Yesterday I met with David Bitton, the founder of Wengo. Wengo is a new company, very similar to Skype but in open source and not p2p. Skype is of course much much larger and still growing at amazing speed but Wengo while three months old, is getting its own group of fans within the opensource community around the world. They are also doing some remarkable software developments. At one point in the meeting David took out this Qtek phone with a Wengo client. I was impressed. It is a beautiful phone and the fact that operates both over wifi and gprs makes it very useful. It is a phone that is crying out “please give me FON: wifi everywhere”. It is the first good looking wifi phone I ever saw.
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I was watching a cat sleeping and remembered that most felines seem to sleep very well. Is this because they are predators? Do predators sleep better? What a life! Mostly sleep until you… kill.

Is Argentina much more subject to populist presidents than Chile because in Argentina it is a illegal not to vote while in Chile voting is a choice? Are voters who are forced to vote as bad making community oriented choices as the kids who were “not aborted” that Freakonomics talks about?

I lived for 18 years in New York City, I started in the East Village as a student at NYU, went on to W118th St as a grad at Columbia and ended up at 5 story elevator townhouse, 47 E63rd St as a very successful entrepreneur. Still those cockroaches were always there utterly disregarding my changes in Manhattan social standing. Why is it that wherever I lived there were tons of cockroaches? Why is it that since I moved to Europe cockroaches are not a problem anymore? Don´t they travel?

Considering that the Vatican inhabitants mostly can´t have children… Does that make the country the most successful immigrant state in the world? Can you have a country in which its president is always born someplace else?

Jobs and Wozniak, Bill and Steve, Larry and Sergey, David and Jerry, Pierre and Meg and recently Niklas and Janus. What is it about couples and success on the internet? Do I need to find my mindmate to make it big with FON? Is that why Larry never seems to make it?

Participants at last year´s March 11th Summit (which my foundation, Safe Democracy, organized together with Club de Madrid) have been asking me if we plan to repeat last year´s event. Same has been asked by participants in the very productive Atocha Workshop. We have been debating this issue at Safe Democracy and we have decided that rather than trying to bring 1300 personalities to Madrid this year for March 11th 2006 we will invest in generating an ongoing web based dialogue on how to achieve the goals that have been set by the Madrid Agenda. If you are a participant of last year´s March 11th Summit or if you were not able to join us but do feel that you have relevant content on this subject or on the more broader subject of how to promote democracy around the world do write to Martin Varsavsky I will be pleased to provide you with writing privileges at our web site. We are looking for short articles of around 500 words. As you can see the Safe Democracy website has a google ranking of 7 which means that your article is very likely to appear as one of the top google results when others show interest in the same topic thereby generating a lively debate.

I found a graph on the net that compared the GDP of France to that of the US since 1960. As I look at this curve I wonder how is it that a country in which people work so many less hours per week, so many less days a year as a result of vacation, in which unemployment is considerably higher, in which the amount of years spent working so much lower than in the States and which is frequently paralyzed by strikes manages to stay pretty constant at around 77% GDP level of the US? My only conclusion is that when they work the French must be much more productive than the Americans. Otherwise this graph is a big mistery.