What is the easiest way to help the credit markets in America? Raising equity. What is the easiest way to raise a trillion dollars in equity for the depressed US real estate market? Giving a green card to any honest citizen from anywhere in the world who buys a home in the US for a minimum price of $500K without a mortgage. Why would a Russian, Chinese, Saudi, or any citizen from anywhere do this? Because having the possibility of moving to the United States to work with your family, even if you don´t take advantage of that possibility in itself is worth a lot. Now green cards have the disadvantage of global taxation even if the holder lives outside USA. That would also have to change for this offer to be attractive with the green card holders only paying taxes if they actually move to USA. The math is simple. 2 million buyers at bargain US prices would generate 1 trillion dollars in equity.

Tariq Krim’s latest startup Jolicloud, maker of the internet operating system for netbooks, has completed its first round of funding with Atomico Ventures and Mangrove Capital Partners. Niklas Zennström, the co-founder of Skype, and serial entrepreneur Gilles Samoun will be joining the board. Former COO of Skype, Michael Jackson, will also join as an advisor. The investment will allow Jolicloud to accelerate development and expand its global network of partners.

The French startup is developing a Linux-based operating system to provide free and easy access to a new generation of web applications on the most affordable computers, accelerating the widespread adoption of cloud computing.

Jolicloud is in private alpha and will be released as a public beta later this year. I have been using it and I love it!

Disclosure: Tariq, Niklas, Janus, Michael are all friends.

When it´s hot smells are stronger. And it´s hot in Miami. Good and bad smells are amplified by temperature. We are on a 5 day vacation in this city which among other things is the undeclared capital of Latin America. English is barely spoken here.

We are here with Nina my fiancee and the two boys, Tom and Leo. We are staying at a huge hotel called the Fontainebleau. It is the ultimate Miami hotel. Only its renovation it´s supposed to have cost a $1bn and they brag about it. Kids love it. Nina seems to enjoy it as well. I alternate. I don´t usually go to hotels and this is the mother of all hotels. It´s gigantic. Crowded. But some of the restaurants, especially Hakkasan are world class.

Here are some random thoughts about Miami. It is hardly an intellectual place yet it seems to be populated with visitors who want to get away from highly intellectual places, for example NYC. It is fashionable when it wants to be but it is also one of the cheesiest places on earth. Sometimes the changes from fashion to horror happen in seconds. The forecast these days is incredibly monotonous and yet the weather changes all the time. People say it´s unbearably hot. I instead think that what is unbearable is how cold every place is. Americans don´t seem to want to manage the weather, they want to defeat it. Miamia is probably the city in USA with the most empty homes at any one time. Especially now in the summer, the low season. Many more people want to have a home here than live here. Spain where I live has a similar problem.

Here are some pictures. I especially liked the beach architecture, the art deco. But I was surprised at the mix of not so much the old and the new, but the fancy and the abandoned. From South Beach to the Fontainebleau, a walk I did this morning I saw the simplest Days Inn type hotels next to amazing new developments like Satay, the W, and others. One plus, the water is amazingly clean for being a major city.

Pictures were taking with my favorite small camera a Canon G10.

Cinch is a voice to RSS service developed by my friend Alan Levy at BlogTalkRadio in collaboration with Dave Winer. It allows anyone to create a podcast using any type of mobile phone with no preregistration required. They are currently rolling it out for the iPhone. Cinch updates will automatically appear on Facebook and Twitter profiles as embedded mp3s in a Flash player. Cinch can also be used as an easy audio commenting platform.

Here is an early beta of the iPhone application.