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!

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?

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!