2013 23
When competing on health, everyone wins
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in General with
Here are my results of my medical check up today.
I am 52. I am 180.5cm tall and weigh 81kg. My waist is 90cm which I was told is ideal as your waist should be half your height. My resting heart rate is 60 and my max during the stress test was 171. I got to 250W in the recumbent bike in which I was tested. My resting pressure is 105/61. My total cholesterol is 114 and the bad one is 51 good one 39. My blood work was normal. It seems that my habits of cycling and healthy Mediterranean food, no drugs smoking or drinking, stable weight and above all a great family, friends and work colleagues are helping me stay healthy, even recommending products from the MSC lab research which are good for health as well.
Now what are your results?
You see this could be a game, but for once a game in which everyone wins. Because if we compete in being healthy then we are all healthier, as simple as that. So this is why I thought that publishing my “health numbers” would be a good idea. Because I know I will be proud of them until somebody else shows me better numbers. And then I will try harder, to be healthier. Because I am foolishly competitive that way. But here foolish is good. My Dad unfortunately did not lead a healthy life, and died at the young age of 49 of a heart attack. Another incentive for me to stay fit. Older men who are suffering from low testosterone levels should search online ‘find a low T specialist near me’. If you’re constantly suffering from stress, it may have a negative effect on your health. To prevent this, you should do things that help relieve your stress. You may watch a movie, enjoy a couple of beers or light up your favorite discount smokes. One of the most balanced tobacco stick options available for IQOS Iluma devices is Terea Bronze, known for its smooth taste. If you also want to try other wellness products like kratom, you may first need to read articles like is kratom legal in canada?.
Somebody should make a game about this. It will make all those who play better off. The medical check up game? Lab work?
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This year Nina and I are thrilled to announce that we have teamed up with Founders Forum to bring you the first ever Founders Forum Menorca TechTalk 2013, which will be held at our farm on the island. We invite outstanding entrepreneurs from around the world to enjoy a relaxed weekend together in a beautiful setting. The 2013 edition will run from Friday, June 28th to Sunday, June 30th.
On June 29th, our guests will give a series of short improvised debates on technology and innovation. As in previous years, we invite the public to attend the TechTalk Open Doors event and join us for an afternoon of dialogue and interaction with some of the greatest minds in the tech world. The event will take place on Saturday afternoon from 4:30-7:30pm. If you are interested in joining us, please contact us at menorcatechtalk@ff.co to secure a spot (capacity limited to 80).
We look forward to welcoming you to our farm to share an inspiring afternoon together!
2013 30
Bands, DJs, Movies and TV Series
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in General with
I grew up with bands and movies, but now I live with DJs and TV series. And that is fine. I saw Argo and was totally disappointed, Silver Lining Playbook was better. And some movies still have it. But I am totally into Mad Men, Boardwalk Empire, Game of Thrones, Homeland, House of Cards, even Girls the first season. These series are up there with any great movie. In fact they are long format great movies. And then there’s long format great music, and Soundcloud is amazing for that. Yes some bands are still awesome, but great DJs are something else. DJs used to play songs, now DJs are the music experience, the composers. They make the music I like when I work, and when I work out. And they also make long format music. Hence the movies vs TV series, bands vs DJs analogy. All co exist. But lately the talent is with the latter.
2013 18
On Why Smartphones are Killing PCs
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Internet & Technology with
When people use a laptop, they expect everything to be free, and when they use a smartphone they expect to pay. That is the main reason why the laptop eco-system is dying and smartphones are thriving.
