In this video I give some of my impressions on Dalian and China.

You can also watch this video in Youtube or Sevenload

I live in Spain. In Spain it´s legal to use P2P. But while people can use P2P programs in their Macs it seems that they will not be able to use them in the iPod Touch taking advantage of the new WiFi functionality. This functionality seems to work only to buy songs (videos not allowed) from iTunes and not to get nor send songs to your friends over WiFi. Even in the States where P2P is illegal, most people download their music using software like Limewire, Bittorrent, and my guess is that at least 90% of the music in all iPods in America has been downloaded from P2P and music streaming sites. Apple knows this well and they know that if they checked if people had paid for all the music they have in their iPods, something they could easily do, their iPod sales would plummet. My guess is that Apple launched the iTunes shop in order to avoid the wrath of the record labels. But iTunes is not for me as it does not even have a decent all you can eat offer like Yahoo Music or Rhapsody. A music unlimited deal would be cool especially when combined with WiFi. This is what what Zing´s gadget offer. I have been using the Sansa/Yahoo all you can eat music offer for a while. I also like Sonos for my home but was dissapointed with Music Gremlin. But at least what Apple could do so I can walk around with the most beautifully designed music gadget that I can connect to Fon is to have Last.fm in the iPod Touch. I want my, I want my, I want my Last.fm!

This is the first time in my life that I visit a huge city whose name I did not know. I am in Dalian now. 7 million people. Until WEF invited me to their meeting here (yes I made up with them and accepted their invitation) I did not know Dalian existed. Now if you like me, have had trouble learning all the new countries that arose after the atomization of the Soviet Union and you like me, care about geography, then you´d better start learning your Chinese cities. Dalian is a good start (don´t ask me I still don´t know the others…). In any case getting here was a haul only made more endurable by the company of Tariq Krim founder of Netvibes who flew with me. We flew via Hong Kong so I could have a meeting with YK Lin who runs Fon in Taiwan and it was there that YK and I took a break to compare WiFi gadgets. Here´s the result.

You can also watch this video in Youtube or Sevenload

Here´s a wonderfully written article from the New York Times on how China´s environmental policies are a disaster for the Chinese people, and for the world as a whole. The story explains, in detail, how while other industrialized countries only saw the consequences of pollution once they were rich that China is still far from being rich and is already incredibly polluted. This is summarized in a great metaphor as China is described as a smoking teenager with emphysema. I can personally testify that my family cut short our latest visit to Beijing last year because two of my children started having respiratory problems and we ended up mostly locked in our rooms at the Hyatt Hotel.  Fon´s offices in China are in Hong Kong, by the sea. We considered having them in Beijing but high pollution was a factor in our decision. While Hong Kong is also polluted it is not as bad. I can imagine that American companies sending employees to work in Beijing could eventually be sued in the same way they were sued in the 80s when they had employees working in buildings with asbestos. By now we have enough information to know that a person who moves to Beijing for a few years from say San Francisco is likely to suffer health damage akin to starting to smoke.

What should China do? In my view there are two simple steps to take. One is to steadily increase taxes on gasoline and diesel fuels so as to encourage people to get small cars and use public transportation.  This is what also USA should do, to bring gasoline prices to European levels.  The second one, and I know that I will be criticized for this, is to go nuclear “a la France”. France derives 2/3 of its electricity from nuclear plants. China should replace coal burning for nuclear energy. Of course solar and wind energy should also be widely adopted but with the energy intensive developmental model that China is pursuing I don´t see another possibility than going nuclear.  Nuclear energy has its risks but I think that at this point with all we know about global warming it´s the lesser of two evils.

This is the liberator limo, it goes around Madrid promoting the services of Liberalia, a company that unlocks all the phones that operators provide lock so you don´t go to their competition. Personally, I am happy that this has not been made ilegal in Spain. I believe that handset subsidies distort the mobile market and lead to a lack of competition.

Same happens in the States. For example, when I bought my iPhone, one of the things I criticized the most was that it is locked to use it only with AT&T. That is why I am happy to find out that George Hotz (17 years old from New Jersey) figured out how to unlock the iPhone and use it with other companies. The hack seems to be complicated though, and requires techie skills since missteps may result in the iPhone becoming useless.

I am still trying to understand what made over one third of my Spanish readers believe that the CIA and not Al Qaida was responsible for the 9 11 attacks. As you can see in this poll 38% of my Spanish readers believe that was the case. Another 7 percent believed that it was the Mosad who was responsible for the attack. Overall less than half of my Spanish readers believed that Al Qaida was responsible for 9 11. I was shocked as to me there is really no doubt as to who carried the 9 11 attacks and it was clearly Al Qaida led by Osama Bin Laden. But trying to find an explanation for such unusual views coming from highly educated, sophisticated readers and commentators in my Spanish blog I think I can venture a theory. What I think has happened here is that because the Bush Aministration lied about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction and so badly mismanaged the invasion of Iraq many Spanish have basically lost trust in American Foreign Policy to the point that they find it easier to believe that the CIA would inflict so much damage on the American People so the Bush administration could invade Irak. Personally while I think there´s no ground to believe that the CIA itself attacked the WTC and the Pentagon I do believe that the CIA and other American agencies were partly responsible for arming and training the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden against the Russians. I also think that the general going alone policy of the Bush administration has created enormous mistrust in anything that the American government says.

These days there was a little war on the Internet in Spain when the leading TV chain in Spain, TVE, ran a show in which they showed how easy it was to vandalize Wikipedia. And what´s worse, after vandalizing some articles, the producers of the show did not even bother to correct the changes. As Microsoft likes to point out that Open Source is not safe to use traditional media´s attack on the Internet generally centers around proving that the Internet is not a trustworthy source of information. In the meantime the value of “reliable” traditional media companies keeps shrinking. Personally I think that the world needs both, professional journalists with great integrity and the user generated content of blogs and Wikipedia. But I can understand why as journalists start feeling that their jobs are being taken by bloggers who compete with their readers attention and do not demand payment other than the occasional Google Ad would react violently and attack the Internet. In the end, this is a foolish strategy. The internet is more reliable than traditional media not because it can´t be wrong (it frequently is) but because it is self correcting. Needless to say the articles that were vandalized have by now been fixed.

Crisis guide 2: Part 1 of our feature looked at why the markets got into a mess. Part 2 looks at how contagion could spread and whether the central banks’ rescue packages will work.

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I normally don´t do this but I got an explanation of the current debt crisis that was so well written that I will publish it in my blog.  As soon as I know who the author is I will give her/him credit.  In the meantime  my general comment is that this crisis reminds me of the Drexel collapse in the 80s when people realize that there was such as poor quality debt.  But what we also know of that collapse is that investors panicked and  sold debt too cheaply. Read More