being born on 2006

Google does have a sense of humour

2007-10-10T06:37:00.000-07:00

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...

2007-07-10T08:24:00.000-07:00

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...

2007-06-01T18:02:00.000-07:00

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?

2007-05-29T18:07:00.000-07:00

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...

2007-05-19T15:35:00.000-07:00

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!

2007-05-06T16:15:00.000-07:00

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...

2007-04-28T07:12:00.000-07:00

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.

Yet another healthy exponential

2007-04-26T18:19:00.000-07:00

Many companies seem to be around trying to capitalize on the Second Life phenomena. Some of them with healthy investments.. some of them with opportunistic PR attempts.

May be they are counting with this curve keeping an exponential behavior going forward. Have a look (source: wikipedia's entry on second life).

Growing at a healthy 1M new accounts/month (or 25%/month), any type of sustainable business proposition in such a growing pond should have guaranteed growth.. nice!

Blowing up expectations...

2007-04-26T05:09:00.000-07:00

Two good examples this morning on how great companies (and great brands) delight their customers/stakeholders blowing out expectations:

1. I just got an email from amazon introducing endless.com, a new way to shop from Amazon.. if not only offers overnight shipping included with the order, but it has a NEGATIVE $5 price for that shipping (limited time promotion, of course). Amazon shines on a great customer experience, but this one was beyond what I expected

2. On a more financial front, Apple numbers went out yesterday. They got their investors used to take their financial guidance as conservative, but this time when analyst expectations were on the mid 50s (cents per share) of earnings, they delivered an amazing 87 cents per share, up 88% YoY, but way above expectations. The flipside is that nobody will believe their guidance going on... it is too conservative.

The "brecha" is 18k and decreasing... but why is there a gap in the first place?

2007-04-21T11:04:00.000-07:00

I've been struggling to explain to myself why there are less articles in the spanish wikipedia than the portuguese wikipedia (225.7k vs 253k on today's numbers).

I do respect quite a lot the communicative style that brazilians have.. and i've witnessed them adopt quite rapidly technologies that get people together like cell phones, and having even faster adoption of community-oriented technologies (like Orkut, blogging, and even flickering to some extent).

But the sheer mass of the spanish-speaking population seems to justify a larger article count in spanish. The role that portugal plays on the portuguese-speaking wikipedia seems quite big, but Spain should have an equivalent role in the spanish-speaking wikipedia.

And there's more: the geographic fragmentation of the spanish-speaking Americas should if anything drive more articles, so how come portuguese is still on top?

I will probably keep wondering that. But judging from the trends over the last couple of months, where the difference in article count seems to be decreasing by ~300 articles a day, probably some time in late june/early july we'll see a crossover.

I gotta confess though that I keep service both as much as I can, with small edits and new article aditions.. but a single individual is a drop in the ocean on these "constructions of cathedrals" as the open-source nerds put it.

How can they be that fast?

2007-04-17T19:19:00.000-07:00

there are a couple of areas where Flickr's speed (seems to me) is just amazing, and wanted to share those:

Last night I wanted to upgrade to a Pro account, but ended up relying of friend to pay for the upgrade via PayPal... and I was talking with him over Skype at the same time. I felt just shocked to see the "Pro" logo on my account withing seconds (and I mean it, low single digit number of seconds)... that was amazingly fast payment processing. So fast that even a cash payment seems soooo slow.

And then today I finally bother to go start correcting typos or basic spanish or portuguese localizations.. and those are also amazingly easy and fast to get done. I don't know if it's AJAX.. but that makes pretty much every other web service I used seem as efficient as a bureaucratic government office on a banana republic.

Dinosaurs in São Paulo...

2007-04-14T17:46:00.000-07:00

There a popular equation in marketing. It says that "customer satisfaction EQUALS experience MINUS expectation".

After receiving one comment* on my previous post (Buenos Aires Zoo promotional billboards) about how good the SP zoo is, and replying to that comment with a "hmpff... i've been there, I liked it, but I gotta give it to Buenos Aires, theirs is better, at least for me", I wanted to give another chance to places of public interest in São Paulo... so we went to the São Paulo Aquarium on saturday afternoon.

Getting there from the south zone isn't that easy, but can be done in slightly less than one hour. The Aquarium+Planetarium is located on the Ipiranga neighborhood, more specificly on the 407 of the Rua Huet Bacelar.

The external aspect and surroundings didn't do much for raising my expectations.. and a planet-earth shaped revolving door welcoming visitors didn't help much... But boy, I was surprised. The highlights to me where the real bones of a whale maxilar, the stones with fossil fish from several species, and the dinosaur bones. They did a VERY NICE job in that dinosaur section.

The fish portion is nice, or just OK, and the 3D movie is quite basic... but that dinosaur section saved the day. If you happen to have a chance, go visit the Aquarium

*- the comment came offline. it is still appreciated as feedback-is-a-gift, on any form.. but it still puzzles me how people end up taking the harder road of writing an e-mail when posting a comment is much easier

brazil at crossroads? halfwaybetween fecundity and frustration.... halfway between progress and inertia...

2007-04-13T14:36:00.000-07:00

I typically end up changing once a decade my favorite magazine. When I was in my low 20s it was Wired Magazine, and in my early 30s it is The Economist. On their edition this week they have an article I loved about Brazil called "Land of Promise".

I moved to live in Brazil on mid '02 and a couple of fine books on Brazil landed on my hands, the first one was called "Brazil, the once and future country", and the other was "Brazil's second chance". Those formed key opinions about the tremendous opportunities and big challenges that the country faces. The first book starts brilliantly quoting an anonymous brazilian saying that goes like this: "Brazil is the country of the future", and will always be. The other painted an almost-there state (didn't forecast the big mess created by the '02 election process).

Several years living in Brazil exposed me further to those contradictions between shiny potential and frustrating lack of progress, but I have to give to The Economist.. they "get it" this time in their article. Hopefully the way to its great future state ends up being less patchy than the rollercoaster history of the country.

A nice invite to coming to the zoo... with your kids

2007-04-11T07:34:00.000-07:00

I still remember a marketing consultant stating that it should be a crime to put kids and animals in the same TV Ad (among other things, because it is so brutally effective in the way it shakes our hearts and moving us to action).. that's something the consultant said about Parmalat's use of kids wearing animal customs and drinking milk.

That memory came back to me recently in Buenos Aires when looking at this billboard inviting kids to come to the zoo. I think it hits many key points:

- it capitalizes on the children's pester power to get what should be a family experience. I can hear "pa!.. sshheevame al zoologico!!" many times over
- it dismantles the potential fear of large animals.. inserting the angle of "every the fearless bear gets born as a harmless little baby bear"
- it capitalizes on every kids anxiety for becoming and adult, feeding it with the admiration of the big powerful animals and their little baby versions that human babies can identify with

and of top of that, the afternoon I spent once with my family at the Buenos Aires Zoo itself is one of nices afternoons I had.. it is certainly an experience that I would recommend.

a subtle way of exploiting the competitive nature of men?

2007-04-08T16:28:00.000-07:00

Many stories have been told about how competitive men are, and that probably drivers some nutty behavior in sports, racing, etc. and I found recently how somebody was taking advantage of that behavior for good.

have a look, I took this picture recently in a urinal in Buenos Aires.

Didn't spent any time checking.. but I picture even drunk guys trying to hit the bulleye ;-)

I knew italians were talkative.. but c'mon...

2007-04-06T09:01:00.000-07:00

David Sifry has made an art out of publishing every trimester his now famous "State of the Blogosphere", and he just published yesterday the latest one (somewhat more ambitious it is called now the "State of the Live Web".

That is to me one of the top 2 nice places to just swim in graphic analysis of data (together with Google's Zeitgest, of course), but this time I got somewhat shocked by one of those statistics. have a look.

Now people are posting more in italian language that in spanish. how can that be?

I know people of italian origin in general are quite talkative, to the point of being to do it without their mouth [hint: look at their hands]... but how can ~60 somewhat million italian speaking people express themselves blogging more than ~300M+ million spanish-speaking people... even taking into account per-capita-GDP differences, i just don't get it. any ideas?

Voting with our pockets.. up the google list

2007-03-29T13:33:00.000-07:00

I find the four-leafed clover in google's toolbar the ultimate act of trust in a brand. punch whatever you want to know about in the text box, and get ready to be taken straight to where you want to go. But that assumes that you really want to go to the first link in google's search results.

Up until 6 months ago, searching for BVSP in google would take you to the site of the Bundesverband Selbständiger Personalleiter e.V. or to the on of the Bellevue State Park.. but it seems that all it took was a boom cycle in the São Paulo stock exchange (Bovespa) and a few obsessive clickers of BVSP (the yahoo finance ticker for knowing the value of the index).. and now that is the first result in the list.

ainda bem..

the man behind "How to Lie with Statistics"..

