2006 18
Netvibes and RSS feeds
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in New Ideas with No Comments
I have been an avid user of Netvibes since Tariq Krim, its founder showed it to me in Paris a month ago. Using Netvibes I came accross the whole culture of RSS feeds and OPML files. Basically an RSS feed is distilled content from a web site as seen in another website, it´s pure text content without the graphics. An OPML file is a collection of RSS feeds. Thus if you and I exchange OPML files you will get my collection of RSS feeds and I will get yours. I already did this with Lance Knobel for example and through him I learned about many interesting new interesting feeds. Looking at this new environment two opportunities come to mind. The first one is adding graphics to RSS feeds. Graphics say a lot about a site, when I am deprived of graphics I am deprived of information. The second idea is to start an OPML exchange where people on the net exchange OPML files basically revealing their reading preferences to each other.
2006 14
Originalator
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in New Ideas with No Comments
There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured with what is right in America Bill Clinton. There is nothing wrong with America that the faith, love of freedom, intelligence, and energy of her citizens can not cure Dwight David Eisenhower. Should Bill Clinton have quoted Eisenhower in his inaugural speech? I don´t think so… unless Clinton knew about the unoriginality of his phrase. Case in point, this blog. To me, this blog is mostly a blog of my ideas, or at least of what I think are my original ideas. Indeed my whole career has been built around what I think are my original ideas from callback to Educ.ar to FON. But the way I define originality is whether I had or did not have the idea on my own, not if somebody else also happened to have the same or a similar idea and I did not know about it. Now enter Google. One of the things that Google is great for is at testing your originality. Should Google develop a tool that googles every phrase as you write it? Maybe, but it would probably be terribly discouraging to discover that most phrases you write have been already said (should I google this last phrase?). And is the concept of a google based originality tester an original idea? I think so, because I never heard anyone mentioning a tool that checks your originality in real time. Indeed I believe that google or an associated developer should develop an “originalator” The originalator would basically destroy any idea that you thought was original (should I Google that as well?). Personally, I don´t think I could use it I would be paralyzed.
PS 1: using the google spell check from the toolbar while writing this post I discovered that the verb to google is not part of the google dictionary. Maybe the google originalator would be more lenient than what I had imagined.
PS 2: Damn!! I just google “originalator” and found 18 entries!
2006 3
Coolprepaid
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Fon with No Comments
My friend Jack Hidary alerted me to Coolprepaid a new start up he invested in. Coolprepaid is what I was looking for not to get ripped off when I visit the States. Basically Coolprepaid does two things that other providers don´t do: to sell SIM cards without phones and to not only have a very low national calling rate for US phone calls but to have super low international calling rates. International calling had been the last bastion of cell phone scams. With Coolprepaid the scam is over. No more 50c to $1 per minute for international calls on prepaid services. Plus I very much prefer to change SIM cards rather than phones. Soon I will be travelling with FON´s wififons and call for free when there´s wifi but I estimate that we will need 4 years to build a seamless wifi signal in the States… in the meantime Coolprepaid.
2006 3
A Small World
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in New Ideas with No Comments
I belong to A Small World. I know, it´s elitist. Some have called it a “friendster for the VIP Set”. But I belong to “aSW” because aSW delivers. Tonight for example, we were having dinner at my farm in Jose Ignacio, Uruguay with a group of friends who had flown from many countries to spend New Year´s Eve with my wife and I and Ola Alvharsson announced that there was an aSW party nearby. We all went after dinner and the party turned out to be amazing. It was held at a construction site surrounded by antique cars where a very large pool house was being built. There was grilled food, candles everywhere, great music and psychodelic projections. Ola told me that there were people from over 30 nationalities dancing through the night. What´s the secret of aSW? That the people from aSW all see themselves as members of the same tribe, a tribe that many despise and yet want to be part of. Curiously I met Eric, the founder of aSW hanging out with my friend Ola in Stockholm 3 years ago. At that point aSW was only a dream. I liked the idea then, I love it now. What´s unique about his concept is that aSW is one of the only community on the net that has 4 times more members wanting to belong than who actually belong to it. From a financial point of view this is a community that is not so easy to monetize because while each member has a significant spending power the overall size of the community is quite small. At the same time it is the SMALL in aSW that makes it a success. I guess there are cases when small is beautiful…
2005 18
¿Can Politics be more Competitive than Business?
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Fon with No Comments
At FON we are using the tactics of democracy in business. We are, for example, planning to run city wide elections among foneros to select our city managers instead of going to headhunters to find us the right person. Also at FON, at least so far, we don´t advertise and we don´t have a PR firm. As in the world of politics, at FON we speak, or in our case, we blog.
