III Día do Emprendedor

Last week I was invited to participate as a speaker in the Entrepreneur Day at Galicia (día do emprendedor in Galician) to explain the different ways we have used to finance the foundation and growth at Warp and the development of eBox.

The Entrepreneur Day consists of a series of events celebrated in each region in Spain to encourage entrepreneurship among youth. In these events the main structure, materials and funding are provided by the Ministry of Industry but the way it is organized depends on each region. I think the formula is pretty good because the economical, demographical and social context can be very different from one region to another. Moreover, this way new ideas can be tested and reused in following editions.

As far as I know, Galicia is the only region that programmed a session focused on describing open source models and showing examples of companies that have succeeded based on collaborative technologies and open source software. It was great that Javi Vazquez, the CEO of Igalia and the one responsible for the open source session, managed to bring together interesting people such as Juan Freire, Eduardo Manchon or Dani Armendariz among others, sharing great stories with the audience.

The next day I was invited to attend a meeting of AGASOL, the Galician association of open source companies, where I could meet more players of our industry and learn about the ways they coordinate and get organized over there. With more than 20 companies registered in AGASOL and getting new members every month, it looks like there is something brewing in Galicia and I think they can teach quite a few lessons to the rest of Spain.

With all this pro open source environment, together with the natural kindness of Galicians, the beautiful old town and the night life at Santiago, Galicia has won me over

Update: other bloggers have also their summaries of the event, like Juan Freire, Alfredo Romeo or Andres Maneiro.

Firefox on the point of reaching 30% share in Europe

Firefox is continuously strengthening its position in the European browser market. According to XiTi’s report, during the last year Firefox use in Europe has grown from 24% to 29%, snatching market share mainly from Internet Explorer. A deeper analysis shows wide differences between countries: while almost half of Finland’s Internet users navigate with Firefox, only one in every six does it in the Netherlands. Spain is still below the average but it is quickly catching up. This is reassuring, because the last time I blogged about it Spain was almost the last country in Europe.

And you might wonder why the use of Firefox matters at all. Well, at this moment it is the only massively used open source desktop application, and as such, it is the best example showing that an open source product can really become mainstream. Too often, the only way to force skeptics to see open source as a serious trend is to show them a real, specific example where an open source alternative has overthrown a closed source monopolist, and Firefox is by the moment the best example. By the way, another good argument for the skeptics is that Mozilla is also a vastly profitable organization, with a revenue between 100 and 200 million dollars per year, and rumors are arising about a possible IPO within one year time.

Enjuto supporting Ubuntu

I did not realize how mainstream Ubuntu is becoming in Spain until I saw Enjuto Mojamuto’s latest sketch in one of my favorite blogs. In the video, Enjuto, a geek character in one of Spain’s most popular TV shows, is checking his email when a virus pops up and starts threating him with destroying all his data. Then an anti virus pops up saying to defend the computer. They start a squabble until Enjuto informs them that none of them has anything to do as he has installed Ubuntu.

This is the best possible commercial Ubuntu could get: in a TV show, particularly popular among youngsters, in a moment when everybody is paying full attention and with a very catchy message saying “No virus with Ubuntu”. And it could not come in a better moment, just when the new release Hardy came out, with eBox packaged for it

By the way, Enjuto has another video discussing with Internet Explorer. Worth seeing

A philosophical article: where we are heading to

Radiohead earns more by distributing their music freely

Not too surprising anyway. I read in Libertad Digital (in Spanish) that Radiohead made their new album available to download on their web site. They only asked to pay what one considered a fair price. During the first week, it was downloaded 1,2 million times, which is more than the sum of the first week sales of their previous three albums. Moreover, the average price paid per download was $8. This is much more than the average $1-$2 that a band usually gets per copy sold, after the discography and distribution channels has ripped most of the income off. So, they have roughly multiplied their income by 20, just by removing the middleman and by allowing free downloads of their music, without counting the greater number of fans they are getting access to. Not bad for an industry claiming to be disappearing.