2007-03-27T15:26:00.000-07:00

There's this small little book that helped changed the way I saw numerical information in the media... kinda becoming a self-convicted skeptical on how media can cherry-pick numbers to try to make their point, and what is most amazing about that book is that it was written on 1954. Fifty three years ago and still being relevant is not a small feat for a book.

A clever title helped making it popular, but it also shocking how a person with no formal training in statistics can write a book that became the most widely read book in history.

The man in question was Darrell Huff. He passed away on 2001, and here you can find a small description of his achievement and his life.

My uncle's encyclopedia wasn't that cool...

2007-03-16T06:45:00.000-07:00

I didn't have an encyclopedia at home when I grew up, but sure I spent whole evenings at an uncle's place just browsing their encyclopedia (it was quite a bit more usage than what my cousins')... but it didn't have features like this.

Ségolène Royal is a key political figure in France, an a candidate on the '07 Presidential Election that will take place on April 22nd. When I went to wikipedia, I found the warning note that you can see above. cool, isn't it? Content that is dynamic enough - and honest enough- to warn the reader that the information on the topic is changing real time.

It actually reminded me of that magic book on the Neverending story film (1984)

I can't stop liking wikipedia ;-) !

problems in paradise (a tiny case, though)...

2007-03-15T05:57:00.000-07:00

Google had taught me to pretty much expect anything wonderful from them, and there is one particular feature that i use a lot: searching for "define: XXXXX" to find a fast, short list of definitions of that word in english... and it had always worked, until today, where I found for the first time a word that it couldn't find a definition for (despite google itself linking to the american heritage dictionary for the definition.

I am a subcriber to The Economist online services, and one of their recent articles describes markets as "twitchy".

...sometimes is fun to find a black spot on a normally spotless service...;-)

Incentives, incentives, incentives...

2007-03-13T19:46:00.000-07:00

I was fascinated when I first read freakonomics about the unintended consequences that setting incentives might generate. Their first chapter in particular makes a dramatic case describing the story of a babycare center in Israel that faces issues with parents showing up late to pick the kids up, and after implementing a "negative incentive" (a fine), the found [shock!] that the number of parents arriving late to pick their kids up increased rather than decreasing.

Now, fresh from the freakonomics blog (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYVTsxJssjk ) .. do incentives make sense for organ donors.

A couple of considerations.

Is the altruistic aspect of an organ donation contaminated if prisoners get an incentive (like shorter time in prison) if they commit to donate their organs once the die?

or an even bigger case...

If younger patients in need of an organ transfer get prioritized higher in the list of recipients (one can argue they will use the organ for a longer time)... is this action implicitly stating that the "value" of the life of older potential recipients is lower?

have a look... a fascinating case.

kick-butt presentations... radical approaches

2007-03-10T09:00:00.000-08:00

We end up nowadays having to communicate publicly quite often (at school, at home, and even raising issues of common interest to friends and family). Most of those cases do call for how to deliver the message well in a limited amount of time.

Then most people gravitate to overusing Microsoft's powerpoint in a couple of areas: visual clutter and sheer number of slides.

I wanted to share a couple of pointers to content on the web about effective presentations that I find worth considering.

1. the anything but powerpoint approach. Have you wondered how historical speeches might have been if the powerpoint plague was around at the time? in particular.. how the temptation to abuse the tools can damage the message? have a look at the Gettysburg address by Peter Norvig, and don't miss "the making of"

2. the don't-you-dare-to-blink style (aka. the Lessig Method of presentation). What I like about this type of presentation is how it debunks the myth of the "slides budget" and simplistic rules-of-thumb suggesting 2 minutes per slide or so. It clearly calls for a proper rehearsal (since timing is everything), but it boasts an amazing visual simplicity. Here it goes in 2 versions, the first one on Larry Lessig's speech of Free culture and the second one on less earth-shaking topic by Dick Hardt at OSCON 2005.

I found those cases thought-provoking, especially given the thousands of hours that most of all have to leave just feeling that somebody is pushing powerpoint slides down our throat without much previous analysis. Sure there are more effective ways of communicating

When your nemesis is one click away...

2007-02-25T16:08:00.003-08:00

I didn't know about snap.com, but in the few days since I discovered it, I keep liking its search capabilities... and today there's one extra thing that I like about snap.com. It yielded a case on how on today's internet, your Nemesis might be way closer than what you think, next to the praise and all the carefully-prepared positioning statements.

When searching on snap.com for "kiyosaki", the first link it provides (unlike Google, where it is the 2nd in the list) is John T Reed's analysis of Robert Kiyosaki's "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" best seller book.

The story is somewhat longer, but let's start by acknowledging that reading Kiyosaki's book did change the way I manage my performance finance.. it made me think about many ways in which I was probably wasting money, instead of making it produce more money. However, there was this bitter taste in the mood that I got when reading Kiyosaki's book, beyond just making me feel stupid.. and I couldn't understand what it was (something was fishy.. but couldn't tell what at the time).

Enter John T. Reed. He does go as far as qualifying Kiyosaki of ".. a liar and a charlatan". Several potential buyers of Kiyosaki products thank Reed on his web site by his "Analysis of Rich Dad, Poor Dad", a gold nugget that pops up near the top of google searches on kiyosaki, a great counter-balance to Kiyosaki's claims. And he became himself a source about kiyosaki that has very high credibility, and brutal reputation. The former can come by simply not being kiyosaki.. but the second was earned much more skillfully.

The Easy Bay express ran recently an article on Reed an his ongoing argument (including legal actions) against Russ Whitney (yet another self-claimed real estate guru). Reed is a sixty-year old Army lieutenant who has wrote himself 26 books, and makes a living off his real estate books, and is not afraid of calling BS whenever he finds it... and nowadays no personal finance guru on his/her right mind would be dumb enough to probe him on that.

Back to my experience with Kiyosaki: despite all that I concede my [financial] life was changed by this book, i DO NOT RECOMMEND IT as a stand-alone source of financial wisdom. It dangerously depicts wealth-building as an easy, almost instantaneous task. At a minimum, "The millionaire Next Door" should be read next to it (it addition to Reed's analysis, which is a classic).

But back to the Nemesis next door, after searching on snap.com for Halliburton, Taco Bell and Intel, the first five results on each search have a link to either a corruption cases tracker, and sites of former employees alledging discriminatory practices.

The other site of the argument on ethical debates seems to be coming closer and closer to the spotlight built by top brands themselves.. and somehow snap.com seems to be favoring that better than google.

oh boy!!! he has the knack (or she....)

2007-02-12T08:37:00.000-08:00

I got this funny link today from a friend.. I'm sure the engineering types will empathize with it:

Dilbert has the knack

enjoy!!

lose the tie!...

2007-02-10T09:10:00.000-08:00

wanted to share this post from mark cuban on reasons for NOT wearing a tie, which I found quite interesting for the latin types (listen clearly Bogota and Mexico City in particular, although São Paulo is not quite behind).

http://www.blogmaverick.com/2007/01/16/why-i-dont-wear-a-suit-and-cant-figure-out-why-anyone-does/

Now 2 and a half months later.. spanish is catching up

2007-02-09T18:53:00.000-08:00

as of saturday/sunday midnight est, wikipedia had 199365 articles in spanish. It was about time.

On Nov 25th (http://beingbornon2006.blogspot.com/2006/11/comemorando-200k.html) I was commenting on portuguese reaching a similar milestone... it still puzzles me how long it is taking for spanish to catch up with portuguese on wikipedia.

Very respectable for the brazil+portugal cybercommunities anyway!!... and provoking at least for the spanish cybercommunities.

that's a clever logo for orthodontics...

2007-01-22T13:11:00.000-08:00

I found an ad of this entity in the restroom of a colombian bar... and was quite impressed by the logo. Having had myself braces earlier in life, making sense of the logo was immediate. wanted to shared with you guys:

having a killer product is a wonderful thing...

2007-01-18T11:14:00.000-08:00

just in case somebody still find it hard to believe the statement that "the iPod was an earth-shaking product in the electronics industry".. have a look.

anybody dares to comment on a # for their Q2?

If she lied (as it seems).. she must go down...

2007-01-15T12:25:00.000-08:00

that seems to be the logic that the public is applying to the Daniela Cicarelli (the famous.. and now infamous VJ/presenter of MTV Brasil) intrigue in Brazil nowadays. I guess PR-consultants would be happy throwing advise on how it should had been done differently.

Here the summary:

First Daniela has sex pretty much in public (in the beach, and on the adjacent water) with her boyfriend, and happens to get caught on camera.. and not only still pics, but video.

Then that video becomes the sensation on youtube and several other video sharing sites.

At some point but her (with her signature on the document) and her boyfriend take legal action on brazilian courts against Youtube.

And somehow (poorly advised, probably?) she goes on an interview DENYING that she had anything to do with blocking youtube in brazil.

It took minutes for the brazilian blogosphere to start churning out evidence that her signature was on the document.

Ain't it amazing how THE PUBLIC (en masse) demands the truth and nothing else nowadays.. it is just amazing what type of scrutunity a public figure gets for lying nowadays.

