Un poco de todo - Carlos Domingo Official Blog

Too much to do, weekends should have 72 hours

I was really "bloggy" yesterday (not sure that word exists) but today I am going to resist the temptation in spite of having few things in my head that I want to write about and only post this blog. Why? Well, basically, because there are too many things that I want to do during the weekend (my weeks are mainly just work) and I am trying to organize my time. Here is a list of things that I wanted to do this weekend (some of them only partly achieved) in no particular order or importance:

- Blog, enough for this weekend, this is my last post
- Read (blogs, news, books, magazines, research reports, I have a huge pile of unread things that I keep...), done a lot yesterday and this morning but there is no way that I will ever catch up, need to rethink my strategy here
- Catch up with work (mainly clean up my inbox and make a to do list and arrange my calendar for next week, on process, this has to get done otherwise my week is less productive)
- Play Sudoku (yesterday night till way too late, I got to do something about this)
- Play with my PSP (got a new game last week in Tokyo, have not touch it yet, this will not get done)
- Phone/chat with my family (done between yesterday night and this morning)
- Exercise (got to keep that May triathlon in mind, that is what I am doing right after this post)
- Do some shopping (definitely not this weekend, too late for that)
- Clean my apartment (not done properly except for the very basics...)
- Watch a movie (did that yesterday night)
- Go out with some friends (did that on Friday finally!!)
- File my taxes (uhmm, next week perhaps, I have to provide a list of all days that I have been in the US last year and with all my travel is going to take me ages to figure that one out)

So no more blogging this weekend, moreover I am flying down to Portland this evening so my day is shorter.

CD

"I find it absolutely amazing that Murdoch is still the guy that gets media the most"

I read that comment in a post in the Bubblegeneration blog that refers to another post in the Business 2.0 blog that refers to a Newsweek interview with Murdoch (sorry for the triple referencing...) that I happened to read this week.
I am actually not surprised at all that Murdoch gets media since he has been all his career a media guy, what I think that is surprising is that at his 74 years he seems to get thechnology and the Web more than any other media mogul. Their acquisition of MySpace was a pretty bold movement and I totally agree with some of his comments like not thinking that people will pay $1.99 to Apple to see an episode of Desperate Housewifes in a tiny iPod screen just because they missed it the night before. If you are so TV obssesed, you should get yourself TIVO or some other similar device (my wife just did that a few months ago in Tokyo so now we have a Sony RokuRoku that is pretty much like a TIVO and she does not miss any of her favorite TV series or animes while I am watching something else or we go out for dinner). I see Semel and Yahoo!! also getting media (that at the end is Semel's background) but I do not see Google getting it at all (their crappy video store that they recently released is just a good example of how they do not get how people will consume media over the Web).

CD

Dubai 1991 versus 2005

As I was writing my previous post, a friend sent me these pictures of Dubai in 1991 and in 2005, pretty amazing how the city has changed, no wonder they are buying companies abroad.

CD

Nationalism versus capitalism

I usually do not write about politics, my sister already does a pretty good job on her blog (recently referred to in an interview she did as one of the longest running political blogs in Spain). But three seemingly unrelated financial news and political controversy have been hitting the papers this week and I think that what is going on is interesting enough to write about it. And at the end of the day, this is blog is about "A little bit of everything" so politics should also be part of it.

In the US, the news were the acquisition of P&O, a British company that runs major commercial operations at key U.S.ports by Dubai based DP World and the concerns about national security that that deal raised. In Spain, the takeover bid of German based E.ON for Endesa (largest Spanish utility based in Madrid) that tops the early takeover bid by Gas Natural (another large Spanish utility but based in Barcelona) and that became the largest takeover bid in Europe to date. Finally, the rumors of Italian based Enel (again another utility) to acquire French based Suez. All those potential acquisition deals have been received with criticism in the US, Spain and France raising concerns aboutnational security and national protection against foreign interests.
So what those news have in common is that the real debate behind is nationalism versus capitalism. From a capitalist perspective, in this era of globalization, all the three deals make sense and should move forward. For instance, in the Spanish case, Endesa shareholders should take E.ON offer since it is higher and has a large cash component. The Gas Natural offer is not only lower but it is speculative in nature since it has a large component of shares from Gas Natural, a company that is way smaller than Endesa. Interestingly enough, when the first takeover bid was announced, the issues discussed in the Spanish press at that time where also of nationalism nature, this time local nationalism between Madrid (capital of Spain) versus Barcelona (capital of Catalunya) not cross border. In the case of the US, it is even worst since the deal does not even have to do with US based companies. I wonder how Spain would have reacted if the British government had publivly opposed the recent acquisition of O2 by Telefonica under the same grounds, that telecommunication are a strategic market for the country and it should be in local hands and not foreign hands.
On the port deal, Americans seem comfortable with the British running their ports but not with the Dubai people doing so in spite of Dubai letting the US have a large military presence in their own soil, the word reciprocity does not seem to be known in this side of the Atlantic. The French, being French and representing the worst of the European nationalism (chauvinism is a more appropriate word in their case) have already reacted and decided to merge Suez with another French company, Gaz de France to avoid a takeover bid by the Italians. So much for all being part of the European Union, Spain does not want the Germans and the French do not want the Italians and in the way, they are ignoring the actual owners of the companies, the shareholders, as well as the rest of the country.
The interesting thing is that Bush seems to be the only president from all those countries that is doing the right thing, let the deal go through and I am sitting here agreeing with his decision which is pretty disturbing....