And this is only a secondary part of their business; otherwise they would not have left it open to fan’s unpredictable reaction. The core business for any band remains in its concerts and merchandising. Madonna understands this perfectly, when she decided to break apart from Warner, the discography behind all her albums so far, and sign with Live Nation, a concert promoter. The music industry is adapting to new models, and it is going faster than many think.

If corrupt, vote for OOXML

Via The Open Road I got to an amazing article by Electronic Frontier Finland stating that the more corrupt a country is, the more likely it voted in favor of Microsoft-supported OOXML document format as an ISO standard. The analysis is based on the Corruption Perception Index, which ranks more than 150 countries by their perceived levels of corruption, as determined by expert assessments and opinion surveys.

Their study was triggered because “during the voting process the reputation of ISO as a dependable technical standardization organization was questioned”, with suspicious facts such as a Microsoft representative caught in Sweden offering to recompense partners for voting yes to OOXML, or a sudden interest from countries like Ivory Coast to the OOXML issue.

Although “the trend is interesting and the results informative, the conclusion is still not particularly strong due to a relatively small number of voting countries”, but we all see the point. The map below marks the countries where there are serious concerns of corruption during the OOXML approval process. Almost all these countries voted “Yes”.

Open Source and the Spanish companies

I just finished writing a comment at plunchete’s blog and it got so long that I thought I could add it to my own blog. In his blog entry he wrote about how few Spanish companies actually develop open source products compared to other more developed countries. He showed Warp as an example of open source Spanish company:

The best example of a Spanish company who believes in Open Source is Warp Networks this company is from Zaragoza (my city) and with only a handful people and a great product eBox, an this product is going to be going to be the official Ubuntu server management tool.

Well, with such kind words I had to reply and comment my opinion on the subject Here it is:

My opinion about why there are so few open source companies in Spain is that there are actually very few open source companies around the world, not only in Spain. Open source is a tendency still in a very early stage and you would be surprised on how many business men from supposedly developed countries still don

Back from holidays in a flat world

I just came back from holidays in the country of elves, where I enjoyed two long weeks of nearly complete isolation from the networked world and lots of coexistence with natives. I realized that during my vacation Koke has managed to make planet Warp just another extension of his active blog(s), which I cannot allow

Usually I don’t blog about books but during my holidays I had time to read The World Is Flat, by Thomas Friedman, and I think it is worth mentioning. What I like the most about the book is the big picture it depicts about how the world is changing, describing the main trends that are making us work different, socialize different and think different. I particularly like that he includes open source as part of one of these trends, in the exact same group as blogs, file sharing or video uploads. Well, as a history enthusiast, I like explaining each moment of human evolution as a convergence of related trends, so no surprise I enjoyed the book

Although the last 2/3 of the book are written in a bit too American centered, good vs evil point of view, there are pretty many good ideas, particularly in the first part. Here is a short summary of the best ideas of the book, borrowed directly from Wikipedia:

Friedman suggests that the world is “flat” in the sense that the competitive playing fields between industrial and emerging market countries are leveling. Friedman recounts many examples in which companies in India and China are becoming part of large global complex supply chains that extend across oceans through a process called outsourcing, providing everything from service representatives and X-ray interpretation to component manufacturing. He recalls seeing such major American companies as Dell, AOL, and Microsoft using Eastern teleoperators who are paid much less than their counterparts in the West. He describes how these changes were made possible through intersecting technologies, particularly the Internet, fiber-optics, and the PC.

