Kamenetzky and Anna Lena Wetzel, last weekend. I share a lot of similar moments with my followers (I have 333) and the pictures I twitx are instantly available on Twitxr, Facebook, Flickr and my blog, so I save the time and effort to publish them on each platform.

Now at Fon we don’t know what to do with Twitxr. We know we have to get a better design and maybe change its name (as nobody seems to get the fact “tx” should be pronounced “tch”, like in Basque, and that it rimes with picture), but what should we do next? Could Twitxr become a company of its own? How can it make money? Sure, it won’t need to generate huge revenues as managing Twitxr costs us less then a 1000 euros a month. I’m amazed by the fact that pictures come from all over the world: when I look at the global timeline, like I just did, I see photos from Japan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Europe and Latin America. The best way to use Twitxr is on the iPhone, if you have one I recommend you to install it from Installer.app, although Twitxr works great from any mobile phone via e-mail or mobile web, including phones from Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, HTC and many others.

The issue with Twitxr is similar to that of many other social networks. Its only value seems to be in its advertising potential. Although much of its use actually can’t support advertising: when somebody takes a picture in Twitxr people often don’t see it on Twitxr, but on other websites we have no control on, like blogs, flickr or Facebook. In some way Twitxr is the opposite of Meneame or Technorati, two companies I’ve invested in. These websites get a lot of content from other websites and send back traffic to them. Twitxr instead sends out a lot and gets few traffic back.

You don´t need to understand Japanese to see that La Fonera is the the third best networking product in Amazon Japan. Having Spanish as my native language I just love to see that they still keep the “La” Fonera. Fon is the only technology company from a Spain or any other Spanish speaking country that has managed to have its products sold in Japan. Sorry for the promotional tone of this blog post but if anything it is only inspired by pride in the people who work at Fon and their abilities.

I was pleased to find out through my good friend Tariq´s Twitter that after years of recommending to Tariq to open a blog he finally has done so. My insistence was based on our many conversations in which I learned a lot from him. Tariq is a great reviewer of the internet. His first post proves my point. He has 5 recommendations to make Facebook a better social platform and I like them all. Keep them coming!

When Digg, Techcrunch, Gigaom, or others talk about me or Fon, visits to my web site or Fon’s go through the roof. But yesterday the New York Times had me on the cover of the business Sunday Times with a huge pictureand long article and the increased visit effect to our websites was negligible. Same was true when Forbeswrote a great article about myself and Fon. Even though the Sunday New York Times has a circulation of 2.3 million papers and is arguably the best newspaper in the world, the cover article only added 200 additional uniques to this website. Instead when I heard from Michael Dell that he used Ubuntu, I blogged it, my post was picked up by Digg and I got over 50,000 additional unique visitors to my blog!

But while there is a big disconnect between old media and new media and old media does not send visitors to new media, the impact of an old media paper article far exceeds that of an Internet article. Michael Arringtonmay send you a lot of visitors but it is rare that I will go somewhere and people will remember what Techcrunch wrote a year ago. With paper this is not the case. People will cite the Erika Brown’s Forbes article a year later. And yesterday I was getting many emails from long time friends and even a former university professor about the New York Times article and this does not happen to me when blogs who send tons of visitors write about me or Fon.

There really is something about old media that we retain for a long time which is not true of new media and this may explain why people like Tom Friedmanare still not blogging. As a consequence an old media reputation, good or bad, seems to be deeper and longer lasting than the flavor of the month reputation that the Internet builds. When John Markoffwrites paper in hand people listen. They know that Markoff has fact checkers, has done his research and is paid to spend a lot of time on a story. Same was true of Erika Brown whose fact checkers kept calling me for weeks before the Forbes story came out. So while I try to write objectively from my blog and so do other bloggers I don’t think anyone of us has the time or resources yet of a Forbes or a New York Times. Old Media still has more money to pay journalists than new media and it shows. Nor does new media have the undivided attention that readers of magazines or newspapers get. Paper, whether we like it or not, still looks better than screens. So even though I have been an advocate of new media for 12 years and I have never invested in any news that came out in paper, I still think that paper is more credible than pixels.

An old media reputation is still more valuable and lasting than a new media reputation.

I just read the New York Times article on Fon. It´s well researched, worth reading. What´s great about the article is that it shows what it is to try to build a global wireless network on a day to day basis. In this struggle you meet great partners such as Google, who invested with Fon, or skeptics such as Apple, or telcos who ignore you while others embrace you.

We are proud to announce that the BT FON Community we built with our partner BT is the winner in the Most Innovative Wireless Broadband category at the Wireless Broadband Innovation Awards 2008. Over 210 entries were submitted and just 7 winners were selected in 7 different categories: alongside BT FON, our friends at Fring won the award for Best VoIP Product or Service and the WiMAX Network of Castilla y Leon in Spain won in the Best WIMAX Product or Service category. You can find the list of all the winners on the WBI Award website. The WBI Awards is a global institution that recognizes leadership and the very best in innovation for Wireless Broadband.