Carlos Domingo - Un poco de todo

I just read two related blog posts (Calacanis here and Blodget here) and I share with them the view (out of my own past professional experience) that the recent market correction might have a large impact into the revenue stream of most Internet companies. Why? Well, if you run a company (and I am talking about a regular, any kind of company, not necessarily an Internet company) and the market slows down for a reason, you most likely need to reduce cost temporarily to mantain your cash flow level. Where do you take it? Well, there are not many places where you can do so without firing employees (which is usually a very last minute thing after you have tried everything else since that is very painful not just for the people leaving but also for the people staying and for the managers executing and communicating that to the company). In the P&L you have got what is referred to as the “controllable expenses” which are all the expenses that you can theoretically control like travel expenses, legal, contractors, etc. but unless your company is in a very special business that uses tons of lawers or relies heavily in contractors, controllable expenses are just somewhere around 5% of your total expenses. So there is not much you can do just reducing controllable expenses. What else? Well, the marketing budget. That is typically a place you can cut temporarily without raising any panic around the office and without doing something that might have long term impact into your business. So when the economy slows down or there is a sign of recession, companies tend to first reduce marketing costs and that also means online marketing costs. This then will mean less revenue for Google, Yahoo! and any other Internet company that relies solely on online advertising revenue (which means 99% of the Web 2.0 companies). Blodget mentions that after last crashed 50% of online advertising revenue vanished overnight. I do not think that it will be this bad now (first, we are just on a “correction” and not clear whether this will be a long term crash) but still we might see either reduction or much smaller growth on that market which might also impact valuations of companies like Google, M&A activity and VC activity so the Web 2.0 bubble (or sort of) might burst.

CD

Share on Facebook

When I first began blogging back in November 2005 after two years of actively reading blogs but not participating was because attending the first Mind Camp triggered my desire to participate in the blogging community not just as a voyeur but as a contributor. That year of blogging allowed me to learn about the medium, my interests, my communications habits and style and how quickly people find your blog on Internet without you ever tell them that is there.

Last year my blogging activity has dropped to levels that even David Sifri´s from Technorati, with his generous definition of what a live blog is, will probably agree that my blog was dead. My last post was in March this year and the overall activity since last summer was very low. Another problem was that since my blog appears now first in Google when you search for my name, having a dead blog there did not reflect very well, so I was thinking about completely removing the site from the Internet.

A great deal of personal and professional changes have happened to me in the last year since I moved back to Barcelona and joined Telefónica and I have been using that as a self-excuse for not blogging.

So why the blog restart?

I just came back from attending the 11th edition of Campus Party in Valencia and being there has again spurred the need for being active part of the Internet community as attending Mind Camp did back when I was in Seattle. Campus Party was a great event and I had the chance to participate not just being there but attending the opening ceremony (so I saw the now famous “I am Deivid from Tenerif” life, you can see it in You Tube here), organizing a visit with some Telefónica executives on Tuesday (some pictures here), sponsoring some development and robotics competitions and participating in the jury and in the awards ceremony (pictures of that here). Campus was great and it made me realize that the Spanish Internet community, although smaller, can be as active and creative as the US one, that I was more familiar with, and the finding has made my job suddenly much more interesting. And I want to be part of that community. Also being there was a great opportunity to spend a great time with the organizers, Paco, Belinda, Alejandro, Marcelo, Richard, David, Miguel Angel, etc. and with some friends and colleagues like Raul, Oriol, Pablo, Fernando, Mario, Juan Carlos, etc. the gang from Telefonica R+D Barcelona and tons of other people that I met there so restarting my blog is a great way to keep in touch with them.

For the time being I am using the same blog platform even though I am not particularly happy with it (and it is not free) but I will leave changing to some other platform for a later time. I had a more urgent need to start writing than to get up and running a more fancy platform. Alternatively, I have decided to set up a Facebook account since I had lots of recent request to join Facebook from friends the last few months. Even though is still a bit buggy, I was impressed with the site, how easy is to configure and add third party apps to your profile after they opened up the platform, great move from their side and even tough lately some prominent bloggers are claiming some Facebook fatigue I think that the time you spend updating the site is worthwhile so I will stick to it for a while. You can find me here in Facebook and feel free to link to me.

So, here we go again.

Welcome to Carlos Domingo’s Un poco de todo Weblog, V2

PS.- Geek test: Which famous post was the source of inspiration for this post? Post the response in the comments section, the prize is that I will consider you from now on a true Internet geek.

Share on Facebook

The above “couch-potato” is the image of the blog of Meevee, a startup that is trying to solve the problem of what to see on TV in a world with IPTV, cable, Internet TV and YouTube and its millions of clones. The site is pretty cool and useful (not working for European countries at the moment though) and the problem they are tackling a huge and interesting one but their choice of the couch potato image (specially that underwear…) a very questionable one.

CD

Share on Facebook

Profesor Watanabe has finalized his method for efficiently index and provide an index number to each Sudoku problem (I wrote about a discussion with him on the topic I had last summer here). The number of different Sudoku problems (and solutions since each problem has only one solution, the reason why it is so interesting) is 6,670,903,752,021,072,936,960 and it was already discovered in 2005 by Bertram Felgenhauer and Frazer Jarvis and now what Watanabe-sensei has discovered is how to efficiently assign a number to each Sudoku problem, a task that obviously cannot be done efficiently looking at each solution due to the huge amount. You can see and try their method here.

