2009 25
Menorca TechTalk 09
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The Menorca TechTalk 09 has just finished. This is the third time Nina and I have hosted the TechTalk, an event attended by about 80 entrepreneurs from all around the world to spend four days at our farm in Menorca. This year we had participants from every major world region: Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, North America, the Far East and, if we include the sailboat crew, the South Pacific. The goal of the Menorca TechTalk is twofold. First, it aims to offer a relaxed atmosphere in which the entrepreneurs can get to know each other and establish business networks and friendships. Secondly, the event provides the people of Menorca with a technology forum since it is open to the public for one of the days. This post will grow as I continue to read articles and receive pictures about the event.
Here is one article from Barak Kassar to begin with.
The following two are in Spanish: One by Mariano Amartino and another one by Santiago Bilinkis, co-founder of Officenet in Argentina, a great e-tailer that was sold to Staples.
These are some great pictures from Rodrigo Sepulveda. And here are some others from Eduardo Arcos and Alec Oxenford.
2009 23
eRepublik raises €2 million
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eRepublik Labs announced that it has raised €2 million in a series A round from AGF Private Equity, after a seed round of €200,000 in 2007 and an angel round of €550,000 in 2008. The money will be spent in the next 12 to 18 months to develop more features in the game and new products based on the eRepublik platform.
eRepublik is a strategy Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) with a social component. Alexis Bonte, co-founder and CEO of eRepublik, described it as a “mix between Civilization and Facebook”. It is set in a mirror version of the real world in which players can participate in all kinds of activities, from the mundane day to day tasks (buying food, working, traveling) to national politics, setting economic policy and war waging between countries.
eRepublik is special in that it has been created openly and interactively from a very early stage. The founders began with a live prototype that they improved based on user input. This, combined with its heavy emphasis on user generated content, has allowed eRepublik to quickly and cost effectively grow into a rich gaming experience.
While I am not an investor in eRepublik I am a friend of Alexis Bonte and it is great to see your friends doing very well in tough markets. Alexis was a the Menorca TechTalk.
2009 14
How to make Ocean flying safer after the AF 447 accident
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It is unacceptable to go on sending planes over the ocean without position trackers, real time weather information, ground based support and no satellite phones. It is wrong that in emergency situations pilots can only communicate with, say, Cape Verde control and not with their own airline, or even plane makers such as Boeing or Airbus. It is absurd that we don’t know where planes are when they fly over the ocean and even when they are on the ground we only know it within a few miles range but not exactly where they are because radars are so inaccurate.
Aircraft in transoceanic flights should send location, heading, speed and other relevant data by satellite; automatically and every few seconds. They should be capable of downloading real time weather data to increase the efficiency and safety of flights and pilot autonomy. Weather radar is a very primitive way to fly, especially without ground support. Weather radars from the plane should be contrasted with satellite info received in the aircraft. There should also be a secondary means for voice communication, also by satellite to be able to quickly contact an airliner crossing the ocean. Furthermore, making these flights safer should impact insurance costs, and increases in operational efficiency would lower fuel consumption.
In this post I present a few possible solutions to these problems. Of course, this is only one of many series of measures that can be taken to make these flights safer.
Voice communication and transmission of important flight data
The Guardian Skytrax 3Xi is a device that transmits GPS location, altitude, bearing, wheels up-wheels down, time and velocity information over the web, where it is accessible through a secure internet connection using IE or Firefox. A transoceanic airliner requires the 3Xi model, which works with external antennas and costs $2395. It can be configured for a message frequency of your choice (eg. one message per minute). The messages are $0.06 each, and there is a one-time activation fee of $110.
This device comes with the Maptrac system for tracking and reports, which costs $39.95 per month. Maptrac is a web-based mapping tool requiring no server, software, data purchase or IT investment. It allows airlines to see all their aircraft simultaneously, whether it be their active or historical tracks. There is a screenshot of Maptrac in action below. Guardian Mobility, the makers of the Skytrax, also have a Google based mapping system called Rimtax which can be used on iPhones and Blackberrys.
The Skytrax is offered standalone and in a package including a satellite phone. This package, including the additional antenna, goes up to about $4000 plus installation.
The cost for installation and certification of this equipment on an aircraft like the A330 is about $8000. The certification required is called a Supplemental Type Certificate (STC) and only needs to be done once for each aircraft model. After that, the cost of installation would approximate $2000.
It is also possible to send location, speed, etc. via Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS) messages. ACARS is a protocol in aviation communications for the transmission of short messages between aircraft and ground stations via Very High Frequency (VHF) radio or SatCom (Satellite Communications). This can be done for about $0.15/message. At one update per minute it would amount to $108 for a 12 hour flight.
