This morning I was contacted by an interesting start up in the Ukraine over Skype. As conversations progressed over Skype, when demo time came, my Ukrainian counterpart switched to AIM Pro and asked me to do the same. I was extremely impressed.

AIM Pro has a feature that is remarkable and that is that I got to see the laptop screen of the programmer in Ukraine as we communicated. Seeing someone else laptop screen is a much better way to understand how a Web 2.0 service works than seeing a power point presentation. Especially, when you are talking to the developer in an interactive format.

In 1990, I invented Call Back, a means of routing telephone calls through the United States who at the time was the only country who had liberalized its telecom sector and its long distance rates where a third of those overseas.
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I am very sad to report that two female students who collaborate in my foundation were attacked by Spanish Neo Nazis this weekend in the Madrid metro station of Bernabeu. One of them is badly injured with a broken jaw. They are in their mid 20’s and were identified as foreigners by the skinhead gang because of their accent (they were both speaking in Spanish).

We are all extremely concerned about this xenofobic anti American incident. One of the victims is of Mexican origin and lives and studies now in Madrid. The other one lives in the States, studies at Syracuse, and is currently studying for 5 months in Madrid. Police reported that skin heads attacks on foreigners is becoming more and more common.

I grew up in Argentina in the 70s. At that time the military had staged a military coup and committed tremendous atrocities, including killing my cousin David Varsavsky and nearly killing my father, a Harvard trained physicist whose only crime was to stand for democracy.
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Is here.

There are many services to help you discover music on the internet. I really got to appreciate Jamendo because it is the first site I see where musicians invite you to download their music for free. This is cool because with Jamendo I discover new music and don´t feel guilty downloading it. I say “don´t feel guilty” and not “commit a crime” because in Spain it is not illegal to download music and movies from the internet for personal use.

Now one thing Jamendo needs to improve is its music rating system. Yahoo Music is much better at that. So is Last FM. And Jamendo is more for people who are interested in new music rather than established music.

In a way Jamendo is like the open source movement, brought to the music world. We like that at Fon as we are also open source.

My dream pocket gadget would be something like a Nokia N80 with a Blackberry software and keyboard. Until that comes out I will carry two gadgets. The Blackberry 8800 and the N80. But yesterday I heard that Blackberry is addressing one of the major shortcomings of the 8800 and adding WiFi to it. That’s a great move because WiFi is faster than 3G or GPRS and is free.

Still my biggest consumption of bandwidth does not come from email, because Blackberry is very efficient at compressing email. My heavy usage of bandwidth comes from pictures and videos some of which end up in this blog. A video weighs around 20 megs, and 3G is too expensive and slow for that. I now use a tool provided by Vpod to upload videos from my N80 over WiFi and upload them to my blog that works very well.

The new Blackberry with WiFi does not have a camera and the Blackberry Pearl does, but its camera is very poor compared to that of the N80 and does not have video capability.

Skype just came out with an amazing flat rate plan in Europe. Only 2 euros per month and you can call as much as you want to all fixed lines. This is great for us at Fon as now the value of buying a Skype WiFi phone bundled with our Fonera increases as it makes more sense to look for Fonspots to call for free once you are in this plan.