If you want to help on the boycott: more details here.

searching.. for a meaning

2006-12-17T13:26:00.000-08:00

I can't speak for them, but If I were google, the rise of wikipedia would concern me quite a bit. It has popped out of nowhere to become a free [and comercial-free!!] way of reaching plenty of knowledge on the web... and some of us might just start looking there for things.

As the ads-driven content keeps struggle to deal with spam.. quite a bit of it coming in the for of new blogs, the crystal-pyramid that wikipedia has become keeps growing, and provides something that is hard for google to match, the MEANING of the words or expression that people are looking for.

One can claim that they don't necessarily compete. The "search for a meaning" that you get in wikipedia also ranks quite a few times on the top search links in a google query... but I wonder how many times it is just better to jump right into wikipedia. An example: If you're going to New York city and want to know "what is so special about this New York?".., a google search will land you in a page with plenty of sponsored links to hotels, direct links to restaurant guides, and quite a list of subcategories (dining guides, lodging guides, suggested itineraries, etc)... and the chances of learning about New York end up buried down the list.

I found myself looking for information about the MoMA (New York's museum of modern Art) earlier this week, and the wikipedia article taught me more than moma's own site. That was a weird feeling, but I wouldn't be surprised if it happens on many other topics, because wikipedia's point-of-view is more likely way less self-serving that any entity (commercial or non-commercial) is tempted to be.

Jimbo Wales seems to be making quite a few merit for a big recognition from mankind.. something like the Nobel Prize for Peace.

What I love [or hate] in the 4 browsers I use...

2006-12-02T13:58:00.000-08:00

I just read here that now that the november figures are out, Internet Explorer's market share dropped to 80.65% over the last year, Safari is up to 4.03% and Firefox is also up to 13.5% (and it's growth seems to be accelerated.

Seems like a good chance to sum up what I personally like [or not] in each one of the fox browsers I use (include by Treo 650's mini-browser):

Safari
++ being able to press one single key (expose) and get a glimpse of every browser window open is just great
+ same metallic look & feel than itunes and Tiger.. feels born to be work together with the rest of the system.. and it does quite well
+ the google toolbar comes embedded
+ tabbed browsing..althought navigation with keys from tab to tab is not that great
- the embedded google toolbar lacks images and the clover button
- last week for the first time I found one page that crashes it (on the + sign it seems that the reporting of the even going directly to apple should help getting that solved)
- blogger just doesn't work as seamlessly from Safari... strange

Firefox
+ it feels the fastest of them all to me
+ the integration of the google search bar works the best
+ the anticipation of the search term compared to the past search stream and common searches (with numbers of links) is just fantastic
+ foxpose is an OK imitation of expose from safari
- foxpose takes a full extra tab (can that be solved)

Treo 650's minibrowser
++ well.. it's just VERY VERY practical to be able to browse when not in front of a NB/PC
+ wapedia is a fantastic repackaging of wikipedia... even with images
+ google images has a specific page for these type of device.. just great
- certainly not that fast
- only able to support a single browsing session
- clumsy when you need to go to your e-mail or calendar and get back to the

IE
+ proven. just works... and hence my employer's intranet mostly uses it
- it seems to inherit the classical Microsoft reliability [frequent crashes, I mean]
- I just don't know how I can have a look in a single glimpse to all the browser windows (do I need vista for that?)
-- it feels quite slow compared to any of the others
--- for a long while searching news around a specific term only landed on the google news page, which was quite frustrating

Would that continuous slide on the MSFT share in the browser wars generate any significant comeback.. I hope so. If they don't invest seriously on improvements.. they'll keep seeing their share slide further

comemorando 200k...

2006-11-25T07:03:00.000-08:00

é isso aí!!: a wikipédia ja quase tem 200.000 artigos en Português!!.. ou para ser mais exatos 198 474 artigos às 13:55 UTC de hoje sábado, 25 de Novembro. Parece ser questão de aguardar só(ate quarta feira, eu acho).

A língua portuguesa, com mais de 230 milhões de falantes nativos, tem crescido na wikipédia com 10 mil artigos novos cada mes (perto de trezentos e pouco artigos diarios).. dá vontade de ser quem escreve o artigo 200k, né?

E mais uma coisa, hoje se comemora com cachaça, é não com sangría: O que ainda escapa o meu entendimento é... como é possivel que a wikipédia tenha menos artigos em castelhano com tantos falantes da língua espanhola que andam por aí?!

Levitt unfiltered, and blunt...

2006-11-24T04:46:00.001-08:00

TEDTalks : Steven Levitt (2004)

When I read freakonomics, I loved the book overall, but didn't particularly like Chapter 3: "Why do Drug Dealers Still Live with their Moms? ".. but now after removing the censure, I find the topic quite interesting.

Levitt is certainly a good presenter, but what made it for me this is how he managed in this video of the TED'04 conferences to do an R-rated version of his pitch: He does pronounce the F*** word, and even dares to say that passing from flipping burgers in McDonalds to dealing drugs in a gang, is a "good thing". I can't help but be amazed on how cool it is to get a more direct communication with the source of the information (not filtered anymore by book editors, or content producers).

Don't miss the gang-speak for economic terms, in particular the Nash-equilibrium of gangs when having the option to do shooting and generating turmoil on their neighbors, they choose not to do it.

Video caption: (from Google Video)
Steven Levitt is an economics professor at the University of Chicago and the best-selling author of Freakonomics. In this talk, filmed at TED2004, he goes inside an inner-city gang to examine economic principles at work in the real world. (Recorded February 2004 in Monterey, CA. Duration: 22:00) - More TEDTalks at http://www.ted.com

It's me, Júlio Cesar...

2006-11-23T23:13:00.000-08:00

More than 2M books sold, and 55 editions to date on the native tongue of his author. Malba Tahan's "The man who counted (A collection of mathematical adventures" was a hit by pretty much any metric; it fed the abstract fantasies on math of thousands of teenagers.

But Malba Tahan didn't exist. He was a product of the imagination of Júlio César de Mello e Souza, native of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

At age 23, when Júlio Cesar was a frequent writer at O imparcial newspaper, he gave to his editor five short tales with the hope of those making the printed edition. The stories remained on his editor's desk several days without any reaction, and then Julio took the manuscripts back, only to bring them in some days later (after deciding to attribute those to a ficticious american writer named R.S. Slade). The cherry on the pie was claiming that the stories were being quite succesful in New York. It took only one day to have "The Jew's revenge" published, with some other stories getting published using the same trick.

Once Julio learned how to operate in that 1918 Brazil, he was able to get his masterwork published using the pseudonym Malba Tahan.. and the rest is history.

I have to wonder, how much is this cloud of low self-respect still present over the heads of latins in today's world? Somehow Guillermo Puertas Nieto, Lorenzo Elizondo, Jorge Arbusto doen't sound quite as impactful as Bill Gates, Larry Elison and George Bush.

On your marks, set, Go, go, go!!

2006-11-23T22:56:00.000-08:00

Today is black friday, then flocks of people will head to their closest consumption temples (malls are around america) since as early as 5am, and start shopping as if there were no tomorrow.

If you sell to a retailer, and you haven't launched your key produce (and even more, ensure that it is on shelf, and promoted), forget about it... you've missed the key window.. 'coz the Holiday season already started, and the retail engines are tuned to perfection to maximize sales for the remainder of the year.

and they don't even have an extra boost in the form of an extra salary like brazil's 13th salary (decimoterceiro salario) or mexico's Aguinaldo (Xmas bonus), or colombia's "prima navideña".. but they don't need it.. the shopping olympics are on, starting today!

A gallery of [the best?] some curious photos from Google Earth...

2006-11-07T03:01:00.000-08:00

I receive [argh.. daily] the Silicon newsletter (from CNET UK), and found something there today that i'd like to share: a gallery of what Will Sturgeon considers the best of google earth. Start here

Some of the ones I liked the most are The Hollywood Sign, the 'is that a shark in the pool?' one, and the shadow of a man next to his car in Las Vegas

I got a weird sensation when the prisoners in San Quentin look like small fire ants here.. scary stuff!... and less gut-wrenching (but still in the "we're all ants in the universe" category) look at the people gathering at London's Trafalgar Square
.. and the intrigue section of the post features the UFO question on area 51

tbc... (as I need to work and stop watching pictures for now)...

Learning the case for small government.. from one of the masters..

2006-11-03T19:10:00.000-08:00

Jurassic Park(1993) stamped on my mind the image of a mosquito conserved on a piece of amber.. and that memory came up when I found Milton Friedman on this interview, making the case for small government.

This seems to come from an interview circa ~1975, given the reference to Friedman's 1973 public debate with Wilbur Cohen, secretary of Health, Education and Welfare under LBJ. (there's a good nugget on SS paid by the employee).

enjoy!

Video: Milton Friedman on Limited Government
The best case for limited government ever made.

Can't blame a mediocre teacher for not learning how to graph a linear function...

