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?

Somewhere in my blog I told the story of my unfulfilled promise to do my PhD. In short, I promised my grandmother Ora Alperovich, before she died in 1994, that one day I would have a PhD like my father (who had one in Physics from Harvard University). For her my two Master´s from Columbia University were not enough and she was terribly disappointed when I was accepted to do a PhD in Economics at Oxford, but did not go. During her last days before her lymphoma took her away, she kept going on and on about how important it was for Jewish people to be well educated and she asked me to promise her that I would do my PhD one day.

My grandma had grown up in a very antisemitic Russia and left only to see Nazis coming close to winning WWII (she feared they would win and then Argentina would hand over all the Jews as other countries had done). Basically, her view of the Jewish people is that, unfortunately, we were always going to be on the run and that the more knowledge we carried around with us the better we could do.

While I think that the global environment for Jews has changed for the better since my grandmother´s time, I am sometimes concerned about my unfulfilled promise to my grandmother. Hence, I keep coming up with ideas for my PhD thesis. As I am managing Fon full time and don´t have time for a PhD, I decided that for now I am just going to blog these ideas which is all I have time to do.
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When people analyze wealth they tend to look for wealth. I instead, thanks to Argentine entrepreneur and dear friend Maximiliano Fernandez who once educated me on this matter, think differently. I think that the richest countries are those with the richest poor. Why? Because if the poor are not doing that badly then the rest are all doing better.

Today I found out that the World Bank keeps the closest proxy to this assertion.
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I have an 11 year old son. Tonight we were talking about Bit Torrent with some friends at dinner table and then somebody asked him, I guess as a representative of a new generation, how he felt about downloading files over the internet and whether it was theft of not. This was his answer.

When you steal from somebody you deprive this person of something, you take it, they lose it. You have a hot dog you are about to eat, I run away with it, I eat it, you don´t. But with music and movie files theft does not take place. You have a file, I copy it with your permission, you still have it. No stealing, and we both have it.

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I am back in Madrid after spending a week in the Bay Area and Seattle. The companies I met there were Google, our investor in the Bay Area and Microsoft and Starbucks in Seattle. From what I saw corporate America has decided to make food and drink one of the key competitive advantages in recruitment. First an article. Walking around Seattle I was surprised to see this headline in the local paper:

Under Pressure Microsoft Fights to Keep its Workers, Here´s a link to the full article.
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