The dollar is very weak now.  At close to $1.5 per euro some call it the new peso.  European companies are hurting when it gets to export but at the same time they have an incredible currency as their market caps in dollars are going through the roof.  Telefonica for example is worth around $160bn, that´s serious money when Verizon, the second largest US mobile and fixed line operator is only worth $124bn.  And some huge internet companies are now very affordable to a company like Telefonica including Yahoo which has a market cap of $35bn and Ebay, of $45bn.  Only a few years ago the market caps of Verizon, Yahoo, and eBay were all larger than that of Telefonica.  I think that this is the time for Telefonica and many other European companies whose earnings are mostly in euros to diversify their profit base and go into major acquisitions on the other side of the Atlantic.  And I am saying this knowing that it´s traditionally been hard for Asian and Europeans to manage Americans.

Fon is “share a little WiFi at home and roam the world for free”. This proposition has intrigued over half a million people around the world with over 1000 signing up every day. My friend Yossi Vardi introduced me to a new company that he invested in called WeFi who wants to achieve a similar objective to Fon but with a different method. The idea of WeFi is that some people go wardriving looking for open wifi routers and report them in a map. Then other users validate that this or that router is indeed open by connecting to it. At Fon we had a similar idea but we discarded it because we were concerned about not knowing whether somebody had left a WiFi router open willingly or not. Nor could we certify the quality of that router and we were concerned about the breach of security of people surfing inside other people´s networks. But WeFi went ahead with a beautifully designed web site and provided that these issues do not turn out to be a real problem Fon is in favor of collaborating with WeFi as we are with Meraki, Whisher and any other efforts that lead to more WiFi coverage.

I don´t know if Fortune just has a natural bias towards technology or if technology is just so powerful in the business world but out of the 25 most powerful business people according to Fortune most are in Technology.

If you have a liberated iPhone you can now go to Installer, Network and install iFon. iFon is an app that autoconnects you to Fon so if you are moving around areas that are heavily populated with Fonspots your iPhone begins to treat WiFi as if it were Mobile disconnecting and autoconnecting from Fonspot to Fonspot. While the process of connecting and disconnecting is worse than that of mobile networks the throughput that you get is much greater and is free.

I generally don´t comment about my investments in companies that work in Spanish in my English blog because many of my readers cannot truly understand their products. But I wanted to announce that today I invested in Hipertextual, a family of blogs started and managed by 28 year old entrepreneur Eduardo Arcos, a fantastic blogger who I got to know and frequently read over the last two years. Hipertextual´s best known blog is Alt1040 but as you go into Alt1040 and scroll down you will see that there´s a whole family of blogs that are owned by Hipertextual covering not only technology but also sports, politics, gossip, movies, music, cars, life in Mexico, and other topics of interest. Last month Hipertextual had over 4 million unique visitors and was growing nicely. Hipertextual fits my investment criteria which is very simple, invest in products I use made by people who I like. Hardly objective but my 10 million euros invested in risky, early stage start ups over the last 2 years are worth over 30 million now with some interesting exits coming up in the next 3 months. Another company that I am very happy to have invested in is Meneame, a Spanish Digg like site whose surprising characteristic is that it is all open source. But even though anyone can actually copy Meneame and some have the growth of Meneame itself seems to be unstoppable. Meneame also has around 4 million uniques per month. Now having said all this I still consider myself an entrepreneur with Fon being my main activity. But at this point in my life and with 3 significant exits and a passion for the web I like to invest with up and coming entrepreneurs whose products I love and help with their strategy. Eduardo Arcos clearly fits this profile. Tomorrow night I will be in Sevilla at Evento Blog and where Eduardo, Manu Contreras and the Hipertextual team and I will be available to meet other bloggers.

The Sansa Connect is a wifi radio with iPod type functionality that was designed by Zing and that I use around my home to listen to music.  Last night I gave a Sansa to my son Leo who just turned one and it was remarkable to see what happened when he realized that he could turn the wheel and change the screen functions.  He tries to explore the Sansa in all possible ways, including putting it in his mouth.  But the key is that he does get the basic idea of how a Sansa works.  I recommend to all gadget designers out there to give them to very young children!

When I see the stats of when is it that people visit my Spanish and English blogs I see that most people read them during work hours while probably, at work.  And probably this is not only true of blogs.  I would imagine that the stats at Facebook, Myspace,  many gaming, music and entertainment sites that are most likely unrelated to work, would also show that most visits come from people who are at work.  Now what I wonder is this.  Is there going to be a point in which corporate productivity goes down because people are listening to movies, watching movies, flirting, connecting with their friends they have not seen in a long time….at work?  If this is true I guess I should also stop blogging…and get back to work!

This week I had the priviledge of having David Sifry from Technorati staying at my home and helping me as CEO of Fon with a bunch of great ideas on how to make our services better and easier to use.  While we were working on Fon and looking at different advertising models (Fon´s revenues come from selling services to non foneros or non wifi donors partly with advertising) we came across Viddler and we both were very positively impressed.   Yes, I know you may say that Viddler will turn all videobloggers into infomercial machines but men does not live off the internet alone.  I hope my friend Loic Lemeur adopts a similar model for Seesmic, his new video start up.  I love the way that Viddler mixes contextual advertising with people´s comments making you want to read the video timeline.