Abbreviations
A video about abbreviations in the Internet era… specially useful for SMS 
Found thru Dvorak Uncensored.
Summer ads
This are the best ads of the summer… at least in Spain jeje.
Renault Megane
Atún Claro Calvo
Islam in Europe
A video about islam in europe…
I have nothing against Islam, but what I don’t agree with is to have different laws depending on your religious beliefs. This I know also happens in India (from my indian ex-class-mates) in which Muslim Indians have different laws than Hindi Indians. How can someone in one country have several wives but another one can’t? If all are citizens of the same country, they should all have the same rights and obligations… or at least I think so. What do you think?
Holidays and other news…
With the summer, Spain stops… literally! and Madrid suffers an amazing transformation from a lively city into a deserted one, taken by empty streets, closed shops and sunny evenings. Thankfully, I also had a break from work and got some proper vacations
First of all, an important news is the new acquisition I made hehe. I bought myself my first reflex camera, a Nikon D40. It is an entry level camera but for my inexpertise it is more than enough, and it came in very good time to take pictures during the holidays, which you can check at my Flickr account.
So, having a break from Nokia, I had a week and a half of holidays starting in San Sebastián. I went with Alex and we stayed in San Sebastian as a base, travelling to nearby places from there. Overall I liked it a lot. I had only heard positive comments about the Vasque Country and they are all true. Great food, nice beaches, nice girls and overall a very nice city.
We visited cities along the coast nearby, both on the Spanish side as well as on the French side, and although all the beaches were more than full of tourists, I liked a lot more than one. On the French part we went to St. Jean de Luz, Biarritz and Bayonne, and on the Spanish side to Hondarribia (specially nice), Gentaria and Zumaia. On the way back, we stopped at Guernica and Bilbao. Guernica was a big disappointment, but Bilbao is very nice.
But we didn’t go back to Madrid… instead, we went to a rural house for the weekend with some friends of Virginia. The house was in the middle of nowhere, and we had a good time… definitely very relaxing, with great food and lots of fun. We spent the weekend with Virginia, Isabel, Elena (from Barcelona) and Javier.
We returned to Madrid Sunday afternoon, and after a few hours, I left to the airport with Divya to start the next trip to Barcelona. Although a bit tired from not sleeping at all, we had a great time, doing the typical tour around the city. Although I had been to Barcelona before, I enjoyed a lot the trip… lots of fun teasing Divya and enjoying the beach Barceloneta. I got a good tan from the whole week walking in the sun, and a big sun burn from lying in the beach 
And finally, the holidays are over and now back to Madrid and to work. Although holidays are never long enough, I really needed a break after the master, and this was a very welcomed one. Now back to empty Madrid in an empty flat! Looking forward for work, parties and job hunting!
Carlsberg & Menthos
This is viral marketing…
Probably the best ad in town
Nokia, Björk and other farewells…
Well, firstly my apologies for late updates but the last week was a bit chaotic…
To start, my first impressions working at Nokia… Well I started working on Monday so over a week now, and overall it has been very good. As expected, in the beginning it has been a lot of reading and getting up to date, and doing administrative stuff like getting a place, a computer, an email account, etc.
The first thing that shocked me was the office atmosphere… it is extremely relaxed, with a couple of couches and a coffee-kitchen area, bright colors, low cubicles and open spaces. It is the exact opposite of my previous job at QTC, which had blue-grayish colors and high cubicles. However, people seem to work more here and waste less time! I guess it is mainly because of the age difference, which obviously is higher here at Nokia. Still it is very friendly and supportive.
The second thing that shocked me were the noises, particularly phone bells. Instead of having the typical office where everybody has a desk phone and you hear the typical phone ring from once in a while, at Nokia (as expected) everybody has only a mobile phone. Therefore, you hear all the time the same SMS sound and the latest song as a ring tone At the beginning I thought it was a bit annoying, but now I am getting used to it and I even think it is better since you can easily recognize who’s phone is ringing.
