I read in the Guardian that the students of the only-women colleague of Oxford University have voted in favour of men student admissions, but only the St. Hilda government body could change this.

Which are the advantages of an only women college?

I don’t see any…

I don’t know the amount of emails I receive everyday, but they are quite. Time instead, is little.

What I have always wanted is having my emails ordered by priority. Read first what is first and read last what is last. The question is: how do I establish priority in the Inbox?.

Well…I will give you a simple idea. Just vote your email. Yes, make your email a digg-like utility or google email ranked utility. Ok… probably if your girlfriend realizes that she isn’t well ranked you could be in trouble, same with your boss. Well, in those cases you could change the ranking in the hypothetic program preferences.

You can teach a dog, you can teach a baby, you can teach your brother…why not email?. I WANT TO VOTE.

Meeting with Negroponte, the promoter and charismatic leader of the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project and prominent member of the MIT (Massachussets Institute of Technology), is already something that someone would hardly everforget… but doing it in a private JET with Martin Varsavsky (and the beautyful German Christiane zu Salm) is just unbelivable.

Martin, appart from him business life, is a very enthusiastic man and is very keen on culture, design, music, art, politics etc. Negroponte is an authority in his fields as well as a very well educated american man, and Christiane is simply so intelligent and has such a delightful conversation; shee always seems to have something interesting to ask or offer.

He was waiting for us at Johan Strauss airport in Munich. He was sitting in the lobby with an IBM laptop and trying to unsuccessfuly connect to a WiFi signal: “They are all locked” he said when he spotted us, “I hope FON can change this someday!”. That got us.

The flight was so interesting: I really felt sorry to be a little out of my place because the conversation was about big business, the Davos conference, the UNO… international politics, humanness and business. But I was delighted.

Martin and I were very interested both in a professional but even more in a personal way on the olpc project. The project is all about producing fully functional and featured laptops (with WiFi, hard drive, meshing, imaging soft, etc.) for 100$:

• Isn’t 100$ way to low? Is it really possible?

That’s a question a lot of people make. It’s a simbolic number: what’s the difference between 100$ and 130$ for example? The price will vary. The thing is to be on that frame and to have a very cheap yet useful laptop.

• Why did you start all this?

Because I love Internet. And I think Internet can REALLY (I really believe this) help the so called Third World to develop.

This is some of the hundreds of thinks we talked about. He later that day, after a meeting (this time at ground level :-D), showed us a model of the OLPC laptop.

We also talked about FON; we wanted to know about his impressions regarding our project. We were happy because he knew about us before Martin and him could arrange the meeting. Actually his knowing about FON was what really triggered this meeting that, in their words, had been uncomprehensively delayed for years.

“I think FON is gonna do it”

or

“You guys really have it in your hands”

are just some of the remarkable elogiums he gave us.

The impression I got from him is that he was an intellectual, coming from a good and stablished american family who had had a very good education and made an impecable career and undoubtfuly made the most of what he had in it’s hands everytime.

The fancy thing? I was often distracted with his joker-like smile. I have this trend to usually pay attention at little unimportant details

The Chief Connectivity Officer in the program One Laptop per Child (MIT), the Greek Michail Bletsas, has talked today in the Malaga Open Source World Conference. More or less he says: “Our option taking Linux in the 100$ laptop is not because of the price, it is a matter of quality, user freedom and future”.

No doubt, no question.

Have your ever noticed? I just once. Coke that I supposed had the same flavour all over the world, hasn’t!.

I didn’t notice all over Europe but I did in Tunisia. I think there is a reason and two simple ways of changing the flavours. The reason is the local tastes (easy!) and the ways I think are two.

1. Water. I do think water from one place to another can change the flavour of Coke somehow.
2. Amount of sugar. You just add more sugar and you get something different.

In Tunisia it had more sugar (my hypothesis) and the result was: ‘Is this Coke?’ (Ok. I’ve exaggerated a little but not too much). Yes it was and after having talked with other people they told me that in other continents it seems to happen almost the same.

We are not always conscious of how life changed since the automated calculus machines appeared. Charles Babbage proposed the first model in the 19th century and since then, science took a new path… Human calculations were error prone and the automation would mean a great step towards precission. But not only science was affected: technology, music, art, design, architecture, writing, human relations (that’s a more recent change) and even cooking has changed significantly since.

Now Lego has taken one of the designs by Babbage and made a game out of it…

‘Disruption rocks’

That’s the motto today at FON. We have done an announcement: Google, Skype, Indexventures, Sequoia capital, Janus & Niklas from Skype and some more people have invested in FON! 18M € (21.7M USD), not bad.

Google rocks: it has disruptive products, such as Google maps, Google pack, Google, Google, Google… quality becomes standard at Google.

Skype rocks: VoIP made easy, good quality and cheap! Another disruptive product.

And now it’s FON who is going to bring disruption to the Internet Cloud. FON will build a WiFi ’standard’. Anyone with a broadband connection at home will provide connection to the by-passers and will get connection everywhere in exchange. WiFi will never be a messy and anarchyc network again, where there’s no relation between one WiFi node and the other. I will become a global network, like taxis, like buses, like bars; you can find them in every city, in every country anywhere. But FON is for free!

Soon, in part thanks to FON, we will be able to have internet connection wherever we are. We will pay a monthly fee to our provider and will be allowed to use it all over the world.

Welcome to the FON era!

Look at what others say:

Martin Varsavsky, FON president and CEO

David Isenberg

David Weinberger

Mariano Amartino

Ethan Zuckerman

Wendy Seltzer