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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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.

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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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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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Nice ad by WMF. What a journey!!!

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Esta es una de las imágenes que más me gusta del Barça, su estadio y sus himnos al inicio del partido. Hay que reconocer que es algo increíble el ambiente que genera este estadio de fútbol. Hoy tenía algo muy dificil que hacer, una remontada casi imposible con Mou poniendo las cosas dificiles, y no pudo ser.

Como madridista no me crea una gran depresión que esto haya ocurrido. Y si dijera lo contrario no sería fan de mi club o un mentiroso. Así que me gusta que no haya llegado a la final, me gusta no tener al Barça jugar la final de la champions, aunque algunos piensen que sería mejor que un equipo “español” juegue la final. Mejor no meterse en tierras movedizas con eso de “español”, así que dejémoslo así.

Pero es de reconocer que este Barça de la forma que ha jugado este año se merecía haber llegado a la final e incluso ganarla, sería justo ganar este año la champions. Más que nada porque estamos en los años de la época gloriosa de un equipo muy interesante. Pero no ha podido ser, esto se perdió en el partido de ida en mi opinión.

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Content from a search engine is very important to have a quality search service for users. A few months ago, I started to think that unless I had the chance to have funding, I would not be able to compete with the big guys due to lack of infrastructure, etc… The funding failed but seems it is not that critical at all.

Current Data

My startup is a new search engine. I have now like 6 million web pages in spanish. Content is very low with respect to Google and Bing, to name a few. But on testing I did, I have average 50% of the content Google has on first page for popular queries. I assume this is not that bad considering that so far I have no modules to get only authoring or popular content.

Fetching Popular Content Module

I am testing a module that creates a database of all the links outbound from those 6 million web pages (which are reasonable relevant). The db is building now, in a few days will have the results. I assume I would be getting like 10 million links. After that point, B+ will only index content from these web pages, leading to a higher percentage content. Anything above 70% will be good, and figures like 90% would be great. This improve will lead to better search results for users.

Why First-Page Google Is Important?

I am not focusing on giving results on first-page from google, but this factor is important to tell how much relevant content B+ has in spanish. The personalization technology and preferences feeded into B+ will allow nice search quality for communities and groups of people. So first page analysis gives me a pretty good estimate that I have most quality content and lack of funding is not ruining the evolution of this search project.

Soon will publish on the blog results

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Tengo un amigo que se llama despertador. Nuestra relación es de amor-odio. Me gusta que me recuerde que es la hora de levantarme para ir al trabajo. Pero tiene la costumbre de molestarme todas las mañanas. Por eso cuando suena le doy a “Sonar en 10 minutos”. Probablemente esteis pensando que soy un holgazan, que no me despierto. Pero la realidad es que no me gusta que me manden, y menos un despertador.

Así que le doy al botón como muestra de fuerza e independencia, como diciendo “no me voy a levantar cuando a ti, despertador, te plazca”. Esos 10 minutos son un pequeño rincón de libertad, 10 minutos de autonomía, de felicidad. Pero como todo lo bueno en la vida dura poco, a los 10 minutos vuelvo a la realidad, y en mi interior se oye esa voz: “Levantateeee!!!!!”, a la que no puedo obviar y esta vez si, me digo: “Arriba, este va a ser un gran día”.

Como apunte, mi despertador no es exactamente este, que es muy bonito y tradicional. Se trata de mi blackberry que la uso para este motivo, le pongo el despertador y la apago todas las noches. Así que de esa forma no suena por la noche el telefono, y me despierta por las mañanas.

Darme vuestra opinión sobre estos cacharitos llamados “despertadores”.

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Hoy estaba viendo la tele. Primero salía ZP hablando de los 2.500 millones de apoyo a Grecia por parte de España. Despues de pensarlo unos segundos, estaba de acuerdo, si es lo que nos toca por poblacion y producción, creo que debemos hacer un esfuerzo para ser solidarios con ellos, porque todos vamos en el mismo vagón.

Así que más que solidaridad es no tirarse piedras a tu propio tejado. En eso que pensaba lo que algunas personas de la calle podrían pensar: ¿Y nos gastamos esa cantidad de pasta con lo mal que esta todo? Pues en mi opinión sería una expresión como dicen en EE.UU uneducated, osea, de personas con respuesta fácil y sin análisis ni inteligencia.

Y entonces viene nuestro maravilloso Rajoy, si, ese gallego que a menudo nos lleva a todos medio locos, porque entre la incapacidad de los de rojo y la falta de liderazgo de los de azúl en España estamos mareados como si estuvieramos dentro de una piñata, de esas que los niños dan con palos. Y eso es lo que nos van a dar si vamos con estos razonamientos, “palos”.

Ademas, si Rajoy hubiera estado en la misma situación hubiera hecho lo mismo o más, por lo que me parece tremendamente hipócrita mantener una posición así. Aunque bueno, en una semana donde este hombre nos dice: “De eso ya opiné ayer” cuando le preguntan sobre las declaraciones de Mariano Oreja sobre las declaraciones de ETA, pues eso, falta de liderazgo. Por cierto, uno de mis informadores de política que escucho con atencion (de esas personas que tienen información extra) hablaba hace unos dias de esto mismo. A él le dije lo mismo que opino ahora, que es precipitado hablar de ETA en esos términos.

Por cierto, acabo de votar en elmundo.es de que estoy de acuerdo con que España preste dinero a Grecia, igual que el 17%, lo cual demuestra que la mayoría no opina lo mismo, quiza por eso Rajoy dice lo que dice, para tener lo que los políticos quieren, votos. Me gustaría que fuese más hombre de estado.

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It was nice to watch this video. Daniel is a great communicator and as allways TED content has great quality. This event was at Oxford, would be great to attend to these events life.

Panda CEO some months ago was talking that stock options and so forth creates merchandisers instead of a good team of talented individuals. I had  my doubts at that time. Watching the video I agree on Dan terms. While working 100% on my start-up the three motivators mentioned in the video got me moving. These three are:

1. Autonomy: Desire to direct our lives.
2. Mastery: Desire to get better and better in something that matters.
3. Purpose: Participate in something larger than ourselves.

I think these three motivators can work for most people. I think that this will depend from person to person the level of motivation for each point. For overall will work for most people. People that value security and belonging would go with #3, active people will love #1, etc…

Working as consultant in software development for clients I found that people I talked about this they were not that much interested in better salary but rather that their opinion counts, they are listened and influence, etc…which would go to #3 becaouse if you are working on a project and have no level of influence then “you can no purpose”, right? becaouse you are not really participating.

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