2006-11-03T18:39:00.000-08:00

[no, I won't say that teachers don't matter... but..]
I was wandering on Google Video when I found this post from today, and I can't help wonder that for this generation there are alternatives.

At least some alternatives for those cases when a mediocre teacher is not up to the job. Imagine learning how to plot a linear function.

I am not praising this particular teacher, but imagine being able to check out 10 different teachers on how they deliver their "magic" (teaching), being able to rank them, and choosing the best one.. all on a daily basis.

How fast will the generation of the recently born kids learn if we can remove a bunch of the barriers that we faced when learning? It seems to me that they will learn pretty darn fast!!

video:
Solving Linear Systems by Graphing (5th period)
Mrs. O'Flynn's 5th period Algebra students explain how to solve a linear system in two variables by graphing.

iTunes Latino?... te falta.. te falta...

2006-11-02T15:11:00.000-08:00

with some fanfarre apple announced few hours ago a specific "iTunes Latino" section. My enthusiasm was short lived, it only took me two searches to get dissappointed:

- La Planta, from KAOS ("y te pareces tanto, a una enredadera en cualquier tronco te atoras y le das vueltas con tus ramitas que se enredan donde quiera") was the first strike to my excitement
- not finding Pedro Navajas was an embarassing miss also

As I like these fellas (Apple), I rather give them another shot b4 strike three.. but I'll hold for a while (about 1 week) to see if their catalog really gets some of the core latin songs. we'll see then.

Who reads this blog? ..or at least where from?...

2006-11-02T11:28:00.000-08:00

Google analytics is so cool! Registering is a snap.. and the reports are quite interesting IMHO.

for instance, here the map of where the last 200 visits to this blog came from:

I didn't even know that there was a place called La Laguna off the west coast of Africa!

What google print is good for (2)...

2006-10-31T19:19:00.000-08:00

it took me (literally) years to find again where this comparison between Copernicus, Darwin and Freud came from... and it came with a bonus: finding out how it came from [immodest] Freud himself. The text blow (just for the kicks).. but the amazing think it that it only took <10 seconds in Google Print to find that book

But although his ideas are often dismissed, many thinkers, including the immodest Freud himself, have described his contribution as equivalente to that of Copernicus and Darwin, because all three have systematically dislodged human beings from thinking of themselves as the center and pinnacle of the universe (Burtt, 1954; Butterfield, 1960; Koyre, 1968). Copernicus informed us that the planets do not revolve around the planet Earth, but instead around the sun; Darwin helped us realize that humans are not categorically different from other animals, but instead share common ancestry; and Freud showed how irrational and biologically determined we are, thereby helping us see that our behavior is less intelligente and God-like than we previously thought.

The type of stuff where google print makes a brutal difference (at least for me)...

2006-10-31T19:12:00.000-08:00

I'm talking about the capability of looking up a specific reference in a huge collection of books... solving that uncomfortable situation of knowing that you read something, something very specific... but no idea of exactly where is it that it came from. 'coz what we read grows within us, and we own it!!

"Cuando Lucía Peláez era muy niña, leyó una novela a escondidas. La leyó a pedacitos, noche tras noche, ocultándola bajo la almohada. Ella la había robado de la biblioteca de cedro donde el tío guardaba sus libros preferidos.
Mucho caminó Lucía, después, mientras pasaban los años. (...) Mucho caminó Lucía, y a lo largo de su viaje iba siempre acompañada por los ecos de los ecos de aquellas lejanas voces que ella había escuchado, con sus ojos, en la infancia.
Lucía no ha vuelto a leer ese libro. Ya no lo reconocería. Tanto le ha crecido adentro que ahora es otro, ahora es suyo."
Eduardo Galeano
"El libro de los abrazos"

Dusting off an old problem...

2006-10-30T18:01:00.000-08:00

... I loved this one back in college, a couple of nerdy friends came all excited from the library with this problem.

think about it.. I'll post the solution later in the week:

One day walking in a street, Caesar meets his old math teacher. Happy to meet him, he says hello to the teacher but he doesn't remember that his teacher answers everything with a puzzle:
-- How are you doing, professor? It's been a long time since we don't meet! Are your daughters ok? How old are they now?
-- Multiplying the three ages you get 36
-- But that's not enough to know the ages!
-- So, add up the ages and you'll get the number of that house.
Caesar starts calculating, but still can't figure out. The professor seeing that he wouldn't be able to find the answer says:
-- The oldest girl plays the piano...
That's what Caesar needed to know to figure out the problem. How old is each girl?

a Macbook gets extra life...

2006-10-30T17:46:00.000-08:00

just when my wife was about to throw the towel...(on using her Macbook), Apple posted a firmware update for Macbooks suffering from RSS (random shutdown syndrome).

I digged this story on saturday on RSS and the firmware update:
http://realitycheck.evonet.ro/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=25&Itemid=2.

Also got listed as customer ~1538th at http://macbookrandomshutdown.com/

if you have any friends suffering from RSS, redirect them there... the patch takes <5 minutes to get fully installed, and after it... Macbooks return to their greatness (at least my wife's did)

2006-10-28T20:17:00.000-07:00

Steve singing a different AMAZING [grace]..

.. just after his throat surgery

2006-10-28T11:56:00.000-07:00

um presentinho para os amigos palmeirenses...

o porquinho tem vontade de segunda divisao, hein?

Corinthians vence o Palmeiras - 1x0

You gotta love Wikisource...

2006-10-28T10:12:00.000-07:00

Being able to find this particular story was a big deal for me! I read The Dancing Men from Arthur Conan Doyle back when I was a kid, and I couldn't help but being fascinated by it. (I can't still get rid of the "absurdly simple" qualifier that holmes uses in the first page of it).

Anyway, now the copyright of it has expired, and WikiSource has the short story in the open. here the link, for you to enjoy:

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Adventure_of_the_Dancing_Men

2006-10-28T08:57:00.000-07:00

Aging is merciless...

and now we have in GooTube a big chunk of the collective memory to bring those memories close to us anytime.

Have a look at these famous stars years before they were on the big spotlight.
Now I have a hard time getting off my mind the misaligned teeth of Celine Dion, and Jean Claude Van Damme dancing.

2006-10-23T05:37:00.000-07:00

wow, he DID find the right recipe...

on the day of the 5th year anniversary of the iPod, watching Steve Job's original announcement just reinforces his reputation as a visionary.

2006-10-14T20:16:00.000-07:00

de repente los 50s no se sienten tan lejos...

dificil que pase una noche de tragos en una cantina colombiana sin sentir esta pieza en el fondo en algun momento... yo no hubiera apostado ni siquiera 10-1 a que la pieza original era francesa... pero de un momento para otro mucha musica de Edith Piaf esta disponible en youtube.

Esto le da otra opcion a los bebes del siglo XXI cuando charlen con sus abuelos... el poder VER a que se referian!!.

la letra en frances en: http://fr.lyrics-copy.com/edith-piaf/la-foule.htm

Apropos iWoz: An Evening with Steve Wozniak

2006-10-14T18:30:00.000-07:00

Now that Wozniak's new book (iWoz: from computer geek to cult icon) is out, watch this video. You can almost see his eyes sparking with excitement as he tells the story.

Woz serves up Apple Computer history in his own unique way. Steve will describe a sequence for providing a rational understanding of many of the innovations leading to early Apple designs. He'll look at early company structure, the personalities that influenced him, and personalities within the company. In addition, he'll discuss the reasons he wants to be an engineer for life but not a CEO. Don't miss this sure to be entertaining, informative, and very personal view.

Analyzing Anderson's Long Tail...

2006-09-26T17:29:00.000-07:00

If Newton claimed that the reason why he achieved what he achieved was: ~"If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."... I can't help but think what Anderson's book would be if you substract from it:

- The almost religious admiration that he seems to have for google. I can NOT believe that he didn't mention youtube at all in his entire book.. and it took him almost 100 pages to even mention technorati.. that seems short-sighted to me.

- the obvious influence that Kevin Kelly's book from a decade ago had on him ("Out of control", and especially "New rules for the new economy"... he hardly gets enough for the economy of abundance as opposed to scarcity. It was way more clear for me when I read in longtail.com his review of Kelly's book one decade later

- Alvin Toffler's entire work, from "The Third Wave", but in particular "Powershift"

Once those three things are substracted, other than the cute graphical depiction of what mainstream misses, few things seem really noteworthy.

However, if you haven't read those, The Long Tail would work as a good way of catching up on an interesting megatrend.

2006-09-12T06:32:00.000-07:00

A nice example on building a product (music video+song) awareness with PR and WOM..

OK Go's - "Here It Goes Again" video is getting ~5M video views in about 1 month, plus a lot of the MSM outlets interested on interviewing them (they were in Colbert's show recent).

Yet another example on how a good idea with smart PR and WOM can get famous really fast, and it doesn't take a lot of money

Heard about Bud.tv already?...

