The BBC reports that the US Army is bombing civilian targets in Somalia right now because there´s a suspicion that there are terrorists around. Even if there were terrorists US has to stop its policy of air bombardments of civilian towns in which terrorists may be present. Think about it. There are probably Islamic terrorists in Madrid where I live right now. Should we get bombed then? Are we all fair game for USA to catch terrorists? And even if a terrorist is identified, should he/she be killed from the air or instead brough to justice as we do over here in Spain? Why is placing bombs terrorism and throwing bombs from airplanes not terrorism?

Recently FonLabs launched two apps. One is a site that offers a simple way to measure the appeal of different web sites called Okorko (is it OK or knocked out?) and the other one is Twitxr (pronounced Twitcher) a tool that brings photography to Twitter, the messaging platform. Interestingly both were featured on Techcrunch as they were launched and both had the same initial traffic. But as I watch the usage in both platforms you can see that while Okorko is destined to be a niche site with limited appeal (it was launched as a geek answer to Hotornot), Twitxr is getting real usage from many people, including Michael Arrington who first trashed it but then actually got to like it, and it is growing nicely. The positive forces that converged on Twitxr is that it combines Twitter than everyone knows, photography that everyone loves with cross postings on Flickr and Facebook. A twitx (pronounced Twitch) is a moment that is capture by text, picture and geolocalization automatically available in many mobile phones. The easiest way to use Twitxr is to try iTwitxr with a hacked iPhone (the only type of iPhones that are really fun to use). As far as data is concerned we are getting around 5000 uniques per day 2 weeks afer the launch. The cost of developing Twitxr was around $10K and it will cost us around $1K per month to maintain.

Dollar hit 1.52 vs the euro today. For Fon this is not tragic because our routers, the Foneras are priced in dollars and in the last 2 years the dollar has gone down over 30% and so has the cost of our routers when measured in euros. On the negative our labor costs are mostly in euros and labor costs are by far the biggest at Fon cause we are mostly a software company. But never mind Fon. When will the dollar reach a value that makes the financial world crack? When will the Arabs for example stop taking dollars cause they can´t afford their vacations in Marbella and St Tropez anymore and the US is seen as hostile anyway? When will the Chinese stop taking US debt because they get tired that the US government then blocks them on most company purchases they want to do for security reasons? And when will the US suffer serious inflation because of the high cost of imports such as oil that can be replaced? And on top of these issues there´s a bigger one and that is, can the US continue to be the world´s biggest debtor and the globala superpower at the same time?

Alan Levy and I started working together in the 80s when he helped me build Viatel a company whose main source of revenues came from telephone services and from which we both had very successful exits. Since then we have parted ways in business but remained friends with me thinking of him as a more conservative guy who stuck to telephony in the SIP format and me going on to build Fon, the global WiFi network. But my view of Alan Levy changed when I saw how he could successfully blend old style telephony with an exciting new format and the result is BlogTalkRadio. This week I was going to write an elaborate article in order to explain how is it that BlogTalkRadio democratizes the talk radio format using the internet and telephones and makes it available for all but I found out that Conde Nast Portfolio saved me from doing the research. Here´s a great article summarizing BlogTalkRadio.

What did the guys at Radar.net do to get $11 million for what is basically a Twitxr that Fon Labs developed with 2 people in 3 weeks? And I see my friends Joi Ito and Reid Hoffman participated on the first round when they got their first $4 million so there´s probably more to the story than meets the eye. In the meantime Twitxr now links with Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, it has its own iPhone app called iTwitxr, and it works over tons of devices and mobile phones via uploads or emails. It has 4000 members who have posted over 6000 pictures during the first days and pixs are geolocalized (I don´t see that theirs are nor do I see a friends map). I know we owe you a graphic design for Twitxr, so far it has the coders design. We will upload something soon when the Fon designers get a break for Fon stuff. But then what do I know. Radar just appeared on my radar. Maybe they are truly great.

First Jason Reitman comes up with a cute, funny and wrong movie that defends the tobacco industry called Thank You For Smoking and gets away with it. After this feat he comes up with a cute, funny movie about teenage pregnancy called Juno and the movie wins an Oscar and makes over $100M in the box office. What next Jason? A cute and funny movie about the Iraq war?