CD

Multimedia search and the problem with metadata

Check this post, it is a pretty funny joke (and an extremely boring 5 hours video, look how dull Eric Schmidth is making jokes at the begining, he will certainly not be making a living as a comediant). What I found interesting is that it actually raises the issue about how multimedia content is being indexed by search engines. Google seems to be relying on manual tagging by the people uploading videos or just on text around images or videos in the Web sites from where the content is being crawled. That seems like a pretty simplistic approach compared to what Riya is trying to do with face recognition or what community sites are doing with tagging. For text content, the issue of search becomes simpler since you can use the text to extract keywords or derive content (this second option being something no search engine does but that knowledge management companies like Autonomy do) but that obviously does not work for images. However, for video someone could envision a speech to text process that converts to text all the dialog in a video and uses that to create video metadata. I guess the problem is that speech recognition is still not working well enough to do this with enough accuracy (Nuance, formely ScanSoft, seems to be the leading company here but as far as I know, they have not applied their technology to solve this problem).

CD

Origami Project

Check out this web site, according to some people and news site, it belongs to Microsoft and it is a teaser ad for their new portable device (an iPod killer? a PSP killer?), pretty unusual for Microsoft to launch products this way but they certainly caught my attention, they have a RSS feed so I added to my RSS reader to follow the updates to the site, the device is being released in March.

I hope is not too cool, I promised myself not to buy more gadgets for a while but the temptation might be too high if this is a cool device....

CD

Sudoku and low tech games

The last few weeks I was introduced to Sudoku by my wife and I have been getting addicted to it, if you do not know what it is, I will save myself the time to explain it, just go here to try some games for free over the Web.
It is an interesting game that requires a lot attention and it is a good mental training and stress killer but without the stress of video games (I do actually enjoy the stress of video games though, just not all the time), nothing is moving and you can take your time to figure out the next move. The rules are very simple and you can always complete the game (at least, I have not come accross one that I could not finish), the challenge is how quickly can you do it. I guess that at some point I will get bored and drop it. My next low tech game then? Go back to play with Rubik's Cube since this year is the 25th anniversary (there are selling them all over Tokyo again) and I have really great memories of my childhood playing with friends to see who could finish it faster.

Note: I am not abandoning video games, I am enjoying my PSP and waiting for PS3 to get myself one.

CD

Using Gmail as a web storage system

With 2GB of free space, there was only time before someone come up with a way to do this, I have tried few of them and GSpace is my favorite, it acts as a Firefox extension so you need to be using Firefox (which I am finally using).

CD

Are some blogs lacking on fact checking of their stories?

While blogs are a good source of information, sometimes I feel that there are too many rumors and wrong stories being published and that a ltittle bit more effort from the blog writters could substantially increase blog content quality.
The latest example of this is an article I just came across in Gizmodo about a rumor for a potential iPhone to be released by Apple. Check the post here.
The title of the post speculates about an iPhone Concept designed being leacked by Apple and goes on saying that "but this could be one of those purposeful leaks to gauge a reaction from the public or a complete hoax." The original speculation comes from the www.techeblog.com. Obviously, the way these posts are written is very powerful and attractive since rumors of an iPhone have been around for a while already.
Well, if you look at the pictures in the bottom of the iPhone pictures, they have a copyright notice that says Applele and a Japanese name Isamu Sanada. A simple Google search points to the site www.applele.com, a web site created by Isamu Sanada where, although mostly in Japanese, you can easily find a page with the profile of the author that says in English "In this homepage, I display my imaginary designs of future apple products.". It took me less than 2 minutes to find this so I wonder whether the bloggers are both Gizmodo and Techeblog are either too busy to even bother to verify their source or they have done it and in spite of that, they have chosen the most attractive path of speculating with Apple being behind this. Either way, it says very little about the quality and reliability of those blogs.
Btw, check some of the other "imaginary designs" from Applele here, some of them are pretty cool in fact.

CD

Google chat

I have been reading about the integration of Gmail with Google Chat this week and this morning, when I was checking my email, a chat window pop up and I suddenly was chatting with a friend of mine from Boston. I was very surprised and I actually did not realize that it was actually a chat window within Gmail. It was pretty cool to chat with my friend unexpectedly but at the same time it was scary to realize that all my Gmail contacts had been automatically assigned as chat contacts and that my chat status was online by default. While this feature is cool, I think that Google is going a bit too far on how they push things to consumers without them even knowing it, this starts to raise all sort of questions and concerns about what else they are doing without your permission.

CD