2008 4
Sick in Aspen
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in General with No Comments
It´s 3am here in Aspen and I am awake mainly for three reasons. One is altitude sickness. Aspen is at 2500 meters and one of the consequences of altitude is insomnia. Secondly I have had fever for a day now without any other symptoms. I arrived to Aspen the night before last and since yesterday morning I have had between 37.5 and 38.7 fever. And lastly there´s the 8 hour jet lag between Aspen and Madrid which partly explains why I would wake up at 3am since it´s now noon in Madrid. And what´s worse is that I am in Aspen on the first trip ever with my second daughter Isabella who is 15. We had never traveled just the two of us. But while it is depressing to be sick it was special to see how well she took care of me. Isa brought me cold towels to lower the fever, ordered food for me and even googled altitude sickness reading all the symptoms to me. As she took care of me I remembered the nights in which things were the other way around.
So far I missed my dear friend Jack Hidary´s 40th birthday party. Today I have a meeting of trustees of the Clinton Foundation. If I go on feeling like this I will miss that too. But sometimes life is like this. We are reminded of the fragility of the human body. One thing is sure, I am not getting up until I feel reasonably well.
Update: It is five hours later and my fever is gone and I feel better. So I will be able to spend a very American Fourth of July after all!
2008 3
When Culture and History turn against us
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in MV with No Comments
In this video I speak about the success of many American companies, especially about Google’s. My argument is that these companies base their strategies on simplicity and in finding out how to replicate the same business model in many different places with different cultures, in finding out what mankind has in common. European and Asian businesses many times are tied to historical prejudices that prevent them to succeed in a global scale.
This video was filmed during my presentation at EVCA‘s 25th anniversary in Madrid.
I’m very glad to let you know Twitxr is one of the first partners of Polar Rose, the service that lets you name the people you see in online photos and search for pictures of any person, with much better results then Google Image search.
Polar Rose will automatically find people inside the pictures users post to Twitxr and let anybody visiting Twitxr.com name them (see for example the picture of Azeem Azhar I took today during a meeting). All these pictures will then be searchable on Polar Rose. This integration brings to all Twitxr users the features available to the Polar Rose users who installed a browser plugin. We’ll keep working with them to find other collaboration opportunities and welcome your suggestions.
Last week T-Mobile, the fourth largest wireless carrier in America, launched T-Mobile@Home, an offer that will provide its customers with landline phone service for 10$ a month, a cheaper then Vonage price.
The service is based on a WiFi router that lets users use special mobile phones provided by T-Mobile that can route calls over the mobile network (when out) or via WiFi when at home (using a VoIP technology called UMA that tunnels voice traffic over the Internet to T-Mobile’s backbone network), additionally T-Mobile@home customers will be able to plug their old landline phones to the router and enjoy the same unlimited local and long-distance calls included in the offer. T-Mobile@home is available to existing T-Mobile customers who have mobile subscriptions costing at least $39.99 per month and have a broadband connection at home.
Thanks to WiFi and VoIP T-Mobile can compete with AT&T, Verizon Wireless, and Sprint Nextel and their “all you can eat” plans on a lower cost basis. In Seattle and Dallas, where T-Mobile has first tested T-Mobile@home, they say that 45% of users of the service had switched from other mobile operators.
NTRglobal a Spanish company based in Barcelona and one of Europe’s biggest SaaS players with more than 12,000 customers has recently closed a €22M round of financing, one of a largest rounds of VC funding for a SaaS venture this year. Congratulations to Luis Font, CEO and co-founder of NTRglobal, who is running a very successful global business from Spain.
NRTglobal is growing faster then most of their competitors, providing on-demand solutions for remote support, access, online collaboration and IT system administration to more then 12,000 small and large corporations in 60 countries. The investment from international investors Kennet Partners and Atlas Venture will fuel NRT expansion in North America, UK, China and Japan, and will help the company further develop their NTRsupport, NTRadmin and NRTconnect products. Existing investors Debaeque and Elaia Partners also participated in the financing round.
Image via WikipediaMy readers know that I believe that the Bush Administration record on world affairs is pretty bad. Still for the sake of fairness there´s something positive to say about President Bush as he prepares to leave the White House and that is how well he and his team have managed North Korea. And nothing more dramatic than today´s footage showing North Korea´s nuclear reactor in which its atomic weapons were made being blown up. It is clear that military power supported by diplomacy as in the case of North Korea works much better than military power alone as it was the case in Iraq. It seems that medication plus therapy is a better treatment for brutal dictators than…lobotomy.
From next year Chrysler, the third-largest automaker in the States, will provide most of their Chrysler, Dodge and Jeep models with a “uconnect” system that will give the vehicles a 3G cellular Internet connection shared throughout the car over Wi-Fi. This, as a similar service I reviewed last March, proves how WiFi keeps thriving as a common language spoke by laptops and gadgets (like the ones built by Apple, Nintendo or Sony) and turning 3G into a WiFi signal will keep making a lot of sense for more then a few years.
