Why do I have the feeling that Bill Gates is making a “been there done that” T Shirt to send to the people at Google? Been there, been trashed, been there, fought the US government, been there, fought the Chinese, been there done that. At Davos when Eric Schmidt said that Google thought long and hard about its choices and decided to offer most of its search capabilities but not all in China, Bill Gates replied, that´s “do less evil”. He was having a ball. Still my heart is with Google. To me and I think to most, there´s still a huge difference on how Google succeeded vs how Microsoft succeeded.

Today the Financial Times Rankings came out and I was very pleased to see that the school where I have been teaching entrepreneurship for 9 years, Instituto de Empresa, has been ranked first in Spain, 3rd in Europe and 12th in the world. Congratulations to everyone at IE!

Just came back from DLD 06. Americans may have the best technology companies but Europe gets the upper hand on great technology conferences. What I like about the European events is that they take place in beautiful cities, DLD in Munich, Les Blogs in Paris and SIME in Stockholm, that they have fantastic nightcaps, and that they bring the best selection of American participants. Why are the best speakers in the world American? Is it because the American speakers are just great or that the ones who make it over here are chosen by Europeans? Mine was an all American but me panel, and it was a pleasure to be part of it.

Having managed three ISPs, Viatel, Ya.com and Jazztel I think that this senior American executive is clueless. Liberalization: it all started in America. But with the Bush Administration, monopolists are having a ball. Witness unbundling, Americans invented it, we copied it in Europe, now Americans lost it and we get much more bandwidth for less money than in the States that it´s not even funny. And that´s with the euro at 1.2. With ideas like selective speed management soon America will revert back to the Internet Dark Ages of dial up.

Yesterday I met with David Bitton, the founder of Wengo. Wengo is a new company, very similar to Skype but in open source and not p2p. Skype is of course much much larger and still growing at amazing speed but Wengo while three months old, is getting its own group of fans within the opensource community around the world. They are also doing some remarkable software developments. At one point in the meeting David took out this Qtek phone with a Wengo client. I was impressed. It is a beautiful phone and the fact that operates both over wifi and gprs makes it very useful. It is a phone that is crying out “please give me FON: wifi everywhere”. It is the first good looking wifi phone I ever saw.
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I was watching a cat sleeping and remembered that most felines seem to sleep very well. Is this because they are predators? Do predators sleep better? What a life! Mostly sleep until you… kill.

Is Argentina much more subject to populist presidents than Chile because in Argentina it is a illegal not to vote while in Chile voting is a choice? Are voters who are forced to vote as bad making community oriented choices as the kids who were “not aborted” that Freakonomics talks about?

I lived for 18 years in New York City, I started in the East Village as a student at NYU, went on to W118th St as a grad at Columbia and ended up at 5 story elevator townhouse, 47 E63rd St as a very successful entrepreneur. Still those cockroaches were always there utterly disregarding my changes in Manhattan social standing. Why is it that wherever I lived there were tons of cockroaches? Why is it that since I moved to Europe cockroaches are not a problem anymore? Don´t they travel?

Considering that the Vatican inhabitants mostly can´t have children… Does that make the country the most successful immigrant state in the world? Can you have a country in which its president is always born someplace else?