2006-09-12T06:19:00.000-07:00

Anheuser-Busch has silently complied and paid the Superbowl tax at hefty rates for quite a good time, and now it seems that they had enough of that.

On 9/6th they issued a press release announcing Bud.tv to come out on February '07. It is promised as a 24-hour live and on-demand programming.

The few that are NOT seeing this as a blow to the established mainstream media giants claim that they will need to pay "MSM taxes" just for acquiring traffic...but judging by the decent initial PR they got, I don't think so.. this seems to me a way cheaper alternative.. a potentially more efficient.

Probably the media planners got busy, since their equation is not now how to fit existing programs in Budweiser's media plan, but how to BUILD new programs for bud.tv.

If the Subservient Chicken from Burger King and OK Go's "Here it goes again" (see post above) have proven anything, is that low-cost productions with well thought word-of-mouth propagation can be REALLY cost effective.

2006-09-11T18:56:00.000-07:00

from The long tail.. of human emotions

Fidel Castro shows honrando al amigo que se fue (Habla del Che tras conocer de su muerte)

complacency (2).. that makes good people screw up!

2006-09-11T17:03:00.000-07:00

Player by player, the brazilian soccer team beats hands down pretty much every other team in the world.. but their performance in the world cup is described by brazilians as dissapointing. what happened?

Well, I dare to say that complacency probably had quite a big role, a friend of mine that lives in brazil had to stand to "what is the date again that we play the final?" when the team was barely in the first round.

And here's a picture that I took recently in a brazilian supermarket: Hexacampeao version of tic-tacs for brazilians.

sure: he has a strong accent.. but his english is not that terrible...

2006-09-10T01:16:00.000-07:00

yet another reason to not believe everything that the mainstream-media (MSM) feed us with: they had me convinced that Uribe's english was just embarassing. I don't think so. Not that he doesn't have an accent, but he certainly can get his points across.

2006-09-01T19:22:00.000-07:00

complacency... that makes talented people really screw up...

when people spend more time celebrating past accomplishments than trying to come up with new ones... bad things are about to happen... watch this video as an example!

The afterparty.. of a nice book

2006-08-31T08:51:00.002-07:00

When I started my [limited] teaching experience, I didn't know about that magic spark of interest that you can see in your students when the "get it". That was a great feeling and a key driver for my motivation as a teacher.

But even before feeling that, there was always something that I always admired among the best teachers that I had: the passion for their subject was visible in their eyes. It was a glowing spark in their eyes, and that was a key complement to the content, and even a complement to the delivery of the content by the teacher. When passion exhuded in their face, the message came across with higher credibility.

I always missed than when reading books. Some claim the movies substract a lot of the creativity and imagination that the reader inserts when reading a book... and hollywood quite often removes a lot of the book's author key messages. But I was more frustated for the opposite reason: I missed seeing that spark in the eyes of the author.

That's why youtube and google video have me that excited recently:

Take "Blink" from Malcolm Gladwell, and the concept of snap reasoning. Reading the book is one good thing... but checking out Gladwell himself in Google video , seeing his gesture when talking about "snap judgements" did add an imagine in my memory to the concept.

Or take professor Cialdini, who wrote a great book "Influence: the psychology of persuasion" in a video excerpt of one of his conferences.

Even non-exciting ones, like Robert Kiyosaki (author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad) get on online video a way of reinforce their messages... and we get a way of feeling closer to them that just reading their books.

Hopefully the merchants of online video don't get too greddy so soon, as Google Video now charges for the high quality version of Charlie Rose's interview to Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner(co-authors of Freakonomics)... will they start charging more for video?

Is Youtube the next Napster?

2006-08-28T19:44:00.000-07:00

Just spent the last 2 hours finding how much has Youtube advanced on music videos... and flashing back to some interesting memories (don't we all do that sometimes when we listen to music?)

Starting with my mom's favorite, Frank Sinatra, singing his classic "My Way" at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_oL8R175PM

Moving to the 21st century, and to the Royal Albert Music Hall, Robbie Williams singing the very same song.. with quite a different style: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_5ooj2PC6s

Back to the US, Aerosmith in one of their greatest videos: "Amazing" @ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAYPUG4RwVs

Now passing by the caribbean, Silvio Rodriguez from Cuba singing "La Cancion del Elegido": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXNk9pSnDuo

Touching Colombia, Juanes in his "A Dios le Pido" video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tf9lP0v-US4

Now way south, Charly Garcia from Argentina singing "Los Dinosaurios", quite loaded with political content:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CKSgMT2mDo

and closing with Zeca Pagodinho in Brasil, singing "Verdade": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nH7jX69u3E

in every single case, either the artist on a live performance, or his/her videos are avaiable to watch with streaming flash... and in a few cases this is way more efficient to get the video that the "organized" music industry itself in LAR... let alone free!

..and btw, it all started for me when I went and watched my brother's "Favorite" video, which ended up being one of the songs described above.

transcending...

2006-08-27T10:51:00.000-07:00

At a time when more than half of the scientists worldwide were employed of either one of the world's only 2 superpowers, a ray of non-political hope came out in the form of a TV series that still today influences future generation of scientists.

Thanks to Ann Druyan, Steve Soter and Carl Sagan who brought Cosmos: A personal Voyage, and more recently to Google video, some of the current infants can open their minds about the Cosmos we live in.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5136506065534776449&q=cosmos

2006-08-11T09:33:00.000-07:00

The ephimeral nature of aging...

If one image is worth more than a thousand words.. does that make a video more than a thousand days (~3 years)?

Better granularity when looking at the time dimension...

2006-08-08T16:03:00.000-07:00

back to high-speed photographs.. but this time we're not talking about video.

Some cool phenomena just passes in front of our eyes so fast, that we kept missing it, until fast-enough photography came to help. Have a look!

read more | digg story

[Yet another] A step closer to seamless transition for Mac-users...

2006-07-30T19:10:00.000-07:00

Messenger on a Mac has been less than desirable, but that is not an obstacle anymore:

this week Skype released their 1.5 Beta for Mac, INCLUDING SUPPORT FOR VIDEO.. and that means that the iSight camera is supported.

There's a nice full-screen video view for the PC on the receiver end...

This is certainly another distance killer (both on the distance from Macusers to the rest of the world.. and from conversations between family members that live far from each other).

Now, as per the things it can improve.. it would be nice to see something more than a small thumbnail of the local video.

2006-07-29T05:42:00.000-07:00

Microsoft listening skills are NOT getting better..

All those who blame Microsoft's poor listening as one of main reasons for the low-quality/stability of their software, now can even claim that it is a genetic problem... at least judging by their coming offspring: Vista

2006-07-21T13:22:00.000-07:00

Nowadays... even tying your shoes can be done faster..

nossa!.. no pais do futebol isso tem que ajudar (quanto tempo perdido em arrumar chuteiras!!..)

Another (this one is addictive) improvement to Youtube

2006-07-20T08:21:00.000-07:00

As if we needed more reasons to be hooked to the screen watching online videos, now they had a very simple idea.. yet quite effective.

They have always had an "Explore more videos" sidebar next to the video.. but it took some effort, and the masses are lazy.

Now they just put the top (in pairs) related videos and they give you the option of just clicking on the video window and go straight to them (once you've seen the initial video you wanted to see).

amazingly simple idea.. and sure it does provide a tangible benefit

Aug 7th: will that be the date/day when Hollywood goes 2.0?

2006-07-18T07:47:00.000-07:00

Apple to announce iTunes movie RENTALS at WWDC (story in the link below from digg):
[That's right folks. MOVIE RENTALS. - Because the movies will be rented and not sold, people familiar with the situation report downloads will be coded with a date stamp that will restrict playback.]

It sure does like a big shake-up. Nicholas Negroponte has been hammered enough for how his apocalyptic vision of a non-future for Blockbuster (he pretty much sentenced them to dissappear in his "Being Digital" book by '95) never materialized. He might have to thank Steve Jobs for that.

If it is true, we have a two-fold story:
- How bloggers keep stealing Steve Jobs' thunder consistently. On an era of blogging-driven transparency and voyeurism, not even Apple Computer's legendary secrecy can stand unscathed the winds of change.
- How apple gives yet-another-proof that they can shape the future the way they want it, with vertical integration (Macs, iPods, iTunes, studio deals).

You can bet that I will be "standing in line" (more like in Digg.com's Spy watchmode ;-) ) waiting to see the first options of movies. At a minimum they should be better than the pay-per-view for movies in Silicon Valley hotels.

read more | digg story

Geographic Arbitrageurs: (re:150 Cheap Places To Live)

2006-07-17T13:49:00.000-07:00

[We've all heard about the wonders of the broadband Web. You can stream video, surf at lightning speeds, search for God-knows-what, get your e-mail in a blink. Here's what you may not know: It can let you live far richer than you probably live now. (read the full article at the end of this post)]
Rich Karlgaard in Forbes "gets it".. but what about adding some other ingredients to the mix:
- There are more chinese kids learning english than american kids at all K-12 levels
- Skype offers now free calls ALWAYS to US and some portions of Europe, and free calls within specific dates to places like Mexico
- Many places in the 20M+ square kilometers of Latin America are way cheaper than the places he considers "cheap". and 9M+ sq km for China alone and the cheap land factor starts to sound intriguing

I can't help but looking at it as: "the big real estate bubble: When the knowledge worker in an emerging market can live great with

read more | digg story

seeing beyond the big, obvious and not-so-telling number...