Laptops have traditionally been expensive. For a couple of decades now we have gotten used to paying over $1,000 for one– the average selling price of a Mac is $1,400. Smartphones however are almost free. While Google is beginning to have some success selling the Nexus 4, most people are reluctant to pay for a smartphone. They expect it subsidized or free. But what is remarkable is how the user behavior changes after the acquisition of the gadget. A phone consumer expects a phone for free, but what happens afterwards they are willing to pay for in excess (e.g. texting, voice minutes, data roaming), even when free alternatives exist. It is a different frame of mind, almost like a deal, an agreement between corporations and consumers: get something for free and pay later, vs get something that is expensive upfront and then stop paying. A laptop is a big investment upfront to enter a mostly free world. A smartphone is a tiny investment upfront to enter an expensive, yet very much accepted world. A laptop is an all-you-can-eat experience, including an all-you-can-eat fixed internet connection. In the laptop world piracy is rampant because people expect everything to be free, but much less so in the smartphone world. And this is almost psychological: the same people who pirate on laptops don’t as commonly pirate on smartphones, even though for example there are many bit torrent clients for Android. A smartphone is an “a la carte” experience in which every component is paid for and dearly, including data packages. As a result the smartphone eco-system is well funded and thriving but the PC or laptop eco-system is dying, making the laptop experience less and less “fun”. Since 2011 more smartphones are sold than PCs. This is mostly because developers and content producers need to get paid, and they are seeing much more money developing or producing for iOS and Android than for Windows and Mac.
Moreover “smartphone only” experiences are on the rise. Path, Foursquare, Uber, Instagram and Whatsapp are but some examples of these. When smartphones started, people used to say that they fell short of what was available on the Web. Now the opposite is true. People using laptops have to have smartphones handy as well. And this is even more extreme with games. As developers realized that few wanted to pay for games on laptops but many more were willing to pay for games on smartphones/tablets, they switched to develop for iOS and Android. And games became huge on mobile.
This perception translates to the investment world. For example Instagram is a free app and yet Facebook paid almost a billion for it. They didn’t pay concretely because of the money they thought they would make out of Instagram itself, but because as young as it is Facebook was until recently a PC company and in Instagram it found a short cut to the mobile world. In general VCs now are much more likely to invest in a mobile platform than in a PC platform even if the mobile platform like Instagram had no way to monetize itself. Mobile growth has the same premium Web growth had a decade ago. And this is regardless of the fact that so far, for example in advertising, it is easier to monetize on the web than on mobile. This is because everyone sees the future as mostly mobile.
For many years, when phones were phones and PCs were PCs, there was a tough debate on how content and software producers were going to get paid. And the answer, provided by Steve Jobs, turned out to be get people hooked on a device that was a computer but one in which everyone had to pay, and call it a phone. There was always another possible alternative, which was open source software and user generated content. That still exists, mostly promoted by Google, but even Google had to adopt the content/software world of Apple to make Android thrive.
Now before I end, here is a list of secondary reasons to explain why smartphones and tablets are killing PCs (or why iOS and Android are killing Windows and OSX):
-Smartphones expanded into tablets and they started competing in screen size with one of the few advantages left for PCs.
-People are finally getting used to glass keyboards (some apps like Swiftkey make them more friendly), and can therefore bid farewell to their keyboards.
-Laptops are more for content producers and most people are content consumers. That’s why the work environment is still dominated by PCs and probably will be for a long time.
-Smartphones are much easier to carry around and therefore open to a whole set of apps, like for example sports apps.
-Smartphones offer connectivity via WiFi and mobile and most laptops only WiFi; WiFi is common but not as pervasive as mobile and therefore a smartphone/tablet has the best of both worlds.
-One of the biggest advantages of laptops is storage, but cloud computing is taking care of that.
-The hardware that is needed to provide a great mobile experience uses energy in a smarter way than the hardware that is needed to provide a great laptop experience.
-While there are very affordable laptops now, they are not as inexpensive as great smartphones that are given out for free or almost nothing in contracts, and laptops are in a head-on race between processor speed and RAM and programs that makes inexpensive laptops appear as just bad products.