Most planes on transoceanic routes are equipped to transmit ACARS via satellite, so this option involves no certification or hardware upgrades. It is still however more expensive than the Skytrax solution. Assuming two flights per day, one message per minute and the aforementioned prices you would save around $3900 a month by using the Skytrax 3i instead of ACARS. According to this, the Skytrax system is the better choice.
Receiving real time weather data
Real time weather data would require about 512kbit/s. The commonplace SatCom equipment in transoceanic flights uses a band of the electromagnetic spectrum named “L band“. Bandwidth here is too low and expensive to handle the data rates required for this application.
The “Ku-band” is another band that has been used to provide passengers with broadband connectivity aboard commercial flights in the past. It isn’t certified for flight critical functions but it is ten times cheaper at about $0.5/mbit of transmitted data. The intention here is not to replace primary, safety critical systems; but to complement them. Hence, Ku-band could be a suitable type of connection to download real time weather data.
The problem here is that although most of the aircraft that fly over the ocean are equipped with L-band avionics, very few are equipped with the systems required to connect to Ku-band signals. And they are expensive: About $0.25M each. However, this cost can be recouped by selling broadband to passengers, generating ad revenues from adverts placed for the passengers, more efficient flight routes and the lower insurance costs that should be associated with safer flying.
2009 11
There´s no age limit for hatred
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- Image by DJ Curly via Flickr
I used to think that fanaticism and hatred tempered with age. I was wrong. The murderer is 88.
WASHINGTON — An elderly gunman, said by authorities to have a violent and virulently anti-Semitic past, stepped inside the crowded U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum on Wednesday, opened fire with a rifle and fatally wounded a security guard before being shot by other officers.
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- Sources: Shooter is white supremacist (cnn.com)
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2009 10
Come to Minorca and live happily ever after
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- Image via Wikipedia
No, this is not an invitation to the Menorca TechTalk. Those went out already. Nina and I are looking forward to seeing our friends next week. This post instead is about an idea to radically improve the economy of the island of Minorca converting it not into a tax haven but into a wedding heaven.
If you are American you probably don´t know that in Europe, it is very complex to get married. In the USA, where Nina Wiegand my fiancee and I, will get married in December, you just show your ID, sign an affidavit in which you swear that you are fit to be married and you get married. In Europe there are waiting lists to get married and even in places where there aren´t, it is unbelievably bureaucratic to get married. Moreover getting married itself is a rigidly structured event with little opportunity to make it your own as people do in the States. And if the bride and groom come from two different European nationalities, something that is more and more common every year since in the EU, as opposed to NAFTA, citizens can freely migrate from country to country, the request for translated paperwork can be endless.
So my proposal is to combine the beauty of the island of Menorca with a new regime that would be unique in Europe and that would make it very easy, and truly special, for people to get married in this beautiful island. A set of rules about marriage similar to those that exist in USA.
First of all, for this new regime there is already the advantage that Spain allows Gay marriage. That in itself should be of help to attract more tourists who want to get married there. But what Menorca should do is to make it easy and fun to get married there. It should make it very simple to get married through affidavit and not this absurd certificates in which people must prove that they are single as if they had to prove they don´t have a “lien” on them. It should also make it simple for anyone, after a day course, to be allowed to officiate weddings – so Menorca would be the only place in Europe where people can get married by their friends. Getting married by your peer is what the Facebook generation wants. Menorca can change the rules to allow that. This is also important because getting married is a very cultural experience and people prefer to get married by somebody akin to them or close to them.
If Minorca created this new “wedding friendly regime” it would do something similar yet distant to what other islands do. The Canary Islands for example have created a tax haven regime. So have Bermuda and many other fiscal havens. But I find an island of florists, bakers and musician somehow nicer than an island of dodgy bankers. If Menorca did become the marriage capital of Europe – celebrating say 1000 weddings a week – the island´s GDP could grow by half a billion euros per year, something huge in an island of only 60,000 people. Let French Polynesia and Maldives do the honeymoons. Menorca should do the weddings!
And the slogan would of course be “Come to Menorca and live happily ever after.” But as it is right now, so beaurocratic and complicated, Nina and I will marry on another island, Manhattan, away from dodgy bankers, and enjoying the close company of our friends and family.
2009 5
Twitter “Customer Care” at Fon is Fonwifi
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Fon with No Comments
- Image via Wikipedia
At Fon we are Fonwifi in Twitter. But it so happens that naturally FonWiFi is evolving from being us telling news about Fon to quickly becoming a first help site for customer care. We were not prepared for this but as thousands of Fonera 2.0 get shipped around the world we are doing what we can to answer. So long as people understand that it is not meant to be our customer care we are cool with it.
