Google does have a sense of humour

The Google guys just found a "shortcut" for me to take when flying up to Miami from São Paulo!. I just asked them for directions starting in Paulista Avenue and heading to South Beach.... you need to have a look to believe it:



and here on text. pay attention to step #41 ;-)

....
39. Turn right at Av. Atlântica 0.5 km 1 min
40. Turn left at R. Rodolfo Dantas 26 m
41. Swim across the Atlantic Ocean
Entering United States (Florida)9,207 km
47 days 23 hours
42. Slight right at 4th St 0.2 km
....

That's outside my boat!: Good reading on not worrying about what you can't control...

Recently, when visiting the HQ campus of my employer in california, and using somebody else's cube.. I found a story posted on the wall, in a single page.. that got stuck in my mind.

It does package in a nice image the need of focusing on the things that can be controlled directly by each person.. instead of worrying about everything, you might want to give it a read, here

If you haven't heard the chest-beating yet from brazilians, you will...

367 companies on the Sao Paulo stock exchange reached on 5/31 a market capitalization of R$1.9T (and USD$984B).. and since the 1st day of june pretty much every stock on BOVESPA went up, the iBovespa index went up 2%+ and the dollar exchange rate went down to R$1.906.. the "Bovespa reaches USD$1T market capitalization" should be about to make headlines.

An amazing contrast to the pessimism of 2002. Now the big question is how close to a bubble this is? The progress on economic fundamentals that brazil experienced in the last 3 years is great, but does it justify such a brutal 5X+ increase of the stock market?

And how does that street look like?

Google maps keeps adding candy to their offerings.. have a look at the 360 degrees view they added today for selected cities: frisco, NYC, Denver, Miami, Vegas.... sure it will make the experience of finding your way a little bit easier.

Colombia on the cover of Business Week this week...

It was a well kept secret for a while. It seems that it won't be anymore.

For the best part of the last 5 years, I rather take any offer to walk a full mile in the streets of Bogota, than 3 blocks in either Mexico City's Polanco area or São Paulo's Berrini Avenue... it is certainly safer.. but nobody knew, and it sounded hard to believe anyway.

After meeting a few hundred executives, managers and employees of multinational companies in Latin America in the last few years, and partying in lots of places, by far the best place most of the agree that latin america has for partying is Andres Carne de Res in Chia, about 40 minutes north of Bogota.

But this week BusinessWeek's Robert Farzad just spilled the beans on his cover article about the most Extreme Emerging market in the world: Colombia.

Adding insult to injury, Farzad does a nice job endorsing the good stuff he saw during his week in Colombia both in the podcast and in a specific section online called Colombia's Renaissance... and starting it with "La Butifarra de Pacho" (composed by Pacho Galan, a colombian), and he also let his lips slip with "the women are quite quite quite beautiful".

At least he couldn't decipher with a Butifarra is... but this will drive some few dollars of extra investment to Colombia, for sure.

p.s. check out his video taken at Andres Carne de Res, and make sure you visit the place the next time to go to Bogotá

A greener apple... way to go Steve!

Apple posted recently an update on their progress in environmental issues (here).

A nice note to their customers, their critics and the world... it was about time.

I found it particularly elegant how Apple dealt with the "We apologize for leaving you in the dark for this long".. and the subtle pun to the CRT-using competitors they have on the computer business.

I doubt many people were having their next iPod "hostage" pending to see some evidence of tree-hugging affinity from Apple, though.

Ya era hora / it was about time...

The article count in the spanish wikipedia recently surprassed the "svenska" (swedish/sueco) version. That shouldn't come as a surprise... there's an estimated population of 9.8M swedish-speaking people on the planet (compared to roughly 0.5 billion in a very conservative estimate for spanish).

At some point spanish should take a more respectful place in the top 10 list. This move barely took it to language #9, and with the obvious expectation that chinese should enter that top 10 languages list, heading brutally fast into #1, things should remain almost unchanged for spanish... I'd count with spanish surpassing easily (in the near future) the article count of the wikipedias in portuguese, italian , polish, dutch.. and time will tell if it really has a shot vs japanese, french and german.

If anything it was surprising how far 10M people went (or the thirdy thousand contributors to the wikipedia or that language)... against the 385k contributors of the spanish version.

And there's an encouraging aspect there, if we are to approach it with a "half empty" view.. the spanish wikipedia has a lot of headroom to grow, if latins were to improve on education, and web particulation... passing the "hurdle" of the submissive behavior entrenched culturally and becoming more active, more opinionated.