2006-07-17T10:53:00.000-07:00

Google news lists today more than 50 articles about Youtube.com passing 100 Million video views everyday. I can't help feeling that they are missing the point.

When seeing thru the eyes of traditional media that is probably the key figure to focus on. But i'd like to propose other interpretations that tell more about what youtube means instead of just a huge, and rapidly growing number:

- The top 5 most seen videos ever total 65M+ views.. but we're not talking about video segments ripped from NBC, Fox or other mainstream media outlets. The ones we are talking about include Judson Laipply's "Evolution of Dance" performance, and other 4 examples of content created by amateur users that under normal circumstances WOULD NEVER pass the filter that mass broadcasters tend to use to decide what to broadcast or not.
- PR coverage on youtube used to focus on it become a repository of pirate videos, where the copyright is not respected. While that happens, I can't agree about that being the reason of youtube's growth
- The top 10 most commented videos are also amateur videos, whether great guitar performances, creative editing or just good coreography
- Today's top 20 videos include descriptions in japanese, chinese, french, and english.. demonstrating brutal diversity and challenging the usual assumption of how much people care about their LOCAL contant. this thing is really crossing borders. This generation is really so multicultural that it becomes quite hard to spot where the differences start

what it means to be a virtual listener in this century..

2006-07-10T17:50:00.000-07:00

I have been listening for the last 2 years a daily radio segment from a well known financial advisor in the country in which in live. The guy always have valuable advise on personal finance, savings, the stock market, and what to expect from the day-to-day fluctuations of the markets as they navigate the rollercoaster of economic news that an emerging market has.

But today I got to the office at an unusual time... and I did realize that I had never heard him live. It just happened today. Every single time in the past, it had happened free-of-commercials, and streamed over the web. It was quite unusual.

Is Firefox 2.0 beta a hairball? [missing the google toolbar for a start]

2006-07-10T17:39:00.000-07:00

Testing it sounded like quite a temptation.. and I just did, but I have to confess that not having the full google toolbar (in particular the "I feel lucky button"-the clover w/4 leafs and the monalisa button - google images) is quite annoying. It seems that they don't have a FF2.0-capable version yet.

The tab scroll bar is more discrete than what I expected. That's a good thing.
It is hard to assess speed at this very moment, and I guess that the interaction action will start once I install several extensions.

oh.. and hats of to the "undo close tab" function: that one is REALLY cool!

I'll use it for 1 week and will let y'all know how it goes

Zidane video views update..

2006-07-10T17:35:00.000-07:00

it has been roughly 28 hours.. and videos of Zidane's foul that ended up resulting on his expulsion already are #1, #2, #3, #4, #6, #8 and #9 out of the top 10 of most viewed videos of the week in youtube, exceeding 2.5M views.

that's a quite public way of screwing up..

100 minutes... and 40k+ views ago...

2006-07-09T15:37:00.000-07:00

Zidane started making waves. The clip (its more popular version, since there are several) is already top 10 in youtube.

If he were to choose, probably he would not pick exactly this way to "retire at the top of his game"...

Mais pourquoi? Heroes in the spotlight (with a huge magnification factor)

2006-07-09T14:49:00.000-07:00

It has been barely an hour.. and the scene in which Zinedine Zidane headbulls materazzi in the 2nd extension time of the Soccer World Cup finals already has 11k+ views on youtube.. and is getting digged quite fast on digg.com. It is already (twice) in the top 20 of most discussed videos on youtube.

With hundreds of millions watching, plus the drama of this final being ZiZu's last match (worse, last 10 minutes) and the added intrigue factor of nobody knowing what is it that Materazzi said to him.. this really has the chance of being a "fastest growth ever" in youtube.

A sad way of reacting to provocation.. but does it really make sense to jump on top of Zidane with brutal criticism?

Probably it was an extreme situation (certainly it was from the ratings perspective), but if this society judges its heroes on every blink, every move and every single second they are on the spotlight, it sets an unachievable expectation of perfection; one that note even heroes can comply with.

It might be worth thinking what alternatives did Zidane really have against the obvious provocation trick.

nossa senhora!...

2006-07-08T18:50:00.000-07:00

Despite being on the 21st century, some roads look more like 19th century roads. See this link about what they claim is the most dangerous road in the world (in bolivia).

I guess the world is just not as flat as Thomas Friedman wants us to believe... how on earth can these people eBay their goods out or Amazon other goods in?

source: http://javimoya.com/blog/pics/200607/bolivia.htm

me dijo un pajarito...

2006-07-05T18:43:00.000-07:00

The Apple guys pressed.. but when Judge Conrad Rushing stated:

"We decline the implicit invitation to embroil ourselves in questions of what constitutes 'legitimate journalism," he wrote. "The shield law is intended to protect the gathering and dissemination of news, and that is what petitioners did here."

He gave a lot of space (as he should had) to many bloggers around the world.

So, welcome to an open market of rumours.. probably the same way than tracking markets of "futures" for the outcome of presidential election, or a sport contest start to serve as a proxy for adivination... blogging can take us to greater transparency (from governments, companies, and oh yes.. individuals). I once heard a F500 CEO saying "Privacy? forget about it, it doesn't exist. Get over it".

It would be interesting to see many players from the major visible targets having to dance around "I heard that... " accusations coming from everywhere.

no hagas cosas buenas que parezcan malas?

2006-07-01T03:54:00.000-07:00

El arresto domiciliario del ex-presidente mexicano Luis Echeverria por genocidio (la matanza de estudiantes de 1968 en la plaza de Tlatelolco) levanta una polvareda política bien interesante:

- es un triunfo para el CP Fox, quien apostó a una solución apoyada en las instituciones existentes?
- o es simplemente una gran coincidencia (especialmente el momento en que se anuncia, un día antes de las elecciones

Hay una frase siempre que se usa bastante en México y siempre me intrigó bastante: "no hagas cosas buenas que parezcan malas"

shamelessly biased blogging

2006-06-17T10:27:00.000-07:00

A lot has been said of the big contribution of bloggers to counter-balance the bias of established media... a liberal's dream some say. But, don't you ever want to see some proudly biased blogging? I do:

The Dallas Mavericks are now in the NBA finals for the first time, and Mark Cuban is more proliphic than ever on is Blogmaverick.com blog. With the passion of an insider, with the obsession of a fan. worth checking out.

... and the fact that after leading 2-0 in Dallas their Miami games took the count to 2 for the Mavs and 2 for Miami heat only makes it more interesting

funny flash...

2006-06-07T17:38:00.001-07:00

Sure: there are many flash animations flowing around the Net, but this one is special for a couple of reasons:

It was ABC's videopodcast that seems to have made it famous. A sign of mainstream media catching-up? I don't think so... but they can try, nobody will get hurt
It is really creative.. with sort of "the son of Dr. Frankenstein vs Dr. Frankenstein" tone, a flash animation fighting back its creator.. I guess experienced flash animators will have lots of fun with this

here it is: Animator vs Animation (you'll have to click on the "WATCH THIS MOVIE!" in the right). Author is Alan Becker. Great stuff, alan!

frustration...

2006-06-07T17:03:00.000-07:00

Blogger was down earlier today for about 2 hours. How many thoughts stayed on the ideas limbo in that period?

pausing, rewinding and making your candidate accountable..

2006-06-07T09:03:00.000-07:00

Debates between the top presidential candidates are a big modern institution. They are claimed by some to have played a big factor of Kennedy vs Nixon in the 60s... and now they are just another example of country-specific relevant content that is digitized, posted on youtube.. and that can be paused, forwarded...(or rewinded) as needed.

It would be interesting to see in 2 our 3 years specific videoclips of the promises, while making the elected candidate accountable for his/her promises in the past.

last night's debate for Mexico's presidency is available on 11 chapters in YouTube (the link actually starts on the part II, since the part I is even more of an ad).

For Madrazo, Calderón, and López this is a key photofinish.. for Campa and and Mercado probably their 15 minutes of fame. And for many mexicans abroad, and many non-live attendees, this might represent an interesting new medium to find out about their candidates ahead of the July 2nd elections.

As per the debate quality per se, IMHO: with 5 candidates on the debate, this is more like a staged fight. A good sales opportunity for political marketeers, but all those soft-balls are hardly a way to really see the candidates in action. At least rewinding and pausing might offer some chances to go deeper than the lean-back approach of watching it while sitting in the sofa.

