In 2004 Spain´s on the aftermath of the bloody March 11th Madrid train bombings that left over 200 dead and 1000 injured, President Zapatero and his administration came up with the concept of the Alliance of Civilizations between Islamic civilization and Western Civilization. The idea, not a bad one in my view, is that rather than fight each other moderates on both sides should get closer to each other. Along those lines, Club de Madrid (the organization of the former presidents) and Safe Democracy, my foundation, organized the largest conference ever hosted centered on the issue of global terrorism. And last year in January this was followed by the first conference of the Alliance of Civilizations. Unfortunately it was not particularly well attended to the point that the opposition leader Mariano Rajoy made a mockery of the meeting mainly due to the insufficient international relevance of those who attended. Personally I always thought this was a great idea in the sense that if I have to choose between clash and alliance I go for alliance. And the movement went on with the leadership of the United Nations to organize a second meeting set to take place in Istanbul. Now the surprise of the day is that Obama has just said that he will attend the Istanbul meeting and this gives a whole new relevance to the concept of Alliance of Civilizations. For Zapatero this will be the first big win of his troubled foreign policy. Now being Jewish myself I just wonder on which side of the alliance “we” are in. I hope that there is a little room left for Jewish civilization in the whole project and the future of the State of Israel in this project alongside with the creation of the Palestinian State along the lines of the Oslo Treaty.

Jazztel, the second largest publicly traded Telecom operator in Spain that I founded in 1999 has recently turned cash flow positive. It was a long struggle but it finally happened. And growth was significant with 140K new customers for ’08 to a total of around 375K by year-end 2008, and revenues of 350 million euros. Moreover for ’09 Jazztel expects revenue to grow to 450 million euros and EBITDA to grow from 6 million to 40 million. It seems that not all news is bad in times of crisis as customers are looking more and more for better Telco offers and Jazztel has one that consumers in Spain like. Other than congratulating the management team led by Jose Miguel Garcia that achieved these results, I would like to mention a key part of Jazztel´s new strategy is a new focus on uploading. When I used to run Jazztel, everything was about downloading speeds but with the rise of the social web activity now is all about communities and sharing and uploading has become particularly important. Anexo M, Jazztel´s new offer provides up to 20MB of download speeds and an impressive 2.5MB of uploading speed. So Jazztel has made it its objective to the the fastest operator with whom to upload pictures or videos and this offer is being very well received over here.

Disclosure: I do not own Jazztel shares or bonds.

After nine years as the owner of Aphrodite, today I was, for the first time, at the helm. And it felt good. What happened to me sailing is the same as what happened to me flying. I could not stand not to be piloting. I have this pathetic need to be in charge. With flying, after a few years of owning my plane, I started asking so much about flying that one pilot recommended me to take flying lessons. And I did. I had time then as I had sold Jazztel and Ya.com, and had left Einsteinet unsuccessfully. This was in 2004. And, I became a pilot. But sailing is something I have been doing since I was 14. And I know how to sail. But Aphrodite is so much more complicated than any boat I had ever handled before that I always had a professional crew. But the tension was there. I felt like a guest in my own boat. Many skippers felt that it was their job to make me feel like a pampered passenger. And with 99% of the owners they would be right. But not in my case. So last year I took more sailing classes. And today I had my trial, my first day of sailing as a skipper. Here are some pictures of a day of sailing around Minorca (not all of today).

The day went well except that we had a serious mishap. The engine died at one point. But the 2 crew members discovered the failure. It was the pump that fed the day fuel tank. And we manually pumped fuel until we had enough to restart the engine and made it safely to port.

I take this opportunity to thank the many skippers over the years who helped me learn how to sail in my own boat.

Buusu is a company based in Madrid and run by two ex-students of mine, Bernhard Niesner and Adrian Hilti, developing a language learning community with the aim of making language learning accessible and easy for everybody. Busuu has already more than 80,000 users from more than 200 different countries. They recently released a new version of busuu.com and left the beta phase, so I’d like to congratulate them for the great work they’ve done so far.

The new version includes an improved interface, online courses for each level of the Common European Framework of References for Languages, user rankings based on their activity in the community and most importantly a premium membership option.

Premium users paying 7,99 EUR/month will get:

• Audio for more than 3,000 key phrases and listening comprehension exercises for more than 150 dialogues
• Printable PDFs for more than 150 learning units
• Access to more than 35 Grammar Units
• Audio Podcasts for more than 150 learning units

What differentiates Buusu.com from its competitors is the quality of the content they provide and the easy to use interface that helps users keep track of their improvement. The premium membership is still relatively cheap compared to a normal language course in a school, so definitely something worth checking out if you’re trying to learn a foreign language. More details on Busuu’s blog.

On the negative side I have tried and failed to connect to real people in the first tries. Also I did not see a function that would allow for somebody to get paid for teaching a language without learning another one. Maybe that is not necessary but in my case frankly I would just rather pay something and learn. The language that I am learning now btw is German. I have started with Nina my girlfriend and now I am exploring other ways of learning German over the Internet.

I am getting tired of the American press trash talking the euro. I just came back from New York City and all my friends in finance over there seem to be convinced that the euro will not survive this crisis. The New York Times and other top media all had articles about this. They think that euro nations will not agree on monetary policy and the French Franc, the DM, the Lira, the Peseta will be reborn. I am convinced that the Germans, French, Italians, Spaniards, the Dutch may not agree on things as to using its own taxpayer´s money to help the new members of the EU, but they all agree that without the euro they are all worse off. Indeed these are times that show that having your own little currency is a curse. You don´t believe me? Ask the British how they will manage to save a hugely dimensioned banking system in relation to GDP, having their own currency. Viva el euro!