Recently, I have seen quite a few good movies. I was bewitched by the sad and fascinating Laberinto del Fauno, struck by Forest Whitaker's thrilling performance as Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland and surprised by the smart and perfectly staged Lucky Number Slevin. However, today I have found my favourite: The Lives of Others.

This German movie tells about a Stasi captain in the DDR who is in charge of spying on a famous theatre director. Originally cold, perfectionist and emotionless, he starts to like and feel for the "objects" he has to observe. I don't want to tell no more about the story, just that this movie is very well made and deserved the Oscar it won this year without a doubt.

In my point of view, the movie makes a very good point how personal lifes and careers can depend on the goodwill of the ones in power. Although the story plays in the old days of the Democratic Republic of Germany, it should not be forgotten that this is still reality for people somewhere else right now and we should not wait to act against it until we watch a movie about it. Because then it will be already too late...

I'm amazed AND pissed off. It just needed a moment of lack of attention and this prehistoric Web 0.5 community sent an invitation email to all the contacts of my Gmail account! I seriously thought such sites don't exist anymore but apparently I was wrong. Tagged.com makes use of nearly all the big DON'Ts of the industry: blinking ads, pop-ups, spamming the users, etc.

But from the beginning: I am at work and get an invitation from Tagged. Curious as I am, I sign up and the site asks you if you want to check with your address book which of your friends are already in this community. Somehow I don't pay attention and accept to send an invitation to all the other contacts. Minutes later I get the first emails "Dude, this is kind of spammy", "A lot of advertising in there, don't you think", etc. I log in myself and see the most disastrous community I have seen in a long time.

So I take this opportunity to apologize to all the people who got an invitation. It was not on purpose. Next time you see me and greet me with the words "You've got Tagged" I invite you for a beer. I hope that's a deal.

I don't even want to link to them because that would be actually a favour to them, but I just warn you: Avoid this "service" by all means.

P.S.: One thing I like about them. You have the possibility to cancel your account, which I just did, and they actually ask for the reason why you are about to cancel your account. I wrote: "You tricked me to send an invitation to all my contacts. Your site includes pop-ups and blinky, sleazy ads. Dudes, we are not in the '90s anymore."

Here is one of the worst articles that I have recently read about Google's business model.

The message is practically that Google gets rich because it "uses" other peoples information, while the truth is rather that Google organizes the information so that it becomes more accessible and useful for internet users. It's pretty obvious that the vast majority of people actually WANT to get ranked well by Google's search engine (be it as an advertiser or in the organic results) and not the other way around. For some, a good ranking is their major revenue driver...

However, it's especially curious that Mrs. Bogatin quotes the people from Microsoft to stress her argument. A company that runs a search engine with the same business model and that would die for Google's market share.

Mrs. Bogatin should not have hung out so much with the Microsoft folks at Stern school. It did not reflect well on her journalistic skills.

I had heard of Nicholas Negroponte before and also of his 100 US$ Computer, but I did not realize that this is such a fantastic project! I am absolutely for it.

Computers (and food!) for the children of the world!

Read here the Wiki article about the Children's Machine.

Directly from the source...



Gmail Open Sign ups now worldwide ;-)

Today I held a presentation at the Chamber of Commerce in Murcia about "How to sell on the Internet (with AdWords)". I think it was quite a success: It was attended by some 60 people and together with the presentation about Search Engine Optimization by our partner Victor de Francisco (Reexporta, article about the event on their page) we gave the participants an idea of what kind of (commercial) opportunities the web provides for a typical SME.

Although I know that I stepped in for my boss, I still wonder how I became the "Director of Products of Google Spain" so fast ;-)

Interesting (not live changing, though) and sometimes funny presentation of Seth Godin (author of All marketers are liars) at Google Campus from last year. All the great guest speakers would definitely make it worth to spend some time working in Mountain View/ California.