Chrysler is an American brand and we don’t see many of its cars here in Europe, so if you want to turn your car into a WiFi hotspot you’ll soon be able to do it with Fon‘s help. We are making a lot of progress into enabling our users to plug an HSDPA modem (like the ones most operators give you for free if you pay for a monthly data plan) into our upcoming Fonera 2.0, that as you know has a useful USB port. Once you’ll have bought a Fonera 2.0, got a HSDPA modem from your mobile operator of choice and found a way (there are many) to power your Fonera, you too will have WiFi in your car for all your family’s gadgets (iPod touch, Nintendo DS, PSP, laptops, etc), and probably at a much lower price then Chrysler’s option.
Is America really under attack to the point that the life of American citizens has to be so hard? This morning I had the horrible experience of taking my son Tom to renew his passport to the American Consulate in Madrid, and ordeal that took three hours and it´s not finished. My son is a US Citizen and his passport had just expired. My son is also a Spanish citizen, so I have recently been exposed to the process of renewing both his passports and I am sorry to say that the American system is both awful and humiliating.
First of all, the access to the American Consulate in Madrid is a mission impossible in itself. Forget about WiFi access at the consulate. Not only is there no WiFi there, but there´s no phone usage because the Americans are so terrified of terrorists that they don´t allow you to bring any electronic devices into the consulate, not even a Nokia phone. Moreover, once you come in, Americans and non Americans are thrown into one small room –that is probably unsafe in case of fire– in which consulate employees only appear as animals in the zoo out of glass cages. I wanted to photograph or film this crowded for my blog, but, of course, I couldn´t as that in itself would constitute a security threat so there´s no way the overcrowded conditions can be reported other than by my description.
And once in, what you have to do to renovate a simple expired passport is out of this world. In the case of my son we failed to get his passport renewed because my presence, his presence and his expired passport –which was of course all that was needed in Spain to renew his Spanish passport– was not enough. The American Consulate requires that his mother had to come as well, that we had the social security card and birth certificate and both his mother and I had to swear in front of a consul (who is behind the thickest bullet proof glass that I have seen in my life) that all we said was true. This American swearing thing just drives me nuts. Why is just signing not enough?
In the meantime, the application for the passport renewal is very confusing itself. Nobody helps you to fill it up. All embassy employees are in glass cages so they cannot see very well what you have if you show it to them and there are so many people waiting that the whole place feels like a crowded subway that is not moving.
Will America one day learn not to be terrorized anymore? Will America learn to stop seeing most people as potential enemies? I certainly hope that Barack Obama not only wins the election, but changes the rethoric of fear of George W Bush that has hurt USA so much.
Nokia, already a shareholder of Symbian, has announced yesterday the acquisition of the remaining 52% it didn’t own for €264 million, along with the promise to make it open-source in two years, with the launch of the Symbian Foundation, where Nokia will be joined by AT&T, LG Electronics, Motorola, NTT DOCOMO, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone.
The Symbian OS platform has 67% share of the “smart mobile device” market and is powering around 200 million mobile phones sold to date, especially thanks to Nokia’s S60 platform used in its popular Series N and Series E phones. Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and NTT Docomo, will unite their Symbian-based platforms in an open mobile software platform available for free to all Symbian Foundation members, in a move that seems a direct response to Google’s open-source (and free for manufacturers) Android mobile platform, while still making economic sense for Nokia (who paid €160M in royalties to Symbian Limited in 2007 alone).
Tomorrow’s mobile business is all about software, Apple clearly demonstrates this with the iPhone. As Om Malik pointed out in a great post, “in this platform game, the winner is going to be the one that can attract the most developers”. So with yesterday’s announcement, a big win for the open-source movement, Nokia is trying to face competition with open platforms like Mobile Linux and Google’s Android, and of course, less open but rich platforms like Apple’s iPhone, in an effort to attract the most and best developers to build mobile applications.
2008 25
Seesmic raises a new $6M round
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in General with No Comments
I consider myself an entrepreneur first and and investor second and this is mostly the case because if I am an investor at all it is because of the money I made being an entrepreneur and not the other way around. And as an investor I have invested in very few companies. I get an investment proposal per day on the average and make one investment per month. But so far my investments are doing well. My stellar investment is not on the internet surprisingly but in alternative energies where I was the first backer of Miguel Salis in Eolia, a Spanish company now worth over 700 million euros only after 3 years from its foundation. But in the field of the internet there have been some exciting developments this week including the sale of Plazes to Nokia, the new investment round of Technorati and now Seesmic´s announcement.
My friend Loic Le Meur’s startup, Seesmic, has raised a new round of financing attracting investors like Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, and Wellington Partners, a well known VC. In this post on his blog Loic tells us the story of how Omidyar and Wellington Partners joined Seesmic. Congratulations Loic!
According to the data Loic made public, Seesmic, a website and platform enabling video conversations, is getting 120,000 unique visitors per month, 69,000 video posts per month and around 3,600 new users. What is especially interesting is how their video comments feature for third party platforms like WordPress and Friendfeed has proved extremely popular and taken the conversation out of the website and into thousands of blogs. To bring it back together, Seesmic recently launched a new version of their embeddable video player which shows all replies to the post shown at the bottom of the player.