2007 26
Thought Nuggets from Twitter – Part 1
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in General with No Comments
I don’t twit in the traditional sense of the term (internet tradition is measured in months not years). I don’t generally tell people what I am doing. Instead I twit what I am thinking about. For year end I will post what Evan Williams, founder of Twitter, appropriately called thought nuggets.
- laptops still need to be lighter, faster, less hot and with daylong batteries
- the problem with psychology is one of marketing, nobody likes to be called a mental patient, how about changing titles to “life trainers”
- Immigrants make 8% of the population of USA but the companies they built account for 25% of US mkt cap
- The Spaniards disagree on staying Spanish. The French want to be French, but they disagree on the regime they want.
- How can the French have both, the largest supermarket chains in the world and the petit marche au coin?
- Most countries have cultural centers in Paris. USA does not need one. Its culture rules is pulled, not pushed.
- Height is one of the most overrated virtues
- using windows is like smoking, people know its bad for them, but they still do it cause they are addicted
- digesting the time warner news, tremendous coverage in the States
- Waking up to the cries of my baby son I enjoy the congratulatory messages
- Truth is a moving target
- Google rank should be language based
- sugar and milk, if u stir well you end up with dulce de leche, if you don’t with curd milk
- I don’t care about what most people do. I do care about what a few people think.
- As u roam the world: what does your footprint look like?
- Does the instinct to kill have anything to do with eliminating competitors?
- My iPod is designed by Americans, buit by Asians and populated by Africans
- In Hollywood movies bad guys were first German, then Russians, then Arabs, lately….Americans
- Guns don’t kill people. People kill people. But people with guns kill more people.
- If u make Ducatis, should u feel remorse for all the people who die riding them?
- If speeding is dealt with fines so should illegal downloads.
- Is evolution about species or about DNA itself building a diversified survival portfolio?
- Can u be both very smart and very poor in America?
- Are keyboards so bad to give us a chance to think about what we write?
- Sorry twitter but I am still not telling u what I am doing right now.
- Can u do a newspaper for the chinese that is in english?
- considering how islamic Saudi Arabia already is it is remarkable that the people who fight that regime are those who want it more so
- Its unfortunate Koreans, Chinese and Japanese dislike each other when there’s so much they can do jointly.
- I am a green, but i am in favor of prudent use of Nuclear Energy and GM food
- While the world changes aircraft dont
- School is a poor model for real life
- If u think of air as a fluid flying becomes sailing
- is the richest country the one with the richest people or the one with the richest poor people?
- politics is a winner takes all game, that’s why politicians trash each other even more than competing businesses
- I allow my kids to bring their boyfriends/girlfriends to sleepover at home after a one year relationship, in USA I could be sued I was told
- In Spain the law works so slowly that people are forced to get along
- in the 70s maoist terrorists killed in Europe, now they are simply outdated, hope the same happens to islamic terrorists in a decade
- music is a collection of sounds that somehow make sense
- Israelis are realizing that the Lebanon invasion made Hezbollah more powerful
- babies show that falling asleep must be a very scary experience for the uninitiated
- Is having children a humanitarian act?
- I have loved hip hop since RunDMC in the 80s. Almost nobody else I know does.
- sarko and sego’s debate looks like a matrimonial dispute
- a single engine turboprop that i used to own fell in the Mediterranean yesterday
- craig’s list is like the bad looking guy who gets all the cute girls
- Nazis killed 3 times as many Russians as they killed Jews. Why are there so many Russian Neonazis?
- The toughest job that immigrants are doing in Europe is having and raising children.
- gtalk is not a download anymore, that makes it so much easier to use!
- we hear about gold diggers, we hear less about beauty diggers
- Why are women more religious than men?
- Men make most rules but women tend to follow them better
- www.fotolog.com one pix per day diet leads to more page views than flickr all u can eat
- why can’t France get the heart of sego with the brains of sarko?
- everyone in Europe likes the welfare state, but the French are addicted to it
- the 35 hour French assumes that work is punishment, i favor freedom for all, workaholics and workphobics to work as they negotiate
- European garage designers are in cohoots with body shop owners
- my father used to argue that the 7 day week in which we all work 5 days and rest 2 does not make sense, he proposed shifts and a 6 day week
- at least on twitter I am a follower of Barack Obama
- beaurocrats exist thanks to unnecesary laws and regulations
- on the earth we move until we run out of energy, in space we move until we encounter energy
- Wish Turkey was the role model in the Muslim World as far as separation of mosque and state
- Curse: to only be happy til u find someone else who is happier
- In Europe people rarely talk to strangers and ask them where they r from.
