The other day I was on a taxi in Seoul (Korea) with my boss.
We were discussing about something else but suddenly he looked at me and said: "There are going to be big business opportunities in China when 3G licenses are granted"
Well, this everybody knows. My boss was thinking of corporate opportunities. But was thinking of entrepreneurship in the web 2.0 sector for mobile in China.
The leading Chinese ISP China.com, announced last year in november that it will invest up to US$20 million in local firms to develop a range of "Web 2.0" applications including online video, social networking, blogs, 3G and broadband content and mobile search.
Apparently China.com will select small to medium size developers with the "technological skill, innovative vision and deep understanding of what drives the Chinese Internet community". As I said in my previous post, understanding China is a must for being successful in China.
With about 140 million PC Internet users and 450 million mobile subscribers, I wonder whether the mobile device will become one day the primary means for accessing the Web in China. After 3G licenses are allocated we will start to know little by little about this
Kiva is a non-profit organization and Internet start-up that has become the world's first person-to-person micro-credit lending marketplace for the poor.
Kiva uses Internet web 2.0 technologies and a worldwide network of micro-finance institutions all around the world to enable individuals in rich countries to lend as little as $25 to help fund small businesses run by low-income entrepreneurs in the developing world.
How does Kiva work?
Loans made on Kiva provide 0% interest to lenders. Kiva entrepreneurs in the third world usually borrow relatively small loans (usually around 2000 USD or less). These borrowers are charged some interest by the respective micro-finance institution handling the individual loan (an average interest rate of about 19 percent, lower than the 35 percent worldwide average for micro-finance loans). Kiva borrowers have a historical repayment rate of almost 100%.
Kiva and Web 2.0
Kiva has the usual 'web 2.0' stuff like RSS feeds, journals with comments (like blogs), face wall that links to user profiles, badges for websites, easy Web payments (using credit card, Paypal), recommendations, and more.
Business Model
Self-sustainability is critical to Kiva. To this end, Kiva supports itself principally :
On the "optional fees" lenders voluntarily pay to the organization in addition to the loans they make.
Raising growth capital from a small group including Silicon Valley angel donors, corporate sponsors and foundations.
Kiva expects to be self sustainable in 2008.
Conclusion
Kiva model is quite a breakthrough in Web 2.0.Consider 100% of your money going directly to those in need and you have almost 100 % chance of geting your money back.
By the way, Kiva is the Swahili word for "agreement" or "unity".
In a previuos post, there other day we discussed about the possibility that a Charity 2.0 start-up might be a for profit organization. Today I would like to discuss about a famous web company that in September 2006 created a for-profit charity: Google
"The ambitious founders of Google, the popular search engine company, have set up a philanthropy, giving it seed money of about $1 billion and a mandate to tackle poverty, disease and global warming.
But unlike most charities, this one will be for-profit, allowing it to fund start-up companies, form partnerships with venture capitalists and even lobby Congress. It will also pay taxes.
One of its maiden projects reflects the philanthropy"s nontraditional approach. According to people briefed on the program, the organization, called Google.org, plans to develop an ultra-fuel-efficient plug-in hybrid car engine that runs on ethanol, electricity and gasoline. […]
By choosing for-profit status, Google will have to pay taxes if company shares are sold at a profit — or if corporate earnings are used — to finance Google.org. Any resulting venture that shows a profit will also have to pay taxes. Shareholders may not like the fact that the Google.org tax forms will not be made public, but kept private as part of the tax filings of the parent, Google Inc. [...]
Google.org is drawing skeptics for both its structure and its ambitions. It is a slingshot compared with the artillery of charities established by older captains of industry […]"
Basically, someone decides to do something like running a marathon, going for a long walk or some other physical challenge (one colleage of mine even joined a trip to the base camp in mount Everest in the Himalayas!!).
Then this person asks around, usually via email, saying 'Please sponsor me in my race against Cancer'. Then people receiving that email may donate some money to the cause, in websites like justgiving. Donating there is a pretty painless process.
