You could either say that Bill Gates is the most generous man in the world (now even more so that he gets others to donate through him), or you could say that he is a man who made his money as a monopolist who now gives his money away as an authoritarian. Personally, I think the truth is somewhere in between.
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Being Argentine I am pretty sad by the fact that even though we were very even against Germany during the game (1-1), we lost by penalties. As I watched Argentina who played so well, lose out in penalties I wondered if penalties are actually a fair way to decide matches. When aiming talent is evenly distributed, penalties seem to favor taller goalies and stronger players, in this case the Germans.

But then to be honest, I know I would not be saying this if Argentina had won. Besides, the Germans also played very well. So congratulations to the winners!

I invested in vpod.tv. I asked Rodrigo Sepulveda, one of the two entrepreneurs behind vpod.tv, to send me a company description and this is what he sent me:

vpod.tv is an easy online video publishing and syndication platform for the web and mobile devices aiming at the global consumer market, enabling massive new user-generated content and personal customizable TV-channels. It brings a real convergence between fixed and mobile devices such as computer screens, TVs, mobile phones, and portable media players.

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As you know I am an entrepreneur. I have ideas and I hire or team up with people to execute them. Lately though I have decided to blog my ideas as I am Fon, Fon, Fon and don´t have time to execute non Fon projects. So here´s an idea for a movie script (I have never produced a movie) inspired of World of Warcraft, the game. I had this idea listening to Joichi Ito´s stories about the 200 person guild he runs at World of Warcraft. It turns out that Joichi has real soldiers playing in his guild. Soldiers who are in Iraq fighting a real war. So they fight a virtual war under Joichi´s leadership and then a real and a real war under their commander. Here´s the plot.
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Today I added El Pais in RSS to my Netvibes and realized that the Spanish headlines have many more words than headlines in English. I wonder if this is a matter of style or if Spanish simply takes more words to say the same thing.

As I was about to blog Aula I read this excellent summary of yesterday´s session. Thanks Bruno!

If you like Netvibes you will love Widsets from Nokia. I am on the Nokia Internet Advisory Board and saw this development today. It rocks! It is like an RSS reader for mobile phones. I did miss the green cross that was started by Netvibes and copied by many including Microsoft. I think that add content green cross is becoming the symbol of the new way to access the internet.

I am in Helsinki at the Bio Rex theatre attending Aula. At Aula, you can find an extremely diverse group of people whose only common characteristic seems to be that they are highly creative and intelligent in whatever they do. There´s Joi Ito, the famous blogger, World of Warcraft guild manager, VC, entrepreneur, ICANN board member and on top of all that fonero leader of Japan. Also Clay Shirky, an extremely talented professor from NYU who coined the phrase social software, Alastair Curtis, Nokia’s Head of Design, a great saxophonist like Jukka Perko and Marko Ahtisaari, founder of Aula, Nokia executive and fonero leader in Finland.

It is at Aula that a few hours ago I launched Fon in Finland, the home of Nokia. Considering that 3G is the staple of Finland it was great to see how everyone, including many Nokia executives, loved Fon and said they would become foneros themselves. To accompany the launch if you visit Fon, now you will see that we have the 5 euro offer for the routers, but only for people who live in Finland (sorry!).

Tonight I was having dinner with a Korean CEO who surprised me with the story that some 3 year old children in Korea take supplementary lessons in music, math, English to get into competitive schools. By the time they are 13 most Korean children are taking supplementary lessons to prepare for university exams.

In Spain where I live, most children never have supplementary classes, not when they are 3 nor when they are 10 nor when they are 15. Spaniards are by nature not very competitive people, nor are they ambitious, indeed “ambitious” is a derogatory term when applied to somebody´s personality. Now if Koreans work so hard and Spaniards are so relaxed about education and work, how can it be that Spain still ranks ahead of Korea in terms of GDP? And even in terms of PPP this is true.
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Today I had to fly from Paris to Hong Kong and while there was a direct flight with Air France I added 3 hours to the trip and took Lufthansa for only one reason: I knew they had WiFi on board and I had never experienced it. Considering this one of the ultimate fonero experience I decided to trade bad food for internet connectivity and here I am, blogging at FL380. What can I say, this is AMAZING and I am saying this not only because I am a net addict but because being on line takes away the stress of being disconnected while flying. Personally I don´t have fear of flying, I am a pilot, my paradox is that on long haul my anxiety did not relate to what would happen to the plane but what was happening to the world! And here I mean the macro world in the sense of CNN or BBC and the micro, my family, friends, fon, etc. Now I can fly with my Netvibes on, my e mail, chat and even speak on Skype and even upload my latest Paris pictures from this weekend on flickr. I wonder how do I appear on Plazes as I fly?

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