- In the last decades capitalism clearly won. But democracy?
- we have the social router, the fonera, should we launch the fatera a social scale for collaborative weight loss?
- the Chinese r only one political party away from American style democracy
- God’s probably an Atheist cause he does not believe in a superior being who created him
- Good funk doesn’t die, it’s remixed.
- the American election will be a gender, race and generational contest
- Blair and Bush made the same mistake in Iraq, but for different reasons.
- Best measure of national food success is that which foreigners like the most.
- In Spain it’s blind people who sell lottery tickets. A lesson on trust.
- Many people I know are migrating to Mac or Ubuntu. I have yet to find one person who loves Vista.
- USA alternates left and right in decades, Reagan, Clinton, Bush and now?
- Are Netlog and Meetic the two largest communities in Europe?
- sms is the technology that has been pronounced dead most often, and Americans are just discovering it…
- In Spain birth rates collapsed in the 90s, the country had to import 8% of it population in the last 7 years
- Spain has the most proislamic press that I have seen in Europe.
- The best diet is to eat whatever u normally eat, but less. I don’t believe in eating weird stuff.
- In England high school ends at 16, college goes from 16 to 18 and university starts at 18.
- USA’s fights illegal immigration at the border, Europe in the streets.
- It would be arrogant of us to believe that only on earth there’s life
- sometimes my body seems to have a mind of its own
- Europe is 46% of Google’s profits. Where is Europe’s Google?
- Eric Schmidt says Google has the LAX theory of corporate culture…if u r stuck at LAX for 6hrs with the candidate…
- Why is it that most oil in the world is own by non democrats? Coincidence or does oil allow rulers disregard the views of others?
- the second tear most successful web communities like bebo, netlog, fotolog or twitter have a real hard time making more than $500K per month
- www.jamba.de spends 70 million euros in TV advertising, and it’s profitable
- ad based companies reach a ceiling that is only pierced when they get into the virtual property business a la facebook gifts
- the bubble test: when only vcs and not crowds fall in love with your idea
- Countries don’t attack countries in which they have invested a lot of money, unless they are about to lose it….
- twitter without IM is not fun as I twit from my blackberry using jabber, fix this please!!
- Most of the people who speak Spanish are poor.
- Best cities to visit: NYC, Tokyo, Berlin, BA, Barcelona, Rome, Paris, San Fran.
- the different between a first wife and a second wife is that with the first u lost all arguments, with the second…most
- Berlin is by far the most interesting city in Germany
- Israel was built on the premise that Jews needed a safe home. Now the least safe place for Jews is Israel.
- The best incentive that we could offer Russia to reform is membership in the EU
- Why do ethnic groups who frequently murder each other stop doing so the moment they immigrate to USA?
- Yasmina Khadra says that the 2 choices of islamic youth r to emigrate or become terrorist.
- Paradox: The place in which Palestinian’s live best is Israel. The place in which they are worse off is Lebanon.
- skype is better than google talk but google talk keeps showing up everywhere, on twitter, blackberry, gmail…
- The most educated countries are those with the lowest police to crime ratios.
- The richest countries are those with the richest poor people.
- To what extent are new generations taller because of widespread availability of C Sections?
- genetics is getting to the point in which while we cannot know our genetic future knowing our genome we can now do a genetic “horoscope”
- Argentina has a huge trade surplus with China because China is the first industrialized country that does not subsidize its own food
- Is China the rising tide that lifts all boats?
- Only robots and communities yield extraordinary profits.
Why is it that none of my friends gamble and yet so many people do? Probably because my friends are intelligent people who have long discovered that betting in casinos is an idiotic activity that, given enough tim,e will lead to the dwindling of your savings. And yet there seem to be millions (if not billions) of people interested in gambling and, as a result, yesterday Aristocrat Technologies, represented in Europe by Nicholas Khin, announced that 25 million of these simple minded people are expected to go every year to lose money at a 2000 hectares 32 casino gambling paradise that his company, the second largest gambling group in the world, will build in Aragon, Spain.
