Yesterday I spent half a day at Jack Hidary´s office in Midtown Manhattan. While the visit was mainly focused on Global Solar Center, his new company, I happened to be there when Jack got the news that the Cash for Clunkers Bill that he had sponsored in Congress through his not for profit called Smart Transportation had reached its 3 months goals to give out $1bn in incentives to buy more fuel efficient cars in only one week. Jack Hidary himself tells the story in an article in the Huffington Post this morning . The Cash for Clunkers story is a remarkable example of what a motivated and well connected citizen can do to promote change in America in an area where USA is the world´s laggard. It is also a story of an administration, the Obama administration, and a Congress, that is willing to listen to the best ideas of their citizens, especially when proven elsewhere in the world. This is a welcome change after the Bush Administration who took pride in its go at it alone global policies. In Jack´s case we are talking about a simple idea, already used in Germany, of giving a cash incentive to people to trade in their old, highly inefficient cars for new cars with much better MPG standards. According to Jack, there were many people in government who thought that the program would not be very successful, that the cash incentives were small and that as usual the government was going to be a poor communicator of its strategy. But what Jack successfully argued to politicians and turned out to be true is that if you leave it to car dealers, the cash for clunkers story would be told by the most powerful advertising machine in USA. And that´s what happened. Until yesterday you could not turn the TV in the States without watching some ad of some car dealer offering you the cash for clunkers program. That is how the $1bn that the government had allocated between this week and November ran out in a week. It is also worth noting that the old cars are not being sent to LDC as it usually happens with the export of used cars. They are being recycled into more efficient cars. Now the challenge is that tons of people were left out of the program. Will the American government be able to shut down a program that so efficiently allocates funds to reduce oil consumption and helps the car industry? My bet is that somehow more money will be found for it.

Now what is Jack´s next challenge? To convince Americans to save energy in another major way: installing solar panels in their homes. For that purpose he created Global Solar Center. Global Solar Center is as he puts it the “Salesforce.com of the solar energy industry”. After spending time with Saleforce founder Marc Benioff in Hawaii last week I can say that Jack is on to something there. What Salesforce.com did to provide an online alternative to Oracle and SAP software package products Jack may do for the Solar Energy Industry. The Solar Energy industry suffers from a chicken and egg problem. How do you communicate to the American people that there are billions of dollars of government incentives available for them to generate their own electricity when installation benefits vary so widely among home owners? Jack´s answer is the creation of an online tool that is available for everyone on the internet and gives home owners a free and quick answer, something that until now required visits from solar panel installers and studies that could cost in the thousands. This tool, which was recently launched, combines the power of many mapping and photographic databases coming from Google (maps) and Bing (pictures), with precise information of USA´s solar footprint to give solar panel installers and the average citizen a quick answer as to how much it would cost to install solar in her/his home, what programs are available to subsidize the installation and the return on investment. While his results have not yet been as impressive as Cash for Clunkers, probably because solar panel dealers are poorly organized and have not managed to communicate the government incentives available to them as well as the car dealer industry, Jack has managed to generate $6 million worth of orders obtaining a 3% commission on each one in a few weeks. So as opposed to his efforts in Smart Transportation an NGO Global Solar Center is a for profit company and may actually be one of those rare companies that both do good and make money.

First the news: Hawaii is so big that you can spend the whole day going on a road trip and do half the island. Then the confusion: watch this senseless video.

Nina and I got married for the simple reason that after being together over 2 years we love each other more than ever.

But we got married in Hawaii, a place that is so far away from our home in Madrid, thanks to the help of friends who we would like to thank after last night´s wonderful ceremony: Michael Dell and Marc and Lynne Benioff.