So overall, it looks pretty well… but hopefully with time I will get more integrated and the job will become more interesting.
Well, next… on Tuesday we had the master farewell party at the well-known Cielo de Pachá with the usual free open bar The party was done together with the MFM, MMM and spanish MBA programs, although still few people attended. It was a lot of fun, although obviously my plans to leave early (I had to work on Wednesday!) didn’t work out quite as planned and I ended up getting home after 3am. Obviously I slept-over and woke up at 8:30am! So yeah, I was a bit late to my third day of work :S
To continue with an active week, on Wednesday I went to the Björk concert here close to my home at Plaza de Toros de Las Ventas. It was full of ‘alternative’ people and started very late, but when it finally did it was totally worth it. It was a great concert… what at the beginning seemed to be a simple concert ended up being a high-tech rave full of lasers! High-tech electronic multi-touch screens were used to produce sounds. It started with the song “Earth Intruders” from the latest album which also has a great video that is posted below. The second video is from the Coachella festival (the best version I could find) and it was simply awesome!
Finally Friday and Saturday where party time, so Sunday I was tired and sick. I am still sick but hopefully I’ll get better soon.So I guess that is enough for now… thanks for the ones who are brave enough to read it all
cheers!
Master Leco
Well, it has been a while now since I haven’t written any updates in the blog… sorry about that. But not to worry, the time has come for an update!
The reason for a lack of updates has been the final days of the master, which imply exams, final projects and final presentations. Overall, this period had a lot of smaller courses which implied that at the end we had a lot of final projects to do 
As always, some courses were very good, others were ok and a couple that I would’ve preferred to skip, but overall a very enriching end to the master.
We ended classes last week with a full day of leadership, with the long awaited feedback session. It was a very interesting and useful session, at least for some of us, and definitely an unforgettable one. After the last class, we obviously had to celebrate, so we went for some drinks to Bò Finn. We drank, we chatted, we played pool, we poured drinks on each others heads, and we got kicked out of the bar. But thanks to Alvaro’s negotiating skills we managed to stay for a bit longer Now that I think about it, it had been a very long time since I was kicked out of a bar!
This week we had the final case presentation, which was based on a very recent Harvard case of Brightcove, a video publishing and distribution company. We had to deliver the written document (which I’m sure nobody read ) on Monday and we had the presentation yesterday Wednesday at closed doors with three judges. Although with some questions, the presentation appeared to be more a sort of a procedure that had to be followed. So anyways, I did the presentation with Alex and we were the last ones to present. And then… party! Well, actually we went for food and drinks, and then for a typical Spanish siesta since we were all so tired. At night, fiesta again, starting with a nice exotic dinner thanks to Yan (who by the way was in the shower when I arrived… one hour late!). After the great dinner, we went to the bar of the week, at Fortuny. Not my favorite place, but we had a good time.
And now, well enough talking about parties… regarding my job search, I went this week to Everis to present the application exams. Overall I think I did good but keep your fingers crossed so they will call me However, I am still looking for a job in other places. And yes, as some of you already know, I got an internship at Nokia! 
On Tuesday I got a call from them to start the internship as soon as possible… meaning today! Fortunately, I managed to change it for next Monday to at least have some rest. So yeah, next week when I start I will give you an update on how it goes… but I am already excited!
And well, to stop boring you, I have pasted below a couple of videos that were done by classmates for the final project of Digital Media Management. They are supposed to be to advertise the master… I don’t know how successful they are but at least you get to see with whom I’ve spent almost a year now!
Blog’s Worth
I have found this “widget” by Technorati, the most important analyzer and search tool for blogs. It uses the popularity of your blog to estimate its worth:
My blog is worth $2,258.16.
How much is your blog worth?
So where do I cash my money?
