A few weeks ago I wrote that Google had to buy a smartphone maker. I am very glad they bought Motorola. Google has very little to lose buying Moto and a lot to gain. Motorola is affordable, has good IP, is in USA, and even though they clearly don’t make the best Android phones now [...]

I’m happy to announce that I invested in Busuu, the most active language learning community worldwide. Busuu already has over 2 million users and is growing rapidly, adding more than 10,000 new users each day. Busuu also overtook its two older and more heavily funded main competitors, as this chart shows. How does Busuu work? [...]

I am not a VC. I am not an angel (don’t like the term). But I am a business mentor. Most of the times my mentoring is accompanied by an investment. Occasionally I get some shares in exchange for mentoring. If you look at the right side of this blog you will see the companies [...]

Image via Wikipedia My investors at Fon include most of the people and companies that were involved in the recent sale of Skype. At Fon we have eBay, Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom personally as investors and board members, Mike Volpi personally as an investor and board member, Danny Rimer as a board member and [...]

Nina and I have been to Japan many times. But always to Tokyo, which we love. But on this trip we had a special situation going on. We are working on a significant project related to Fon in Japan, one of these complex deals that takes many people and significant time to pull off. And [...]

During my business career I have founded 7 companies. The first, and least known, is Urban Capital Corporation, a company that develops and manages real estate in Tribeca, NYC. I started that company while I was at Columbia University together with my partner Len Kahn. We developed over half a million square feet of loft [...]

Yesterday we had our first in person presentation of the Fonera 2.0. It was in Paris. During this presentation I announced that the Fonera 2.0 will go for sale everywhere in Europe on April 21st. USA and Japan, Hong Kong and Taiwan will start in May. The promotional price for the launch will be 49 [...]

Image via Wikipedia As the main supplier of capital to Bernard Madoff with over $7bn raised from clients whose investments have now evaporated it is a fair question to ask if Andres Piedrahita of Fairfield and his father in law (and boss) at Fairfield Walter Noel were victims of Madoff or part of the scam. [...]

Most investors who trade stocks and other securities trade frequently. I don´t. I am your average broker´s nightmare. I probably do around 1 trade per month. This year I decided to share my portfolio in my blog. And it has not been a bad year. In a post I wrote on May 4th I told [...]

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 [...]