2011 12
Four quick ideas for Blackberry
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Internet & Technology with No Comments
-Make it such that when you get a new Blackberry you can clone the old one, apps included, as iTunes does with the iPhone, now it’s just Blackberry services. As a manufacturer you want to make it as easy as possible for people to buy your newer products.
-Create an API for the keyboard and trackpad so any other gadget in the planet, including your iPad, your TV… can be managed from your Blackberry acting as remote, of course the Blackbery should be the remote of the Playbook. What people love the most about Blackberry is the keyboard.
-Make it easy for developers to write stable apps for Blackberry.
-Have BBM connect to the iPhone, Androids and the web. It is useless to give this business to WhatsApp if you are RIM.
2011 7
Wikileaks should be more transparent
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in General with No Comments
I was looking at the financial statements of Wikileaks online and could not find them. Greenpeace, Oxfam, Wikipedia and other NGOs that solicit money are very transparent about their financial situation. To me Wikileaks becomes much less credible if they do not have that level of transparency but yet they claim to bring transparency to the world.
Oil prices are collapsing. I see this as a mixed blessing. On one side I am happy that oil exporters get to make less money doing nothing. On the other side I am concerned about more CO2 emissions around the world and a slower shift to alternative energy. So what I would love to see is for the US and EU governments to leave gasoline prices as they are now and as oil prices go down to keep the differences in taxes. This would reduce their gigantic deficits, help alternative energy, reduce the oil import bill and reduce CO2 emissions.
2011 6
A perfect ending to our summer vacation
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in General with No Comments
These photos are from the last day of our summer vacation. We spent it on Aphrodite, the family sailboat. We have been sailing Aphrodite for 11 years. We have gone as far East as Beirut and as far West as Mexico. Aphrodite is a 92ft Ketch designed by Andre Hoek and built by Vitters. And don’t ask me why I still work so hard at turning ideas into businesses like Fon and just don’t spend my life sailing 🙂
Aphrodite is a blue water sailboat that has crossed the Atlantic 10 times. What they say about boats is true, they are incredibly complex and expensive to maintain. But they are also great fun to sail.
In this video I show Aphrodite sailing.
2011 5
What “A” yacht
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Trips with No Comments
Sailing around Menorca we found this incredible yacht. Maybe somebody who looks at the pictures can tell me her name. In the meantime it was funny to see that some nudists had discovered this ultramodern wet dream ahead of us 🙂
Ok now I know it was this yacht the most expensive in the world, $300M to build $1M to refuel, $20M to maintain per year, designed by Starck
2011 30
Netflix to launch in Spain
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Internet & Technology with No Comments
Probably the fact that Spain is the country with more downloads per internet user in Europe made Spain the first EU country to get Netflix. When I recently met with Presidential hopeful Alfredo Rubalcaba he spoke about how much pressure the Spanish government received to stop the downloading of US content without pay in Spain and was very aware of how Spotify was making it in Spain as a legal alternative.
Now the challenge will be to see if it was true that people downloaded because DVDs are a rip off or because they don’t want to pay any price for movies. Because Spotify really took off in Spain but only the ad based version. Few pay. And there is no ad version of Netflix. Only on Hulu there is. But to me Netflix is an incredible deal. To pay less than €10 per month for all you can eat quality streamed movies is unbelievable.
I pay for Spotify and for Netflix. Netflix I had to sign up through our home in NYC and use it with VPN service Witopia that makes me show up as a US client.
I love Spotify on my mobile!
2011 26
Irene is coming
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Trips with No Comments
Hell is coming to The Hamptons http://passageweather.com/ I am sailing in the Med these days and use Passage Weather as a sailing web site. Go into this site and track the hurricane, it’s scary! We have a farm in the Hamptons, Luna Farm in Sagaponack. It is a historical farm. I hope it survives. And I hope some miracle makes the hurricane go away from the coast in the next 48 hours.
2011 23
Why did we go to war?
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Arab revolts with No Comments
I am debating with too many people on Twitter. I give up. Most people seem to believe that EU and USA went to war in the Arab countries, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and now Libya because somehow we are making money doing so. They don’t get it that Europe and USA lost trillions in these wars. That their people, their economies… lost trillions and a horrible sacrifice of human lives on all sides. That yes there are some minor beneficiaries of this disasters like some people in the military industry and military contracting but that for the economies of USA, UK and some EU countries have been wasting $3 trillion only in Iraq as you can see here. And this is madness. Most on my twitter stream believe that somehow we will get paid back. How? Stealing their oil? Well that will never happen and should not happen. Did Saddam or Gaddafi not want to sell oil? Because now we get somebody else to sell us oil at $107 per barrel is that enough reason to invade Iraq? If all we wanted was to buy oil we would not go to war. We went to war because of some idiotic reasoning in the case of Iraq and some smarter reasoning in the case of Libya (where we invested much much less, worked with Libyans and got what seems to be like a good outcome). We went to war because we believed that toppling people who kill their people and sometimes foreigners with oil money don’t deserve to be in power. But the Iraqi money and human lives spent in the Iraq War are gone for good. We should have done nothing in Iraq, Saddam had nothing to do with Al Qaeda and he would have fallen like Gaddafi did, at a much smaller cost if we had waited a decade.
2011 23
The average American owes $50K, the average Libyan has $30K
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Economy with No Comments
Libyans look like they are in horrible shape, and as they finish their civil war they are. And we are all happy Gaddafi, while still at large, is not in power. But unlike anything you can imagine, Libyan finances are not that bad. Libya is no Egypt. They have over $200bn in assets of which $165bn are abroad. They are only 6 million people and have no national debt. As a result each Libyan has assets of $30K. Americans instead have around $50K of debt per capita and Europeans $30K. But Americans and Europeans, paid dearly for the liberation of Libyans, not as much of course as the failed wars of Iraq and Afghanistan but still significant. Should us in EU and USA stop fighting other people’s wars and focus on rebuilding our economies? I think so. We should emulate George W Bush who had everyone contribute to the cost of the Gulf War and as a result it was short and relatively inexpensive as described in the first link. My view is that from now on, if we deal with wealthy nations like Libya I think we should only intervene only to tilt the balance and only if we get repaid. And in cases in which true humanitarian reasons are at stake we should do this together with many nations and sharing the costs.
2011 22
A better USA just a few “if’s” away
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in USA with No Comments
USA is an amazing country. But it would be way more awesome if:
-it did not spend half of what the whole world together spends in the military.
-it did not have lawyers who leech on business with a “tort tax” adding unnecessary costs to the economy in medicine, patents and tons of other fields.
-it did not spend twice as much as Europe in health care per person leaving many in precarious conditions and ending up with the average American living 3 years less than the average European.
-it regulated guns.
-it educated more and incarcerated less.
-it reduced the environmental footprint and calorie intake per person.
-Americans learn to live within their means (not from the savings of foreigners).