There are plenty of businesses that were “jump-started” into operation, without VCs or with minimal investment. A few examples of these businesses in Spain are Meneame and Panoramio now part of Google Earth, while in the U.S. there’s Digg. And of course, there are many more throughout the whole world. As the crisis hits us all this is one of the topics that I touched upon during my latest lectures with future entrepreneurs.

Right now startups are being made Open Source style: everyone puts in a little bit of their time. And this is partly feasible because Open Source itself exists nowadays: programming requires fewer resources than before, hosting is cheaper, hardware in itself is cheaper. Open source apps lowered the barriers to putting products on the Internet, and the Internet is now ten times bigger than it was at the time of the last crash. Indeed, here is a little tidbit of information for you: In 2007, YouTube alone consumed as much bandwith as the entire Internet in 2000.

Ever since I founded Einsteinet in 2000 and began to promote the concept of an intelligent Internet, I’ve been obsessed with the idea of being able to do everything from the web browser itself. Although I lost $50 million on Einsteinet mainly because I was five years ahead of the game, I haven’t lost that passion for seeing the day come when all I need to do is open Firefox, and everything will take place right there and in the cloud (or the brain as we used to call it back in 2001). And although Zoho is good, I still think that the people who are closest to giving us an intelligent Internet are the folks at Google, with many of their applications, and especially Google Docs (disclosure: Google are investors in Fon).

I had to give a presentation recently and I decided to do it with Google Docs. It ended up being incredibly easy to be in Firefox with many tabs open and add photos from the Internet to my presentation (searching via Google images) by simply clicking on a photo and dragging it to the Google Docs tab. You can also use your own photos and videos with ease, and it is even easier to use photos from the Internet, or videos on YouTube. The format of each photo adjusts accordingly. And when it comes to speed, forget about using Power Point, Keynote or Neo Office on a Mac. Now, what I wasn’t able to do is receive a presentation in my Gmail account and save it directly in Docs without first downloading it onto my computer and uploading it later to Google Docs. But what you can do is just send it to yourself at a special email address and keep it uploaded in Google Docs.

On most common apps, on what used to be Word, Power Point, Excel, Outlook, Google Docs, Gmail are all you need now. And they work especially well with Netbooks connected to WiFi or HSDPA. My favorite netbook? The Dell Mini with Ubuntu.

At the beginning I only accepted people I knew as friends in FB but after having a waiting list of 700 potential friends I decided to accept them and new ones. I now have around 2300 friends. Recently a new phenomenom started: comments on Facebook. Maybe because of the closeness that FB inspires I now get a lot of comments on my status updates in FB. And because FB is linked to this blog I get comments on posts on FB instead of my blog. Now the interesting thing is that there are no trolls in Facebook and the average level of comments on FB is very good. There is dissent in FB, which is positive. But no trolling. In FB I don´t get antisemitic comments, or anti south American comments (yes in Spain some people have anti South American prejudice) or people insulting me because I have done well in life which seems to be a favorite occupation of some readers of my Spanish blog. People in FB disagree strongly with me sometimes, but their behavior is similar to the one they would have in public. Disagreeing without insulting. I only had one instance of a person insulting me in FB and I have been a member since mid 2006. And it was simple. I removed this person from my friend´s list. But that is one in over 2 years. In my Spanish blog I get insulted every week, especially when I write about religion or politics. In the end I think that the success of FB is that it elevates the conversation. But not everyone agrees. Benjami Villoslada co founder of Meneame for example for example recently wrote that he misses trolls in FB, that everyone si so polite it´s boring. Indeed his latest update was that he was going to Meneame because he wanted to find some trolls, that he missed them. Another friend of mine instead, Anil de Melo, who got “trolled out” after the Mobuzz closing, spoke to me about installing Facebook Connect in his blog and only accepting comments from friends in Facebook. But the problem I see with this is that it forces people to be in FB and that is also bad. None of us want FB to monopolize the conversation.

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I love Google. They are my investors in Fon. Having said this, I don´t understand why the translation tools of Google are so much worse than those of Yahoo. Especially in English to German. During this vacation I started learning German with my girlfriend Nina, and I was trying to “cheat” by using the Google translation tools to do my “homework.” It did not work. But now that I use Babelfish of Yahoo I sound much better. The problem is that I went from sounding absurd to sounding “too good to be true.”

Have you heard of the test in which you had to guess if you are talking to a computer or a person? Well, that tests fails with Google Translator but it frequently passes with Babelfish. Try this simple sentence: I like to fish in the ocean. Yahoo gets that ‘to fish’ is a verb, Google doesn´t.

Nobody knows how to fight terrorism. In spite of having co organized the largest conference to study terrorism ever hosted, neither do I. Still I will make a statement about terrorism and Israel´s anti terrorist policies.