Photosynth
I guess it has already been commented somewhere, at least I saw it at laJunglaDigital (although I had seen it before ), but still I think it is an amazing technology.
This time, it comes from Microsoft (or a company it bought recently ) and it is a technology to create 3D environments from a series of digital photographs called Photosynth. For this, it takes regular pictures from any source (cell phones to SLR cameras) and detects the relations between them. With this, it creates the environment which you can navigate being enriched by pictures. So that you can understand it a bit better, below is a video with a demo:
You can do a live demo of the technology at the Photosynth website. It is really amazing, and just imagine the possibilities this opens to!
Pocoyo 2
Get ready for the second season of Pocoyo!
San Francisco in ruins
This picture was floating around the web a few weeks ago, and I thought it was absolutely amazing but forgot to post it… so finally here it is hehe Taken from a blimp, it shows a panoramic view of San Francisco’s Bay area in 1906 after the earthquake. It is amazing how all the city was planned. Obviously, the golden gate bridge is not there yet
cheers!
WWDC’07
Well, as many of you may already know, last Monday was Apple‘s yearly Worldwide Developers Conference. As it has been widely discussed, it generally didn’t show new “top-secret”, eye-dropping new features of the future release of Mac’s OSX. However, there are three points that I believe have not been widely discussed that I feel are of great importance.
The first, is the announcement by EA Games (which we visited during the residential period at Silicon Valley ) and id Software of future game releases for the Mac platform. This is definitely good news, considering that gaming is one of the weakest points of the Mac. But what is very important are the underlying reasons, and its that the Mac is gaining popularity, period. It is starting to become an attractive market for programmers, in which they will find a big enough market that makes Mac programming profitable. So maybe this means that a critical mass of mac users has been reached, with which more and more programmers will begin to shift towards the Mac. This will in turn make Macs more attractive, with a wider offer of applications. How will this change the monopoly of Windows in the future? I guess we will have to wait and see.
Another announcement that took place was the release of the Safari browser for Windows. Although at first sight it looks as a move to increase the market share of Apple’s browser, I believe there are more underlying reasons. First of all, Safari’s future increase in popularity is questionable… starting because most of the Mac users (including me) use Firefox primarily. I think Safari is a great browser but is missing an important feature, which are plugins. Without plugins, it is impossible to expand the browser’s features as you can now do with Firefox. Therefore, as much as I like Safari for some things, I will keep using Firefox. Therefore, this move is very questionable as a try to hook new Windows users and convert them into switchers. Specially now that just after a few hours of release several security holes have been found in Safari.
But in fact, Safari was released for Windows for another purpose: the creation and testing of applications for the iPhone. Which brings us to the other big important announcement: the iPhone will only support Web 2.0 applications, which in other words is no applications. Or is it? I think this marks clearly the shift from typical system based applications to web based applications. And there are several advantages. First, as Apple’s main concern, it is a lot easier to maintain a level of security and system stability. And second, there are no needs for installation, maintenance, updating, etc. Everything is maintained remotely and updated instantly for every user. This I believe is the future, if not for all uses, but at least for a lot. This however, also limits in a way the possibilities for such applications. An important example we have already studied at the MMTDB is Salesforce, which manages to remove the cost of system maintenance from its users and gains by economies of scale.
This is another move towards the previous model of shared computing power through “dumb” terminals. Let’s see how fast and how far we will go in this direction…
Instituto de Empresa @ SecondLife
So last Friday evening (I know, tell me about it!) we had the first meeting on the new campus of Instituto de Empresa. That’s right, well, at least the new virtual campus As an initiative of our academic director, Instituto de Empresa in trying out the new possibilities brought by virtual worlds such as SecondLife. For that, we (the MMTDB class) had an online conference with Jaime from Telefonica. Overall I have to admit it was an interesting experience… from seeing the avatars and behavior of my classmates, to having the idea of a virtual classroom. I believe this promises a bunch of new opportunities for the future, that combined with products such as HP‘s Halo or Cisco‘s Telepresence, could become incredible tools for a more enriching communication experience.
