Kaizen Bits

I was reading a couple of biographies of Colombian tycoons such as Carlos Ardida Lulle and Julio Mario de Santo Domingo. Both have common traces: they started with drinking products and they ended up at the media business. The former got rich with Postobon, a drinks company and then bought RCN Television, together with many other companies from textile, building an so on. Santo Domingo, on the other hand, started with Cervecería Aguila, which purchased Cervecería Bavaria and became Cervecería Bavaria S.A., the biggest beer company in Colombia and, after buying 15, 1% of SAB Miller, becoming the second major shareholder of the second biggest beer company in the world. Santo Doming owns Caracol Television, the second private channel in Colombia.

What is this all about? Well, there are four big companies in the country: Organización Ardida Lulle, Grupo Bavaria, AVAL (building company owned by Luis Carlos Sarmiento) and the Sindicato Antioqueño. The two first ones are polarized by these two tycoons with interests in both beer and media, I think it is difficult to compete with a structure where your product can be widely advertised in your media. But also this happens in a country where some other industries (the high-level added value ones) are not developped.
Hence, which sectors could be interesting to invest in Colombia?

Yesterday, I was having dinner and enjoying a good Costeña at La Tienda de Café, in Usaquén, with my friend and former student Juan Camilo. We were talking about how Colombia has lately been opened (slowly, but surely) into the foreign investment business following to political stability. We had a chat on potential business that could make a difference in Colombia.

That very morning I had heard a software business manager from a small Bogota company that there were too many small sofweare companies and they were “canibalizing” each other. But on the other hand, when I talked about cooperation with Universities and innovation programs such as the AVANZA program in Spain, or even EU initiatives, he just was not listening. He said that the strength of a company is selling products and services (nobody is gonna doubt that, though) but Universities just look on the amount of papers published.

This is of course not the first time I hear this argument. I coud clearly hear it from a CTIC manager in a conference two years ago when he was saying academia was all about lots of sheets of paper. And somehow, I think this is extremely untrue. Let me ellaborate.

In the all groups I have worked, there was an interest in Applied Research. This means research is based on real-world scenario requirements and they usually fulfill some needs from companies. Actually, all projects we are involved now do fulfill that premise. This is good for companies because they get money to subvention their R&D (otherwise it is not clear if they would be prone to) but also for Universities to get a grasp of what we are doing and contributing.

I feel quite disappointed about the feedback I am getting in some Latin American institutions, but I guess it is more a work of evangelizing at long term…

Gosh, these months are being terrible in terms of workload, so I am simply not blogging that often. This week, I was giving two talks at the Universidad Libre de Colombia, in Bogotá. First talk was about Cloud Computing and the second one was about the combination of Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web. Both had a lot of attendance and it was great fun.

The thing is I love Colombia. As they say in their motto, “el peligro es que quieras quedarte” (the danger is wanting to stay for good). I visited Colombia end of August after a trip to Venezuela and I found many things thrilling. People are great and extremely polite, food is gorgeous and the booze and the party (rumba) is also top class.

This time, I flied Avianca (strange enough, they serve no whiskies or alcohol in between meals) and when I arrived I understood the tremendous potential of this market. Unlike Mexico which powerfully stated brands such as “tequila”, Colombia has not opened to mass tourism and foreign investment till a few years ago, simply because the political situation made it impossible.

Nowadays, security has improved exponentially, prices are stable and very affordable and all what remains is a horrible “brand” of the Colombia naming. Mentioning cities such as Medellin makes people shiver and ask you how is it possible to be that crazy. Well, for what it is worth, it is crazy not visiting it

I was in London this weekend and I couldn´t wait to come back and get hands on to shout loudly and widely: Lond has changed, London is Spanish. Let me explain.

First time I went to London, I enrolled on a Business English course at the prestigious Central School of Lond in Tottenham Court Road. It was a great experience, to the point that the city of the Thames became my favourite destination and for many years, my favourite city.
In one of the lectures, we were discussing what our country was producing in a very multi-national environment. I partnered with a (very attractive) German girl who pointed out that Germany exported cameras, TVs and mostly, cars. “What does Spain produces?”. There was a huge silence in the class. Among them, my friend Panizo. We were unable to say. I mumbled “sun” and “olive oil” if I remember. But got quite ashamed.

Now we are back to 2009 and I am strolling along Oxford Street with my parents and brother from Oxford Circus to Tottenham. And I simply can´t believe what I am seeing. There are four fashion shops in a row: Mango, Berskha (Grupo Cortefiel), Zara (Inditex) and Massimo Dutti (Grupo Cortefiel). The four are Spanish. Just in front, there is an O2 shop (O2 was bought by Telefonica in 2005). But mostly, and boy, this is amazing. There is an Abbey bank branch with the red flame of Santander. Amazing. How the world has changed, how Spain has become a top world economy in these last ten years. Simply, it is amazing.