Terrorism is about angry people who hate the status quo and want change it through terror. The key to deal with terrorism is to focus on recruitement, in what turns a non terrorist into a terrorist. Terrorism is an industry that is fueled by anger. To make it harder for terrorists organizations to recruit we have to make it harder to make their case for anger. I imagine Hamas or Hezbollah recruiters as people who go to sympathizers and show them proofs that USA, UK, Israel, Spain, are countries who should disappear from the face of the earth. Some are convinced and the terrorist ranks are increased. So the more “proofs” we give these recruiters the easier we make their job.

I don´t think global terrorism will ever vanish. It will be more or less intense. I also believe that fighting terrorism is like trying to tackle a statistical process in which we don´t aim to stop it altogether, we simply aim to make it unlikely. Like many other forms of crime there will always be some frustrated individuals who believe that killing innocent people will somehow make the world the world a better place (remember Timothy McVay).

This leads me to a conclusion about Israel policies against Hezbollah and Hamas. Even though I am Jewish and have a natural sympathy for Israel I disagree with the Israeli invasion of Lebanon of 2006 and the current invasion of Gaza. I disagree on three grounds. One is that I believe attacks of this kind make the moderates in Lebanon and Gaza more likely to become radicalized against Israel. Secondly that I believe it is immoral to kill innocent civilians regardless of the fact that Hamas uses them as human shields. And thirdly I believe that just as Hezbollah went from being a minor force in Lebanon disliked by most Lebanese to being seen as the defenders of Lebanese sovereignty I see it likely that Hamas will emerge from this conflict as victors in the eyes of the Palestinian population. And while I think that Hezbollah has no reason to attack Israel nor hate Israel and should focus instead in making Lebanon a better country I do think that while I disagree with the methods of Hamas I and probably most of my readers agree that it is time that the Oslo two state solution is implemented. So far Hamas is easier to oppose because their aim is the destruction of the state of Israel but if their objective evolved to the creation of the Palestinian state they would be as legitimate as Fatah. And most of us want to see a sovereign Palestinian state alongside a sovereign and safe Israel.

Israel went into war with Hamas with a clear military objective, to make Hamas stop their rocket attacks on Israel. But these attacks that had not been lethal before the invasion are now both lethal and more intense making it easier for Hamas to claim that they are “winning the war”. Now when Israel negotiates a cease fire Hamas will be seen as victors by the Palestinian because they were able to fight until the negotiation, that they were not defeated just like Hezbollah was not defeated. And in the future it will be easier for Hamas to recruit members among the angry unemployed youth of Gaza.

What could have Israel done in both cases? More targeted and limited air attacks without a ground operation with an objective that is clearly military. If Israel invades Lebanon because they kidnap two their soldiers or kills 600 people in Gaza because they fire rockets without victims and in both cases there´s tremendous infrastructure damage the enemies of Israel will grow in numbers throughout the Middle East and around the world. If PR plays a significant role in conventional warfare in the case of terrorism it plays a crucial role and Israel is losing the PR game and so far not increasing its safety.

Three out of my four children are of Facebook age. I am friends with all of them. I consider that an accomplishment. In some cases I am friends of their friends and in many they are friends of my friends. But I have been asking around and found out that Facebook´s success has been annoying for teenagers who dread what their parents may learn about them on Facebook. But I guess this tension reflect real life tension. If you get along in real life you get along in Facebook and if you don´t, well, why should it be different in Facebook. Yes, I do admit that when I see pictures of them going wild at a party I occasionally wonder if they were drunk, stoned or under some influence but then the “observation” goes both ways. When others post pictures of Nina and I going wild at some party…they are there for my kids to see. It´s been over a year now of Facebook co existence and so far the experience has been a great way to keep in touch. Especially with my daughter Alexa who left Madrid to attend college at Columbia University. Through Facebook I find those irrelevant details about my kids lives that turn them into even more lovable people who are out there to have a great time. I particularly enjoy the comments that other kids make on them. When buddies publicly praise your kids on their wall or in their pictures I feel an unavoidable parent´s pride. I am also happy that Facebook has destroyed the culture of privacy. For years I have felt that the conversation on privacy among parents and kids was an excuse for lack of communication. And when the phone was the only tool you would not get a lot of the stories just because your kids may not feel like calling you to tell you some seemingly irrelevant detail about their lives. Still when you love them so much those irrelevant details become News. And that is the genius of Facebook, to discover that when love is involved those “news” can be more important than whoever Obama is appointing to be a new cabinet member.

When I moved to Spain in 1995, I was very surprised to see that my Spanish friends, who as most Spaniards nowadays are former Catholics, are all great promoters of the Epiphany. As a result while a minority of Spanish kids today go to church and hear about God, almost all of them are told about the existence of the Magi who bring them gifts on January 6th. For Spanish kids the Epiphany is more important than Christmas. When I asked a Spanish friend called Jesus (Jesus is still a very common name in non religious Spain, another paradox) why he told his kids about the Magi and not about God he said very plainly “because I don´t believe in God”. The real identity of the Magi, namely the parents, is generally revealed to kids only in Grammar school. So because both Atheists and Catholics teach their kids about the Magi but only Catholics about God more kids believe in the Magi than in God.