Living in Europe we frequently read about the challenge of integrating Arab immigrants. In Europe we think of Arab Europeans as a low income group. Personally I don´t know if this perception is true but I to learned today from my friend Kaleil Isaza who started JumpTV that this is certainly not the case in the United States. Indeed the Arab American´s average income is higher than the average income of all Americans. Later at home I found this article on Arab American demographics that corroborates what Kaleil told me. JumpTV by the way is an interesting venture that brings TV over the internet to immigrant groups and is mainly focused on Arabic and Spanish speaking channels. For JumpTV it´s very important that immigrants be reasonably well off as internet tv requires a much greater investment than regular TV. As I read the Arab American Institute web site and how Arab Americans I wondered about the factors that led to the tremendous success of Arabs in America and if these could be replicated in Europe.

I was born in Argentina. My background is German, Ukrainian, Polish and predictably Jewish. When I was growing up in Buenos Aires there were mainly two main kinds of Jews, the businessmen and the intelectuals. The Varsavskys were clearly on the intellectual camp. My father Carlos Varsavsky had a PhD from Harvard in astrophysics and he exemplified the Varsavsky type. Now while being an intellectual was and still is very prestigious there was no money in it. In America scientists struggle but are not poor. In Argentina they were then and they are now. Maybe this is why I grew up thinking that men does not live by science alone and decided to make a living out of investing in science rather than practicing it. This was not easy. My grandmother on my mother side, Ora Waisman, before she died in 1994 made me promise that I would get a PhD. I did go half way and in 1996 I became a professor of entrepreneurship at Instituto de Empresa and have been teaching in the fall ever since. But that is as far as I went with academia. I used to think I could get away with this. That my work was very relevant as evidenced by the enormous number of citations that Martin Varsavsky got at Google. But then Google came up with Google Scholar and there all the other Professor Varsavskys beat me by a great margin and rightly so. I am sorry Ora! I did what I could. I just LOVE starting businesses. I hope you understand. Entrepreneur first, scholar second.

My entrepreneurship efforts are in the field of Telecoms and the Internet where I founded Viatel, Jazztel, Ya.com, Einsteinet and now Fon. My investments however are in alternative energies. Together with partners I have built an 18MW wind farm that we are expanding in the process of expanding to 50MW and we are also in the process of asking permits for solar and wind energy for another aprox 150MW.

I invest in alternative energies for two main reasons, one is because I believe I can make money with them and two because I, like many others (but unfortunately not enough others), believe that burning fossil fuels is bad for the environment and bad for global peace. Today however I was presented with a potential investment in biodiesel and so far, while convinced that it can be a money maker, I have concluded that biodiesel production is not a sustainable and decided against the investment. Why? Mainly because in a world in which over a billion people go hungry how can we morally justify burning food to drive cars?
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A few months ago I met Netvibes founder, Tariq Krim during Les Blogs. Not only was I fond of Tariq personally, but I also loved his website. It was at that time that Tariq became a FONero and a Advisory Board member in France. Now I have reciprocated. Yesterday, together with Pierre Chappaz, founder of Kelkoo and ex head of Yahoo Europe and Marc Andressen, founder of Netscape, Opsware and Ning (and to clarify – both Pierre and Marc are collaborators as well as investors in FON) I invested in Netvibes.

Netvibes already has more than a million users. Basically what Netvibes does is put together in one page all the blogs, information sources and other tools that you use regularly. The file that I include below is called OPML. It’s interesting because it shows my own personal page of all the information I look at regularly. As you will see, the majority are in English, some are in Spanish and in French. For me the interesting thing about sharing OPML archives is that they’re the best way to find out what kind of information other people are interested in. Of course in my own there are important sources and sites missing – it’s impossible to have them all – but I would welcome suggestions on additional information/sites that would be worth adding..

If you’ve read up to here and have not gained an understanding of Netvibes, I suggest you chat with friends who understand what RSS is and how Netvibes works. I recognize that it may not be for everyone.

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