Of everyone I know I am probably the person who knows how to do the most things….badly. Allow me to explain. I am like a perennial amateur. Ok, one thing I seemingly do well which is to have original ideas, like Fon and turn them into businesses. And that I do well. Maybe not Michael Dell well, but well enough to have started and sold 3 businesses for over half a billion. But other than that I am an amateur at so many things that I love to do but others do better!

The list is enormous. I love to cook and I cook reasonably well, very fast, people enjoy my food but of course there are so many better chefs than I am. I was also a diplomat for 4 years representing Argentina during its worst crisis. And I did what I could, in the States some still call me Ambassador cause once an Ambassador always an Ambassador in the States, but frankly, how can an Ambassador be a blogger? I was not a good Ambassador because I like to tell what I believe in. So much for being a diplomat. And what about being a Jet pilot? Yes, I am a pilot with a private pilot license and I did my Citation Jet certification. I had to pass 11 exams, take many classes and I can fly a Jet. But of course I am a so so pilot compared to most jet pilots. I have no doubt that most jet pilots are better than I am, still I greatly enjoy piloting my plane. And how about sailing? I have sailed since I was a teenager, I sail around 30 days per year in the Mediterranean or the Caribbean and I am studying to be the skipper of my 92 ft sailboat that I have had for 8 years. And I do know a lot about sailing and my sailboat but I know very little compared with professional crews. Still I know enough and can sail my boat from an island to another island. And by next summer I will have my skipper title. Again an amateur.

And the list goes on. I write for newspapers, magazines and have been writing for them since I was in college when I was a correspondent for Spanish and Argentine media. But am I a journalist? Even though articles of mine have appeared in books and 300K people per month read my blog, I could hardly call myself a writer, even though in practice I am and I do spend an hour a day or so writing, like I am doing now.

Another job I have is to organize conferences and events including some very large ones like the ones we organized at my foundation, Safe Democracy or the Menorca TechTalk. But even though I spend a significant amount of time organizing events, I know many people who do that for a living, people like Klaus Schwab for example. And even though many heads of states have attended conferences that I have organized I am no Klaus Schwab nor a professional conference organizer. And as far as being a speaker I have been paid sums like 14 thousand euros for speaking for one hour. But I decided not to charge for speaking and only speak at events I enjoy and be an amateur speaker. Somehow I feel uncomfortable about getting paid to speak, I feel that my freedom to say whatever I want is restricted. So I speak in around 30 conferences per year but I would not call myself a professional speaker. I guess the common theme in all I do is not being a professional, that I am not except as an entrepreneur, but being extremely curious and being fearless about trying new things.

I also have this necessity to be the boss of everything I do which is probably a disease. So if I am in a car I want to drive, in a boat I want to steer, in a conference I want to speak, in a plane I want to pilot, in a kitchen I want to cook. I know I should just let go, rely on others, and to a great extent I do as I have pilots, crew, driver, etc. Being a blogger is a good example. I used to write more for newspapers and magazines and I know that if I continued to do so I would have more readers. But being my own editor and publishing what I want when I want is more important than being read by tons of people. I prefer to publish in the Huffington Post which gives me total journalistic freedom than writing for Newsweek as I once did and had to deal with an editor telling me to add or take away words and change my piece. And I do write for the leading news magazine in Argentina, Noticias but that is because they are crazy enough to publish articles that are sometimes 9 pages long unedited. And I guess people like them cause they are now complaining I have sent nothing for a few months.

In short, in a world of professionals I am a perennial amateur. I do what I do out of love and probably a sick desire to be the master of my own life. I don´t care about doing things perfectly well. I care about doing reasonably well and having fun in the process.

Facebook is the second largest social network in the world quickly gaining ground over Myspace. But if Facebook is number two as far as I am concerned Facebook is a distant number one as of my hundreds of acquaintances and friends only a childhood friend of mine who is a musician is in Myspace. Everyone that is…who speaks English. But the issue here is that I am Argentine/Spanish and so far a great part of my social circle has not been able to enter Facebook and nor have my French and German friends. This is a subject that I spoke about during my first visit to Facebook last year in which I was shocked by how well the company was managed and predicted that Facebook would be worth over $10bn (sorry I know its pathetic to think so much in terms of money). So back to social life and friends I have great news for my Spanish, Latin American, French and German friends and that is that Facebook will be in Spanish, French and German in the next weeks. In Spanish as early as next Monday! Moreover in Madrid, at Teatro Lara (disclosure I partly own the theater) Fon will host a developers event for Facebook to launch the apps platform in Spanish. This event will take place on Monday February 18th but it is in Spanish only as the purpose of the event is to recruit Spanish coders to come up with great apps in Spanish. We at Fon will present our plans for our own Facebook app at the event. If you are interested in attending the event please write to developergarage@fon.com. If you developed or are working on a Facebook app in Spanish, you are invited to demo it during the event, please write to Pietro Saccomani.

