The major software companies including Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, Dell, Symantec, HP, IBM, Intel and McAfee, founded a group called the BSA (Business Software Alliance). They define themselves as “the voice of the world’s commercial software industry and its hardware partners before governments and in the international marketplace”. BSA programs foster technology innovation through education and policy initiatives that promote copyright protection, cyber security, trade, and e-commerce”. In fact, one of their campaigns they run worldwide is to encouraged employees to denounce their companies and employers that use piracy software, such as copies of microsoft, antiviruses and other privative software. and they have become quite succesful in their task in places such as Germany, where quite a few employees contacted them.

This is not a problem we have at FON since last May we decided to drop Microsoft and adopt Ubuntu. We did this to save time, maintenance costs, license costs, to be able to use hardware for a longer time, to have access to quick updates, to operate in a secure, virus free environment. But now that I know that Microsoft and others were asking employees to denounce Fon, I feel even happier that we are using open source software.

One of the amazing things about the Web 2.0 sites is that their founders seem to have no clue as to where success (their community members) will come from. It’s one of the facets of globalization: one can succeed in the least expected place. I found a map describing this phenomenon in the case of social networks. Lucas Shaw from Wandamere is its author and it was published by Valleywag.

Using Alexa data, this map of the World shows how different sites position themselves in different countries. Bebo dominates in Australia and New Zealand; Blogger in Iran and Spain; Fotolog in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay; Orkut in Brazil, India, Pakistan and Paraguay; LiveJournal in Russia and Belorussia; Facebook in such different countries such as: Canada, Egypt, Jordan, Norway, Panama, South Africa and the United Kingdom. SkyBlog is very successful in Belgium and Senegal; CyWorld in South Corea; Studiverzeichnis in Austria and Germany and Hi5 in Mongolia, Colombia, Tunisia, Honduras, Kuwait and Peru (amongst many others).  Now this was suprising to me because Fon the company I manage is growing pretty evenly in all the developed world.  Fon can only grow where broadband has previously deployed.  Broadband is mostly deployed in the world in 7 time zones out of 24.  These are the Japan, East China, Korea, time zone.  USA, Canada, Mexico time zone and European time zone.  These area which is 7/24/2 of the planet (these countries are all in the Northern Hemisphere) has over 90% of the broadband of the world.  But it is very interesting that with Fon we don´t see strong preferences.  Our Foneros are pretty well distributed between North America, Europe and East Asia.

I am delighted to announce the launching of Seedcamp, an idea of my friend Saul Klein, that I think is great. Seedcamp will take place in London in September of this year and the proposal is to turn it into an annual event for young entrepreneurs in the technological world in Europe, Middle East, Latin America and Africa. The idea is to dedicate one week of work to find the most innovative and aggressive entrepreneurs to help them get venture capital and first rate connections to develop their projects.

From all signed-up entrepreneurs, 20 will be chosen to participate in the event. And at the end of the week, 5 of them will be offered an investment of €50K , which will be considered equivalent to a 10% of the company. Entrepreneurs who accept this offer will move to London for three weeks to prepare the start up of their project assisted by Seedcamp’s network of mentors. All young entrepreneurs presenting an innovative idea and the wish to develop it can, right now, sign up online!

While I am on the record for saying that Facebook will become the number one social network in the world and will sell for over $10bn and I still believe that Facebook will do to social networks what Google did to search, as I use my own Facebook I am beginning to see some real problems. What follows is a list of the biggest challenges that I see as a Facebooker.

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I am at Supernova in San Francisco. I just spoke at a panel on social networks in which AOL and Yahoo were represented. AOL has over 100 million unique users, mostly in America. Yahoo has around 400 million uniques with USA being it´s number one country as well. And other than Flickr my guess was that most people in the audience did not use AOL, nor Yahoo. Also other than Flickr I could not see how any AOL or Yahoo properties benefit from the Web 2.0 effect, namely that your experience gets better on the net because somebody else is surfing the same site as well.

But if anything AOL and Yahoo were eye openers to me in the sense that I wonder how elitist many of the sites that I invest in are. Companies like Technorati, Netvibes, Joost and many others are much smaller than Yahoo and AOL and have little chance to ever catch up with them. So is the Web 1.0 just here to stay? Is the Web 2.0 a minority group that just looks huge to us because we live in it but it is tiny when all is taken into account on the internet? Or will AOL and Yahoo eventually evolved and make most of their experiences comunal? Hard to tell.