2007 23
Get WiFi, build an Army
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In this video my son Tom explains Metal Gear Solid on his PSP. What I found interesting is that finding WiFi signals gets you soldiers.
2007 17
Are Entrepreneurs Hypomanic?
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My friend Joshua Ramo just introduced me to the concept of being a Hypomanic. I felt at home with it. Both with the good and bad aspects of it. This is what he wrote.
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For many years now I have worked with Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, probably the two best investment banks in the world. These two banks helped me financed my previous start ups. But for the two capital rounds of FON I did not work with them, nor with any other investment bank. FON raised a total of 28 million euros with a first round of 18 million and a second round of 10 million for, and we did it all ourselves. Investment Bank disintermediation in the case of FON is probably due to two reasons: one personal, one less so. On the personal front after having raised funds for Viatel, Jazztel, Ya.com and other companies I created, it is easier for me to go out and raise funds on my own. But in general I think that investment banks left the start up scene in 2001 never to come back.
2007 14
The Fatera, joke or reality?
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During a dinner at TechTalk Loic started with a joke directed to the heavier techies at the table called “the Fatera”. The idea was to propose that Fon, who already makes the social router known as the Fonera, builds a social scale called the fatera that tells your friends over wifi connecting to the fonera, how your weight is evolving. How would this fatera work?
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2007 9
Putting horny people to work…
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Today my friend Jonathan Zittrain gave a great talk that I moderated at IE that was called “The Future of the Internet and how to avoid it”. Here´s a video of a similar talk he gave at Oxford in what seems a much more elegant setting. Jonathan´s lecture was brilliant: the first half was a brief history of the internet, the second half a brief history of what went wrong with the internet. His point is that we need to fight back internet vandalism (virus makers, spammers and the like) before the internet closes up. While I did not agree with Jonatahan as to the extent of the danger, I agreed with him that censors love opportunity to censor and that there´s clearly some risk. Now call me a one track mind but this the one story that stayed with me of all the ones that Jonathan used to illustrate how “evil” people are compromising the openness of the internet. It is the one of how bot builders put horny humans to work for them. Pretty clever.
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2007 7
Google Alert Invite
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Today I received an invite that is certainly funnier than mine to Menorca. To see it: Username, enter, password, thelobby.
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2007 3
Sun: The New Tobacco
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Despite the warnings, sun bathing and tanning beds are still in style. Although some people are slowly beginning to decrease their exposure to the sun, being tan is still “cool” and too many folks are still overexposing themselves to UV light. UV exposure today seems to be were tobacco was 20 years ago. For many years it was considered sexy and even healthy to smoke, and today it’s looked at as attractive to be tanned. Both fads are bad for your health or, to put it bluntly, have the potential to kill those who choose to make a habit out of either. The danger of tobacco is pretty clear, although there are still people who senselessly continue to smoke. With the sun issue, it’s really a shame that one out of five people will develop skin cancer but still most don´t care enough about sun radiation exposure.
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2007 3
My Former Plane is now at the Bottom of the Sea
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For many years I owned a single engine turboprop called Jetprop. That plane now is in the bottom of the sea.
2007 30
Should I be a terrorist or a model?
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I was reading about the life of Anthony Garcia, the 25 year old who was hesitant between becoming a male model or a terrorist and fail at both and will now spend the rest of his life in prison. As the BBC puts it:
He worked nightshifts at Tesco but spent much of his time daydreaming about becoming either a model or a jihadi fighter.
As I read this peculiar story I thought that what these two occupations have in common is that they get your face in the media. I guess this, Anthony Garcia, born Rahman Benouis, did achieve.
2007 30
Why are European Cars so much Cheaper in America?
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My friend Manuel Antelo, creator of Argentina’s Car One but who lives in Spain, was toying with the idea of releasing a Car One for the Spanish set. Unlike in the United States, in Spain there’s no such thing as a used-car hypermarket with thousands of cars in stock, therefore making this an opportunity with major potential. Used cars in Spain are sold out of small dealerships with extremely high buyer-seller price differentials.
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