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.