This is how news are written at CGI

In this video I show the press conference in which Angelina Jolie, together with UNHCR, promotes education for children living in refugee camps around the world. The plan is to raise a total of $220 million for refugee education part of it going to ninemillion.org and organization in which Fon is the digital champion for.  At the press conference I was also on stage, first next to Angelina and then near her on stage.  It was the first time I ever met her and my impression was that she is going to follow the steps of many of the American stars that went from being in movies to being in politics.  But I am not only saying this for her looks or charisma.  Angelina Jolie is truly smart and articulate, she has the right moral values and in my view she is likely to be a very good elected official 10 years from now.

I am at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York and this is President’s Clinton welcome to the particpants.

Tonight I attended the world premiere of The Kite Runner. Here´s the background of the movie from the Wikipedia as well as the background on the novel that inspired the movie.

The Kite Runner tells the story of Amir, a well-to-do Pashtun boy from the Wazir Akbar Khan district of Kabul, who is haunted by the guilt of betraying his childhood friend Hassan, the son of his father’s Hazara servants. The story is set against a backdrop of tumultuous events, from the fall of the monarchy in Afghanistan through the Soviet invasion, the mass exodus of refugees to Pakistan and the United States, and the Taliban regime.

The movie is a must see. It´s well acted by Farsi speaking actors who are now involved in a controversy that could actually be part of the movie itself. It turns out that the child actors and their parents who are unable to separate fiction from reality are now concerned that the rape seen that is not graphic and looks more than a beating than a rape will make it impossible for the child actors to go out and meet with their friends who will think that they were actually raped. If anything this type of world view by the actors and their parents complements what the movie portrays and that is that Afghan society is extremist in its views and unable to distinguish symbolism from reality. The story of the characters in the movie is a story of pride, guilt, abuse, humiliation, extreme violence. One unusual element in the story is that that this movie is mostly a story of men. The only potent seen with an Afghan woman is one in which all you see is this woman getting brutally stoned to death.

In this video I interview David Karp, co founder of Tumblr. Now you have probably heard about the MBA drop out who goes out and starts a company, you have probably also heard about the college drop out who goes out and starts a company, now how about the high school drop out who leaves to start his company and then by the time he´s 21 he is on to his second start up: Tumblr. So what´s Tumblr? How about WordPress meets Netvibes, meets Facebook, meets Twitter and they all get along? Tumblr is….well…it´s Tumblr and there´s nothing like it. You can see my Tumblr here. If you follow that site you will see feeds every time I post in my blog, or I post videos, or I post pictures on Flickr. It´s like a Netvibes of my own production.  And here is David´s.

Myspace and Facebook have won. Second Life has lost. Myspace and Facebook proved that while people love anonymity on the Internet above all, they want to show off, they want to share a lot about themselves. And this is even more the case for the worlds 50 million bloggers, a few of whom are anonymous.

Now if hundreds of millions of people around the world want to promote themselves and sometimes share the most intimate details of their lives, why is it that there´s so much fuss on the internet about privacy? My take of this is that most people are not privacy freaks, nor do they live in fear of others finding out about themselves. If they did they would be all with secret identities somewhere in Second Life or other sites that promote anonymity.

Last week Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, wrote an article in the Financial Times asking the United Nations to work on a set of global guidelines on privacy.

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I am an investor in Technorati and I am sorry to see that Dave Sifry left the day to day management of the company.  I am also sorry to see that now “authority” as a concept has been taken out from the home page of Technorati and relegated to www.s.technorati.com a hack that few know.  Now if I was advising Technorati this is what I would say.
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El Mundo, Spain´s largest news web site, announces today that Chueca, Madrid´s gay neighborhood is 90% cover by Fon WiFi signal.  I personally want to thank the leaders of the Gay Community of Madrid and the Gay Press Zero for believing in Fon and making this a reality.  Moreover I would like to invite all of those who visit Madrid to hang out at the Fon WiFi HQ in Chueca and enjoy the neighborhood with their laptops, PSPs, DS, iPhones, Nokias, Sony Ericsson´s, HP´s, HTC´s or whatever WiFi gadgets they may have!

On the way back from Beijing I had a chance to fly with Neil Goldman, a co founder of Capital IQ who is now both a fund manager and a philanthropist.  Neil shared with me that he supports of Hatzalah.   Coming from Fon a global WiFi network built by the people and interested in all efforts that involved citizen participation (see my previous article on Couchsurfing) I thought that the idea of training regular citizens to save lives was quite powerful.  The basic idea of Haftzalah is that without much training all of us can save lives and while it would be ideal of course that only very well trained medical personnel saves lives it so happens that many times by the time qualified medical personnel arrives it is just too late.  So Haftzalah trains anyone in Israel, say a marketing manager at a tech company, to save lives.  And she may be at a meeting explaining how to launch the latest Web 2.0 service but when her phone rings, she drops everything a la Superman and goes to save lives, at least until the MDs arrive.  One of the biggest life savers is in the use of defibrillators.  As the Hatzalah web site describes:

AUTOMATIC EXTERNAL DEFIBRILLATOR
These machines automatically detect heart rhythms and can shock a patients heart back into beating.

My father died of a heart attack when he was only 49 in an intercontinental flight and I certainly wish that there had been a defibrillator on board and regular citizens trained to deal with them.  I was also pleased to see that this concept was extended to the US and it is somewhat similar to that of being a Red Cross Volunteer but even more grassroots.