Don´t get me wrong, I enjoyed both Thank you for smoking and Juno because the acting was excellent and the scripts were very well written. The problem in my case and that of millions of parents of teenagers is that not only I had to give my three kids the “but smoking is still bad” talk after Thank you for smoking but I had to give a tougher “don´t try this at home” talk with my girls 15 and 17 who thought Juno was such an appealing character. After struggling with the incorrect moral undertone of Jason´s subjects at this point I prefer movies who are easier to deal with as a parent. Films like Knocked Up for example in which people who do wrong things (mixing drugs and unprotected sex) just look the part making it hard for my kids to identify with (although admittedly leading to poorer results as a movie). Jason Reitman instead specializes in portraying the most appealing characters who unfortunately also do very wrong things like preaching the benefits of tobacco and getting pregnant after a night of casual sex at 16. In Thank you for smoking and Juno, Jason Reitman went way pass his father as a movie director of social subjects (dad did Kindergarden Cop) into a new political area, one that is valid but thorny, namely that of showing people we like who do things that we don´t believe in. By now I think Jason is developing his own genre of political movies: how to make the public fall in love with what they (mostly) think it´s wrong. In my case it worked in the sense that I am very much against the tobacco industry and against unwanted teen age pregnancies and yet… I found myself uncomfortably enjoying both movies. Recently another movie who was neither cute, nor funny but probably better than Jason Reitman´s films had the same effect on me and that is the German film “The Life of Others”. The Life of Others, a must see, is the story of a “good” torture expert if you can believe that such person can exist. And yet it´s effective because in the world of grown ups we do learn to see that most bad people have something good in them and viceversa. But in the age of black and white sometimes…black and white is good at least if you are watching the movie with your kids and feel obliged to say something. But considering that Jason Reitman is not a teacher, nor a preacher but a movie director who likes to reverse engineer our morals I have a recommendation to make to him. I think his next feature should be about Diablo Cody the Oscar winner script writer of Juno. I am ready to watch the cute and funny version of the story of a stripper who became a writer who won an Oscar.

Twitxr (pronounced twitcher) day 3: Albert and Victor at Fonlabs never stop and in two days from Twitxr‘s launch they added a couple of extremely useful features. As you know Twitxr is like a Twitter with pictures, a service to update your friends with what you are doing, where you are doing it and, most importantly, a picture of it. The text and picture you post will appear not only on Twitxr.com, but also on your Twitter, Facebook and now Flickr account, if you have configured the service to do so.

Starting today you’ll be able to post your pictures and text to Twitxr from any device with an e-mail client (any PC, Mac, BlackBerry, Nokia phone or smartphone, Windows Mobile device, not jailbraked iPhone, etc… ). This adds support to an incredible number of devices and makes the service really simple to use. Of course if you have a jailbraked iPhone you should use iTwitxr (available on the Network category in Installer.app) which makes the experience fast and intuitive and adds automatic geolocation to your posts.

To post via e-mail just save the private address you’ll find in the configuration page to your address book (on your phone for example) and follow these easy steps:

1. Enter your location as the subject of the e-mail
2. Type the update message as the body (140 characters or less)
3. Attach the picture
4. Send it to your private twitxr e-mail address

As a new feature was not enough, Twitxr now allows you to post your twitxs to your Flickr account and have your photos geolocated and complete with a description (your update message). This latest addition makes Twitxr the perfect service for those who want to share messages and pictures with their friends on the most popular microblogging and photo sharing services (Twitter, Facebook and Flickr), using almost any mobile device on the market from wherever they are.

If you have any suggestion or comment please send them to contact AT twitxr.com.

Tonight Fon hosted the Facebook developer´s garage in Madrid. It was the first in the Spanish language and I think that Spanish is the first language other than English that Facebook launched. I am sure that soon there will be may pictures about the event and here is an interview Mobuzz.tv made me. There will be pictures about it in Facebook as well but those be seen by the friends of the people who came to the event. What was impressive about this event is that Facebook in Spain is still a tiny community of 300K early adopters. Still the developer community came to the event in full force with over 100 coders present and over 250 people overall. The event did not take place at a garage actually with garage being such a Silicon Valley term. In Madrid we hosted at Teatro Lara a theater I partly own. While there were some negative comments made about the fact that most of the Facebook apps are hardly used most people were impressed about the fact that if you write a Facebook app you can keep 100% of the income that that app generates. At the end my friend Anil from Mobuzz summarize the Facebook Fon event in one word the Fonbook. What is that, the printed version of Facebook?

For those who speak Spanish here´s an excellent summary of the event.

And we got a ton of twitxs that are pronounced twitches today. And we got so many pictxrs we are quickly ordering more server space for your future twitxs. Btw it is in Basque that tx is pronounced ch. But ch like in English or in Spanish because ch in Italian is pronounced like a k, and in German like a j in Spanish. Is this clear? Welcome to Europe.