At FON Labs we built FON Get Simple or Fon.gs, that like Tinyurl allows you to make a long URL into a short address, but makes it also easy to remember, since you can choose your own address like www.fon.gs/empirestate (while tinyurl used to give you meaningless characters as an address). Recently Tinyurl released the same feature, allowing their users to choose a “custom alias” for their links. I guess we’re even.

I’ve recently got to know about a Spanish startup that developed a really good product based on Google Maps called Wikiloc, a tool to discover and share GPS data on the web. All trails and points of interest that you’ll find on the service have been recorded with GPS receivers and published by the Wikiloc users community. With a passion for biking I’m sure I’ll make good use of it, especially for finding new routes near Madrid and sharing my own. But not only for Madrid of course. I am now in Sun Valley, Idaho and Wikiloc can be used for routes around here as well.

For every trail any user and biking or hiking lover will find useful information like length, accumulated altitude, difficulty level, images, links to other websites and more. Users can also visualize the trails on Google Earth or get driving directions to the place where a trail begins or download the trails shared by other users and upload them to their GPS receiver.

Registered members can use Wikiloc as a personal database of trails, upload their own GPS data, along with descriptions and pictures. Uploaded information is initially private but can be made public and shared with the community.

One of the main reasons I came to Aspen was to attend the 40th Birthday of my friend Jack Hidary. The other one was the meeting of the Trustees of the Clinton Foundation, but for confidentiality sake I did not do videos of that meeting. In this video Jack Hidary, who is so good at explaining anything (I am very surprised he doesn´t teach at any university), explains how the Aspen Ideas Festival came about and what happens there.

From the half day I spent there my impressions were very positive. They seem to manage to be all over the place and yet…focused.

It´s 3am here in Aspen and I am awake mainly for three reasons. One is altitude sickness. Aspen is at 2500 meters and one of the consequences of altitude is insomnia. Secondly I have had fever for a day now without any other symptoms. I arrived to Aspen the night before last and since yesterday morning I have had between 37.5 and 38.7 fever. And lastly there´s the 8 hour jet lag between Aspen and Madrid which partly explains why I would wake up at 3am since it´s now noon in Madrid. And what´s worse is that I am in Aspen on the first trip ever with my second daughter Isabella who is 15. We had never traveled just the two of us. But while it is depressing to be sick it was special to see how well she took care of me. Isa brought me cold towels to lower the fever, ordered food for me and even googled altitude sickness reading all the symptoms to me. As she took care of me I remembered the nights in which things were the other way around.

So far I missed my dear friend Jack Hidary´s 40th birthday party. Today I have a meeting of trustees of the Clinton Foundation. If I go on feeling like this I will miss that too. But sometimes life is like this. We are reminded of the fragility of the human body. One thing is sure, I am not getting up until I feel reasonably well.

Update: It is five hours later and my fever is gone and I feel better. So I will be able to spend a very American Fourth of July after all!

I’m very glad to let you know Twitxr is one of the first partners of Polar Rose, the service that lets you name the people you see in online photos and search for pictures of any person, with much better results then Google Image search.

Polar Rose will automatically find people inside the pictures users post to Twitxr and let anybody visiting Twitxr.com name them (see for example the picture of Azeem Azhar I took today during a meeting). All these pictures will then be searchable on Polar Rose. This integration brings to all Twitxr users the features available to the Polar Rose users who installed a browser plugin. We’ll keep working with them to find other collaboration opportunities and welcome your suggestions.

Last week T-Mobile, the fourth largest wireless carrier in America, launched T-Mobile@Home, an offer that will provide its customers with landline phone service for 10$ a month, a cheaper then Vonage price.

The service is based on a WiFi router that lets users use special mobile phones provided by T-Mobile that can route calls over the mobile network (when out) or via WiFi when at home (using a VoIP technology called UMA that tunnels voice traffic over the Internet to T-Mobile’s backbone network), additionally T-Mobile@home customers will be able to plug their old landline phones to the router and enjoy the same unlimited local and long-distance calls included in the offer. T-Mobile@home is available to existing T-Mobile customers who have mobile subscriptions costing at least $39.99 per month and have a broadband connection at home.

Thanks to WiFi and VoIP T-Mobile can compete with AT&T, Verizon Wireless, and Sprint Nextel and their “all you can eat” plans on a lower cost basis. In Seattle and Dallas, where T-Mobile has first tested T-Mobile@home, they say that 45% of users of the service had switched from other mobile operators.

NTRglobal a Spanish company based in Barcelona and one of Europe’s biggest SaaS players with more than 12,000  customers has recently closed a €22M round of financing, one of a largest rounds of VC funding for a SaaS venture this year. Congratulations to Luis Font, CEO and co-founder of NTRglobal, who is running a very successful global business from Spain.

NRTglobal is growing faster then most of their competitors, providing on-demand solutions for remote support, access, online collaboration and IT system administration to more then 12,000 small and large corporations in 60 countries. The investment from international investors Kennet Partners and Atlas Venture will fuel NRT expansion in North America, UK, China and Japan, and will help the company further develop their NTRsupport, NTRadmin and NRTconnect products. Existing investors Debaeque and Elaia Partners also participated in the financing round.

Image via WikipediaMy readers know that I believe that the Bush Administration record on world affairs is pretty bad. Still for the sake of fairness there´s something positive to say about President Bush as he prepares to leave the White House and that is how well he and his team have managed North Korea. And nothing more dramatic than today´s footage showing North Korea´s nuclear reactor in which its atomic weapons were made being blown up. It is clear that military power supported by diplomacy as in the case of North Korea works much better than military power alone as it was the case in Iraq. It seems that medication plus therapy is a better treatment for brutal dictators than…lobotomy.