I am just back from Lisbon, where I was attending the WEBIST09 and I can´t help scribling here a few thoughts about Lisbon, and in general, about Portugal.

I think the best way of describing the relationship between Portugal and Spain was a motto which become popular end of the eighties in a tourism campaign: “Portugal, España. Tan cerca, tan lejos” (Portugal, Spain. So near, so far). Usually, neighbour countries detest each other. That is a fact. They fought, they had wars and problems, they shared resources. But with Portugal, very differently to France, Spain simply ignores the country. Not hate. Simply oblition. I am not sure what is worse.

Portugal is still quite behind, in my opinion. It is a ten million people country and a service economy, fair enough, but you can still see many signs that is backward, let´s just mention three: a) Paying with credit card was not normal and they always had to bring the VT and look awkward, b) Cars (specially taxis) were Mercedes from the 90s and c) parts of the city look real shabby.

On the other hand, I loved Lisbon. It´s a really cool Mediterranean-style city, with its bohemian areas, like the Bairro Alto, a marvel of small tascas and restaurants with vibrant nightlife. Also, la Baixa and the area of the Catedral de la Sé were very enthrilling.

It is a great place to visit for a few days. IMO, there are much better places to stay longer but of course, like most traveling destinations it is a great experience to get to know and chat (or blog) about .

I never wrote about books, so it is time to wrap up on the summer readings. Firstly, the guilty of me being in Bangkok while physically in Sydney was John Burdett´s masterpiece Bangkok 8.  The book is centered on the philosophical Thai Buddhist detective, Sonchai Jitpleecheep and it is quite a source of knowledge about Bangkok. I saw it in a shop at the Dusit Thani hotel, where I was staying and bought it.

Secondly, I am also finishing with Bill Bryson “Down Under” simply to have yet another way out to understand the Aussies. I found the book entertaining and showing light to some aspects I had not become acquainted to, such as gambling addiction and the Australian outback.
No more reading, except a bunch of papers, but that´s not worth telling…;-)

This bunch of code by Aza Raskin seemed to be very interesting. It is a social browsing history working with the find-your-site query system and it is handy to modify and install on the server (thanks, Aza!!).Probably the bad thing is a CSS leak, as Aza explains: “By using a cute information leak introduced by CSS. The browser colors visited links differently than non-visited links. All you have to do is load up a whole bunch of URLs for the most popular social bookmarking sites in an iframe and see which of those links are purple and which are blue. It’s not perfect (which, from a privacy perspective, is at least a little comforting) but it does get you 80% of the way there. The best/worst part is that this information leak probably won’t be plugged because it’s a fundamental feature of the browser·.
Interesting enough, I am using this code for a code snippet I am doing for a paper (yes, I can still do some programming. No, I don´t love it ).

(I think this post was an excuse to show the beautiful Bondi Beach, in Australian winter!!)

Well, it is ages I should have informed that since beginning of August, I am on a research staying at the New South Wales University (http://www.unsw.edu.au/) in Sydney, Australia, working with the Service Oriented Computing Group led by Prof. Benatallah.

I am currently living in Bondi Beach, a cool surfing beach, east of Sydney. Regarding work, I will be doing a fair share of it, particularly on the Cloud Computing area, as most of you would presume.

Last week I was in Bangkok, a city I was unaware of, despite last year I stayed there with a fried for one night on our way to Laos and Cambodia.  I was again impressed to see the “leapfrogging” in South-East Asia. TRUE is a Thai telco with plenty of small retailing shops over the city where they offer fresh coffee and Internet. It also has a very good offer in terms of telecom services.

In Si Lom Road, by my hotel, the Dusit Thani, I was visiting a couple of times the TRUE network stations. The quality of service was very good and there were hundreds of Thai Internet fiends working right there!!

NB: A side note is deserved by Noodi, the Thai noodle bar chain. Boy, I am a total addict of noodles, why is nobody opening something like this in Madrid?

Same as last year, I was lecturing at the Master de Ingeniería de la Web at the Universidad de Oviedo. I appreciated very much that Labra invited me again.

I had a terrific time and introduced a number of changes from last year, particularly I talked about new stuff such as Cloud Computing and the ever-growing possibilities of service computing, things I have already blogged about.

Yes, the picture is not from Oviedo, despite I love Asturias, I had no time to take a picture…