While I don´t know why Anne Wojciki´s called her new venture 23andMe and not 46andMe (as far as I know I have 46 chromosomes and also happened to be 46), I still think that 23andMe is the coolest tech venture I have heard about in a long time. Probably the best analogy to describe it is “a search engine for human genetic information”.
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Bruce Feiler the best selling author of a series of wonderful non religious books about religion such as Abraham and Walking the Bible has a provocative post in his blog today entitled Muslim Blood in the White House? In this post Bruce, an expert in religious relations describes Obama´s complex family background and wonders if somebody who was partly raised as a Muslim can be elected president in a country that is at war with Muslims. Moreover the subject becomes more complicated by Obama´s own description of his upbringing which was a complicated mix of Islam, Atheism and Christianity.
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I have been teaching at Instituto de Empresa for 10 years. I teach a class on entrepreneurship in the fall. During the last 10 I have seen Instituto de Empresa grow and grow, basically going the way of Spain. Spain was a somewhat successful country that over the last 10 years became the star performer of the large countries of Europe. ´
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Dale Dougherty of O´Reilly did a great job summarizing a session that I moderated at DLD entitled “How to be good?“. Now here´s the paradox. Although DLD is a European conference, I was surprised to see that every “do good” venture on my panel was American. These included Nicholas Negroponte´s OLPC aiming at supplying a laptop to every student in less developed countries, Steve Mariotti´s NEFTE, who is doing a great job teaching entrepreneurship to teenagers, and Gabriele Zedlmeyer , of Hewlett Packard, one of the largest corporations in the world involved in hundreds of projects to improve education.

Confronted with such an overwhelming American presence I felt compelled to ask the question: Why is it so American to want to do good?
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Last week, the Huffington Post published an article of Lester Brown (Director of the Earth Policy Institute at Columbia University and founder of the WorldWatch Institute) about the impact on the food market of biofuel production. While I consider myself an environmentalist and I dislike to take a stance against an environmental policy that is extremely popular in Europe and USA I must side with the new “disident” environmentalists as Lester Brown and take a stand against biofuel.
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DLD sent me the first results of the “DLD Online Survey 2007”, a 228 expert survey about media, marketing and digital life.

Download file
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Our FON labs in Barcelona have just released a beta of the FON software for Macs that we are testing internally. Basically, what this download will do is turn any Mac into a FONspot. Say you go to a conference and they want to charge you $20 for WiFi or, in some cases, the WiFi may be free but, as it happened in LeWeb 3, there´s practically no connectivity cause there´s too much usage. Well what you can do is connect your Mac to a 3G, EVDO or HSDPA connection (some carriers may not allow this, pls check) and offer FON WiFi to many around u and be one popular person. You can then regulate how much bandwidth you share so you are not depleted yourself. Your bandwidth will then be free to FONeros and cost 3 euros first day and 2 euros/dollars thereafter for non FONeros of which as a Bill you can make 50% of it.
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Many of us share the perception that the world´s view of the United States was much better in the 90s than now. Now BBC has released a poll entitled “World View of the US goes from Bad to Worse” that shows that respondents in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Chile, China, Egypt, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Italy, Kenya, Lebanon, Mexico, Nigeria, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Russia, South Korea, Turkey, United Arab Emirates and the very United States agree on this.
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My view on the Huffington Post.



Tariq, a good friend of mine and member of the FON board in Europe, is the founder and CEO of Netvibes. Netvibes is a company in which I invested when it started and that has grown exponentially to around 10 million users.

In this video you can see Tariq presenting Netvibes new strategy, whereby modules will be made to look less and less like RSS feeds and more and more like “design” modules being so attractive in themselves, that you will even be allowed to “wear” them when you visit other sites such as Google.

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