After the race/event, you usually get a nice email from the person who started all this, saying 'thanks for your support, here you have some pics of the race, I made it!!!'
One of our approaches to a Charity 2.0 website could involve making the integral process to happen in a website, and generating some more meaningful feedback about what actually happened with the money, or how was the race.
This feedback could take the form of video or other media. The point is to get the donor to be more involved in the process, giving a bigger feeling of ownership about the particular thing to which they contributed! (And so he /she donates again in the future!!)
I have donated several times this way, and lots of people in my office did it as well. This was in the UK but I think this donation model could be exportable to other countries. We could try it out!
I would like to share with you, this interesting article from Pamela Slim. The article explains the relation between the learning process of new things and the different stages you go through in a start-up.
" If you are transitioning from a "safe" corporate job to entrepreneur, chances are you are doing a lot of new things. It is amazing how much there is to learn when you start a business for the first time; from forming new work habits to web design to bookkeeping to product development to sales and marketing.
Based on your background, natural strengths and experience, you might find some tasks easier than others. Regardless of what you are learning, if it is new to you, you will go through a determined set of steps which us training and development wonks call the "conscious competence learning model."
Why should you care about an obscure model?
Because when you understand the natural stages your brain goes through to learn something new, you are more likely to relax, expect confusion and resistance, seek opportunities to practice and give yourself lots of time to learn [...].
So here is a breakdown of the stages of learning:
STAGE 1: UNCONSCIOUS INCOMPETENCE. You aren't aware of what you don't know. Otherwise known as blissful ignorance.
Example: If you are a full-time employee of a corporation and have never pondered becoming an entrepreneur, you have no real idea what is involved. The idea sounds dangerously romantic, and you spend hours in your cube, fantasizing about your carefree lifestyle.
What you need in this phase: A dose of reality.
STAGE 2: CONSCIOUS INCOMPETENCE You become painfully aware of what you don't know. This is the "hopeless klutz" phase.
Example: You get excited about the possibility of working for yourself, so you poke around on the web and buy a few books. You find out there are a million things to take into consideration and everyone has a different opinion about what will make your business a success. You don't feel like you have a handle on things, and it feels both uncomfortable and overwhelming.
What you need in this phase: Sound guidance, support and information from trusted experts.
STAGE 3: CONSCIOUS COMPETENCE You are able to do the task with focus and mental effort. Think of how you felt as a kid when you were able to ride your bike without your Mom or Dad's hand on the back of the seat, and you didn't wipe out.
Example: With careful planning, study and support, you are able to start your business. You develop your product or service and begin to sell it. You start to interact with customers and handle all aspects of running your business. You still need to use instruction manuals, get expert guidance and spend a lot of time preparing, but you are able to run your business with a decent level of comfort.
What you need in this phase: Practice, practice, practice. And feedback from a trusted source.
STAGE 4: UNCONSCIOUS COMPETENCE You do the task effortlessly without even thinking about it. [..]
Example: You are in business for a few years and work very hard. You perfect your products and services, understand your market and develop real expertise in your field. You learn from your mistakes. You handle all aspects of running your business without a lot of stress. People look at you as an expert and think "man, he must have been born doing that, since he does it so well."
What you need in this phase: Not much, as you are comfortable and "at home" with your new skills. Pretty soon, however, you will need to challenge yourself with something new or focus on improving your performance, since if you stay in the "unconscious competence" stage for too long you can get bored.
[...]
Over time, you will learn that you get stuck in stage 2 or 3 with certain tasks and it never gets better, no matter how much you practice. This is a good indication that a skill is not a natural strength, and it may be better to hire someone to do it for you."h
If you create a Web 2.0 start-up related to charities, which your legal form should be your company?
For profit organization
Non-profit organization
"The recent Red Cross scandal is a reminder that charitable nonprofit organizations sometimes act poorly. Meanwhile, many for-profit commercial organizations try to do good—by helping poor coffee growers, or providing hurricane relief, or supporting schools. Yet the good-doing nonprofits enjoy tax benefits denied to the good-doing for-profits."
