After a long voting period, readers have favoured CK and Fruit of the Loom as their preferred underwear.

I was surprised by the few votes GAP received. I really like the ones I bought a year ago.

Anyway, by the time I went shopping to Walmart, Fruit of the Loom (FotL) was still winning. Plus, FotL is probably much less expensive than CK. So I got me some FotL, which I proudly present at the following picture:

There I am, with my “calsones” at JC’s, Vista, CA. Good thing I uploaded this picture before my notebook was stolen… it is one of the few pictures of my California trip that survived my personal OLPC project.

Tomorrow, Feburary the 14th, is MY BIRTHDAY. And then, in some parts of the world, it’s Valentine’s day. If you are one of the blog readers currently in Uruguay, you are all invited to the party!!! That’s right! All three of you!

It will be at Moove-IT offices, at Juan Spikerman 2324. 9:30 PM. Pizza and beers on the house!

The last day of the year and here I am, trying to get some work done; alone at the office, and with all the bandwidth for me. So in between downloads of the summer music for my ipod, and sporadic chats with other pathetic friends connected today, the client proposal is almost done.

So much work was left behind because of the OpenCoffee MVD Show (a big success by the way), that I never found time to write the post about it here. And this isn’t it either. This post is to share the feeling of accomplishment and happiness that comes from taking some time to review this past year; regarding the big professional changes that took place in my life.

In summary I wanted to write that, as many say and suspect, taking control of your business, embark in a startup, and take the risks of entrepreneurship in general is very rewarding, despite sacrifices and harder work.

2007 was the turning point for me. Even though Moove-IT is now over two years old, just this year I came to work full time for myself. The projects involved, the professional challenge and, specially, all the new people met; are what made 2007 and awesome year.

We have set many goals for our company (Moove-IT), and I have done the same for myself. So 2008 will be a hard working year around here. But I’ll be in touch and hope to hear from you, my readers and my friends. Next three weeks will find me in La Aguada, Rocha, so very little witting is guaranteed, but lots of fun. You are all invited to come!

Happy 2008 for all!

Internet is amazing. I learned about the deployment of the first OLPC batch here in Uruguay through Techmeme->Ivan Krstić’s blog. And I live here!

Ivan’s article is inspirational and exciting. I absolutely believe in the OLPC program, and will do what it is at my reach to support it. There are lots of good people here that I know will join in volunteering to help as the program advances.

On the other hand - and I know this level of honesty is dangerous - part of me wanted to title this article “I gave a Laptop to a child before you!” and start with another tale I wanted to share this week: a very young boy (8 years old according to police suspicions), broke into my apartment last Wednesday night (while Carolina and me were sleeping) stealing cash and my brand new Sony Vaio. Of course I risk being accused of being a bitter-sarcastic-smart ass geek (hey, maybe you are right!) but my feelings remain.

So what’s my point? Of course: giving a Laptop to every child will not solve our bigger social problems (half our children will still be poor tomorrow) but I believe that it is an excellent tool for increasing their future opportunities. So, while I would like to have all my geek friends helping with the technical aspects of the Ceibal/OLPC project, lets take the opportunity to try and share more than our technical knowledge: lets try and convince these children of the benefits of education, work, honesty and entrepreneurship. How? With our examples, our stories, and our REAL help.

A culture of begging and stealing is gaining a strong hold in our society. I will not argue this fact with anyone: denying it implies you either have not been to Uruguay in the last 80 years, or you are a politician at government with some odd stakes.

Lets fight this reality above all, by any means, at every chance we get! The Ceibal/OLPC project is a good opportunity. Lets use it well my friends!

I will help as many kids I can at their school, but will still make them clear that I will not forgive and will gladly help in the detention and punishment of whoever breaks into my house and steals my hard earned 800 dollars laptop and stuff. These are both promises.

I met a Conrado yesterday. It was the second time in my life I shake hands with a Conrado. It felt like a historic moment. The first time was at a summer party in Rocha. I remember having quite a few drinks that one night. Wait! Maybe he is the same Conrado… oh darn!

Good thing we have LinkedIn now.

Well no, I didn’t post anything here during the trip to Chile, nor did I write much for the two weeks I’ve been back home.

The “3 nations tour”

The “3 nations tour” - which actually became the “4 nations tour” since we entered Brazil briefly because we were afraid crossing by Argentina could have been an issue - was a LOT of fun, astonishing, rewarding, and exhausting.

We reached Iquique after five days of tripping.

Of course we had some fun on the way. In Argentina we stayed at La Cumbre (Cordoba), Tucuman, and Susques (a tiny town in Jujuy, near the Chilean border, 4000 meters above sea level!).

In Chile we passed by San Pedro de Atacama (very popular among world tourists), and crossed what is mostly (a marvelous) desert on the way to Iquique. Once there my buddies stayed for four days while I left the group for three days of business in Santiago, and after flying on two occasions only. Unpopular but necessary decision. I’m still “paying the dishes”.

Oh, I did write a little, in Spanish. We put up the 3 nations tour blog, but it has very few posts yet.

Then we came back… and then the OpenCoffee MVD Show happened to me.

The OpenCoffee MVD Show

The OpenCoffee Club at Montevideo keeps growing. Plus, before leaving we had the great idea of putting up “a show” (no, seriously, it is great). The idea is to have a showcase for the startups we talk about all the time, and invite investors and/or anyone interested in hearing our ideas. The thing already grew out of proportion, so it has taken a lot of my time.

