I consider myself an entrepreneur first and and investor second and this is mostly the case because if I am an investor at all it is because of the money I made being an entrepreneur and not the other way around. And as an investor I have invested in very few companies. I get an investment proposal per day on the average and make one investment per month. But so far my investments are doing well. My stellar investment is not on the internet surprisingly but in alternative energies where I was the first backer of Miguel Salis in Eolia, a Spanish company now worth over 700 million euros only after 3 years from its foundation. But in the field of the internet there have been some exciting developments this week including the sale of Plazes to Nokia, the new investment round of Technorati and now Seesmic´s announcement.

My friend Loic Le Meur’s startup, Seesmic, has raised a new round of financing attracting investors like Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, and Wellington Partners, a well known VC. In this post on his blog Loic tells us the story of how Omidyar and Wellington Partners joined Seesmic. Congratulations Loic!

According to the data Loic made public, Seesmic, a website and platform enabling video conversations, is getting 120,000 unique visitors per month, 69,000 video posts per month and around 3,600 new users. What is especially interesting is how their video comments feature for third party platforms like WordPress and Friendfeed has proved extremely popular and taken the conversation out of the website and into thousands of blogs. To bring it back together, Seesmic recently launched a new version of their embeddable video player which shows all replies to the post shown at the bottom of the player.

Yesterday I was interviewed by Vanity Fair, one of my favorite magazines along with The Economist and Wired, as their Spanish edition is about to be launched. When they asked me what my favorite sport was I replied biking, so they decided to take pictures of me while cycling on the roof of my house.

The pictures I’ve published where taken while I was being photographed.

Vanity Fair Bike Shoot

And here is the video:

Now something I didn’t like. While Vanity Fair was interviewing me I googled it to find out when the newspaper was going to launch in Spain and I found this article from El País, with a comment saying something like “in the world there are few publishers capable of investing more then 12M euros to launch a magazine for a general audience of 40M inhabitants. One of these is Advance Publications of the Jewish brothers Samuel Irving and Donald Newhouse, comparable to the Sulzbergers, the New York Times publishers…“. What’s the purpose of saying they are Jewish? What if the New York Times wrote about Telefonica and its catholic CEO César Alierta, or Santander Bank managed by the Catholic family Botín? Ridiculous and unnecessary.

There is still a latent antisemitism in Spain. When somebody is rich they call them Jewish now I still have to see El País called Einstein, for example, the famous Jewish scientist. And who am I, the cyclist on the roof?

I’m one of the early shareholders in Sevenload and I’m very glad to announce the company has just closed its Series B round of financing lead by T-Online Venture Fund (Deutsche Telekom’s VC division), raising a “double digit million €” investment. Congratulations to Ibo and Axel!

Sevenload is like the combination of Flickr and Youtube, a social media platform for user generated and professional content.  This new round of financing will help the company expand its business launching localised sites in French, Italian, Spanish, Russian and Polish, along with the existing English and German ones.

Sevenload also announced they joined the “User Generated Content Principles” initiative, an alliance that sets guidelines for creating and distributing content through the web while protecting copyrights.

Predictify is a prediction platform where users can predict the future and build a reputation based on their accuracy. It’s a website aggregating collective wisdom, in the belief that a large group of normal people can better predict the outcome of uncertain events then a small group of experts. On Predictify you can find all kinds questions and predictions, from stock to pop culture, to US presidential elections. For example, the state of California recently began marrying gay and lesbian couples, so on Predictify you can now find questions such as First California Gay Divorce. More interesting questions are on the site, such as who will be Obama’s vice president or will Yahoo remain an independent company through the end of 2009.

Users can build a reputation based on their accuracy, and even get paid if they answer “premium” questions, such as questions asked by a marketer or a brand, for which Predictify charges who is asking and shares part of the revenue with the people who answer. Clever.

The guys at FON Labs have been very busy this week improving Twitxr.com. Twitxr now has a new logo and a new homepage and a bunch of minor changes that should help us grow faster. Below you can see before and after, we hope you’ll like the new look!

We now have two more mobile applications that will help our users easily share pictures from their mobile phones. Using our API (Application Programming Interface), Justin Braun created a Twitxr application for Windows Mobile phones and  Tristan Helmich developed one for Java phones (tested on Nokia, Simens and Motorola phones). We are greateful to them for the great work they did, as we are to Iván Martínez of Atelmedia and Eva María Pajarón who are working on a Twitxr client for Blackberry devices.

The people like you and me, who spend a lot of time on the internet are still a minority. And many outside our world consider us insensitive, glued to screens. And they are partly right as we do frequently ignored loved ones for an extra moment testing the latest site. But sometimes there are moments that even out of a computer screen you feel emotion. In this case sadness. This is one.

I am looking at the photo flow at Twitxr amazed that this simple idea that came out of Fon Labs in Gerona, Spain, is now a global phenomenom. But as I am looking at the timeline with pictures coming from Japan, USA, Argentina, Spain, Germany, Holland, I find Omjeyed from Iran. And I see that he is sick. I also see that he writes in a language that I don´t understand, with characters that are beautiful, much nicer than ours. Yet so obscure. I also see he does a little drawing, that is special. And I want to wish him well, I hope you have a speedy recovery Omjeyed.