What follows is the press release from Facebook in Spanish.

Facebook lanza la versión en Español; Alemán y Francés en breve

PALO ALTO, California — 7 de Febrero de 2008 — Facebook ha anunciado hoy su primer paso en los planes de internacionalización, lanzando la versión en español. Las versiones en alemán y francés estarán disponibles en las próximas semanas. Aproximadamente 1,500 usuarios hispanohablantes de facebook decidieron formar parte del proyecto, traduciendo todo el website del inglés al español en menos de cuatro semanas.

Los usuarios que desean utilizar Facebook en español pueden cambiar desde ya el lenguaje en las preferencias de su cuenta. A partir del lunes 11 de Febrero, cualquier persona que acceda a www.facebook.com desde cualquier país de habla hispana accederá a facebook en español. Facebook tiene actualmente mas de 2.8 millones de usuarios entre España y Latino-América.

“Más del 60% de los usuarios de facebook vienen de fuera de los Estados Unidos y viven en países donde el inglés no es la lengua primaria,” dijo Mark Zuckerberg fundador y CEO de Facebook. “Nuestro objetivo siempre ha sido que la gente pueda utilizar Facebook en su idioma, así que hemos construido una aplicación que permite a los usuarios participar en la traducción de Facebook a sus lenguas y dialectos. Estamos muy agradecidos por todas las contribuciones de nuestros usuarios en la traducción de Facebook.”

Los usuarios de la herramienta de traducciones tienen la oportunidad de traducir el texto mientras utilizan Facebook normalmente. La comunidad de traductores decide cuales son las mejores traducciones vía un sistema de votaciones. Por ejemplo los usuarios seleccionaron “dar un toque” para traducir el término “poke,” creado por Facebook.

La motivación de muchos de los traductores es el impacto de sus contribuciones; estas permitirán que millones de personas que solo hablan su lengua puedan utilizar facebook. El mayor contribuidor fue responsable por 1.284 de las traducciones seleccionadas por la comunidad, o casi un 3% de todo el texto del interfaz de usuario de Facebook.

Facebook planea seguir dejando en manos de los usuarios la traducción de las nuevas funcionalidades conforme estén disponibles. Adicionalmente la herramienta de traducciones estará disponible para que todos los desarrolladores de aplicaciones en la plataforma de facebook puedan dejar en manos de la comunidad la traducción de sus aplicaciones.

Los usuarios de Facebook también pueden desde ahora acceder a Facebook en cualquier lenguaje soportado desde cualquier teléfono móvil con acceso a Internet. Cualquiera puede registrarse en facebook vía www.facebook.com , o vía m.facebook.com desde cualquier teléfono móvil.

Acerca de Facebook

Fundado en Febrero de 2004, Facebook es una herramienta social que permite a la gente comunicarse de forma más eficiente con sus amigos, familia y compañeros de trabajo. La compañía desarrolla tecnología que facilita el flujo de información a través del gráfico social, el mapa digital de las relaciones existentes en la vida real. Cualquiera puede darse de alta en Facebook y comunicarse con la gente que conoce en un entorno seguro. Facebook forma parte de la vida de millones de usuarios, y la mitad de estos lo utilizan todos los días. Facebook es una compañía privada con sede central en Palo Alto, California.

I am concerned about the fact that ex communist countries such as China and Russia are outgrowing the USA and the EU by a big margin. USA and EU grow at a combined rate of around 3% now rapidly falling as a result of recent financial turmoil while Russia and China are growing at a combined rate of over 7%. At that rate former communist economies double in size every decade. As the democratic West accumilates debt the former communist countries pile cash and grow faster. Watching Russia for example moving away from democracy with most Russians actually in favor of Vladimir Putin´s consolidation in power reminds us that it was not lack of freedom that brought communism down: it was lack of prosperity. Many of us were simply wrong when we thought that the fall of the Berlin Wall was about democracy. People who were leaving Soviet Russia and its satellites were not really looking for freedom, they were trying to make a decent living. At the same time as recession approaches it is sad to remember that it the main driver of Nazism was rapid economic decline. And while in the EU and in North America there´s little risk of moving away from democracy it is in the swing states of the world where we now see that given a choice between prosperity and freedom most choose prosperity. The latest example of this trend is Serbia, a country in the heart of Europe that has chosen to align itself more closely with Russia than the EU.

