Novatel Wireless has recently launched MiFi, a mini router that will let you create a Wi-Fi hotspot using a mobile broadband network like 3G or EVDO. These mobile routers are the size of a couple of stacked credit cards and let you turn a 3G connection into WiFi so you can use it with your WiFi gadgets, laptop or simply share with your family or colleagues. Operators will sell these routers for about $200.

Of course with the upcoming Fonera 2.0 you’ll be able to build your own mobile WiFi hotspot just plugging a 3G USB modem (like the ones Vodafone or AT&T give you when you sign up for mobile broadband) into the Fonera’s USB port, like  John Crispin from Fon shows in this video. A much cheaper an powerful solution, although not as portable.

Another great alternative is using FonJoikuSpot that we developed with our friends at JoikuSoft, offering an easy solution to turn your Nokia 3G mobile phone into a WiFi hotspot, to get rid of bluetooth or USB cables to connect with your PC and share your mobile connection with your friends.

I wrote about Spotify about a year ago, after trying the service. Spotify is a great music software offering free ad-supported music streaming with an iTunes-like interface, a growing database and instant on-demand access to the music you save in your playlists or discover using the search or “similar artists” features. If you want no ads to interrupt your music you can pay for a subscription (9,99€/month) or buy a day pass (probably a good option if you are planning a party).

After a closed beta period, Spotify is gradually opening to users around the world, and is now available in Spain. For those of you who live in this country, you can subscribe and download the client from this address. For those who live in countries where Spotify isn’t available yet, Michael Arrington posted about a way to get Spotify anyway, give it a try.

Life for a tech startup in Europe is not always easy, especially in these tough economic conditions. One of the key challenges European startups have to face is going global. Luckily there are initiative like SeedCamp and Guidewire Group’s Innovate! Europe that can help. Innovate! has a three-part program designed to identify Europe’s most promising startups and accelerate their drive into the global technology market. During this European talent search startups will receive mentoring and promotion while competing against other aspiring startups. Hundreds of companies will apply. Only one will be named the top startup in all of Europe. Executives from the winning startup will have the opportunity to benefit from knowledgeable mentors, to reach new investors and to form strategic partnerships to help grow their business.

For your startup to qualify you need to be in the information technology, Internet, mobile and digital media sectors and be ready to expand out of your home market.

The first step is to apply online for an invitation to participate in one of Innovate!Europe’s complimentary Going Global Workshops. The most promising companies are invited to local Going Global Workshops, where Guidewire Group’s expert analyst team will give you feedback on your company’s competitive value proposition and market opportunity, and help you hone your pitch and the skills you need to best compete in fast-paced markets like Silicon Valley.

Going Global free workshops are scheduled for February the 4th ‘09 in 
Dublin, Ireland and February 5th in London, UK. Going Global Workshops will also take place in Paris, Berlin and Bern in late-March and early April

The most promising companies who participate in Going Global Workshops will receive free online promotion and exclusive invitations to next phase of the program: Innovate! Europe’s Master Class, taking place in Zaragoza May 4th-6th, where they will prepare to go global. Taught by serial entrepreneurs, financiers and experts from Europe and the United States, the Master Class curriculum will highlight proven strategies and best practices that are integral to becoming a successful global entrepreneur.

The top graduates of Innovate!Europe’s Master Class will have an opportunity to accelerate their business in Silicon Valley as participants of the Innovate!Europe Trade Mission. Innovate!Europe will culminate with the selection of one European startup that shows the greatest potential to shine on the global stage. That company, which will be selected by the Innovate!Europe’s Master Class faculty, will win a free spot at Guidewire STUDIO, an in-residence business accelerator in the heart of Silicon Valley.

For further details on the Innovate! program, visit their website.

Antarctica is uninhabited. Nowadays there are only about 5,000 people –mostly scientists– who go there during the summer and about 1,000 who winter over, spread out among the many research stations located on the vast continent. The lack of people is simplys because Antarctica is incredibly inhospitable. Antarctica is much colder than the Artic because not only it contains the South Pole but unbeknownst to people is the fact that Antarctica is the highest continent in the world. While ice floats in the Arctic, in Antarctica it is supported by the continent, which causes it to reach unexpected heights.

Most of the countries of the world accept that Antarctica belongs to all mankind, and many treaties to keep it untouched have been signed, with some being supported by NGOs like Greenpeace. But a few countries, among them Argentina, Chile, France, Norway, New Zealand and Australia, seem to believe that a piece of Antarctica belongs to them. As an Argentinean, I’ve experienced this confusion. They didn’t teach me at school that Antarctica was a continent that the majority of the planet –-except for a few countries, including my own-– believes belongs to them. What’s more, when I was a kid they told me that there was a part of Antarctica that belongs to Argentina, as if it were a fact, and not that the United Kingdom and Chile also argued that part of that same territory was theirs, while the majority of humanity said that it was everyone’s. And it looks like that feeling, associating Antarctica as part of the Argentinean homeland, continues to this day. Case in point: Today I was surprised to see that a former collaborator of Fon, Juan Kestemboin, is about to head to Antarctica with a friend, Mariano Rabinstein, and to read how the Argentinean media is covering what will have to be told as an adventure as if it were an act of patriotism. It looks like Juan and Mariano are saying that they are going to visit the Argentines who are spending the winter “serving their country” in Antarctica. Fortunately, I later saw that they have a sense of humor about it in their blog. I assume that John and Mariano also realize that, since Argentina already has so much territory –-with which it has done relatively little-– finding more land at the pole is not on the list of priorities to help the country move forward. Argentina is almost a third of the size of the United States, but it only has about 13% the number of inhabitants, and its GDP is a mere 2% of the USA’s. In turn, the USA, which doesn’t generally shy away from sticking its nose out beyond its own borders, hasn’t actually laid any claims to large swaths of the polar continent. Rather, it has directed its resources to its successful Antarctic Program, which has been crucial to the fruitful scientific research carried out on the frozen continent, whether it be near the coast at McMurdo Station, or at the true bottom of the Earth: the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station.