However, I must say that we did had quite a few problems during the conference. To start, only god knows why we had a server breakdown at Instituto de Empresa, making Internet unreachable. After this was solved, we all managed to login and locate the school, but having everybody fake names (SecondLife doesn’t allow any last name) it is very hard to keep track and know who is who… you don’t have any physical relation to the real person and no similar name. Furthermore, having 15 people typing and reading at the same time becomes extremely confusing, specially when several conversations happen at the same place. Finally, the speakers were able to use a microphone and broadcast their speech, which is infinitely better than typing. However, only a few people were able to hear which I believe was due to a not fast enough connection.
So overall the experience was somewhat troublesome but for a first try I believe it went pretty good. With practice, it could definitely go better. However, I do believe that it is still a bit immature and with some time both the platform will become better and the bandwidth will grow. But this development gives me a concern, and it is that if such platform evolves and becomes in a future the world ‘standard’, it is still a proprietary platform that belongs to a private company. Therefore there are a lot of legal issues regarding property and level of service that are not very clear now. I would think a distributed open standard could be a better solution, although definitely not at all easy to do. What do you think?
Silicon Valley
Well, as I have already posted, as part of the masters program we had recently a residential period at Silicon Valley. I have already posted about the trip in general but I wanted to write more about the visits. However, I haven’t had much free time recently, but luckily our academic director Ricardo Pérez has written very good reviews on the school’s Digital Convergence blog. So yes, they are a bit long, but if you are interested they are definitely worth reading.
Day 2 – Accenture & Sun Microsystems
cheers!
San Francisco & Silicon Valley!
As some of you already know, as part of the master we had a very nice trip to Silicon Valley! It truly was a great experience, and by the pictures, this post will be a bit long… but, I hadn’t written in a long time
After a long night and some surprises at the Madrid airport when it turned out that Alex & Jesus had invalid passports, we arrived to San Francisco! The picture is from inside the airport, just after passing customs… and yes, policeman started to shout at us and kick us out! :S
Although all the visits were in Silicon Valley, we stayed at a hotel in San Francisco, just next to China Town… and yes, Yan felt right at home! The hotel was good and next to the city center, and obviously the visit to the Apple store was a must!
On Sunday, we had the ‘official’ tour… we went more or less around all the city. The first stop was the de Young Fine Arts museum, which I liked, but I guess it doesn’t look that good after being compared with the museums of Europe. Still, architecturally is really nice. After lunch, we went to the Golden Gate bridge, to Pier 39, and later the official welcome dinner! It was good and definitely a fun day.
Who is the academic director and who is the student?
So on Monday the real business began The first visit was Cisco. We stayed there the whole day and was generally very good. We had several conferences, some demos of really nice future products and a tour. They showed us their mobile offices, where nobody has an assigned seat, but is a ‘serve as you come’ office. In general very good for people that travel so much. And to finish the day, we went shopping! Coming to the US, this is a must so we went to an outlet.
The second day, after some conferences at the hotel by Accenture (which were really good), we went to Sun Microsystems. Although the conference was not as good as we hoped, the demos of the technologies they are developing were outstanding. From the Sun mobile desktop technology to Java real-time… definitely awesome! An example of a company that does great value creation but lacks to capture it.
On Wednesday, we went to Google… possibly the most expected visit And yes, it is a one-of-a-kind company. Actually, it doesn’t look like a company, but more like a college. To Start, they have colorful lava lamps on every building reception… plus obviously colorful sofas. And everything looks friendly, full of employee’s art in every wall, free food everywhere, resting areas, cafeterias, pool tables, games, massage chairs, gym, laundry, swimming pools, beach volleyball, etc. The environment is so relaxed that is even weird… people can take their dogs to work or take a nap if they feel tired. Definitely a good place to work, but obviously all those commodities are focused in enabling you to stay at the ‘office’ 24×7.