So that’s it. My new excuses for not writing much. Or maybe I am not really a writer type. Hum, no, that’s not true. I wrote a lot at the OpenCoffee MVD site. And we put up (both in Spanish) a Wiki and a Bloog at Moove-IT. I see, my issue is with English then. Anyways, I’ll be around.

Saturday night here in Uruguay. Carolina requesting my attention while I try to write something on the blog. Me feeling guilty I am writing so little at MeTheGeek.

Next Wednesday we leave on a hang gliding trip, eight flying buddies and me. We are going to drive all through northern Argentina and Chile, all the way up to Iquique. We plan on being back November 11, good luck by our side. I’ll flee the group for a busy two business days in Santiago, trying to find resellers for Moove-IT’s brand new mForestal (Online Forestry Management Service - Spanish only yet).

I e-mailed a lot of pictures and tales about California, but never got to post anything here. That’s weird uh?

Right after getting back from California I helped fund Montevideo’s OpenCoffeClub. It’s been over a month now, and very successful. Why I didn’t write about it here, beats me.

What’s going to happen to the blog during the trip? I don’t know. Maybe I’ll write more than this past couple of weeks’ average, or maybe flying and pranks will take too much time, like work is doing right now.

The previous post (Gloablization , Customer Experience and Enteprise 2.0) was done by my friend Amir; the first guest blogger. Amir and I met in California in August. He is a very smart guy, hoping to find the challenges he is up to, in the Silicon Valley. If anybody else wants to be a guest blogger, let me know, I’ll be glad to consider the entry. Please take the time to read the about section of the blog for grasping the topics we cover.

Marcos and Ignacio are doing a very good job at OpenGoo. I have the third alpha on my hands to test and upload to sourceforge since yesterday! We drew a very cool schema at home last Thursday that is going to rock the OGoo community. We finally came up with a roadmap, also waiting to be published.

The above, and the fact that none of Facebook’s, Apple’s, Msft’s or Google’s latest news caught my interest, are my excuses for not posting more lately. But which are yours for not even commenting, eh?

Today while enterprises are increasingly going global in IT outsourcing, supply chain and customer services operation, there is a growing need to improve global productivity, collaboration and business processes. The Yankee Group calls it “Enterprise Anywhere” - the trend where global companies leverage their global resources to optimize their global operation.

So, where do Open Source Web 2.0 applications come handy in the enterprise world? It is by increasing global usability, collaboration and productivity. One specific area which seems like a natural fit is the Enterprise Global Customer Experience or CEM (Customer Experience Management).

One of the main customer experience challenges for global enterprises is to be able to capture and integrate all the customer experience history and intelligence from different information sources like ERP customer service module and CRM systems into one global source of Global Customer Experience Intelligent Unit. This unit can be leveraged to capture innovative product and customer service ideas and most importantly improve customer experience processes and customer satisfaction.

Another area where Open Source Web 2.0 applications can be very valuable is the ability to create or integrate to a Master Data Management (MDM - a master source of customer experience data that can be leveraged across the enterprise from both front end and back end ERP/CRM systems) to capture personalized customer experience and interaction intelligence data and use it to improve customer experience processes (CEM), customer satisfaction and loyalty.

By Amir Ben-Mordechai

There are a couple of interesting news this morning regarding the Web Office field. Adobe is buying a company called Virtual Ubiquity, developer of buzzword, and online Word Processor that runs on Adobe Flex (Flash).

Microsoft is announcing an online file management service. It will probably look a lot like the Google Apps file manager. It makes a lot of sense: it can’t get much better than that at the moment. What it still does not offer is the online editing of documents.

There are many critics that can be done to both services. It all has to do with the agendas of these -too big- players.

Adobe is trying to push its Flex thing. They did such a good job with Flash that they think they could own a bit of the Internet this way.

Microsoft is trying to keep you buying the three digits licenses for their Office Suites, so they can’t give you a better product for free.

In pursuing more than one goal with their products, it will be very hard to focus for these two. Yahoo+Zimbra, Zoho, ThinkFree, still more players to come, and my beloved OpenGoo; all have better chances on succeeding in this field. They are focused.

This seems to be the discussion of the week on the Internet. Right? At least judging from this Techmeme thread.

John Panzer linked the Wikipedia definition of the Graph Theory on this discussion at the “Social Network Portability Group”. That motivated me to give it a quick read. If you go the the Applications section, you could find this paragraph:

A graph structure can be extended by assigning a weight to each edge of the graph. Graphs with weights, or weighted graphs, are used to represent structures in which pairwise connections have some numerical values. For example if a graph represents a road network, the weights could represent the length of each road. A digraph with weighted edges in the context of graph theory is called a network.

My connections to people are all weighted, and usually with more than one variable. It is not just that you “know” the person, but you always weight them (Do you “love”, “like”, “barely know”, “wouldn’t recommend”, “hate” somebody?).

So reading the last part of the quote leaves me no doubt that when modeling personal connections we should use a network, not a simple graph.

Verdict: “Social Graph” is wrong (incomplete). “Social Network” is, at least, more accurate.

My thanks to Dave Winer to get me thinking about this with his funny article. It was a fun geek exercise!