This park is expected to be Europe´s Las Vegas, the second largest gambling destination in the world. It will have the same idiotic architecture as Las Vegas, similar historic themes with the Egyptian being a perennial favorite. Among the curiosities one of the theme parks there, Spyland, is centered around the theme of spying, another mostly useless activity that costs the world billions of dollars and few have been able to prove its worth (e.g. with all the spying resources of the United States, Bush Sr did not know that Saddam Hussein was going to invade Kuwait until he did it). Another one will be the typical gigantic water park so the kids can splash while dad loses his savings.
On one side, my libertarian instincts tell me that investments like this should be allowed since they make the economy grow, generate tens of thousands of jobs and if people want to be miserable so be it, but, on the other my environmental and overall ethical views make me feel that flying 25 million people throwing tons of gases in the atmosphere so they can lose their hard earned savings is just wrong.
2007 5
The Credit Card that Fixes your Price at the Pump
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I am in NYC now and thinking about the volatility of gasoline prices in the States I came up with an idea for a credit card that fixes the price that you will pay for gas for the next 5 years. The concept is that you would commit to buy a certain amount of liters at a certain fixed price for 5 years and with this credit card every time you go to a gas station you would pay this price at the pump and the credit card company would pay the rest or collect the rest from the gas stations. What this credit card would do is to bring to the average citizens the financial tools for hedging already available to large oil companies in the form of a credit card, an instrument that everyone is familiar with. Since I am too busy to develop this idea….I blog it. Maybe it exists already. If it does I apologize. I have not even had time to research it.
The US government says it now believes that Iran stopped its quest for an atomic bomb in 2003, I guess it took a while for the Bush administration to find out. After the news this morning that Chavez lost its referendum we can all feel a bit better. Almost good enough to counteract the sad news that Putin won the election to become father of the nation (I guess it´s ok to be authoritarian if you are a “father”). What Iran, Venezuela and Russia have in common is that they are all energy exporters. Energy exporting countries tend to fall in the hands of dictatorial fatherly figures who are frequently tinkering with the constitution because in those countries whoever controls the energy exports controls the money flow into the whole nation. Having oil is in the end a curse, an addiction. Citizens of energy exporters tend to become pretty incompetent at doing anything else because few activities compete with pumping energy and getting rich.
But the news of Iran being now certified as a non atomic bomb producer is in itself disconcerting. Is it true or is it simply that the US government has decided to certify some countries that do not have atomic bombs as Iraq dangerous and those who do like North Korea and Pakistan as harmless? Iran is a country whose leaders hate us but their people love our modernity. Instead Pakistan is a country whose leaders like us and whose people hate us and they do have atomic weapons (a Pew Institute poll said that if Osama Bin Laden ran for elections majority Pakistanis vote for him). In any case it is a sad world in which what matters is not what a country does but what the US government believes it does. Most of the US people and the vast majority of the citizens around the world can´t wait for Bush to go and for some clarity to return to world affairs.
2007 1
If you can´t build them, buy them
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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.
2007 30
WeFi and the willingness of people to share
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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.
2007 30
The role of Technology in the Business World
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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.
2007 30
iPhone? iFon!
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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.

2007 26
Finally this liberal father found his limits
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I am a liberal father. I consider 15 a reasonable age for kids to have sexual relations for the first time. I believe in self discipline and rarely chase my children around the house for them to study (my 3 older kids do extremely well at school). I believe that drugs should be legalized and offered in exchange for medical treatment. I support gay marriage and I could go on with more examples of how “liberal” I am. Now having said all this yesterday what I thought would never happened to me happened to me and that is that I was horrified, and I mean horrified, by this South Park Episode called the Snuke. Watching it I became for the first time….a conservative.
While the treatment of the internet in that episode is very funny, the whole part of Hillary Clinton carrying a nuclear device in her vagina and how this device is extracted from her vagiana was of unbelievable bad taste to me. So much, that it made me wish that some things were simply….illegal to show. South Park makes me want to do something I never thought I would do, and that is to want to talk about dignity. Well, at least I was able to tell my 13 and 15 year olds what I thought about it. They were surprised that I had finally found….the limits to my liberalism.
2007 22
Investment in Hipertextual
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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.