As far as the Fonera is concerned yes, we admit it, we can´t get the Bittorrent to work well. Megaupload works fine, and so does Rapidshare. You can also download by cutting and pasting links. You can even download when away from home by entering your fonera using DynDNS. You can also upload HD videos to Youtube, pictures to Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, convert 3G to WiFi, connect printers and webcams to it. But we do apologize about Bittorrent. It´s not that it does not work. Bittorrent is like loading 3 people on a donkey. Sometimes it moves…but sometimes it just crashes. Everything else requires less resources.
In any case the Fonera is open source and we welcome all help to fix that app as you enjoy the others which is still not bad for 49 euros plus shipping.
2009 5
Discovering new Music Services and Gadgets
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- Image via Wikipedia
Record labels may be going down the drain but music has never been livelier. So here are my latest discoveries (and by discoveries I don´t mean that the Indians were not there before but that they are new to me). First I rediscovered the Sansa Connect: an amazing WiFi music player designed by Zing that unfortunately failed in the marketplace but as a result can now be bought for $30 and I strongly recommend that you Google it, get it and thank me. The Sansa Connect does a lot of things that the iPod does not, simple things like erasing a song you hate without having to wait to connect to your computer. It plays Launchcast radios, it shows you Flickr pictures, and all of that for $30.
Spotify I promoted it a long time ago but it keeps getting better. It will also have Genius which surprisingly does not belong to Apple. Genius is great for making you discover what you already own. Its like a fashion advisor who helps you wear your own clothes. Or tries to sell you new ones which just doesn´t work with me.
The other day I met the co founder of Doubletwist on a London Bath train. Doubletwist is phenomenal for putting music on all that is not an iPod including your beloved Blackberry, PSP and other non Apple gadgets. It also shows pictures, and other wonders. It is still buggy but shows great progress.
Cloudplayer rocks. I discovered it today while testing Jolicloud. I don´t care if the music from Cloudplayer is from musicians I don´t know. Their hot tracks seemed to be made by my personal DJ. Love them. Share their taste in electronic music.
Limewire keeps getting better. Loved their new release. In Spain it is legal to download music and I live in Spain where I can openly use Limewire and obtain any song I want. But even though Limewire gives me free ownership of songs that I can then add to any device without DRM or any limitation I see that in music as in anything else in life, what you want is quality not quantity. And Limewire is music agnostic. It gets you the music but it doesn´t believe in anything. I like services who helped me discover music.
I also use Vuze to get music (I am a small investor in Vuze). Limewire is better to get a song, Vuze to build your music collection. But then downloading music is illegal in many countries so please don´t download if it´s illegal in your country. Of course Limewire and Vuze have tons of content that is legal to download as well.
Lastly the founders of Herzio presented to me in Spain the other day. Very smart developers. Herzio is about becoming fan of a band more than about listening to everything. Herzio is like what the record labels of the future will look like. Music is free and you pay for concerts and merchandising. Moreover music will be bottom up, meaning pushed by your friends, and not by gigantic record labels. Moreover music will be CC. Kind of like Pocoyo, that amazing character for 3 year olds that has made a killing in many countries of the world. Pocoyo is on Youtube but then kids die for the merchandising.
2009 3
Watching E3: the most shocking, controlerless games
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My son Tom, who keeps me abreast of the newest trends in game playing just showed me this video about controlerless games. It is absolutely remarkable. At least in the demo. It kills the Wii because it´s the Wii concept but way, way farther, and without a remote. The whole Xbox press conference is interesting but the controlerless games start in minute 86. Enjoy.
2009 3
Dinner with Paco Arango of the Fundacion Aladina
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Nina and I go for dinner with another couple, Alexis and Jimena, friends of ours, and Paco Arango joins us. We are at Casa Benigna, a great family restaurant in Madrid where grandma greets all guests at the entrance. Conversation is all over the place, internet, politics, the inevitable comments about the crisis, the Air France crash. The shock arrives with dessert. It is then that I find out, that while we are all going to work tomorrow, we realize Paco Arango has a very different job. A job that takes tremendous courage but it is probably the saddest that I ever came across. The video is in Spanish but even if you don´t speak the language you will get the story. Paco´s job takes place at a Children´s Hospital, el Hospital del Niño Jesus. And it is at this hospital where Paco tells children themselves, and his/her parents, that they have cancer. Doctors rely on Paco to tell them the news and deal with the shocking consequences. After the news is delivered Paco and his Fundacion Aladina help the children first, and then the parents, to cope with the terrible challenge of treatment, hope, but all too frequently, impending death. Many times children don´t die from cancer but of their lack of immunity. Treatment choices are still very primitive. We still understand way too little about cancer.
I arrive home and I have a hard time going to sleep thinking about the children I just saw in the video. As we go to bed, there are around 300,000 children with cancer in Europe alone. Children like Antonio, who died after making this video.
