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.

Last night I had dinner with Louise Blouin Macbain, a very smart and attractive entrepreneur who founded LTB Holding, her venture in the art publishing world. During dinner we had a chance to talk about the many projects she is working on.

LTB promotes culture and art with 20 magazines, several annual publications and books, providing information to collectors, educators and academics. It also has a strong presence on the Web: Artinfo.com offers breaking news, profiles of artists, collectors, galleries, market trends and analysis. They recently launched Myartinfo.com, an online network for artists, galleries, collectors and art enthusiasts who join to chat, exhibit their work and share ideas with like-minded people.

Louise also launched the Louise T Blouin Foundation, a not for profit group working across the world to promote culture and creativity, investing in cultural exchange projects, research initiatives and multi ethnic art projects.

The Foundation also organizes the Global Creative Leadership Summit which brings together the most influential thought-leaders in business, technology, government, science and the arts to share ideas and best practices and form new partnerships for concrete problem solving on global issues.

Overall and impressive list of projects for this very talented woman.

I am sure that there´s tons of stuff written on the web about the pros and cons of pinging (notifications a la technorati) vs crawling (programs that scout the web for links a la google) or listening vs spying. Tonight we had dinner with Jimmy Wales the founder of Wikipedia in Madrid and we spoke about some of these. In general pinging beats crawling in everything but thoroughness. Crawling finds all there is to find on the net, pinging finds what wants to be found. Jimmy described to me a problem that I was not aware of and that is that ajax pages are hard to crawl. I commented on a problem that he was not aware of and that is that Google is the biggest or one of the biggest consumers of electricity in the world and that is among other things because crawling is incredibly energy inefficient compared to pinging. In any case what was extremely interesting is the concept of an open source search engine. I really hope that Jimmy and his open sourcers make this one work. One of the worst jobs at Google is probably policing results to make sure they are not hacked as the monetary incentive to hack google results is huge. Wouldn´t it be great to have a community police force rather than some paid employees? This problem is more manageable than the problem of people who tried to hack Wikipedia. If the Wikipedia community dealt successfully with article hacking, search optimization hacking should also be policed more effectively by a community than by a few paid individuals. Wisdom of the crowds at work in search. Intriguing.  In the meantime I mentioned to Jimmy the little search engine that we put together at Fon called Unfolding News.  This engine combines crawled sources with pinged sources that are all fresh.