CD

Share on Facebook

Have a look at the video above (courtesy to yet another new video based UGC startup that is going to eat Gootube, the 137th by my latest count) and you will be amazed at how that 2 year old kid is using Flickr. When I was young (but admitedly, not that young) I played with my ZX81 and later my loved Sinclair Spectrum, kids now use Web 2.0 apps, pretty cool.

This video came via Fer Martin´s blog.

CD

Share on Facebook

Share on Facebook

 The 3GSM conference is coming next week to Barcelona so it will be a very busy week with lots of meetings, visits, events, etc. Among them, Mobile Monday is celebrating its Mobile Monday awards at Telefonica´s Espacio Movistar in Barcelona. Below you have the invitation, I am part of the jury of the awards so I will be there. Don´t miss it, I look forward to see lots of familiar faces around!!!

CD

Talent, creativity and innovation know no boundaries and MobileMonday selected 24 of the best mobile start-ups from the four corners of the world to present their most innovative product/service at the Global Peer Awards 2007, to be held on February 12th at the Espacio Movistar in Barcelona.

Top-level companies have been through a selection process organized at the local MobileMonday chapter level. Finally, finalists have been chosen from Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, Finland, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Russia, Singapore, Spain, Switzerland, Thailand, Turkey, the UK, the Ukraine, and the US.

You can download the complete list of presenting finalists, program, jury bio’s and location details here.

The 3-minute ‘elevator pitch’-style presentations will be moderated by Caroline Lewko, from the Wireless Industry Partnership. The live event will award three prizes: Jury Favorite, Audience Favorite and MoMo Community Favorite. The Jury consists of some of the most recognized mobile industry experts and thinkers.

Another award will be given for the Carnival of Mobilists‘ “Host of the Year“. The Mobilists, as they like to call themselves, is a group of top-notch bloggers writing on mobility, who have an enormous impact on the blogging community and have done a lot to bridge, reveal and support the latest in mobile innovations.This half-day event is open to all who register at http://peerawards.mobilemonday.net/ and will be followed by a networking cocktail. Over 600 mobile professionals, press, analysts, and investors have already registered to attend.

Program
2:00 pm - Registration and pre-networking
3:00 pm - Welcoming messages

3:20 pm - Start of the presentations

(3 slides/3 minutes elevator pitch per speaker + jury intervention)

5:30 pm - Networking Cocktail

7:00 pm - Awards

MobileMonday Chapters Award
Carnival of the Mobilists Host of the Year Award
Jury Award introduced by Reitek
Audience Award

7:30 pm - Closing doors

Our thanks to Telefónica Movistar for hosting the event and to 22@Barcelona and Reitek for their fantastic support as a Premium Sponsor and Nexit Ventures as Silver sponsor. Barcelona Media, Ajuntament de Barcelona and CIDEM - Generalitat de Catalunya, provide invaluable additional support.

Share on Facebook

I just came across Blaugh, the self proclaimed (un)official comic of the blogosphere, with Brad Fitzpatrick and Chris Pirillo behind it, it is pretty funny and certainly worth reading, I am surprise I have not seen this before.

One think that I like of this site/blog is that it is so Web2.0 not only on its content (and sense of humor about it) but on they way to promote it. They have implemented pretty much everything you need to virally promote the site and the content, here is a list since it is one of the most completes I have seen:

- RSS feed (pretty obvious)

- HTML Code to add one of their comics to your blog (also pretty common but enhanced with different versions of the code so you can add it in different sizes, not that you need that but….)

- Code for adding it to MySpace (fairly common)

- A box to add your email for receiving updates via email (although pretty obvious, a feature that is missing in many websites and blogs due to the use and abuse of RSS)

- A one-click link to add it to your Google home page (useful but it will be nice if they had the same one for Yahoo! and MSN to make it even more complete)

- An API to write your own widgets (starts getting sophisticated)

- A Wordpress sidebar widget (presumably written with the Blaugh API mentioned above), pretty useful… for Wordpress users, anyone up for writing one for Typepad users?

CD 

Share on Facebook

I do not like blogs that just repost links from other blogs but reading Techcruch I came accross these pretty good sites that infer which superhero and which supervillian are you after a set of questions and I thought that it was cool enough and will not get much distribution that it was worth post it here. Moreover, I am also disclosing my results below. So next time you see me, careful with me I am a “wanderer with
amazing strength” and “a brilliant businessman on a quest for world domination and the self-proclaimed greatest criminal mind of our time!”.

You are Hulk

Hulk 75% Iron Man 75% Superman 70% Green Lantern 70% Spider-Man 65% Catwoman 60% The Flash 60% Supergirl 52% Wonder Woman 47% Robin 44% Batman 40%

You are a wanderer with amazing strength.

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Test

You are Lex Luthor

Lex Luthor 84% Dr. Doom 80% Venom 69% Green Goblin 68% Apocalypse 65% Mr. Freeze 64% The Joker 60% Juggernaut 60% Magneto 58% Riddler 54% Kingpin 53% Mystique 52% Dark Phoenix 50% Catwoman 43% Two-Face 40% Poison Ivy 35%

A brilliant businessman on a quest for world domination and the self-proclaimed greatest criminal mind of our time!

Click here to take the Supervillain Personality Quiz

CD

Share on Facebook