Why should nonprofit enjoy tax benefits denied to the good-doing for profits? "
"That's the question posed by Eric Posner and Anup Malani of the University of Chicago Law School in a working paper published in September (you can download it here). Posner and Malani suggest that the exclusive tax benefits available to nonprofit corporations are both unfair and inefficient. In response, they recommend that the same benefits should be extended to for-profit charities, and to the charitable activities of for-profit commercial firms.
According to the authors, there are three primary arguments used to support the special status of the not-for-profit sector, none of which they believe justifies the exclusive tax incentives:
The public goods theory
The public goods theory suggests that charitable tax benefits encourage citizens to support firms that create public goods, displacing the need for government or tax revenues to do the same job less efficiently.
The authors claim that commercial firms can also provide public goods and services, and would do so more effectively and efficiently in some cases.
The agency theory
The agency theory holds that the nonprofit form removes the lure and distortion of profit-seeking from the pursuit of social good -- especially in cases where the donors or consumers cannot evaluate the quality of the goods or services provided.
The authors believe this problem could be resolved through contract and management structure.
The altruism theory
Finally, the altruism theory suggests that the nonprofit form encourages altruistic individuals to undertake activities that will benefit others. Assuming that for-profit enterprise will ultimately value profit over quality or quantity of production, the nonprofit creates a space for those who value the latter over the former.
The authors dispute this point entirely, suggesting altruism and commitment to quality can be expressed by entrepreneurs in any organizational form.
...
The proposition was provocative enough to make The New York Times Magazine's list of ''big ideas'' for 2006 (available here, if you're a subscriber). And it nudges an already bubbling conversation about the flexibility and future of the nonprofit corporate form.[...]"
When I was working in Paris I got to know a friend of mine (Frederic Crochet) who proposed me this idea. At the beginning of 2006 my friend had a wonderful idea: "everybody is trying to sort images, videos, messages on maps. But nobody does it on a time line".
There're lots of prototypes of timeline application available. The most significant of them is the open source MIT Simile project. But today I would like to talk about two of timeline services:
ourstory.com, which, from my point of view, was the most elaborated solution back in 2006
xtimeline.com, recently launched in Shanghai (China) in July 2007 and with the ambition to become the Wikipedia of timelines
One of my business ideas I wanted to propose in this blog for my start-up was precisely my friend's idea about timelines. But since I discovered xtimeline.com I really think it is very difficult to do something better tham this Shanghai company.
Coming back to the myth of the great idea (from the blog "I will teach you to be rich"), which I already discussed here, what is really important is not the idea itself but how you implement the idea.
Ourstory
Ourstory was created in 2005 but I have to say that it has not been very successful yet. Why not? well, Ourstory is a service I would never use because of the approach they implemented the idea.
The site is complicate to use: the are timelines, FAQs, blog-like tools, photo sharing tools. You never know where you need to click. The user who wants to make a timeline does not really care about all that staff.
The site is focused on family stories (marriage, children, buy a house...). This is really a market niche and probably a very boring topic for most netizens.
Xtimeline
The story of Xtimeline is just amazing. The site has just been launched 3 weeks ago and has already got much more attention in the blogosphere than Oustory.com. I really believe that Xtimeline is going to be a very big thing so let's pay attention to it. Why? because the approach of their idea: the Wikipedia for history buffs
Their site is attractive, organized and simple to use.
Their content is much more universal than family stories (Oustrory) and is very interesting:
biography of celebrities (have a look at Angelina Jolie's timeline)
Because you give them money but cannot see the result. You do not know what they do with it!
What if every person or organization receiving money, should compulsory publish a video showing what they did with the money?
I have made some research. I will share it with you later on this blog. Currently there are already many online donation tools and social networks on the web and on Facebook but none of them makes use of this approach.
In the previous post I discussed about on of the big issues in Internet: having too many passwords to remember. Today I would like to talk about another big issue: privacy and anonymity.
Web 2.0 change the world and one of the changes is that anybody can be on the web. Just some years ago I was terribly happy every time I found my name on Google. Now, it makes me shiver.
