Jorge Alegre Blog

Rafa, eres un campeón

Posted by Jorge Alegre in Diary on June 8th, 2010

El año pasado vimos como Rafa se desinflaba, en parte por las lesiones, pero también en parte por no poder canalizar esa concentración que él tanto cuida. Yo, como muchos de las personas que le seguimos estabamos tristes en ver como se caía de la cima, y se recluía para poder recuperarse.

Y es que rafa es más que un tenista, es un conjunto de cosas, que nos hacen a muchos vibrar con él. Me acuerdo cuando se quejaba de que la gente veía normal que ganara todos los partidos, porque decía que para él era un esfuerzo tremendo cada partido. Y es que era así, nos habíamos acostumbrado a que ganara siempre, verle el #1. Me acuerdo seguir cada pequeña noticia que se daba de como iba en su recuperación. Tampoco me perdí el reportaje desde su casa en aquella entrevista en TVE1 sobre como se estaba entrenando.

Y poco a poco los últimos meses hemos visto como ha ido ganando terreno, mejorando, ganando unos partidos y perdiendo otros. En mi mente estaba la pregunta: “¿Ganará este año Rolland Garros?” Y resulta que al final lo ha ganado todo en tierra. Rafa, mis más sentida felicitación, porque has conseguido recuperarte, remontar de una situación muy dificil.

Muchas gracias por hacernos disfrutar y vibrar tanto contigo. Y gracias por poder escuchar el himno español de nuevo, es algo agradable con los tiempos que corren. Ahora que te veo contento, estoy yo también contento.

¡Vamos, Rafa!

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rafa nadal, rolland garros, tennis

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Startup School Classes: Project Management, Presentations and Present DEMO

Posted by Jorge Alegre in Startups on June 6th, 2010

This week I enrolled in three interesting classes at Startup School. First one, with Zulfigar Deo about MBA for startups and project management with a view of different project management techniques like Agile, etc… Second one by Supercool School CEO Steli about how to demo your product. And last one about mistakes made in presentations by Nathan Gold. They all promise to be interesting and fun, learning new things, remembering about these topics and most important interacting with presenters and audience.

Update June 19: Steli is CEO of Supercool School and not Startup School

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demo, mba, presentations

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Startup Event With Bill Liao: Listen To Users

Posted by Jorge Alegre in Startups, Technology on June 1st, 2010

Today I had the pleasure of meeting this man, he is huge in knowledge and human values. He told us his beginnings in business as human needs for getting money to solve humanitarian problems, as well as advice on lessons he learnt over 20 years of business. Apart from metting a very interesting person with great stories about entrepeneurship, I would focus on these points:

Listen to what your users “use”, don’t ask them what they want

This is a nice thinking, specially after metting about A/B testing. I agree with this since generally people will not tell you what they want. Even more, they don’t even know what they want many times. But when they use some service over and over again, then you listened to them, even if they never told you to accomplish this or that.

So feature requests and requirements from partners and users should be put in a can and consider them but no more than your own intuition and the trends in your users: what they use, how they use it, etc…

Skills change over time

He undervalued people resumes, since changes happen fast and what someone did great 2 years ago may not be good to what he needs to do 2 years from now in a new venture or start-up. Also, reward people when they deliver not for having a great resume or cv.

His philosophy of funding businesses and start-up companies can be found on the book he wrote, will have it in my wish list, must be great reading.

Also agree on the bootstrapping as long as you can, and start getting income as soon as you can, forget about investors in eraly stages, stating that we know many sucess stories but not the fail stories.

Ah, by the way, this guy helped to make Xing a great success, investing and delivering a product along with the founder in 90 days. He likes to develop software globally with people in India, Pakistan, Canada, US, and use Ruby On Rails. I think this is ok, but would not focus on language, just development philosophy, does not matter in my opinion which language you develop on, but have a great software development team.

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bill liao, listen

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Impressed with Zoho, Business Applications On Demand

Posted by Jorge Alegre in Technology on May 15th, 2010

I started to use GoogleApps in the last work project, where everybody is using gmail for corporate mailing as well as google apps, etc… So I dig deeper into google apps to host by domain there and dump the Exchange mail hosting solution I have now. It ended up that instead of paying 10€ a month for exchange+blakberry bed would pay like 4€ a month with GoogleApps. But since this crisis made me very cautious about spending money, I said to myself to search deeper in the net.

Zoho Mail

I reached Zoho, where I could host my own domain mailing at 0€, having IMAP and POP, therefore being able to sync with my iPod, Blackberry, from any browser, etc… Sounded like a great deal. I have 1GB for first 3 users, which is a great proposition for start-ups. Their spam filter is way cool. Believe me I have tons of spam every hour, the zoho spam folder as I am writing has 8,000 messages and that in a few days only. It catches spam pretty well, at least the kind of spam I get. And finally I can send my personal email from Yahoo to the same account with label personal so have all email organized in same place. I get 25GB paying small fee like 3€ when my mail grows which will not happend soon, so I am OK.

Zoho Apps

Now this is the one that rocks. I get Calendar, Tasks, Notes, Forums, Link Management, Contacts, Notebook (MS OnNote style), Wiki, Project Management, Meeting Software, CRM (Like SalesForce), Share App, Invoice App, SpreadSheet (GoogleApps compatible), Planner, Writer, Chat, Marketplace, People (Human Resource Soft), Recruiting Software, Slide Soft, Reporting Software, Remote Desktop, Document Online Disk (1GB) and Creator (Web site creator) totally free. This is really awesome.

Their application are not crappy apps, they are nice applications, usefull for everyday use. And the number increases like monitoring soft, polls, etc… So I say: “This company delivers”. This is the reason why I moved to Zoho and plan to be there. When need more proyect management will pay very low on-demand fees, the same for the other services. So seems to be much better for me that GoogleApps. And as I said, they have compatibility with GoogleApps and their calendar application so no problem with that.

I set up a public calendar that will publish into this blog with the online events I go and public stuff I go, etc…

Also, besides all this I can choose mail account name and not be jalegre8726@gmail.com, which is not very compeling to me.

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zoho

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