Ok, we had no idea that so many people were going to come to webhotornot so we are taking it more seriously and turning this practical joke into a better tool (or a better practical joke). In the first hours since we blogged this we got over 1000 sites submitted for voting and over 40K votes. Still, we know that Webhotornot is never going to be as popular as Hotornot as we can´t compete with guys trying to get laid (or wank) but even though people will not show so much excitement over rating web sites we can still do a decent sex appeal platform. So this is what we are doing and all this is without consulting Sifry who is asleep now (we are awake in Spain he is asleep in California zzzzzzzzzzzzzz).

-people were submitting so many websites that we did not have time to get the screenshot and most sites offered for voting had no screenshots. Now we changed this and if there´s no screenshot we don´t offer it for voting.

-we are going to make it easier for people to go and vote not only randomly but at least once for the sites they love or hate.

-we are going to have battles for example Techcrunch vs GigaOm so people can have fun (thanks Eduardo Arcos for the idea).

-we are going to introduce a ranking of the 50 hottest sites with more than 50 votes. Then we will change the rankings and let people make their own rankings. The problem with rankings is that they influence outcomes and we will end up with the Google aristocracy problem that some sites always win (but then life maybe like that!)

-we are going to explain to people what this site is about and ask them to vote on sites they have tried and not just on looks.

And now to eat some paella….

I am reading what Techcrunch and Paris Lemon wrote about Webhotornot and they got it wrong. First of all Webhotornot was made in Spain at the Fon Labs based on a funny idea that Dave and I had. Webhotornot is a spoof of Hotornot, a hotornot for geeks. If anything a web doodle a divertimento, a practical joke and if anything useful comes out of this hack that was put together in a few hours by the coders at Fon Labs would be that investors may use it to gather geeks opinions not on babes but on sites. But this site is not a venture, there´s no company behind it or anything and this is not Dave Sifry´s new company!

I have been a telecom/internet entrepreneur for 17 years now. But other than building my companies together with some great employee/partners who have followed me from Viatel, Jazztel, Ya.com, and now Fon I also invest in other people´s companies. My criteria for investing is simple, I invest in companies whose services I like and whose entrepreneurs I admire. Tariq Krim´s Netvibes is a good example. The companies other that I have invested in are on the sidebar in this blog and I would not be surprised if you use some of them. The other day, I was hanging out with Dave Sifry and we were talking about how could we judge how attractive or “hot” a certain new service or web sites were…. and jokingly we came up with applying the concept of “hotornot” but this time, not for babes or dudes but for web sites. Why do this? Well I think there´s a correlation between what folks think is attractive, what they use and….what I may invest in. So here´s Webhotornot, just launched, have fun adding and voting on your favorite web sites.

PS: we are getting so many visitors right now that we are not being able to add screenshots for new sites in time. Please bear with the coders at Fon Labs so we can fix this in the next few hours.

In this article Tony Karon of Time explains to us “Why Davos doesn´t Matter”. The main point of the piece is to say that the people who used to rule the world rule it less now. Instead humanity is now more and more managed by people who don´t go to Davos such as the Chinese leadership or in a strange way, Hamas. For those of us who were at Davos 2000 we can certainly see the change now. In 2000 not only were the most important leaders of the world present at Davos including Bill Clinton, Tony Blair then in power and many others, but the “Davos Man” philosophy was only challenged by the anarchist anti Davos forces who seemed to be more interested in depriving us of junk food than in proposing a real alternative development model. But today as Davos becomes less relevant even the anti globalization forces stopped protesting at Davos and are now focused on other venues. At the same time Davos continues to be a real treat for attendees who see it as an opportunity to hang out with good friends and learn about relevant trends around the world. Those who go to Davos including good friends of mine greatly enjoy it. But Tony Karon has a point and that is that the combined power of Davos attendees has greatly decreased together with the decline on a global scale of the relative weight of USA and Europe. Moreover, even Nicolas Sarkozy who would have been the ideal candidate to revive the “Davos spirit” chose to stay out of the conference not to be seen as part of the “rich and famous” club. The debt implosion of USA and the absurd financial gambles of one of Europe´s largest banks also combined to make the Davos proposition less credible. Would this be the end of Davos? I don´t think so. The World Economic Forum is already making big inroads into the new centers of power in the world such as China (this year I attended the “Davos in Dalian” event in September. So as world power shifts geography…. so will WEF and the new Davos man will be Asian.