Friedman lists ten “flatteners” that have leveled the global playing field:

• #1: Collapse of Berlin Wall-11/9: Friedman attributes the collapse of the Berlin Wall as the starting point for leveling the global playing field. The event not only symbolized the end of the Cold war, it allowed people from other side of the wall to join the economic mainstream. (11/09/1989)

• #2: Netscape: Netscape and the Web broadened the audience for the Internet from its roots as a communications medium used primarily by scientists (8/9/1995)

• #3: Workflow software: The ability of machines to talk to other machines with no humans involved. Friedman believes these first three forces have become a
  

ZIVIS, the citizen supercomputer

Last week the City Council presented ZIVIS, the citizen supercomputer, a project organized together with the Biocomputing Institute of the University of Zaragoza aiming at using idle time in Zaragozan computers to launch complex, CPU-consuming processes, traditionally needing expensive hardware to be completed in a reasonable time. So, citizens can install a program (available for Windows, Mac and Linux) which will activate with the screensaver or run in background to complete small parts of a large calculation. This first experience will help in the calculation of particles trajectory in an accelerator used in research on fusion energy.

The objective was to engage 1000 CPUs by the project (one month duration). One week after the start there are more than 2500, and the figure is still rising. I am really impressed!

Belloch is libre.org

I don’t like being political in my blog or talk about politicians, but this news is worth of it. The Free Knowledge Foundation has decided to give Juan Alberto Belloch, Zaragoza’s mayor, the prize libre.org for his strong support on free/open source technologies both in local administration and in the citizenship.

Apart from that, now when the campaign has just started for the local and regional elections, Belloch has opened a digg-like site in order to create an open bidirectional communication with the electorate. The initiative by itself is really interesting and very innovative, but it is impressive to realize that less than 24 hours after it was made public there is already content and evaluation created by a community.
Not bad for a politician

Zaragoza City Council moves to Linux

Yesterday I attended an event at the City Hall where the City Council of Zaragoza officially announced the migration of all their 3,000 desktops to Linux. This is the first large city in Spain to do so and one of the first in Europe. The details are widely covered in the media (elpais, elmundo, cincodias, elperiodicodearagon, 20minutos, lagacetatecnologica, lavanguardia, abc, cadenaser, baquia, vnunet, extremaduraaldia, periodistadigital, computing, terra, rebelion, camyna, …), explaining the benefits and cost reductions that will be accomplished and the way it will be carried out.

But the most important part, in my opinion, does not appear almost anywhere in the media, and it is a more subtle political move. If Belloch, the current mayor, is re-elected after the local elections in May, he will move the department of new technologies, currently at the same level as the rest of departments, to a general direction, directly dependant from the mayor’s office. This political move will guarantee not only the success of the migration (removing much potential problems and internal opposition) but also shows the compromise at the highest level with other very promising new tech projects, such as the Digital Mile. I take my hat off to Belloch for his decision

LOST, the community game

Via Koke I got invited to LOST, a strange game whose only purpose is to create an Internet community. They give a 5,000$ prize for the member who got more new members into the community, until there are 7 million users.

I guess it is a research project on how communities grow and evolve (that, or a way for spammers to get a load of email addresses). But, apart from a not-very-original contest and prize motivation, I do not see the value they bring to new members of community. I mean, what would motivate member #5 millionth to register, once she is pretty sure her chances to win are pretty slim? I can only find one small value for myself, which is to track how many people who read my blog have enough time and interest to register So, if you wanna try just click on my invitation.

Welcome to LOST. This game is a student project – players score points by inviting others to the game. It aims to show how 7 million people can be connected and become the largest online game ever.

You can join the game if you find an invitation. An invitation is an internet address that looks like this: www.lost.eu/example – but instead of the word ‘example’ there are some random numbers and letters.

There are invitations written everywhere – on the internet and in the real world. To win the game you must score points. To score points you must invite other people using a unique address that is given to you. www.lost.eu/youraddress

Everyone in the game has a profile where they can see who they have invited and who has invited them. It’s possible to interact with anyone in the game.

The game will end when it reaches 7 million players – the winner of the game will get $5000, and the top ten $500 each. There is also a prize given to the best photograph of an invitation