After Google, we went to Hewlett-Packard. Very nice installations, but the complete opposite from Google. While in Google all the food is for free, at HP they have coin machines for aspirin! But generally the conference was very good and they also gave us a demo of their newest products… with HP Halo the most impressive (although I liked more the Cisco ).
The visits on Thursday were Electronic Arts and IDEO. EA was good, we had a tour around the buildings and we visited the team in charge of The Sims 3. We saw everything, even the sound recording studio… which was really nice. It is impressive how they really live the game, with all the offices decorated with the theme. Ahhh and yes of course, they have an Xbox, PS3 and Wii in every building reception
Ahh yes, after everybody complained with Rajesh for asking so many questions when time is so limited, he of course got quite angry. And he got even angrier when I took this picture, but it was worth it Finally, to finish the week we had an innovation workshop at IDEO. It was generally quite good and lots of fun, although I didn’t like some details…
Obviously we also had some fun during the night Although after being in Madrid… it definitely feels like something is missing. On Wednesday we went to Hooters, to eat some ‘typical’ chicken wings served by not-so-hot waitresses. On Thursday we also went out, but no with no excuses Ricardo (the academic director) and Eunice (the executive academic director) joined us. Ahhh and yes, Ricardo had to show an ID to get in… he is still a child, on the inside at least A fun night with a crazy back-riding accident of Rajesh and heart-hopping by Anirudh.
And well, everything has an end sadly… This was a long post, but perhaps if I can I will upload later other pictures or comment on some things I found interesting. We’ll see, depends on my workload 
which lately has been crazy.
See ya!
Belgique!
Well this past week we had a couple of holidays and IE was kind enough to give us a full “puente” of five days!! And thankfully I had the chance to visit a new country: Belgium! Well, actually they were two, Belgium and the Netherlands. I stayed in Wavre with Marc, who was kind enough to stand me for a few days, and traveled around. The first day, we went to Brussels!
Marc with his very nice car at Waterloo
The next visit was Amsterdam! We were very lucky and we went on “Queens’ day!” which meant that the whole city was partying! It was awesome, I really liked it but I guess I will have to go back someday to get to know the real every-day Amsterdam.
And the last stop was Brugges! I loved Brugges, really nice and definitely worth visiting. Nice sights, romantic canals, beautiful architecture and great atmosphere! (although too many tourists)
And as some of you already know… after some digestive problems and a lack of taxis, I almost missed my flight! I am really thankful for those people that do the small details that mean so much.
For those of you brave enough, you can find all the pictures I took during the trip in the gallery… I hope you enjoy!
Apple doing great!
Today Apple Inc. has announced its financial results for the second quarter of the year, and the numbers are simply impressive. Apple has obtained revenues for $5.26 billion and net quarterly profit of $770 million. This is a very impressive 88% increase in profits from the same period in last year, but I think most importantly, Apple shipped 36% more Macintosh computers (1’517,000). This growth is more than three times the industry growth, and this is not the first time Apple has managed to keep a growing when the rest of the companies in the industry are struggling to maintain their sales.
I know it is also important to consider that probably sales last year during this period were not the strongest due to people waiting for the new Intel-macs, but still the company has managed once more to go through a complicated transition rather smoothly, and slowly but steadily Mac is beginning to gain market share. Not as surprisingly, the sales of iPods increased 24% with 10.5 million iPods sold. However, this was despite the criticism about lack of updates and competition catching up.
Now with the iPhone coming soon (to the US at least) and a new operating system, there seems to be a bright future for Apple. Still, it sure is risky, and the success of the iPhone is not very clear yet as is the sustainability of the iPods’ popularity.
Can Apple maintain its success? Will the iPhone be the next killer device? What do you think?
abkontakt.se
This is one of those problems that you don’t believe until you see them, or at least that happened to me.