Judson Laipply's 15 seconds of fame... more like 20M views and growing fast

2006-06-06T16:29:00.000-07:00

Jason Laipply calls himself an "inspirational comedian", but he might be inspiring people with something more than his comedy.

His "evolution of dancing" performance on youtube reached today 20M views, and that's a testimony of the power of small guys posting their content on the web. That's more than the 18.1M viewers that the finale of Will&Grace had on TV on May 18th this very same year.. but they were a little-bit-more-expensive to distribute (just the W&G set occupied a space of 14000 sq ft).

and as mainstream media starts to cover Laipply's success more (the Washington Post did yesterday).. there's no sign of slowdown of the number of views in youtube on this video.

and now wormholes in the musicsphere...

2006-06-05T13:40:00.000-07:00

Not that I had time to digest completely that SIP stuff that I mentioned on the last post... years of mankind knowledge processed somehow and it's essence turned into a map to navigate (thru SIPs) every book written (err.. ok, every book that Amazon.com catalogs, which gets close to that), and jump from book to book.

but I wanted to have digested that, since what I bounced with today was even more interesting. It's called last.fm It's hard to simplify evenmore how it works. You tell him an artist that you like, and just press FWD/NEXT: it will take you on a journey through the music industry passing by artists that are "similar".

That "similar" is troubling for me. Somehow this program and/or site is able to find the "essence" of my music taste.. and that is exactly what it uses to navigate. It really feels like jumping from wormhole to wormhole (sorry, last night I saw Jodi Foster again in Contact and the scene is still stuck in my mind) between songs that will most likely... like!.

scotty: beam me up to wherever my "essence" tells you that I would like. cool stuff!, hein?

Fingerprints in the booksphere.. and browsing over mankind's knowledge

2006-06-02T13:46:00.000-07:00

SIPs: I actually saw them for the first time about one month ago.. but only today devoted some brain cycles to digest the potential implications that they have in the way mankinds' knowledge is organized (or at least the old-order of knowlewge, the one based in books).

Back then I was reading (err... listening in audiobook format) Seth Godin's "The Big Moo: Stop trying to be perfect and start being remarkable" and then stopped in an airline VIP lounge. While being lazy enough for taking by notebook out and connected into the hotspot, I found an idle PC and started browsing in Amazon (in the "anonymous-zone" that doesn't remember my history of book purchases).

That's whey I found them for the first time: SIPs are "Statistically Improbable Phrases". Since i-don't-know-when Amazon started cataloging on the books they sell these collections of phrases that seem to tell you in a single glimpse what a book is about, or at least the terms it usees.

An example might be useful: Pick a recent best-seller, like Friedman's "The world is flat" and search for that book in Amazon.com. You'll see that "reform retail", "call center operators", "global supply chain", "flat world" and "triple convergence" are some of the 15 SIPs listed for the book.

If what happened to me allows some liberal generalization of what might happen to you, I bet that SIPs will READ YOUR MIND!!! meaning: if you read the book and made a list answering "What are the key ideas/concepts of the book?" and then look at SIPs, there is quite a high correlation between the two lists.

But what does that mean? IMHO, SIPs "extract" the key information of the book in less than 200 characters [wow!]. Sort of defining the "essence" of a fingerprint (where the vortex is, concavity, etc. insted of a full scanned image of the fingerprint).

And here's another neat trick: if you click on the SIP (it is actually a hyperlink in that amazon search for anybook), you start navigating the booksphere using the SIPs are links between the books. That might have even more potential than the "people that bought this book also bought XYZ book" for cross-selling, or even better.. for accelerating the positive spiral of knowledge building that we call progress.

Germany '06: A different world cup moment?

2006-05-31T16:41:00.000-07:00

It is that time that we see every four years just days before the World Cup. Many warmup matches happen and in many cases there are few surprises.

Anyway, it wasn't much of a surprise to see Colombia (which didn't qualify for the tournament) beating Poland 2-1 yesterday.. but what was really surprising was finding today that the goals of that mostly uneventful match were #1 and #5 of the most viewed video segments in youtube.

I heard Yahoo paid a quite a bunch to FIFA for having the exclusive rights for online media related to the Germany 2006 World Cup... but does that "Media Goliath" have any chance against the "Army of Davids" that will be posting highlights of every valuable piece of video action, video commentary, or gossip in video? I doubt it.

They should get the feeling that the librarians had of power. Having the power to control information that people want. The bad news for librarians was Google (as much as wikipedia has been quite a hit for Britannica and similars)... but I don't really think they have a change.

I'm reading "An Army of Davids" nowadays, from Glenn Reynolds (bloggers extraordinaire, a.k.a. instapundit).

Un génie par lui-même : Dali

2006-05-28T13:29:00.000-07:00

y más del mismo tema:

ahora es posible escuchar a Dalí siendo entrevistado en 1965 (en francés), en una de las múltiples secciones de video que L'Institut National de l'Audiovisuel de Francia ha puesto en la red.

En video tienen tal vez pueden verse con más facilidad partes del Dalí humano. Aquel que revela el motivo de aquel fuerte deseo de sobrasalir que lo marcó toda su vida.

Aquí Salvador Dalí cuenta entre otras cosas la dificultad que vivió en su infancia y adolescencia después de saber que le dieron el nombre de su hermano (el cual había muerto de meningitis antes mismo del nacimiento del artista).

Learning from the masters.. of the previous generation

2006-05-28T12:47:00.000-07:00

I never got to meet him. I wished, but I couldn't.
All I could was read a couple of books written by him, and few magazines with glossy pictures after his dead.

He was probably the most charismatic professor in his area, coming down from the pedestal of nobel-prize-winner and daring to test a different way of teaching his science to undergrad students.

I used to keep some photographs of him in my room while in college, and once bought in amazon a book+CD wanting to try to decipher from his voice how the man was.

Now I finally could see him on video. It was finally possible to get a glimpse of the man, talking about his conviction, what his father tought him.. what is it that "awards" really meant for him.

When things are in video is easier to see the excitement in somebody, the sparks in the eyes, the leaning forward when the most cherished thoughts come to mind.

And all thanks Google Video!: A 49 minutes interview to Richard P Feynman is available in Google Video.

Almost as interesting, the post came to GV from India's Nejaji Subhas Institute of Technology.

Are we starting to see in digitized video a way for the new generation to learn from our father's masters? exciting times to be born.

Eurovision... and latins more connected to the world.

2006-05-24T08:53:00.000-07:00

I didn't know it.. but it turns out that there is a music contest on TV capable of having 1B (yes, one billion people) watching it.

Even more, it was exactly that event that catapulted the music career of Celine Dion in 1988 (representing switzerland) and ABBA in the seventies.

Every year around mid-May, representatives from 40+ european countries (and other european friends) select one representative from each country and enter the song contest.

The rules are emphatical that votes from one specific country -which happen over cell phones mostly- can NOT be for the representative of that country.

Anyway, cutting to the chase, by saturday May 19th, youtube.com had within its top 20 results the full video segments of the final performance of finland, russia, and lituana.

Some years ago, somebody in latin america would have HARDLY known about stuff like this... but if you are among the many that are being born this year.. that is just part of a normal life.

Now I can see it happening

2006-05-19T08:38:00.000-07:00

When eBay bought Skype last year for $4B, the key word in their business justification seemed to be the potential that Skype had for strenghtening the eBay community.

I didn't get it back then. I didn't get it up until 10 minutes ago. Yeah, yeah.. sure I could think about some value added on cheap calls between members, or "call me on skype" as part of the courting involved in the commercial transaction.

IMHO, the sense of "community" was felt much stronger in the case of bloggers. If you are reading a book (like Gladwell's BLINK or THE TIPPING POINT), when you jump to his blog you get the sense of almost real time interaction with a person that you were already "talking to"(in that steady continuous pace that reading a book implies).. that that real time interaction had the sense of community building around a topic.

A more recent case came to me on wednesday, when reading "An Army of Davids" from Glenn Reynolds and finding his comments pretty much real time on the web on immigration and AMLO (aka El Peje) in Mexico: the conversation CONTINUED, the community was formed around a specific interest.

But now I get in on eBay and Skype!!. I found out few minutes ago aboug Skypecasts.
All you need in Skype in your PC/Mac and be connected and:
- 4 hours and 23 minutes from now you can attend the Skypecast on "Network neutrality"
- 5 hours from now "European Citizen's Band Federation Congress Warsawa 21 October 2006"

that is really a community use (around a specific interest). kudos to eBay on that!

zeitgeisting for the masses?...

2006-05-15T11:37:00.000-07:00

live on www.google.com/trends , the trends on searches (in google for a start.. but what-a-heck!, they are the de facto standard) over the last couple of years.

a small list of suggested stops in the itinerary:
- try "katrina"
- try "natal, reiveillon, pascoa" when filtering Brasil
- try "verano, invierno" when filtering Argentina
- try "libertadores"and see the contrast between Brasil and Colombia (Once Caldas won on Libertadores '04 and generated a peak of interest on the topic coming from Colombia), when São Paulo won (then you get a peak on Brasil)
]

this has an amazing voyeuristic appeal (but right now is having a peek into the collective minds of our countries and communities)... in a way that wasn't possible in the past...

dando a volta por cima (the comeback)...

