Before the digital era there was only way to be poor and that was not to have access to things. But now there´s a new kind of poverty and that is digital poverty. Not only can you be poor because you have no access to the information society as we like to call it in Europe but even inside the Internet you can be poor. Let me give you a concrete example of digital poverty. It relates to Stardoll. Stardoll is a very simple yet incredibly successful site for little girls to dress up their dolls. I first blogged about Stardoll in April of 2006 both in English and Spanish What happened to me after blogging about Stardoll in Spanish is that because of my Google Ranking when you google Stardoll only in Spanish you come to my blog. But what´s unusual about Stardoll is that even though doll´s are virtually dressed in Stardoll their virtual clothes cost real money. And what I frequently get now is e mails from little girls from Spanish speaking countries who ask me if I can please give them stardollars so they can buy dresses for their little dolls. And I feel so sorry about them that I even contemplated that my foundation could finance some of these but came to the conclusion that that would be absurd. Interestingly, yesterday, I had a chance to see Mattias Miksche from Stardoll again and raise this issue. Since there´s little cost involved in producing these clothes. Couldn´t we start an NGO that actually gave them for free or for practically nothing to poor girls in say Ecuador, Peru, Colombia? And in general, now that wealth is both felt (no food) and perceived (Swedish girls can buy clothes, Peruvian girls can´t), don´t we have an opportunity in the virtual world to do virtual philanthropy and make a lot of little girls, boys, and even grown ups happy? Mattias did not give me a concrete answer but I am sure he is thinking about this. Personally I think that there is a chance of bringing digital justice to this world. Pricing digital property in terms of the average purchasing power of each country would be a good start. Cause as opposed to real property digital property has no cost for an extra copy. Let´s take advantage of this and start the digital fair trade movement!

With Stardoll issuing Stardollars, with Second Life having Linden Dollars and many other sites selling virtual gifts and virtual property, will we soon see an Exchange in which all these virtual currencies and properties are traded?

I am at Google Zeitgeist in The Grove outside of London. Just had lunch with Mark Shuttleworth. While we had emailed a lot and he knows that I am a huge fan of Ubuntu, we had never personally met. What I loved about our lunch, that included Tariq Krim, Ola Ahlvarsson, Marc Samwer and Jonathan Zittrain, was that it made me dream. I grew up the son of an astronomer. I heard about space throughout my childhood and probably first landed sometime during adolescense when my cousin was killed by the Argentine Fascist Military and we were forced to emigrate (my father was considered suspicious by the military because he managed the Argentine Institute of Radioastronomy, and the military did not understand about space and thought it dangerous).
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I have accumulated around 20 gigas of PST files. You know, the ones that Outlook uses, over the last 3 years. Now that I changed to Mac and Ubuntu I don´t have access to them. Also even if I can install this 20 gigas in Thunderbird it would slow everything down so I don´t work off my laptops anymore but work online.

In this sense Gmail has changed my computing style. I don´t use POP3 the way I used to. Now Gmail gets all my mail from Fon, filters the Spam and I get the mail from Gmail and after reading it, I erase everything cause I know it´s in Gmail. In this way my laptops stay fast. When I need to search I go to Gmail.
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As I already mentioned, after 20 years of using Microsoft and suffering the long delays, poor architecture and frequent crashes, I gave up on Microsoft around 6 weeks ago and have been using Mac and Ubuntu.

Mac is best if you are willing to go through the retraining and can afford a Mac. Ubuntu is best if you want something with the look and feel of Windows, but that actually works super fast and does not frequently crash.
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El Pais, Spain’s leading newspaper, reveals today that while 10 years ago 1.81% of all new babies were born out of immigrant families, the figure last year was 17.6% and is rapidly rising. Since immigrants represent only 8.5% of the population, these figures show a huge difference between the number of babies that native-born Spaniards and immigrants have.
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At FON we are very proud of our growth. FON has tripled in size in the last 3 months. But while I thought this was pretty unique, I was just looking at how Meneame, the Spanish Digg like site, in which I invested in, and was super impressed with their growth. They doubled in size in the last 3 months. And other companies I invested in, like Netvibes, Wikio, Vpod, Xing, Gspace, Mo.neytrack.in, Technorati, Plazes, Zudeo and Joost are all growing very fast.
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I think that it´s time that United States learns from the way anti American pseudo democrats are dealing with democracy to suit their own political objectives. Democratically elected leader Ahmadinejad is a master at getting Iranian voters to back him in his anti American agenda. So why doesn´t America use the same method to legitimize the Iraqi invasion?

I think USA should run the Should I stay or Should I go referendum in Iraq. Instead of having yet another meeting to discuss in Washington what should happen in Iraq, USA should ask the Iraqi people what they want them to do in Iraq.
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This morning I drove from Jose Ignacio, Uruguay, to Carrasco International Airport to pick up 3 of my four kids. In NYC, where I used to live, I would go to greet dear ones at JFK and I would be normally surrounded by limo drivers. I was really surprised at how few people were actually greeted not by a driver, but by people who loved them. In Madrid things are somewhat better, I would say loved ones significantly outnumber drivers. I seemed to remember that things were different in Argentina and Uruguay but had no proof until this morning.

In this video I show a packed waiting area where families wait standing, in many cases holding babies so they are there first when their loved ones come out. I then come up with a weird idea in which you measure how affectionate people are in a certain country by counting the number of people who come and greet them at the airport in proportion to the arriving passengers. In this case it was a MOB scene for only two international flights.

Here´s an idea that I had for Educ.ar that combines the power of the largest educational portal in Argentina with Skype´s 130 million global community, and that is to create a program in which Skype members volunteer to teach English to kids in Argentina.
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