To me, what the Argentineans have to do is help manage Antarctica, and the easy access that Tierra del Fuego offers to the only part of the continent that is sometimes not so cold. As it stands, Christchurch, New Zealand serves as the USA’s gateway to the Antarctic, even though the city is a long, five hour flight away from McMurdo. In other words, Argentina has to lead by example: work together with the rest of humanity. I believe that the other countries who say that they own part of Antarctica should do the same. The best thing would be for everyone to withdraw their claims, and for Antarctica to be run by the United Nations, in the process becoming a source of revenue for Argentina, as it has a strategic location for conducting expeditions and promoting sustainable tourism. Yet the word “sustainable” is crucial, since Antarctica’s near-pristine state, in addition to its extreme cold and thin atmosphere (as a result of its high elevation), is what makes it such an ideal location for scientific research. Then again, this is exactly why everyone should withdraw their claims, so a greed-driven and environmentally-damaging free-for-all does not ensue.

I will finish by telling the absurd story of the Argentinean soldiers who sent a woman who was seven months pregnant to Antarctica in order to ensure that Argentina had the first baby born on the mainland, and of the Chileans who did not want to be shown up, and some years later had their own polar baby.

Emilio Marcos Palma was the first person born on the Antarctic mainland, at Base Esperanza in 1978, his parents were sent there along with seven other families by the Argentine government to determine if family life was suitable on the continent. In 1984, Juan Pablo Camacho was born at the Frei Montalva Station, becoming the first Chilean born in Antarctica. Several bases are now home to families with children attending schools at the station (all from the same “Antarctica” article on Wikipedia).

What I’m wondering now is, since granting citizenship to the grandchildren of Spaniards (depending on which side they were on during the civil war) is currently in style in Spain, if it is possible that Spain will end up also having a polar baby, whether it be due to Palma or Camacho’s lineage.

To me, it’s clear that Argentina and Chile have a great opportunity – not to compete, but to work together to develop a type of Antarctic tourism which, if well organized, could come to be a good extension of Patagonian tourism.

Dopplr, a company I have invested in, has created what they call a Personal Annual Report for their users. Dopplr is a social travel site that lets frequent travellers share future travel plans with friends and colleagues. The Personal Annual Report is a PDF that gives you interesting data and visualizations about your travels in the last year. They’ll send it next week to all their users via email.

To give an example they created a Personal Annual Report for somebody who traveled a lot last year, President Elect Barack Obama. You can download his report here.

Your report will include Flickr images for the places you travelled to and a number of other information like other Dopplr users that travelled to the same places you did and an estimate of the carbon emissions generated by your travels. They chose a clever representation for the environmental impact of your travelling: they tell you how much CO2 you produced compared to the yearly output of a Hummer SUV.

There are plenty of businesses that were “jump-started” into operation, without VCs or with minimal investment. A few examples of these businesses in Spain are Meneame and Panoramio now part of Google Earth, while in the U.S. there’s Digg. And of course, there are many more throughout the whole world. As the crisis hits us all this is one of the topics that I touched upon during my latest lectures with future entrepreneurs.

Right now startups are being made Open Source style: everyone puts in a little bit of their time. And this is partly feasible because Open Source itself exists nowadays: programming requires fewer resources than before, hosting is cheaper, hardware in itself is cheaper. Open source apps lowered the barriers to putting products on the Internet, and the Internet is now ten times bigger than it was at the time of the last crash. Indeed, here is a little tidbit of information for you: In 2007, YouTube alone consumed as much bandwith as the entire Internet in 2000.

Ever since I founded Einsteinet in 2000 and began to promote the concept of an intelligent Internet, I’ve been obsessed with the idea of being able to do everything from the web browser itself. Although I lost $50 million on Einsteinet mainly because I was five years ahead of the game, I haven’t lost that passion for seeing the day come when all I need to do is open Firefox, and everything will take place right there and in the cloud (or the brain as we used to call it back in 2001). And although Zoho is good, I still think that the people who are closest to giving us an intelligent Internet are the folks at Google, with many of their applications, and especially Google Docs (disclosure: Google are investors in Fon).

I had to give a presentation recently and I decided to do it with Google Docs. It ended up being incredibly easy to be in Firefox with many tabs open and add photos from the Internet to my presentation (searching via Google images) by simply clicking on a photo and dragging it to the Google Docs tab. You can also use your own photos and videos with ease, and it is even easier to use photos from the Internet, or videos on YouTube. The format of each photo adjusts accordingly. And when it comes to speed, forget about using Power Point, Keynote or Neo Office on a Mac. Now, what I wasn’t able to do is receive a presentation in my Gmail account and save it directly in Docs without first downloading it onto my computer and uploading it later to Google Docs. But what you can do is just send it to yourself at a special email address and keep it uploaded in Google Docs.

On most common apps, on what used to be Word, Power Point, Excel, Outlook, Google Docs, Gmail are all you need now. And they work especially well with Netbooks connected to WiFi or HSDPA. My favorite netbook? The Dell Mini with Ubuntu.