I am on Facebok, so are three of my four children. Last night we were having dinner and my two daughters ages 17 and 15 kept talking about older guys who frequently try to connect to them on Facebook, invite them on dates and so on. From the way they spoke about them they sounded as if they were being spammed and I could see that I had not much to worry about as they just ignored them. Still just like I don´t like the thought of 35 year old guys hitting on my daughters on the street, I am quite uncomfortable about the same guys being able to hit on my daughters on Facebook. I like to think that my daughters party with kids their age which for a 17 year old I would consider anyone between 15 and 22. In Europe, where I live, it is not illegal for a 35 year old man to go out with a 17 year old girl as it is in the States. The concept of statutory rape does not exist over here and I think that overall we are better off for that since nothing magical happens when people turn 18 and rape in my view has to include some lack of consent.  So without going as far as coming up with an artificial concept such as “statutory rape on Facebook”,  should Facebook monitor older men and women who are frequently contacting minors and flag them? I think they should. Of course older people could lie about their age, or put fake pictures, but Facebook already has rules about this type of deception and if somebody is found lying about their identity in Facebook they can get thrown out of the community. During my conversations with Chris Kelly at Facebook I found out that thousands are banished every week. Still this does not address the whole issue. Personally the way I would do this is to give an easy way for minors to flag potential molesters. Right now this is not clear. A minor who feels molested can block or report this person but in the main reasons to report the molester there is no one clear category which is “this person is molesting me”. In my view if older men or women clearly understood that they are risking getting banned from Facebook if they try to hit on a 15 year old girl or boy my daughters and everyone else´s children would not be so frequently contacted by older men/women.   Another idea could be that anyone who is a minor appears with a clear indication that they are minors to anyone who is older than say, Mark Zuckerberg´s age.  In this way both minors would be protected and older people warned.

I know this sounds like a commercial, and I don´t even own shares in Asus but here it goes anyway.   I just saw this laptop (site loads slowly but it´s worth the wait) that went for sale in Taiwan for NTD 7000 or around 160 euros and I am in awe.  I want one!

If you work on the internet you can thank the world of atoms.  If it wasn´t for them as everything digital goes to a free model we can only use the virtual world to advertise on things sold in the real world as those things do not run the risk of being given away for free anytime soon.

This week I am attending SIME 07 a conference hosted by my friend Ola Ahlvarsson. I just saw the IPTV Clips that SIME is putting together before the conference at SIME TV. In it there´s a clip from an Indian guy,  Mahesh who asks a simple question. How are 9 million million lazy Swedes going to compete with over a billion Indians and their 100% English trained college graduates?

The whole clip is meant to be funny but the question is reasonable. I will try to give my answer.

Some countries developed ahead of others. The first country to develop and become a global power in recent times was the UK, followed by the US. The US and the UK will probably be followed by China in the next 25 years and India in the next 50. But having said this most people around the world do not care as much as to who has the most power as a country but care more how they live themselves as individuals in that country. And the world is very unevenly divided more along classes than along nations. Think about this: 2% of the people of the planet own half of all planetary wealth.  This uneven distribution of wealth is true in Sweden as well as in India. Sweden, as socialist as it seems also has some insanely rich people like Ikea´s owner Ingvar Kamprad the richest person in Europe and fourth richest in the world. Considering the fact that I am in that lucky or oportunistic 2% I probably sound absurdly Marxist in saying that class matters more than nationality when it gets to competitiveness but this is true. Except that class membership is still somewhat of a merito but in some way or another all countries that develops successfully seem to develop in the same way. They globalize, compete and grow very fast until they reach a glass ceiling on the average GDP per person, after that the race is a class race and not a national race. So my answer to Mahesh would be, worry less about your nationality and more about whether you, personally, will be able to become an entrepreneur and join the 2%, wherever you are.

There are many music platforms which allow you to ban songs that you don´t like as they stream music to you.  In this way they learn how to make you a happy music listener.   I know that if Facebook or Myspace allowed people to ban ads they could not survive.  But isn´t it times that instead of Facebook getting trashed for invading people´s privacy to show ads that they allowed users to actually favor or reject a certain type of ads so long as they get ads?  I think there´s a tremendous opportunity in turning this problem around and instead of spying on people you allow them to speak up and profile themselves in a positive manner.  I would love to see a button that says, do not show this ad again.

The troubles of the music industry are not caused by Apple. They are caused by heads so deep in the sand that they have not seen the light for the last 10 years.

I have wondered in previous posts why is it that America can be the wealthiest country in the world can also be the country with the most homeless people in the developed world.  This maybe an explanation.

The Alliance to End Homelessness, a public education nonprofit, based the findings of its report on numbers from Veterans Affairs and the Census Bureau. 2005 data estimated that 194,254 homeless people out of 744,313 on any given night were veterans.

I already mentioned how sad I think it is that USA, a country that has around 5% of the world´s population and is not seriously at risk,  should spend half of the money that is spent all over the world in the military.  But on top of that I think that there has to be something seriously wrong in the States if so many of those who have served their country end up sleeping on the streets begging to survive.  Other developed countries spend much less in the military, more on social services and have less homeless citizens.

I was reading an article on Techcrunch in which Michael Arrington criticizes Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose for having conversations with different parties for two years about selling Digg. Personally I think that Techcrunch is off on this one. There´s nothing wrong when you have come up with an amazing company, and Digg is one of those, to frequently talk to people about the possibility of selling it. Even Larry and Sergey were doing this in the early years of Google. What I dislike about the article on Techcrunch is a moralistic undertone, as if talking to potential investors or buyers is a bad thing for a start up. Personally I think it is essential. When I built Ya.com for example we started talking to potential investors and buyers from day one until we sold it to Deustche Telekom for 550 million euros. And sometimes these talks are just that, talks. My first company, Urban Capital, which I started in 1985, I never sold. But that does not mean that we did not talk to people over the years. Talking to potential buyers about your company is the only way to know how much is worth. There´s nothing wrong with that as we all need to make informed decisions. I find it hard to believe that Techcrunch blames Jay and Kevin for doing what all of us entrepreneurs, normally do.

This is a blog that is mostly about my ideas and not about unusual things that happen around the world but having breakfast this morning reading my favorite newspaper, the International Herald Tribune, I saw this news on the cover that rank tops in the weirdness index and felt like sharing it.  It is about how a drug that is used for date rape ended up as coating for a popular award winning toy.