You know the story: you make something "funny" on the web when you are young. Then, your pictures, words, videos spread on the blogosphere. And years later when you go to a job interview they ask you about all that "fun". Read, for example, what happened to Miss New Jersey.
Nowadays Google is probably the biggest spy on Earth: you just need to type somebody's name on Google to know more about him than his wife. Some new Google services like Street View, are taking espionage to a new dimension.
Currently on the web there are two extreme trends between protecting your privacy or exhibiting your privacy:
1) Protecting your privacy
Today I read on Enrique Dans' blog (Spanish) that the search engine Ask.com has decided (press release) o go for the privacy rights of the users: Ask.com will launch AskEraser, a new feature which enable the user to decide which information about them should be accessible through the search engine and which one no.
If this new service is welcome, other players in the sector, including Google, may have to change their privacy policy.
Some start-ups are going an step forward on something that rather then espionage we can describe as exhibitionism: sharing or even publishing on the Internet, your web history in real time. Some examples are: cluztr, chatsum or me.dium.com
Today's Internet still has some problems. One of them is that there are too many passwords to remember.
You know the story: a new web site interests you but you have to spend some minutes creating a new account and, what is more, you will have to remember a new login and password
Being a bit simplistic, I would say that there may be two ways of resolving this problem:
1) The password manager
A password manager organizes your login names and passwords for different sites and is intelligent enough to provide the right credentials to each site.
The user has to store all his passwords online. You have to convince the user that you are trustworthy enough. The user may be reluctant to afford the risk of being impersonated. Another problem is that this method does not eliminate the need of having to spend some minutes creating a new account in each site.
This approach is much more ambitious. Basically the idea consists in creating a third party "login & password" provider and convince web companies to take you as a reference for user authentication and accept your login names in their web sites. This means one single login & password for every site that supports it.
The tough part of this is that you really have to convince other web companies to modify their sites to support your universal login. Another problem is that you not only have to provide the login service but, what is more, trust services
The players:
Microsoft tried to do this with Passport years ago and many websites including eBay tried it out. But it didn't work out.
Typekey from SixAppart is a similar system there still isn't widespread adoption.
OpenID is by far the winner of the game: early in 2007, OpenID convinced Digg to adopt their authentication system. Microsoft and AOL announced their support, as well.
One of the reasons of this success may be that, unlike Microsoft Passport and Typekey, OpenID, for better or for worse, is a decentralized system.
One of the most successful Internet entrepreneurs related to China is probably the Irishman Ken Carroll. Ken created ChinesePod, a great example of successful small niche web business.
The primary goal of ChinesePod is to teach spoken Chinese to foreigner by using podcasting. I love their podcasts and usually listen to them while working in the office!
The idea would be to create the contrary: a "ChinesePod" to teach Chinese people another language. I am Spanish, so let's say teaching them Spanish. I like the appraoch of Chinespod much more than that of hablame.tv. By the way Ken Carroll is also behind "Spanish Sense", a project to teach Spanish to English speaking people.
I used to have a Chinese teacher in Beijing who is currently learning Spanish at the Cervantes Institute. I will see her in two weeks in Beijing and will ask her how she is doing with her Spanish.
The problem is that no many people learns Spanish in China. The first foreign language to learn is of course English. many people also learn French. But not so many learn Spanish.
There may be several reasons:
Spain and Latin America is not very present in China.
The image of Spain in China is very bad. Every time I am in China I enjoy discussing with the taxi driver. When I tell him I am Spanish, the always answer me two things: bullfighting (90% of times) and football (10 %). I feel like crying!
I am a bit confused abut this idea:
Do you think a "SpanishPod" for Chinese people would work?
I know I enjoy foreign languages but .... do I want to become a Spanish teacher?
Most people say they"ll become entrepreneurs once they find a great business idea. But according to according to Ramit's that's a great myth because even the grandest ideas won't make your start-up successful. Success comes from a basic idea executed amazingly well.
