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.

Looking for new apps to include the Fonera and testing Pando and Dropbox I found Files Over Miles and it seems great (thanks Raul Chevalier). The key about the new Fonera, the Fon WiFi router that allows you to offer a little extra bandwidth to others and in exchange getting paid and roaming the world for free is that it also manages your file transfers. That´s why we call it the Fonera 2.0, because it manages your relationship with the Web 2.0 namely uploading and downloading content. For Fon this ability to allow people to upload and download while they leave home with their laptops has been a big plus. People are eager to let their Fonera routers connected to their hard drives do the TEDIOUS Internet work such as uploading your videos to YouTube, pictures to Flickr, or downloading their torrents. As a result of this new development at Fon we have been able to stop subsidizing the growth of our network and are reaching profitability earlier than expected. Probably this summer or fall.

But now that the selections of the obvious apps are ready, I was looking for other killer ones – apps to sync folders or send large files from computer. Point here is that instead of being glued to your computer as the huge files are sent, say when you use Pando, your router does the job sending that family video in HD while you are away from home. Moreover you can then access your Fonera from the office say to see how your downloads, uploads, torrents and file transfers are going. But while Pando is great and so is Dropbox, FilesOverMiles is the piece of cake type of app that could be a killer in the Fonera 2.0. It just sends files from browser to browser.

Now we have to see if it´s Open Source and if we can include it in the Fonera. But try it. It is a brutally simple way of sending files from your browser to somebody else´s. Pity it seems to be capped at 1GB and that it only works if you open ports which is not something everyone knows how to do. Other than that you can also get lucky as FilesOverMiles tries to pierce your ISP´s firewall and sometimes succeeds.

Btw we are launching the Fonera 2.0 in USA and UK in September. Sorry that it is so far only available in Continental Europe and Japan.