But overall I stand by my initial thought; that is, the main reason smartphones are killing PCs is because there is more money in smartphones and while information wants to be free it costs money to produce it. At the risk of gaining many enemies with my statement, I would like to change the famous “information wants to be free” to “information wants to be affordable”. I can agree with Aaron Swartz that science that can only be afforded at expensive universities is wrong, but still the key is not to make things free, it’s to make them affordable. To make information affordable, content affordable, and software affordable. And mobile platforms seem to have achieved a better balance at this than laptops ever did. That is why they are thriving. Better format, better business model. That simple.
To read many more comments on this post please see it in LinkedIn.
(Photo: fishbrain.randy@sbcglobal.net, Flickr)
2013 10
Experience is great until…
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in General with
Experience is great until it is used to apply old solutions to new problems. This bias, this failure to recognize new problems, is most common in technology companies as they grow older. And it is because of this bias that in Silicon Valley, the industry of the new, old people are less frequently successful. This is why, for example, Microsoft managed by Ballmer in his 50s performs worse than Google managed by Page in his 40s, and this is why Google is now threatened by Facebook, managed by Zuckerberg in his late 20s. I am sure that when Ballmer first saw Google he thought “another search engine” and when Page and Brin first saw Facebook they thought “another social network”. The real challenge, as we grow older is to use experience for our benefit without losing our ability to recognize the new. Without losing the ability of being experienced but occasionally feeling “inexperienced”. Because Google was certainly a new experience to those who were searching before it. Or Facebook was a new social experience for those who were familiar with previous social networks. But experienced leaders failed to see this. We can’t allow experience to betray us. Experience must be balanced with a childish fascination for the new, a fascination of the kind that kept Jobs young until his premature death. Steve Jobs did know how to combine experience, with an uncanny ability to recognize the new.
2013 4
Fon in Germany!
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in General with
Have you ever seen those people who get on TV and wave hi to their mother “who is probably watching”? Well today is one of those days for me. Except that it’s not my mother but my mother-in-law, my father-in-law and my brother-in-law. And they are not exactly watching TV, but connecting to WiFi. In Germany I mean. Because yes, we finally made a phenomenal alliance in Germany, similar to the ones we made in the UK with BT, or in Belgium with Belgacom, or in France with SFR, or the Netherlands with KPN. Yes, we are launching Telekom Fon! So soon my German family, and everyone in Germany for that matter, will be able to connect to Telekom Fon, just as people in the UK, for example, can connect to BT WiFi with Fon. And today I’m thrilled to announce this exceptional relationship with Telekom to the world.
Fon has partnered with the incredible Deutsche Telekom to blanket Germany with WiFi. Telekom has 12 million broadband subscribers in Germany alone that will join Fon’s WiFi network, already the largest in the world– it’s the perfect ally to bring Fon into a country I care deeply about and have much respect for. The Telekom Fon alliance will build on the 12,000 Telekom hotspots already in place and allow Telekom Fon subscribers, and everyone in the Fon network, to connect to these and more than 7.8 million hotspots around the world for free. This is a huge achievement for us at Fon and I couldn’t be happier to make the good news official.
To my German friends and family: get ready to roam…
Many wonder why Israel as a nation appears to be so aggressive, to invade Gaza and Lebanon when attacked, to bomb Syria, Iraq and possibly now Iran when threatened by the Iranian nuclear bomb program. In general many question the way Israel violently reacts to provocation. The answer may lie in the sad history of the Jewish people. Growing up Jewish, one of the 15 million in a world of 7 billion people, is growing up feeling like a survivor of so many historical massacres, lucky to be alive and stay alive. Given our history it is not surprising that there would be a slight “paranoiac” tone to the experience on real or perceived threats. And this is not to always justify Israel’s behavior, as I think that Israel as a nation is not doing itself a favor with some of the most aggressive intervention. For example I personally support having bombed the Iraqi nuclear reactors but not attacking the Turkish ship headed to Gaza when just towing it away would have sufficed. And historically many innocent people have died as a result of Israel’s quick trigger reactions.