Identify a broad, high-level goal - an industry, lifestyle or financial outcome
Identify things you like and dislike - be brutally honest
Identify opportunities that open up more doors in the right area
Avoid jobs/projects/opportunities that lead to dead ends
Take multiple steps to reach a goal
Eliminating choices
Chalk up now-I-know-I-don't-like-that category
Start doing
Finding the right people to talk to
Finding out what people actually need
May be lacking in style, but doesn't matter
Remember
The Myth of a great idea is a great way to think yourself into oblivion and failure
At our age
Nothing wrong with not knowing what we want to ultimately end up doing
Stop feeling guilty
But there's something ENTIRELY wrong with not actively trying to find out exactly what we want.
Trying, not waiting.
Experimenting, not "thinking about it"
Give it a shot.
Of course, this does not mean that we have to stop trying to find an idea for our start-up. We need to find an idea and we will continue discussing about it in globthink: the diary of our start-up
"GeoURL.orgis a location-to-URL reverse directory. This will allow you to find URLs by their proximity to a given location. Find your neighbor's blog, perhaps, or the web page of the restaurants near you. GeoURL is listing 1,681,046 sites". On the image you can see the red points representing blogs in the world. So many points!
It seems to me it does not work very well because I am in Shanghai and the first site I get is about a the weather at a UK base in Antarctica!!!
3) Local.com
Local.com is another location based engine with a more refined aspect. However, it does not even support IP geolocation. You have to write the city where you are.
I tried to find restaurants here in Shanghai but the search engine says it does not know where Shanghai is (???).
But they are working hard on this because they have just been granted a US patent for "indexing and retrieving web-related information by geographical location". Local search is a patent-mined field!: Google, Local.com, Verizon, Geomas (this is another competitor but it seems to me taht their business model is more like selling software, not really web2.0) and much more
5) Loki.com
Loki.com is a location based search and navigation toolbar. But you have to download it and I am too lazy for this!
I will try to find more information about this. Probably in pages related to the Where 2.0 Conference in California
The idea about location based Internet is not bad! but these implementations don't seem too me very attractive. I wouldn't be a user of any of these applications.
The idea behind www.hotornot.com is very simple. You see pictures of boys or girls and you have to give them a mark from 0 to 10. This is simple and very time killing when you are bored in the office. Of course, there is no adult content.
Well... Hotornot has been cloned zillions of times:
Just to mention some examples:
"How much do I rock?", which is part of the famousning. Ning is a site which allows you to create your own social network. In other words, ning allows you to create your hotornot without writing any single line of code.
Mackable: created in 2006, this clone really improves the aesthetic and usability of hotornot. However most pictures are more provocative
This is not really a hotornot but in this page you can find links to sites where you can download or buy for much less than 1600 million USD the source code of a flikr clone, youtube clone, netvibes clone...
The is one application that stands out from all the others: hotcaptcha. It is so genuine!!
You know every time you create an account in some site, you find a picture with some blur text you have to enter to prove that you are a human and not a machine. Well the approach of hotcaptcha is funnier. You have 9 pictures of boys/girls and you have to choose the three of them who are good looking.
Does it really make sense to clone hotornot?
Postcript:
I would really like to know if there are some Chinese hotornot. I am sure that Chinese celebrities like Furong Jiejie (芙蓉姐姐) would love it (haha!). If you know some please leave a comment or tell me on the blue instant messaging gadget on this blog.
By the way did you know that hotornot inspired Chad Hurley and Steve Chen to create youtube? didn't you? Then, read this article from the New York Post
I cannot refrain from posting the story of my Hong Kong co-citizen: Bus Uncle.
He got famous from scolding an innocent boy in the bus while somebody was filming the scene. The video was published in you tube and zillions of Chinese watched it.
Bus Uncle became the first phenomenon of this class in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Mainland China and even further. People has also written Wikipedia pages about the incident.
Bus Uncle phrases are already much more part of the culture of Hong Kong than 150 years of British government: "I have pressure. You have pressure. Why do you provoke me?"