2009 1
I am a pilot and I believe aviation could be much safer
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I am a pilot. Not a professional pilot, as in real life I am a CEO of a tech company. But in my spare time I became a pilot and fly a small jet, a Citation Jet. During my training as a pilot I was shocked to find out how poorly equipped planes are. Planes are all about radios, VOR, DME, ILS and other systems invented over 50 years ago and still running the cockpit. When I was involved briefly involved in the airline business (with poor consequences I must say) I could not believe how badly equipped planes are, especially when they cross the Atlantic. What just happened to the Air France airliner is but a proof of everything that can wrong in aviation.
Would you believe it if I told you that many planes that cross the Atlantic do not even have GPS systems and instead use highly inaccurate, archaic positioning systems that would be useless to report a crash position? I don´t know what happened to that Air France flight but there´s a reason neither I nor anyone knows. It´s because planes don´t report where they are unless pilots do and many times pilots don´t even know precisely where they are. This is what AP says:
The area where the plane could have gone down was vast. Brazil’s military searched for the plane off its northeast coast, while the French military scoured the Atlantic off the West African coast near the Cape Verde Islands.
Aviation today is as it was 30 years ago. Planes do not carry GPS geolocators. Even if that Air France pilot was as good as the pilot who landed in the Hudson and even if people could get out of the plane after it water landed, passengers would probably be dead by the time we found the plane. Presently in the aviation world we only know where planes are when they fly near or over land. And that is because the only way to know where a plane is is to see the plane with a radar. Planes in the Atlantic do not themselves say where they are and controllers can´t see them.
To know where they are you need a pilot talking over a lousy quality HF radio to report where he/she is using inaccurate equipment You would also be astonished to find out that even though satellite telephony has existed for over a decade many planes that cross the Atlantic do not carry satelllite phones in case the pilot´s radios fail. Flying today is still all about radars and radios and most signals don´t make it to the mid Atlantic, Pacific or many areas over which we fly today. Moreover many parts of the land mass are not covered by radars and planes have to tell each other more or less where they are or choose primitive methods such as flying at different levels not to crash into each other. Satellite technology has not made it to planes. GPS are there, in some but not all commercial planes. But they are not supposed to be used for landing. Landing is supposedly done with antiquated radio systems that seem straight out the 1950s because USA may turn the GPS off in case of war.
Why are things this way? I don´t really know. It´s a miracle that there are no more accidents. Yes planes are safer than cars but they would be much safer if their functioning combined elements of radio communications as now with elements of satellite communications and many, many more technologies available today. Indeed sometimes new piston planes have better instruments than 747s.
As we know pilots can only handle so much information. But planes could have many more instruments. If planes were in permanent contact via satellite they could be reporting the most minute details of what is happening with them to say a global Airbus or Boeing maintenance center. And even though this information would be impossible for the pilot to digest, people and/or computers at Airbus or Boeing could be monitoring a lot more information every second a fly is on its way. They could alert the airline and the pilots of minor yet possibly fatal flaws if not attended. While that Air France plane that vanished a few hours ago was crossing the ocean Airbus could have been receiving tons of information from the engines, tanks, instruments, and all critical parts of the plane. Instead we know nothing. We don´t know what happened to the plane and a tragedy could have been prevented. But now, do not have the information of where the accident actually happened. Yes, the plane has a radio that should float or be somewhere and should tell rescuers more or less where it is but is that all we can do for airline safety? Why do we need a black box? All the info in a black box should be on the ground the moment it is created. Think about this, even a passenger with a geolocator as the one used for anti car theft would have been able to send more information than the whole plane before the crash. Nowadays a person carrying an iPhone or a Nokia E71 pointed at the window could have better positioning information and software than the pilots of the plane. For 1000 euros a plane or less we could at least know precisely where each aircraft. Why we don´t it? And then there´s weather information. Planes that cross the Atlantic sometimes face ferocious CBs that go up to 40,000 ft. There is now instrumentation available over satellite that gives even small aircraft real time weather information. But this instruments are not available yet to most large commercial aircraft that cross the Atlantic. And a CB could bring down a plane and maybe that´s what brought the AF flight down.
If anything our collective lack of action is a conspiracy of people trained in the past scared of change. Many pilots surprisingly actually fear modern instruments. But I am not advocating the end of the pilot. I am advocating support for pilots who have too much in their hands and could receive much more help while flying if their planes were in constant contact with the ground but not always through them. If what brought down the AF flight was a high hurricane like cloud known as CB avoiding that cloud would have been incredibly easy with a combination of the information that is available to a pilot through his own radar and ground information as to where all the CBs maybe located. We now have extremely accurate 2 hour forecasts. It is negligence that those are not in the hands of all pilots.