As hurricanes continue to cause tremendous destruction and death and, as evidence piles up showing that increase in hurricane strength is a function of rising surface water temperature, global warming is becoming our worse nightmare. But until last week I used to think that SUVs and Americans passion for 68F air conditioned rooms were by far the greatest carbon criminals. They are not alone. The internet it turns out may soon be as bad. Working on the internet and having started companies like Ya.com I would take comfort thinking that we operated a clean industry. But this is hardly the case. Over the last month I became aware of two related activities that I thought were energy irrelevant are actually energy hogs. They are thinking and computing.
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2005 17
Google IM
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Internet & Technology with No Comments
Last night during dinner I finally was able to tell Sergey and Larry about my idea for creating the type of IM that Google could launch that in my view could beat Instant Messenger. My concept for revolutionizing chat is based on something I said before, that text of the kind I am using right now to write this blog is obsolete. If you think about it, text is great only because you were trained for 12 years, or more in most cases, to use it. Otherwise text sucks. Have any doubt? Watch an 8 year old chatting and you will see. Younger children who have not developed the skills to type endlessly without making mistakes that others frown upon, use much less text when they chat. What they use is emoticons, skype, webcams or anything to get away from text slowness and boredom. Well my idea is a plan to include the best emoticons of all, your files as given to you by Google Desktop (if you don´t have this amazing tool download it right now!) and by Google when you chat. What makes a good chatter? To me somebody who chats very well is someone who can reply quickly and with somebody who sends you a lot of MEANING in little time. Now how can u increase the rate of MEANING going through a chat? With GOOGLE!
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2005 16
Promoting Clean Energy
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in New Ideas with No Comments
I was asked to give ideas on How can Governments Promote Clean Energy:
Educational programs for the young on the tough choices on energy.
Credit strengthening of alternative energy ventures with poor financing.
Tax cars according to their emmissions.
Keep energy prices as is if they go down through taxes and only have them go up.
Idea for taxation: could we leave a part of our taxes discretionary and say that with 10% of it people can decide what they want to do. It would be like a referendum on the budget.
Change the standards for heating and air conditioning. We were all freezing in the room where the meeting was taking place!
2005 8
Traders are Insects, Entrepreneurs: Mammals
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in New Ideas with No Comments
I was thinking about people who have made significant amounts of money and their success strategies. I was then comparing those strategies to animals and their offspring and their success strategies. And this is what I found.
If you go through the list of the richest people in the world and take out the heirs focusing on self made (mostly) men, you would see that you can divide wealthy individuals into two main strategies of money making. One is the entrepreneur who has built one or very few businesses, as for example, Michael Dell or Bill Gates. The other one is the trader, who has not managed large organizations and has made thousands of investments in which good ones exceed bad ones, example: George Soros. These individuals have very different strategies and yet when measured by money achieved they have similar results: they are all among the richest people in the world.
Now let´s shift to the animal kingdom. In the animal kingdom the same two strategies appear. Mammals have very few offspring in their lifetime, even the most prolific mammals cannot be compared to any insect, for example, in the amounts of offspring that they have during a lifetime. In my analogy, the entrepreneurs are the mammals and the traders are the insects. Mammals as we know, care for their newborn, feed them, protect them and stay with them for a significant part of their life. Mammals cannot afford many mistakes (dead offspring) as their genes would not prevail in future generations if they did. Insects however frequently accept failure, they play a game of chance, lay thousands of eggs and leave hoping that at least more than a few survive. Interestingly both strategies work and yet in terms of personality they make very different type of animals…traders and entrepreneurs I mean.
When I look around at the people I know I see this division. There´s the traders, and there´s the entrepreneurs. Both can be as successful, but their lifestyles and personalities are completely different. Traders tolerate failure as part of their daily routine. Traders base their success in the frequency of transactions. Very successful traders make an incredible amount of trading decisions. Entrepreneurs on the other side make very few decisions, but they spend much more time thinking, studying, comparing, contrasting, analyzing. Entrepreneurs can´t be as frequently wrong. They don´t have too many chances to pass on their genes.
2005 23
Cultural Tectonic Plates
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in New Ideas with No Comments
We have all heard about plate tectonics, the theory that explains how the crust of the earth is divided into moving parts that crash causing earthquakes along its edges. What this theory says is that the earth is made of seven large plates and many small plates that move in different directions in three different ways: they converge, diverge, or transform (as they crash). While this may be purely a coincidence, it appears to me that human beings, in their evolution, have also developed cultural tectonic plates. If we divided the world in “cultural tectonic plates” meaning groups of people linked by language, religion, politics, history or what we define as culture, we would also have seven major cultural plates and some smaller ones. These seven plates would be:
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I oppose America bombing people into democracy. Saddam was a genocidal dictator reputed to have killed over 200,000 of his own citizens. But with casualties of the Iraqi war exceeding 100,000 we can hardly make a case that we, in the “West”, don’t have blood on our hands. I have no doubt that continuing to contain Saddam would have been a better policy than bombing the Iraqi people to the polls. Iraq is still in chaos and the almighty US Army is now one more armed band operating in the Middle East, unable to achieve concrete results.
But while I oppose the tactics of George W. Bush and Tony Blair, I do share with them their stated objective, namely the establishment of democracy in the Middle East and elsewhere.
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I think it´s time the United Nations, that so frequently criticized yet so very needed institution, did something concrete for education around the world. I propose this simple idea.
Children (those fortunate to go to school of course) spend around 10,000 hours at school from from ages 6 to 17. Now, if they do spend 10,000 hours at school studying different subjects around the globe, learning sometimes inflamatory educational content that makes them prejudiced later on in life, isn´t it time that at least 100 out of those 10,000 be the same for all children in this planet? No matter how local we think we are we all share planet earth. So what about 100 hours out of 10,000 in which students follow a United Nations curriculum that is the SAME for all kids in the planet. My proposal is that during this 100 hours students learn the basic principles of human rights, understanding and respecting others, and as importantly learning about our fragile environment and how to protect it. That´s it, 100 hours. If we implement this, any person in the planet who meets anyone else will in the future have at least 100 hours of a common background.
2005 11
Could Computers Turn Text into Movies?
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in New Ideas with No Comments
Text is the technology of the past. There has to be a better way to communicate an idea than grouping a bunch of letters and words next to each other. It occurred to me that maybe it’s possible to attack one side of the problem, either just the writing side or just the reading side.
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2005 24
Gay Hotel
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in New Ideas with No Comments
The other day I was giving a master class at Instituto de Empresa and after I was done, a student came over to me and told me that he wanted to start a gay hotel in Madrid and asked me if I thought it was a good idea.
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2005 21
6 Days a Week
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in New Ideas with No Comments
My father, a Harvard trained astrophysicist, who died in 1983 ,had many brilliant ideas. One of them was the six day week. The six day week is one of those simple, brilliant changes that we could institute in society, in order to gain four extra days of rest per month without causing any changes in GDP. How? By saving fixed assets namely schools, roads, offices, factories, clinics, etc.
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