Once I was eating in a fast food bar of Hong Kong with my Chinese colleagues and a lady asked me if I was about about to finishing so that she takes my table. I answered her: "I have pressure. You have pressure. Why do you provoke me?" and everybody laughed a lot.
Apart from the anecdote, what I want to show you is that China has much more potential for web 2.0 than we had ever expected.
Don't miss this wonderful video in Cantonese with Chinese and English subtitles.
Foreign companies or foreign entrepreneurs in China (called sinopreneur) find it very difficult to compete in the Chinese market due to:
Language barriers,
Difference in culture
Lack of understanding of local netizens' tastes
Government policies and regulations
The fact that foreign web 2.0 initiative are all concept-copied and adapted by local players in no time
The fact that Chinese cost are low but expected revenue is also low (most Chinese people don't have a lot of money in the wallet)
To illustrated this issue, I show you a viral video by Baidu making fun of a foreigner, representing Google. (Video in Mandarin without subtitles.Explanation of the video below)
Explanation of the video:
The story is based on a Hong Kong film (The flirting scholar) inspired on the life a famous poet an painter from the Ming Dynasty called Tang Yin.
The foreigner (Google) knows nothing more about China but keeps claiming he knows : "I know (wo zhidao)".
However Tan Yin plays some tricks by separating the words {I (wo), know (zhidao), you (ni)} in various ways to mean completely different things: "I know, you don't know. I know you don't know that I know you..." and these kind of stuff.
In front of this, the foreigner can only utter "I know" but in fact understands nothing about China and at the end he loses his beautiful concubine and is humiliated by everybody.
By the way, if you want to know about how some sinopreneurs are doing, you will find some interesting podcasts on China Businesscast by Robert Osazuwa Ness
No. It's a nice start, but the operators need to take several other steps as well.
Recently flat-rate pricing for wireless data service has become a big issue in Europe and some other parts of the world. Data service to mobile phones there has often been metered, with users paying by the megabyte. This led to some frightening stories on the Internet of people accidentally ending up with 800-Euro monthly phone bills for browsing too much. Needless to say, this has made many people very cautious about using mobile data.
Recently T-Mobile in Europe offered a flat-rate data service, in which the user pays a single fixed monthly fee for virtually all the data access they want (the limit is about a gigabyte a month, which is a lot for a mobile phone). Then on November 16, Hutchison Whampoa, the owner of the "Three" wireless network in Europe and Asia, announced its own flat-rate plan (more details below).
The Mobile One network in Singapore just cut its unlimited 3G data price by about 2/3, to around $13 a month, in order to compete with fixed broadband services. And on December 1, the CEO of Vodafone went even further, predicting that within a few years we'll have flat-rate billing for all mobile services, including both voice and data.[...]
Has Hutchison revolutionized the mobile Internet?
I don't think so. Unfortunately, just offering flat-rate pricing is not enough to make mobile data take off. This is one area in which the US mobile phone market has been a leader, believe it or not. The top four mobile operators in the US have offered flat-rate data for years, ranging in price from $15 to $40 a month. Some of them even let you use your mobile phone as a modem, something that Hutchison bans. [..] The result? Some happy Blackberry and Treo users, but nothing like a mass migration toward mobile data.
Five steps to make mobile data a success
In addition to offering flat-rate data, here are the other steps a mobile operator must take in order to make that mobile data ecosystem work:
1. Provide a consistent architecture that works offline. This is probably the most critical need. Web applications depend on having a constant connection between the user's computer and the Internet. That's not practical for the mobile Web. Even in countries with heavy 2G coverage, there are lots of gaps in the 3G network, and will be for many years. Mobile Web apps need to work like RIM's e-mail client, which stores both the program itself and the user's data locally and then sends the data to the network when a connection is available. [...]
2. Kill security certificates. But today the operators treat websites and applications completely differently. The new flat-rate data plans let you browse just about any website you want. But operators are starting to insist that applications obtain a security certificate before they can be installed. The certification process is slow, inconvenient, and unreasonably expensive for small software companies and those that create a lot of applications. Since small software companies are the most innovative, this has an enormous chilling effect on mobile innovation. [...]
