After putting together the Conference on Terrorism on March 11th 2005 attended by Kofi Annan and 32 heads of State my foundation worked on the idea of starting a political party. Now I know it´s crazy for a foundation to start a political party, but that´s what we researched.

My basic idea here was that there are huge unrepresented masses of people in the United States and Europe -immigrant, legal and ilegal- and having been one myself, both in America and in Europe, I felt that it was about time that somebody started a political party that represented them. I believe this should be done regardless of the fact that so many of them can´t yet vote. Recently looking at the massive immigrant demonstrations taking place in the States, it is clear to me that a “political entrepreneur” should occupy this political niche. What would the Immigrant political parties fight for? First of all, for the rights of immigrants to gain citizenship and vote. Other than that, for all the key issues that concern immigrants regarding housing, health, education, cultural issues.

Once I googled immigrant party and google replied “do you mean anti immigrant party?”. If the forces against immigrants are so well organized it is time that the forces for the fair incorporation of immigrants to society organize. For Europe I chose the domain www.neweuropeanparty.org and registered it. Interestingly, while there´s a European Parliament there are no European Political parties. A party linking immigrants to Europe to the Europeans who feel that Europe deserves to succeed as a united entity, could become the largest political party of the European Union.

I am in Japan. Japan is one of the most fair countries I know. By fair I mean the country with the most educated population and with the best income distribution. What happens when education is combined with fairness? Basically, a world of low security, as very few people are uneducated or needy enough to steal or vandalize. For example, I just arrived at the offices of a mid size technology corporation in Tokyo 15 minutes before the appointment time. Much to my surprise, the entrance to the building was open even though the doorman was not there yet. The elevator was open as well and took us to the right floor where our meeting was. When we arrived, the office was open and we went into the first conference room we found, where they had WiFi and I started this post while I waited.

While to many people this would be considered a security breach, my take of this incident is different. I see a world of low security combined with very low crime as a success of civilization. Obviously, this company -whose name I won´t disclose…to keep the secure…-believes that high security is more an inconvenience than a necessity. I wish we could live like that in other countries!

Living in Europe we frequently read about the challenge of integrating Arab immigrants. In Europe we think of Arab Europeans as a low income group. Personally I don´t know if this perception is true but I to learned today from my friend Kaleil Isaza who started JumpTV that this is certainly not the case in the United States. Indeed the Arab American´s average income is higher than the average income of all Americans. Later at home I found this article on Arab American demographics that corroborates what Kaleil told me. JumpTV by the way is an interesting venture that brings TV over the internet to immigrant groups and is mainly focused on Arabic and Spanish speaking channels. For JumpTV it´s very important that immigrants be reasonably well off as internet tv requires a much greater investment than regular TV. As I read the Arab American Institute web site and how Arab Americans I wondered about the factors that led to the tremendous success of Arabs in America and if these could be replicated in Europe.

I was born in Argentina. My background is German, Ukrainian, Polish and predictably Jewish. When I was growing up in Buenos Aires there were mainly two main kinds of Jews, the businessmen and the intelectuals. The Varsavskys were clearly on the intellectual camp. My father Carlos Varsavsky had a PhD from Harvard in astrophysics and he exemplified the Varsavsky type. Now while being an intellectual was and still is very prestigious there was no money in it. In America scientists struggle but are not poor. In Argentina they were then and they are now. Maybe this is why I grew up thinking that men does not live by science alone and decided to make a living out of investing in science rather than practicing it. This was not easy. My grandmother on my mother side, Ora Waisman, before she died in 1994 made me promise that I would get a PhD. I did go half way and in 1996 I became a professor of entrepreneurship at Instituto de Empresa and have been teaching in the fall ever since. But that is as far as I went with academia. I used to think I could get away with this. That my work was very relevant as evidenced by the enormous number of citations that Martin Varsavsky got at Google. But then Google came up with Google Scholar and there all the other Professor Varsavskys beat me by a great margin and rightly so. I am sorry Ora! I did what I could. I just LOVE starting businesses. I hope you understand. Entrepreneur first, scholar second.

My entrepreneurship efforts are in the field of Telecoms and the Internet where I founded Viatel, Jazztel, Ya.com, Einsteinet and now Fon. My investments however are in alternative energies. Together with partners I have built an 18MW wind farm that we are expanding in the process of expanding to 50MW and we are also in the process of asking permits for solar and wind energy for another aprox 150MW.

I invest in alternative energies for two main reasons, one is because I believe I can make money with them and two because I, like many others (but unfortunately not enough others), believe that burning fossil fuels is bad for the environment and bad for global peace. Today however I was presented with a potential investment in biodiesel and so far, while convinced that it can be a money maker, I have concluded that biodiesel production is not a sustainable and decided against the investment. Why? Mainly because in a world in which over a billion people go hungry how can we morally justify burning food to drive cars?
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A few months ago I met Netvibes founder, Tariq Krim during Les Blogs. Not only was I fond of Tariq personally, but I also loved his website. It was at that time that Tariq became a FONero and a Advisory Board member in France. Now I have reciprocated. Yesterday, together with Pierre Chappaz, founder of Kelkoo and ex head of Yahoo Europe and Marc Andressen, founder of Netscape, Opsware and Ning (and to clarify – both Pierre and Marc are collaborators as well as investors in FON) I invested in Netvibes.

Netvibes already has more than a million users. Basically what Netvibes does is put together in one page all the blogs, information sources and other tools that you use regularly. The file that I include below is called OPML. It’s interesting because it shows my own personal page of all the information I look at regularly. As you will see, the majority are in English, some are in Spanish and in French. For me the interesting thing about sharing OPML archives is that they’re the best way to find out what kind of information other people are interested in. Of course in my own there are important sources and sites missing – it’s impossible to have them all – but I would welcome suggestions on additional information/sites that would be worth adding..

If you’ve read up to here and have not gained an understanding of Netvibes, I suggest you chat with friends who understand what RSS is and how Netvibes works. I recognize that it may not be for everyone.

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I had a post concerning Netvibes that I was asked to delay posting until tomorrow. I apologize if there are any links to this post of comments.

Today I visited ArtParis. While not a fanatic I do collect art. ArtParis, like Arco in Madrid, is one of those large shows in which the world´s art galleries get together and show their latest acquisitions in the hope of selling some paintings. After watching the thousands of works brought by many galleries from around the world one thing stood up and that is how little artists or buyers of their work seem to care today about the problems of the world. The destruction of the planet, wars, poverty, sickness, were totally absent from the themes chosen by the artists represented at ArtParis. While art would be pretty unbearable if it ONLY focused on human failures. it is certainly running the risk of becoming irrelevant if none of it does. In any case here are some pictures of what I saw at the Grand Palais today. As I found most of the art boring I started taking pictures of the building itself, which is magnificent, and some people I liked.