Now, as I look further into the political process of well functioning democracies (yes, they do exist!) I am surprised by one finding. Democratic politics seem to produce more competitive behaviour than business practices. Take, for example, the case of mobile phone pricing in Europe and the obvious collusion that exists among the three to four leading operators in each country on fixed to mobile rates and on roaming rates. At the same time, compare this monopolistic behavior, so prevalent among three to four players per country, to the tremendous competition that exists on almost every issue between Labor and Conservatives in the UK or between Partido Popular and PSOE (the socialists) in Spain.
Why is it that two political parties can behave more competitively than three to four mobile phone companies? The answer, in my view, lies in the different types of monopolies that politics and business creates. Democratic politics is in a way a quasi monopoly on government…that is temporary. Therefore you either win and have almost all the power (Aznar before the last election in Spain) or lose and have practically no power (Aznar now). In this type of scenario, competition for obtaining the monopoly right to power is fierce. But when companies can do well colluding, each one making huge profits and dividing the market, the number of players is less likely to have an impact on monopolistic behavior. As a result, we have an incredibly non competitive per minute pricing in the mobile phone world in Europe. And this is but one example in which corporate behavior leads to monopolistic practices. There are many others.
2005 23
Google Rank is Too Globalized
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in New Ideas with No Comments
There´s something wrong in Google’s rank. This blog comes out in Spanish and in English. Yesterday I served around 13,000 pages, of which around 2,000 were served in English, 11,000 in Spanish. Still my google rank is 4 in Spanish and 5 in English. Why? Because the people who link to me in English seem to rank much higher than the people who link to me in Spanish and that is simply because English is a much more important language on the internet than Spanish. In terms of relevance however my blog while somewhat known in English it is much better known in Spanish. Still my ranking in Spanish is lower. I think it´s time that Google introduces Google Rank per language and contributes its share to do away with the English bias of the Internet. As it is now, people who write in English always come up with higher rankings. This in my view is globalization taken to an extreme.
2005 23
Random Google
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Internet & Technology with No Comments
Here´s an idea for my friends at Google. It´s called RANDOM GOOGLE. We all love the google ranking algorythm… but sometimes it is useless. For example, let´s say Al Gore, tired of seeing hurricane after hurricane hit the States as a result of global warming, wants to run again as the “environmental president”. The people who run his campaign would like to have a way of “polling” google. They would like to search for “Al Gore”, but this time they want to do away with Larry´s famous algorithm. Voting is not a ranked activity (and there are many who aren´t). Voting is one person one vote. So what the pollers want to know is how popular Al Gore is in Google, posting by posting. What the campaign manager wants is what I call the RANDOM GOOGLE button. What would RANDOM GOOGLE do? Basically give you a random string of say 100 results. Pollers could then read them and classify them as pro Gore or anti Gore. In other words, they would poll Google provided that they have a Google without the ranking. They could search random strings by quantity and time periods. From Google´s point of view, the Random Google button would greatly increase ad servings. People would search a term and then random Google it. Maybe more than once. And they would randomly learn about their search term being more frequently exposed to google ads.
2005 23
Virgins and Bloggers
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in New Ideas with No Comments
When I was at NYU I met a guy who presented his theory of virginity… sometime in the 80s somewhere in the East Village. It was simple. Even though he was only 21 he had slept with 8 virgins. That meant that there were 7 other guys out there who had slept with none. He then went to ask me if I could help him identify them. I told him that, while I could understand his theory, I could think of no way of finding who those losers were. And we went on to another drink.
Fast forward to 2005. Think of blogging. A successful blogger requires thousands of readers. At the same time there´s no way a successful blogger can read thousands of blogs. Therefore, for every successful blogger there are many individuals whose blogs are rarely read or who write no blogs at all. Is there a connection here? Do bloggers get laid? Do you either write or get laid? Maybe my stud friend is reading my blog now!
2005 2
Wifi Nation?
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Fon with No Comments
Wifi rocks. When you are within reach nothing beats Wifi. Wimax is not around the corner, it will take years to develop, and if and when it comes it will need a new generation of devices to go along with it. And that is years away as most devices now are going Wifi. The Wifi iPod is around the corner, Wifi digital cameras as well, Playstations with Wifi are all the rage, PDA´s are mostly Wifi enabled now and so are all laptops. Now the paradox about Wifi is that every operator who has tried to build a Wifi network has failed miserably. Nobody seems to have the funds to create a Wifi national network. So coverage is uneven, and that´s the only thing that´s wrong with Wifi. How can we create a Wifi nation? That is the challenge.
Americans believe that the Chinese Comunist Party promotes piracy of American movies. I used to share that view until I met a Chinese friend of mine, who is a member of the Chinese Comunist Party (yes, and I also have friends who work for the Bush administration!). He gave me a very different view. My friend told me that the Chinese Comunist Party would love to succesfully combat piracy not to help Hollywood but to prevent America from conquering the minds and hearts of the average Chinese. American movies and TV shows, he argues, are incredibly efficient at making most Chinese like America, and if there was no piracy, few Chinese could afford to see them. So comunists and hollywood lawyers, UNITE!