We would like to thank Michael for suggesting a few weeks ago in Sun Valley, that we change our original plans of getting married in NYC for a wedding at the most beautiful hotel in the world, the Four Seasons Hualalai. We would like to thank Michael and his incredibly attentive staff who helped us put the wedding together, with very little notice and yet paying attention to every detail. They are not only great, they are sensitive something that is not common in hotel staff. At the Hualalai we would especially like to thank Scott Cairns, Patrick Fitzgerald and KJ Rhee. I would like to thank Jim Major for lending me his bike 🙂

But concerning the wedding itself the ceremony would not have been the same without Marc and Lynne. Not only were they kind enough to be our witnesses but they hosted the most amazing dinner of our lives together last night at the Kukio.

In short thanks to Michael and his team and Marc and Lynne, a wedding that was going to be basically about a couple eloping and getting married at the beach, turned out to be just perfect. Unexpectedly all the key elements of a wedding were there one after the other. The photographer (the pictures below are mine although his are coming soon), the music during dinner, the Hawaiian symbolism during the ceremony. Marc and Lynne paid attention to every detail and made the event wonderfully complete.

We would also like to thank Keoni Atkinson, the officiant who married us in the Hawaiian tradition and who exceeded anything we could have imagined about making our wedding by the ocean special. Keoni understood us very well after an afternoon meeting and was able to summarize a great deal about how Nina and I feel about each other.

As we spend our last two nights here, now married, we remember last night´s ceremony with a great deal of love for all of those who made it happen.

Mahalo.

Nina Wiegand and Martin Varsavsky are getting married today at the Four Seasons in Hualalai. The ceremony will be Hawaiian style and will take place at 6pm Hawaiian time. Friends and family, no reason to dismay at this surprise wedding here alone so far away from you. There will be a weekend long celebration to be held in Miami starting Friday Oct 23rd in South Beach. In the meantime we would like to extend special thanks to Michael and Marc for helping make this wonderful event happen.

Here´s the announcement video. You can also watch it in HD.

If you’re also planning a wedding, one of the first things to do is choosing a venue. Don’t forget to look into the fire safety in wedding venues because large gatherings, decorations, lighting, catering equipment, and electrical systems can create potential fire hazards. Properly maintained alarms, fire extinguishers, clear emergency exits, and emergency fire watch services Oxnard can help protect guests and ensure a quick and safe evacuation during an emergency.

You will not imagine it like this.

Or at least Nina and I did not. If you live in Europe like we do. And you are used to vacation in the Atlantic as we are, then Hawaii is kind of like Tenerife meets Jamaica..but better. But that may be a meaningless description for you. And we don´t really know all of Hawaii. We know The Big Island, also known as Hawaii, but not all the other islands that are jointly known as Hawaii. And we only know the North of the Big Island. But just the North is three distinct landscapes. A volcanic desert on the North West, grasslands in the North, tropical forest in the North East. In a very small area you go from sea level to 4200m. This island is a lot of landscapes and climates put together. Sometimes it even snows at the top of the volcano and we are at 8 degrees from the Equator. The Big Island is not huge but it is big as they say. Probably somewhere between Majorca and Sardinia in size. But it is empty by European standards. Very little development. Huge open areas. Vast views. I kind of had the wrong idea that Hawaii was touristy like say Florida. It is not.

If you can make it, it´s worth the 12 hour jet lag from Europe. I will add more pictures and videos.

I would like to thank a very special person who hosted us today but he has asked us not to blog about him and we will respect that. It´s a pity though because he is one rare combination of wit and kindness.

In my last post written yesterday I shared with you our Sunday in Tokyo. Well now, a day later but still on Sunday, I am sharing with you our Sunday in Hawaii, more precisely in the Four Seasons Resort Hualalai. I always knew that if you crossed the Pacific from West to East you would gain a day. But what I did not know is that I was going to be able to spend such two special Sundays in my life, one after the other one. The Four Seasons Hualalai is certainly one of the best hotels in the world.

Japan really is lost in translation. I guess the only way to understand it well would be to spend five years here. Which I will probably never do. Still Nina and I love Japan – even what we don´t understand. Here are some pictures taken in Asakusa today.