Buusu is a company based in Madrid and run by two ex-students of mine, Bernhard Niesner and Adrian Hilti, developing a language learning community with the aim of making language learning accessible and easy for everybody. Busuu has already more than 80,000 users from more than 200 different countries. They recently released a new version of busuu.com and left the beta phase, so I’d like to congratulate them for the great work they’ve done so far.

The new version includes an improved interface, online courses for each level of the Common European Framework of References for Languages, user rankings based on their activity in the community and most importantly a premium membership option.

Premium users paying 7,99 EUR/month will get:

• Audio for more than 3,000 key phrases and listening comprehension exercises for more than 150 dialogues
• Printable PDFs for more than 150 learning units
• Access to more than 35 Grammar Units
• Audio Podcasts for more than 150 learning units

What differentiates Buusu.com from its competitors is the quality of the content they provide and the easy to use interface that helps users keep track of their improvement. The premium membership is still relatively cheap compared to a normal language course in a school, so definitely something worth checking out if you’re trying to learn a foreign language. More details on Busuu’s blog.

On the negative side I have tried and failed to connect to real people in the first tries. Also I did not see a function that would allow for somebody to get paid for teaching a language without learning another one. Maybe that is not necessary but in my case frankly I would just rather pay something and learn. The language that I am learning now btw is German. I have started with Nina my girlfriend and now I am exploring other ways of learning German over the Internet.

I am getting tired of the American press trash talking the euro. I just came back from New York City and all my friends in finance over there seem to be convinced that the euro will not survive this crisis. The New York Times and other top media all had articles about this. They think that euro nations will not agree on monetary policy and the French Franc, the DM, the Lira, the Peseta will be reborn. I am convinced that the Germans, French, Italians, Spaniards, the Dutch may not agree on things as to using its own taxpayer´s money to help the new members of the EU, but they all agree that without the euro they are all worse off. Indeed these are times that show that having your own little currency is a curse. You don´t believe me? Ask the British how they will manage to save a hugely dimensioned banking system in relation to GDP, having their own currency. Viva el euro!

The following photowalk took place yesterday around the area of my apartment in NYC where we are visiting for a week in which I am combining work and family time with Nina and my four children. I chose to mainly photograph luxury brands as I consider them endangered species. I am not saying that all luxury brands will disappear. Many endangered species do not become extinct. But the total revenues collected by luxury brands, after decades of enormous growth is shrinking rapidly and many of these brands will either go or be a fraction of what they were. So here´s a picture collection of these brands as I found them along Park Ave and 5th Ave that can serve as one more testimonial so in 2012 you can say, remember how the world of luxury was like?

I must say that personally, regardless of how I have done as an entrepreneur, I have always avoided luxury brands. I shop at Zara and H&M, Diesel, Pepe Jeans, Replay are already an extravagance for me, and from there on I show no interest. No matter how well I do as an entrepreneur I will never part with thousands of dollars to buy shoes, suits or other clothing. I do however admire the mostly Italian, French and American entrepreneurs who manage to cash in on people insecurities and pay them 10 times cost for perceived brand value. The combination of original design, exhaustive PR and ubiquitous advertising that creates a luxury brand is something, I admit, I will never be able to create as an entrepreneur. Now I am a sucker for Apple products and that is the closest thing to a luxury brand shopping experience that I will go for.

Thanks to Gabriel Gruber, I’ve just found out about Xoopit, a cool Firefox extension that lets you quickly navigate the images, videos and files you get via email, directly from your Gmail inbox.

This add-on scans your Gmail account looking for files, pictures and videos and shows them in a nice interface that lets you quickly find what you’re looking for, or what you didn’t even notice you had received, hidden between hundreds of emails. At Fon, we own Gspace that is also an alternative way of getting more juice out of Gmail, but I liked Xoopit cause it basically finds the needles in the haystack.

Another great feature is search. When you search in your Gmail account (one of the key strengths of Gmail is you can keep gigabytes of emails and easily search your archive), Xoopit displays a sidebar showing the attachments that match your search, saving you the time of going through each email to find a specific document or picture.