3. Unlock the user's data. This is the other security-related problem area. Many operators make it very difficult for an application to access the user's data stored on the device, such as the address book, the dialer, and the user's current location. But many of the most interesting new mobile applications need to be able to work with this information. Users should be informed when they give an application access to this information, but it should be very easy for them to say yes. [...]
4. Make it easy to discover new content and services. The mobile data ecosystem will evolve faster if it's easy for users to find new services and applications. Today the content discovery tools and software stores on mobile devices, if they are installed at all, are often buried under several layers of icons, or are very hard to use. We need the mobile equivalent of an Amazon.com -- an online content store that's easy to find, browse and search, and that makes suggestions to you based on what you've used in the past. [...]
5. Get ready to go to a flat rate for everything. Vodafone's comment shows that they understand this: the logical outcome of putting the open web on a mobile device is that voice and data merge under a single flat fee. If a Skype call is free, then eventually all calls need to be free, or the users will just switch everything to Skype. Same thing for SMS messages once they're directly in conflict with instant messaging. The operators' old financial model won't evaporate overnight, but it's now officially dying. [...]
Yesterday, I talked to a friend of mine. He is Spanish, studied for many years in Germany and is currently working in Italy.
My friend knows all mobile Internet access fees in these 3 countries:
The following points is what I recall from the conversation:
Best offers are in Italy rather than in Spain or Germany.
In Italy mobile flat-rates are usually limited to several Gb (3 or so) and cost between 20 to 30 Euros a month. The cheapest one is Wind for 20 Euros.
Many flat-rate schemes in Italy used to allow Internet access abroad with no roaming fees (but limited to 200 Mb a month). Now this possibility is no longer allowed.
In Spain, there is an offer from Telefonica (mobile Internet access limited to 10 Mb) for 29 Euros.
The other day I was on a taxi in Seoul (Korea) with my boss.
In a previuos post, there other day we discussed about the possibility that a 
Sponsorships are common in the anglosaxon world. 
" If you are transitioning from a "safe" corporate job to entrepreneur, chances are you are doing a lot of new things. It is amazing how much there is to learn when you start a business for the first time; from forming new work habits to web design to bookkeeping to product development to sales and marketing.
If you create a Web 2.0 start-up related to charities, which your legal form should be your company?
When I was working in Paris I got to know a friend of mine (Frederic Crochet) who proposed me this idea. At the beginning of 2006 my friend had a wonderful idea: "everybody is trying to sort images, videos, messages on maps. But nobody does it on a time line".
Why don't people donate money for good causes?
In the previous post I discussed about on of the big issues in Internet: having too many passwords to remember. Today I would like to talk about another big issue: privacy and anonymity.
Today's Internet still has some problems. One of them is that there are too many passwords to remember.
This approach is much more ambitious. Basically the idea consists in creating a third party "login & password" provider and convince web companies to take you as a reference for user authentication and accept your login names in their web sites. This means one single login & password for every site that supports it. 
I used to have a Chinese teacher in Beijing who is currently learning Spanish at the 
As you know, this blog is about discussing business ideas to create our start-up.
1 ) GeoURL 
2) A2B 
But they are working hard on this because they have just 
Coming to our discussion about 
The is one application that stands out from all the others: 
Foreign companies or foreign entrepreneurs in China (called sinopreneur) find it very difficult to compete in the Chinese market due to:
No. It's a nice start, but the operators need to take several other steps as well.
1. Provide a consistent architecture that works offline. This is probably the most critical need. Web applications depend on having a constant connection between the user's computer and the Internet. That's not practical for the mobile Web. Even in countries with heavy 2G coverage, there are lots of gaps in the 3G network, and will be for many years. Mobile Web apps need to work like RIM's e-mail client, which stores both the program itself and the user's data locally and then sends the data to the network when a connection is available. [...]
Yesterday, I talked to a friend of mine. He is Spanish, studied for many years in Germany and is currently working in Italy.