Yellow badge Star of David called “Judenstern”. Part of the exhibition in the Jewish Museum Westphalia, Dorsten, Germany. The wording is the German word for Jew (Jude), written in mock-Hebrew script. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Still, contrary to what many believe, Jewish-Arab conflicts have killed far fewer people than Muslim-Muslim conflicts. For example the civil war in Syria these days, or the Iraq Iran war, or the Lebanon civil war or many other Muslim against Muslim conflicts that have been far more lethal than Israel’s conflicts. Just looking at the Wikipedia casualty lists of these wars I estimate for every Muslim killed by a Jew there are 100 Muslims killed by other Muslims. And there are many more Muslims killed by US and EU armies than by Israel as well. But still even one non combatant death is too many and should be avoided, so let’s try to understand why Israel responds so violently to aggression, sometimes crossing acceptable boundaries.
Israel is so aggressive because the history of Judaism is a history in which us Jews get killed for being Jewish again and again. And the few times we were spared, we celebrate it as a holidays. As one Jewish friend put it, a Jewish holiday can be summarized as “they tried to kill us, we won, let’s eat”. So we have Passover for when we saved ourselves from the Egyptians, and today, February 24th, we celebrate Purim, another survival celebration. This time we celebrate how we prevented a holocaust in Persia when Jews were deported from present-day Israel to present-day Iran. But then of course there was the very sad time we did not win, and that was the Holocaust, a systematic elimination of Jews, where nobody saved us and around a third of the Jews of the world were massacred by the Nazis. As a result, while the population of the planet has tripled, there are the same amount of Jews now as there were in 1900. And this is very much in the mind of the current generation of Israeli leaders who grew up right after the Holocaust. These leaders are haunted by the ever present question of why Jews didn’t defend themselves effectively in the Holocaust, by a conviction that if we don’t defend ourselves nobody will. And that’s why they see that their primary mission as leaders is to prevent a new Holocaust. This mission is not helped when Israel’s Sharon returns Gaza hoping for peace and Hamas who has a stated mission to eliminate Israel wins the local elections and starts an ongoing conflict with Israel. Or when Iran itself says that Jews should be thrown out of their country or exterminated. As these events unfold, Israeli leaders think “never again” and act, sometimes judiciously, sometimes not.
So given the history of the Jewish people, which could be summarized as the history of a people who tried to stay alive among Christians and Muslims and did quite poorly, a history of a people that are now only one in 500 of humanity as a whole, not one in five as Muslims or one in three as Christians, the Israeli fear is more understandable. Especially in a world in which other nations like the USA go much further in committing what I would call human rights violations (i.e use of drones) in order to defend itself. The intervention of Europe and the USA in the Arab world in the last few years in Afghanistan and Iran has resulted in far more deaths than all the Israel wars with Arabs combined, yet even these invasions seem more accepted by general public opinion around the world than Israel’s policies. So as Jews, myself included, celebrate Purim today, I hope this commentary helps to put the issue in perspective and helps non-Jews understand why Jews will always be quick to react to attacks like the rockets Hamas frequently fires into Israel.
I have spent around a third of my life in Argentina, a third in the USA and a third in Spain. While I have friends from all over the world, most of my friends are from these three countries. And there is a very big difference in the tone of their social media commentaries. My American friends talk about their lives in a positive tone and are in love with innovation, with ways of making the world a better place. Occasionally, generally at election time, they speak about politics.
My Argentine and Spanish friends, on the other hand, share an obsession with local politics that makes reading most of their social media commentaries tedious and sad. I am so tired of their whining that at this point I am actively looking for ways to filter out of my social media for political commentary. Both countries suffer from similar problems, an inept and corrupt leadership that makes it hard for citizens to move on with their lives. The tone of the commentaries is always something like “I can’t believe that such and such politician would say or do such a crazy wrong thing”. Most of my friends are disgusted by all politicians and complain across party lines. In the case of Argentina there are still a few who love the Kirchner government while most by now hate it. In Spain there is a general sense of embarrassment for all politicians that is more realistic but the conversation about them never ends. There is always some new topic, lately it is the Barcenas corruption scandal.