Xoopit now also allows you to update your Facebook status clicking on a small button at the top of your Gmail window. It also lets you see your friends’ status from a little box inside their emails, letting you know what they are up to at that moment.

After you’ve installed the extension, you can also visit the Xoopit website and get a nice feed view of all your incoming emails and attachments.

We have all been through the same thing. We can connect a computer via WiFi, we can obtain Internet around the home and on the street via WiFi but we can hardly ever link a display, a monitor or a flat TV to a computer via WiFi. As we at Fon prepare to launch the Fonera 2.0, I have started doing research with the help of Jordi and Pietro on the subject of how to move HD Video around via WiFi or WiFi like technologies and this is what I found.

High Definition Video has become an increasingly common feature of our TVs, video cameras, and game consoles. The consumer electronics industry has made great steps ahead in delivering high quality video, but our gadgets, set top boxes and large flat displays still require us to fill our living rooms with cables. Wireless technologies like WiFi and Bluetooth can give us high speed Internet and easy file transfers between portable devices, but the promise of wireless HD video remains largely unfulfilled.

The basic issue with wireless delivery of high definition video is of course the high speed rate required to transmit high quality video streams. The consumer electronics industry has been working on different solutions for a few years and the first wireless HD transmission devices are now coming to the consumer market. The main advantage of wireless HD video is not only getting rid of cables, but also and more importantly, moving your TV set away from your set-top-boxes, consoles and HD-DVD/Bluray readers, an attractive idea, especially for users with a wall-mounted flat-panel TV or a ceiling-mounted projector.

Like for most innovations in consumer electronics, different standards are being developed by different groups of manufacturers. Broadcom, Intel, LG, Panasonic, NEC, SAMSUNG, Sony and Toshiba have joined to form the WirelessHD Consortium. The WirelessHD standard is based on the 7GHz bandwidth around the 60GHz radio frequency and allows for uncompressed, digital transmission of full HD video and audio and data signals, with theoretical data rates as high as 25 Gbit/s (check Wikipedia for more details). WHDI (Wireless High-definition Interface) is a competing standard, supported by Motorola, Sharp, Hitachi (recently joined by Sony and Samsung, spreading the risk supporting both technologies). WHDI provides a high-quality, uncompressed wireless link which can support delivery of video data rates of up to 3Gbit/s. Ultra-wideband (UWB) is another competing technology that uses a large portion of the radio spectrum for short-range high-bandwidth communications. Products based on UWB are often labeled as Wireless HDMI.

A few products have already made their appearance on the market. Avocent’s Extenders and Converters have been on the market for a while. These products are based on WiFi technology (802.11a/g or 802.11n) and JPEG2000 compression and can’t provide full quality uncompressed streams as the throughput is  limited to WiFi’s 100 Mbit/s to 300 Mbit/s maximum.

The Sony KDL-40ZX1 is a 40-inch display that is only 9.9mm thick. A wireless box can send 1080i images over a 5GHz wireless channel. The price is around $4,100.

Samsung’s FP-T5094W Wireless Plasma is a wireless HDTV plasma TV set. According to reviews on Amazon the use of WiFi technology means there’s a slight delay between the source and the display. Bad for gamers. Price? Around $1,900.

Belkin’s FlyWire is a device (two actually, a transmitter and a receiver) that wirelessly connects video devices to your TV set transmitting at 1080p high-definition, using radio signals in the 5GHz band. Price? $700 for the basic version, available in Q1 09.

Some interesting articles on the topic are those from Ars Technica and CNET.

I would like to congratulate Elisabet De Los Pinos, President & CEO of Aura Biosciences and an ex-student of mine, on raising $3.7 million from experienced biotech investors in these tough markets. Aura Biosciences is a US/Spanish biotech company that is developing groundbreaking nanotechnology for the targeted delivery of drugs. Last December the company moved to the offices of Jazzya, my holding company.

Aura Biosciences developed Nanosmart, a technology that uses the advantage of viruses to cross the membrane and deliver drugs into the cells. Unlike other technologies, the Nanosmart structure is a hollow nanoparticle that resembles the viral shell but does not carry any viral genome making it a safe technology for the delivery of a wide array of drugs.