Pietro Saccomani, my TA of last year at my entrepreneurship class has started a group in Facebook that is called I studied entrepreneurship with Martin Varsavsky. If you were ever a student of mine please feel free to join. Thank you XL for the recommendation to start this group. In theory there could be over 500 people who have studied with me in the last 10 years at IE. But students are all over the world now and I don´t really know how to reach them other than blogging about this group.

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I met Kevin Rose co founder of Digg and Pownce a couple of times. I found him smart, funny and engaging. I signed up for Pownce after we met, over a year ago. But now Pownce is shutting down. I just woke up in Madrid with this email from them.

We are sad to announce that Pownce is shutting down on December 15,
2008. As of today, Pownce will no longer be accepting new users or new
pro accounts.
To help with your transition, we have built an export tool so you can
save your content. You can find the export tool at Settings > Export.
Please export your content by December 15, 2008, as the site will not
be accessible after this date.
Please visit our new home to find out more:
http://www.sixapart.com/pownce
Our thanks go out to everyone who contributed to the Pownce community,

The Pownce Crew

Pownce was supposed to be a “better Twitter” but Kevin, founder of Pownce has become extremely famous on …Twitter. To me that is as if Steve Jobs used Blackberry as his main communication platform. Not good. Because as raw communication power goes with over 75K followers on Twitter (I only have 2500) Kevin is a walking PR machine. This ranking will give you a sense of how famous Kevin is on Twitter. He is only second to Barack Obama! Pity he could not use that power and the promotional tools of Digg (Diggnation) to make Pownce the success it could have been. And Twitter itself, as popular as it is, still needs to achieve two milestones: one is to get out of the geek community itself and truly go mainstream, and the other is to find a way to charge for its services. Charging for sending SMS would be a start. As the financial crisis continues and VC´s stop funding fame and finally seek fortune, Silicon Valley´s new motto will be “earn or die”.

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For those interested in architecture….

Here are a few pictures of a ruggedized Fonera for outdoor deployments. We built it with one of our Asian partners and we are now testing it. This is not a product announcement. As my readers know this is my blog and I share R&D projects as they evolve. But we have had a lot of requests for outdoor foneras and we are working on the concept.

Because Intel earnings will evaporate in 2 hours if these notebooks popularity continues to rise. I love them though and I hear that over 5 million have been sold so far. I have 3 of those, one with XP, one with Linux and one with Mac (an Asus turned into a Mac). My 350 euro Asus works as well as the MacBook Air that cost me $1800. It is very small that´s true and I only use it in conferences, planes, or public places but it´s battery life beats any Mac I know. On the negative side the ethernet doesn´t work, sound only works with Bluetooth and the sleep functions that works so well in Macs doesn´t work in the Asus Hackingtosh. I also greatly enjoy the Magalhaes, the Portuguese notebook that competes with the OLPC another favorite.

There’s a quasi civil war going on in Palestine between Fatah and Hamas. The former is in power in the West Bank, and the latter in the Gaza Strip, which are the two parts of Palestine, also known as the Palestinian territories. I have visited Gaza and the West Bank, I have been to Ramallah and I have also met Palestinian ministers and even Ehud Olmert.

To me, the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians does not clearly have good and bad guys. Sometimes it’s the Israelis committing the atrocities, and other times it’s the Palestinians. But the leading Spanish newspaper, “El País”, believes that the Palestinians are the good guys and the Israelis the bad guys. And when a civil war started between the two Palestinian factions breaks out, “El País” didn´t know how to bring “bad” Israel into the picture and published an article like this, in which the Israelis still come off as the bad guys even though they were not part of the dispute.

What I don’t understand is how Spaniards, who have reached a fairly high level of sophistication when it comes to matters of domestic policy and are mostly skeptical about their own political parties, continue to be fairly unsophisticated in matters of foreign policy, and don’t demand more objectivity from the local press.

The Palestinian-Israeli conflict will be resolved when everyone recognizes their mistakes, and changes, and not just when the Israelis do. The Israelis pulled out of Gaza unilaterally Gaza fell into utter chaos. It does not surprise me that the Israelis now believe that if they pull out of the West Bank, the civil war among Palestinians, as well as the attacks on Israel, will only get worse.

If the Palestinians had created a well functioning state in Gaza that provided Israel with some reasonable security, the Israelis would be pulling out of the West Bank, just as they have left the Sinai Peninsula and other previously occupied territories. The majority of Israelis don’t want the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as part of a greater Israel. Those that do constitute an organized and fanatic minority, but that minority was forcefully removed from the Gaza Strip and the results were awful.