Tonight I had dinner with Alex Zubillaga of Warner Music. During our dinner conversation we spoke a lot about the so called problem of music piracy, namely the heavy downloading going on on the internet that results in people filling up hard drive after hard drive with music that they do not have the rights to listen to. As we all know, the problem of illegal downloading is considered by most executives one of the biggest problems facing the music industry but for Alex Zubillaga who is in my view one of the smartest, more visionary thinkers in the music world this is not the case. Alex spends most of his creative time working on models that embrace music downloading without destroying the industry he represents. Now after brainstorming with Alex for a few hours I came back home and thought that the whole downloading phenomenom is likely to dissappear in the not so distant future. This is why.
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Tonight I was thinking about this question, How is it exactly that we store information in our brains? In this case simple information, say a phone number. Intrigued by this I asked around and found out that most adults remember the phone numbers they had when they were children and I wondered, where and how is that phone number stored. I went to the Wikipedia but the results were poor. The Wikipedia article article on memory basically says that we don’t know how information is stored in our brain. Concerned about this I started googling my own guesses of how memory is stored in our brains which is namely that that there must be a molecular biology of memory. My thinking here was that we are now, with our understanding of memory where we were with our understanding of genetics before Watson Crick. That we can describe the phenomenom but not how it really takes place but that the answer could be similar to that of genetics in the sense that there could be a molecular biology of memory. Interestingly when I googled that exact phrase, the “Molecular Biology of Memory” to see if anybody had found a DNA type compound that accounted for our ability to memorize I found an article that is commented by different web sites called just that Molecular Biology of Memory. I was also glad to see that it was written by a Nobel prize winner scientist Eric R Kandel . Reading about Eric R Kandel I found intriguing that he had started his career doing psychology work and then evolved towards molecular biology. Most scientists seem to go the other way as they get older. Eric R Kandel instead started figuring out how is it that we can actually store concrete pieces of information. But his is not the only theory.
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I met Alan Levy in the 80s when I was starting Urban Capital Corporation, my first company and he was my auditor working at Edward Isaacs, an accounting firm. When I started Viatel I convinced Alan to leave his accounting firm and join me. Alan had something very few accountants have and that is that he understood the source and use of the money he was accounting for, he was an entrepreneur hidden inside an accounting degree. Viatel was Alan´s last company and since he cashed out of a significant chunk of Viatel shares Alan has been a serial entrepreneur. I do recommend that you check out Alan´s latest venture, Blogtalkradio. What´s unique about Blogtalkradio is how two old, yet still extremely strong technologies, radio and telephones, are merged with the world of blogs and the internet. Ever dreamt of being a talk show radio host? Now you can.

Yesterday I spent two hours in a very interesting brainstorm at Oxygen Media. What makes Oxygen Media different is that it is a TV Network and Internet Site that is made by women and mainly targets women.
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