In this beautiful FT ad, you can see most landmark skyscrapers of the World in a single virtual city. Excellent art choice to illustrate their point about an integrated economy!

The ad is near my apartment, and I found it fascinating. I did a lot of mental check (been there, been there, where is this? been there, this looks familiar, etc.)

I took the picture with my “camera-phone”, thus the low quality. If anyone finds a better quality image of the ad, just let me know!

Tomorrow I have a VIP, a VERY IMPORTANT PRESENTATION with the team of Reuters Innovation. I am thrilled, they have a very interesting and unique “entrepreneur in residence” program for the summer.

I will be there pitching my ideas and myself. Now I am going back to the slides and the rehearsal.

Wish me luck!

PS: If you want to see something interesting, check out the “Reuters’ Pictures of the year 2006“

I am in a state of near-shock! Tomorrow I have two exams.

But the exams are not the reason why I am under shock. The shock comes from the fact that after completing these two exams (and the take-home exam of MOB), the spring* quarter will be over. That means that out of 6 quarters in the MBA, I will be gone through 2/6 = 1/3 ONE THIRD OF THE MBA!

Time is flying by! Unbelievable. It was just yesterday that we were being oriented! I want my time back! One third of the MBA has already happened!!!

Pros: I have learned tons and tons over this six months. I am not the businessman I used to be.

Cons: This is going to end too soon!

I better come to the peaceful realization that my MBA will feel shorter than I expected it to feel!

* The names of the quarter make no sense most of the time. Autumn quarter is ok. But the so-called “Spring quarter” takes place during winter (Jan-Mar) and this year it snowed thrice during the “spring quarter”, with average temperature around 5ºC. How do you call that spring? Why? To keep up the high spirits? And the so-called “Summer quarter” takes place during spring (Apr-Jun) and hopefully will bring an improvement in the weather.

Probably the most interesting and innovative course this quarter, DEO (Discovering Entrepreneurial Organizations) is over.

Here is a list of ten things I learned over the course:

1. CASH is KING. But don't get too distracted from operations trying to get finance.
2. Contadina: Changing consumer behavior is very difficult. Also, learn the basics of estimating market size and attractiveness
3. When talking about your business idea, don't show much enthusiasm if you want to learn from others about your unknown unkwowns.
4. I can jump on the spot and do a great presentation, yet I will not allow this to be necessary again.
5. Now I can see different things on people carrying items. But my team together can see 1000x more.
6. L.G. Interesting approach: As an entrepreneur, quickly get rid of (delegate) the boring stuff.
7. Iridium: Great decisions can be those of stopping projects. Test always before going to market.
8. Space data: Be the anti-iridium
9. Alberto Gonzalez: The power of learning and gaining reputation for over 13y.
10. New Barn Studios: In a diverse team, the options and perspectives multiply. Different perspectives open new worlds (of business).
11. Bonus: Best beats always first!

Some are obvious and some others need the course case to understand them fully, but I thought I would share them with you.

I want to congratulate Angie for going to Chicago and Karlitos for going to NY-NY . I am sure they feel really lucky, because not all of the people that applied got their choices. Actually, many people applied to the two NY-NY schools, Columbia and Stern, so Karlitos has been successful where many others’ application have been denied.

And where am I going? Hint: It’s one of the best connected cities, increasingly powerful financial hub of the World, extremely expensive, with centuries of history, with a preeminent business school, double-decker buses and black cabs…

YES, I AM GOING TO LONDON!

What can I say? I am thrilled of staying three more months there. I know London is my default now, but the city still rocks and it is great living here. And now that it is spring time (although today weather was crazy with sunny clear skies and hail) the city is even more attractive to live in. You cannot imagine how beautiful is Hyde Park these days. I am looking forward to the first outdoor lunch under the sun…

I did not apply for international exchange (many people stay), basically because I am thrilled to be here and also because my wife would had to stay here working, and there is no fun in being three months away from each other.

So maybe that is why I borrowed Karlitos’ car on Sunday (THANKS AGAIN!) and went to IKEA, to buy some more furniture, to be certain that I am going to be extra comfortable in the rest of my stay.

By the way, what did I buy? My main goal of going to IKEA was clear:

In full MBA fashion, I bought an extra bookcase, to put all my classes binders, my books and my papers!