2006-05-02T15:18:00.000-07:00

so many stories have told about Apple (and Steve Job's) comeback.. but this is probably one of the best I've seen so far. I'll pass it at face value from MacDailyNews :

Apple passes Dell in market value
Tuesday, May 02, 2006 - 10:21 AM EDT

On October 6, 1997, in response to the question of what he'd do if he was in charge of Apple Computer, Dell founder and then CEO Michael Dell stood before a crowd of several thousand IT executives and answered flippantly, "What would I do? I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders."

A little more than a month later, on November 10, 1997, new Apple iCEO Steve Jobs responded, speaking in front of an image of Michael Dell's bulls-eye covered face, "We're coming after you, you're in our sights."

On January 13, 2006, after a little more than eight years of hard work, Apple Computer, Inc. passed Dell, Inc. in market value, $72,132,428,843 vs. $71,970,702,760 at market close respectively. After trading places, Apple promptly fell behind Dell as shares of the Cupertino Mac maker were subject to a multi-week bear raid. Today, however, Apple's share price continued its rise while Dell's continued to slip. The result, once again, is that Apple Computer ($60,166,590,800) is now worth more than Dell ($60,061,881,440) in a race whose leadership is likely to oscillate a bit in the near term (before Apple pulls away for good).

ain't it even better (for a comeback) when it goes along an "I told you so... "? wow..

great! (they are podcasting now).. but why not doing it well done once and for all?...

2006-05-02T07:55:00.000-07:00

la noticia sonaba excelente. Caracol radio en Colombia poniendo su contenido en podcasts.

La suscripción en iTunes requirió menos de un minuto... ver llegar en menos de un minuto 6 o 7 noticias diferentes, bajando a mi disco duro, pudiendo ser seleccionadas asincrónicamente.. todo iba bien.

Pero... la forma en que rotularon las noticias es bastante disfuncional, una noticia de 12 minutos acerca de Uribe y Chavez a reunirse en Costa Rica pasa mas de 10 minutos hablando de otra cosa, y el retraso entre la noticia en radio y cuando entra en iTunes es de un dia completo. También es bastante frustrante ver que tan largos son cada uno de los segmentos. Si le apuntaran a que cada segmento tuviera <5 minutos esto podría funcionar bastante mejor.

en resumen, una iniciativa interesante, qué bien que lo estan haciendo. Pero por qué no hacerlo bien hecho de una vez por todas?

Colbert roasts Bush, NYT omits it, youtube gives it a boost...

2006-05-01T20:04:00.001-07:00

Different edits of the same C-Span video made it today (by 11pm est) into the top #20 most viewed segments in youtube, ranked as #1, #4, #6, #10, #17 and totaling >1 million views so far.

On April 29th, comedian Stephen Colbert was the invited speaker for the White House Correspondents dinner, and while standing <10 feet from president Bush he went on for ~30 mins worth of jokes ranging from Iraq to Global Warming... in what has been probably the most daring performance of a comedian in front of a US president ever. The type of performance that (whether or not you approve the strength of his remarks) you can NOT miss.

But The New York Times didn't even bother to mention Colbert's performance on its monday coverage... and many of the mainstream media (MSM) vehicles decide to down-play what happenned... but not the bloggers, and certainly not youtube.

If he wanted to make a point about MSM vs liberal media, he couldn't have planned it better...

That blue curve --> A new era in government accountability?.. tomara que sim..

2006-04-26T19:01:00.000-07:00

~1opmish on a weekday, at home... the TV is on, tuned in bloomberg TV

Brazil's new minister of economy was in New York that very same day, and while I wasn't looking at the screen, he says in portuguese

~"and you can see that the inflation expected by analysts for the next 12 months is slighly below the target... i'm talking about the blue curve in the chart"

what blue curve? the TV wasn't of any help.. they weren't even showing the powerpoint slides... so why not dreaming? why not trying www.fazenda.com.br?

AND THERE IT WAS!! his presentation from the very same day, slide #8 .. market expectation just below the target. that was delightful, really more than expected!!

is that the world that is waiting for a baby born in 2006? cleaner government-to-citizen communication, more transparency on public data? it would be really nice!!

hopefully he/she can hope to be president one day in the future.. and role model accountability in 21st century governments ;-)

Vertical mobility (at hyperspeed)...

2006-04-15T07:13:00.000-07:00

One of the ultimate engines that drive [capitalist?] societies is vertical mobility (moving up the ladder of social and economic status).
tudying hard, and working hard to ensure that you end up Living better than your parents did. Isn't that engrained in almost everybody?, hasn't it driven many parents to invest heavily on the education of their children? hasn't that idea conquered many readers for Horatio Alger novels?

I look at it as the convection in a lava lamp, generating a constant change from bottom to top (and a short stay at the top).

And is the speed increasing? as globalization drives the capitalism dream of getting to the top fast, sometimes even challenging the importance of education, experience and certainly requiring less and less investment capital in every iteration. Empires are built overnight on top of a winning idea, and even the recently established empires seem challenged by the newcomers.

MySpace.com and Youtube.com are rising at an amazing speed in the rank of the top sites with most traffic in the Internet, and one year ago they barely were a blip in the radar. Even when comparing traffic with the much-more-commented video.google.com, youtube as a pure-play video sharing service already has about 3 times as many users.

Can that lava-lamp effect illustrate the changes in the top 100 ranked sites in alexa.org over time? is temperature increasing? do we have a taller lamp? and what would it take for a specific bubble to stay in the top? (probably the unrealistic expectation of a company to keep recruiting and retaining the very best brains in the planet.. quite unlikely!).

Bowiechick's breakup.. and broadcasting from a dorm!

2006-03-23T12:02:00.000-08:00

Logitech esta de fiesta!.. difícilmente iban a encontrar un mejor showcase de los efectos visuales de sus camaras.

El lunes 20, una adolescente de 17 años desde su dorm room (con afiches y bandera británica en la pared) cuenta cómo terminó con su novio.. por andar diciendo una mentirita piadosa.

Pero al hacerlo en video, en youtube.com, y jugando con los efectos visuales de su cámara, logró 160k views in youtube en 3 dias (de los cuales ~50% pasaron en las ultimas 24 horas). La mezcla de autenticidad e informalidad debe ser lo que hizo de este video un hit.

Aquí está el link

CNET ya corrió un artículo/blog al respecto tambien!!

Forget the TV.. things are really happening faster on your PC!!.

2006-03-22T12:53:00.000-08:00

Opa!! faz tempo que fiz o ultimo post. Ahora si tocó:

Mientras estabamos hibernando.. varias cosas estaban pasando:

- 4 or 5 days ahead of the actual Oscars Award Ceremony, the 5 short movies that were nominated were available for download at the iTunes Music Store... that was a quite decent first, especial for being "al sur del Rio Grande"
- Now the only way of seeing Natalie Portman coursing is NOT in youtube.com... NBC gave in an started giving [gratis!!] their jewels in a [desperate?] attept to at least keep the audiences on their site. more @ http://www.nbc.com/Video/ (ex unge leonis).
- iTunes was of no use for trying to find the controversial [and by now famous scientology+"tom cruise, get out of the closet"] episode of South Park.. but www.youtube.com was quite useful for that. here the link
- Fortune Magazine last week states that on Feb 28th youtube.com got 25M videos viewed (not clear if in that single day)... put that together with a growth curve of this shape
- and in a recognition of what for me means "average jane blogs at ease" look here to see the video that had 85k+ views in a couple of days on youtube.. or even better, see the full vlog here

Who needs more realities in Open TV in LAR.. when there is so much wealth (of content) out there?

competition is good! (Google Video store vs iTunes)...

2006-02-25T09:56:00.000-08:00

why buying a Music Video if you can get it for free

and this time MBAs resonates in our heads "why buy the cow if you can get the milk for free? "

try Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody on Google's Video Store here for instance... and btw, forget the iPod obsession.. just think about putting that in tons of PC screens all around the world.. that makes a decent case for a video rental shop on Amphitheater road.

boa musica pra começar o carnaval!

or is it Google Video instead? (links to a couple of jewels..)

2006-02-25T08:31:00.000-08:00

who really wants to watch TV on a saturday morning when there's google video (is it beating iTunes?!) ?

my personal favorite is Google Video (easier to search for content on it ;-) )

un par de joyas!.
"Woz" (Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computer) in an 1:30hr long video. He spent an evening in the Computer History Museum, sharing stories of his pre-Apple and early apple life. amazing stuff:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1406180788960771638&q=wozniak

and they also have a video of Sergey Brin (Google's co-founder) in a lecture at UC Berkeley. it was mostly QnA... it started with an interestion mention to wikipedia
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7582902000166025817&q=sergey+brin