People in Spain and Argentina never seem to come to the conclusion that their political class is just rotten and probably will always be like that, and that they can either emigrate or put up with it. They are like children of divorced parents whose only obsession is for their parents to get together again. And that they never will. But as children of divorced parents can overcome the trauma and thrive, so can citizens of these nations. Argentines, Spanish and citizens of all troubled nations (which all countries are to some extent) should learn to live well in their own countries in spite of their political classes, something that is actually very doable. But in order to do this they have to stop talking, commenting or getting involved in political discussion, and focus that energy instead on their families, friends and especially on their work. I can give you countless examples of Argentines and Spaniards who have done amazing work in spite of the crisis. The most striking example is Amancio Ortega who, working out of a little town in the northeast of Spain, La Coruña, has managed to become the third wealthiest man in the world (net worth estimated at $55 billion ahead of Warren Buffet) building Inditex. On a smaller scale, the same can be said about Marcos Galperin, an entrepreneur who is building Mercado Libre into a multi-billion dollar company from Buenos Aires, or my own company Fon, which we built in Madrid and is now the largest WiFi network in the world. And Spain has many more large and thriving companies that are ignoring the political impasse and moving on. Mango, the fashion retailer, is another example. And in other fields like the arts, movies, architecture, fashion, technology, science, many productive, creative and extremely smart Argentines and Spaniards have decided to focus on their expertise and are managing to thrive in spite of the negativity that surrounds them.
So my advice to friends who live in troubled countries is to ignore politics. To stop blaming their environment for their shortcomings and to move ahead in life never even mentioning Kirchner or Rajoy and other political “leaders”.
In the meantime as a favor to me, if you know of a way to filter political commentary in Spanish away from my Facebook, Tumblr, Google+, LinkedIn and Twitter do let me know. I just want to know what my friends are up to, or what they are doing. Not what the Spanish and Argentine politicians are up to or doing, because their ability to screw up their countries out of ineptitude and/or greed is endless.
Everyone says that Facebook fights privacy because they grow by making you and everyone else, very public. And that part is obvious, if they don’t encourage you to be less private they have no network. But there is a countertrend to that and that is post IPO monetization. Now that Facebook got 1 billion people to share their intimate and mostly irrelevant moments they hope to make money by you being so desperate for the attention that you got used to having that you start paying NOT to be private. In order to achieve this Facebook is now making you less popular, or more private against your will.
So the new Facebook, the post IPO “have to meet the next quarter numbers” Facebook, is paradoxically more private, unless you pay of course. But if you don’t pay, less is disclosed about you to others because those who pay increasingly crowd you out. And paradoxically a new privacy will be achieved.
2013 11
Lance Armstrong: To cheat is French, to get caught is American
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in General with
Lance Armstrong in the prologue of the Tour de France in July 2004 in Liege, Belgium (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I once saw a Steve Martin movie in which he played a character, an American, who while visiting France got stopped by the police together with a woman who was not his wife. Worried that somehow the story would leak to his wife he tells the policeman: Well, you understand, “to cheat is French” but the policeman smartly replies. “Yes sir, to cheat is French, but to get caught is American”.
As the whole Armstrong confession happened I remembered this phrase and felt that what’s really embarrassing about the Lance Armstrong investigation is that the US government has been the only one to truly fight in a forceful way by stripping its own national hero of his titles. In the meantime the widespread cheating that has been taking place in the Tour de France for years has gone with lesser punishment to European competitors and that is shameful. Here’s a Wikipedia article on doping in the Tour de France. I have a hard time imagining European nations going through the trouble that the US government went through to strip their national heros of their cycling titles. Because as you read the history of doping in the Tour de France you conclude that it’s been incredibly common and that as Armstrong cheated and rightly got stripped of his titles many others should have gone through the same level of scrutiny and public outrage.