Yesterday was a very special day. 8y anniversary of my relationship with Raquel. I was smiling all day! And we went to celebrate to one of the most interesting restaurants in London:

maze

Grosvenor Sq.

I want to share with my dear readers my comment on the place: Beautiful location, the food was amazing. To order, I needed 1h and 3 dictionaries to understand all the ingredients on the menu (English, Spanish, French and Italian words at least).

So I went for the degustation menu of five small courses (all courses are small in the restaurant) and two desserts (bite-sized).

It was a memorable culinary experience. All dishes tend to be quite unconventional. In the picture you can see the “Duart salmon, pork belly with choucroute and smoked raisin reduction”. I wondered what pork has to do with fish. Different foods, right? But the salty-fatty test of pork complemented surprisingly well the salmon blander taste, achieving interesting results.

The food is an interesting experiment, and you can have a great time with all the experiments. All dishes were awesome! Yet it is not something you want to integrate in your regular diet. Is more like “playing sophisticated games with food”. I am happy to eat this food every once in a while. But not more often. Maybe once a year?

Minor cultural nuisance: One of the things that still shocks me in trendy anglosaxon restaurants is the absence of tableclothes. Spanish trendy restaurants all display one (if need to reassure of trendiness, the tablecloth can be a superposition of two,. Maybe one in gray tones other bordeaux color?). On the other side, americans and brit restaurant look like they want to “show off” their beautiful wood tables and state that tableclothes are passé! I know it is a cultural thing, but for me tables without tablecloth look so dirty! And so cheap!

My final comment on the restaurant food: Incredible experience, great for tasting many different dishes, but not more often than once every couple of months!

Last Monday, I went to a FT Conference on digital media. Very interesting stuff. In one of the morning panels, Mr Chris Ahearn, President Reuters Media and Mr Patrick Walker, Head of Content Partnerships Google Video UK. The following exchange happened:

From CH (Reuters) to PW (Google): If you guys can filter for porn, why don’t you filter for (c) protected material?

The answer from Patrick Walker was so convoluted (community filtering, resources, difficult to say who has actually put the content online) that it could not convince anyone in the audience, not even himself.

That’s why it was inevitable that Viacom sues Googles YouTube for $1 billion (Google News) (oh the irony! Linking Google News for this :p ) Apparently, Viacom has had enough.

Which suers will follow? Will there be a crackdown on uploaders of (c) protected material? And even more daunting: Will the quality of videos at YouTube ever increase?

If you have never written a blog, you have never faced comment-spam, the plague of comments left by “online robots” trying to set up thousands of links to their websites. It is a nasty problem (more info in Spam in blogs), and I was getting 50+ spam comments on my inbox.

That is why now that I have a new layout I have installed an antispam plug-in. From now on, all new comments will need the user to fill in a “captcha“. But thanks to Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam Plugin the captcha will not be a complicated code (I hate when webpages require me to type in “z&x€dñÇdG2f4” case sensitive!).

It will be much more fun: the captcha will always display a buzzword, to keep in line with the business&mba theme of the blog. Here you have a couple of examples:

So just think of a good synergy you can exploit, build on my posts, and leave me comments.

Sorry for the down time. I needed to update the blog software to the latest version. In the next days, I will progressively recover the old posts and comments, the pictures and the original template.

In any case, this server down time (<24h) is so much better than blogger!

List of things to do:

• Set new version up and running - DONE
• Recover old posts - DONE and Special Thanks to Raquel for the help with SQL
• Recover pictures - DONE
• Recover comments - DONE
• Recover old template or get a new one - DONE
• Recover random quotes and random logo…
• Other? - I have a new plugin for comments.

Because…

• The world is full of opportunities.
• Effort pays back in the long run.
• Doing an MBA opens a myriad of thrilling choices.
• Sunlight hours are back to a reasonable level.
• I discovered Cafe Garcia, where I can buy all sorts of Spanish food, including Chocolates Valor.
• I live a thrilling, fast-paced and intense life .
• My study group is the best. Ever. Period.
• I have an orange sweatshirt.
• I am surrounded by interesting and intelligent people I can talk to.
• During dinner yesterday, I had another confirmation of how much I have learned in the six months I have been involved in the MBA.
• Visits to this blog are above 12.000.
• Many other reasons.
• Spring is around the corner.
• Last but not least, love is in the air!