BrainSick

An interesting article, written by a Nobel guy - Joseph Stiglitz - about one of the darkest legacies of the Bush administration, the Economy.

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Business Week has published an article that tries to give an idea about what China might look like in 2035, that I think is very interesting to read.

In our lives, to set a course, we need to try to understand the impossible, i.e. the future. It’s an ungrateful work, but is essential to be done.

Portugal is a small country, that belongs to the European Union and has the luck - for several reasons - to have excellent relations with Brazil, PALOP and China.

The weak economic growth - but consistently positive - that Portugal is having on the last several years, was mainly due to the exports to the BPC (Brazil, PALOP and China) countries.

Thats why it’s so important for a company - that as exporting potential or internationalization ambitious - to study the future (with all the errors and uncertainties), so it can set its course and strategy.

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I finished reading the book Never Give Up on Your Dreams, by Augusto Jorge Cury, and again I was impressed with this Brazilian physician. Cury does not only score in Psychology and Psychiatry, but also on writing.

He can explain knowledge, that is usually only accessible to a bunch of area experts, in a clear and simple (but not simplistic) way. As an excellent story teller, Cury wrote a very interesting book.

Cury shows why day dreams - those that we have when we are not sleeping - are the base to Human motivation. To be mentally healthy, motivated, intelligent, creative and happy it’s crucial to embrace these dreams.

These kind of dreams give us strength and hope in the hard moments we all go through. They are crucial on intelligence development and on enduring through life’s set backs and chaos (wishes don’t have this property).

It’s a book written for all people and it teaches us how to think about ourselves. It’s likely that after reading this book you will end up thinking over your own life.

I recommend it!

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A few months ago, Apple did it again! It launched another really cool product: iPhone.

Well… It’s not a conquer-the-world-product, since it’s clearly targeted toward the highest-value subscribers (at least for now) but they are also the most profitable clients.

While iPods are still selling well, growth has been moderated. iPhone is a very refreshing product to Apple’s portfolio.

Apple’s talent consists on making great products, but to a greater extent on making money out of them.

The core processes of any business (according to Peter Drucker) are:

• Innovation
• Marketing

All the rest is secondary and solely supports these two processes.
Apple guys are great with both of them. In fact, they aren’t just good, they rock. And they are growing in a sustainable way (for many years now).

• Their retail stores are awesome. In usability as in beauty and are expanding consistently.
• iTunes store its selling each year more and more content, selling music, tv shows, movies, audiobooks, etc. And currently a picture was leaked, showing a possible future movie rental service for the iTunes store. Netflix and Blockbuster should be looking at this carefully.
• iPhone was a tremendous success, and a good add to Apple’s portfolio. It has already have sold 1 million units since last June. The iPod only reached that number 2 years after it’s launch. The iPhone will be only launched in Europe at the end of this year.
• iPod continues to be the #1 digital player in the World.
• Apple’s Computers. Apple’s laptops sales are growing a lot more than their PC counterparts. The iMac is being a good surprise.
• Apple’s Software. A lot of work is being done here. Tiger is excellent (I’ve being using it for quite some time and I love it more and more each day). The new OS Leopard will be launched in November and promises to be a nice evolution (As soon as I have it, I will post a review here). We also have the new iWork, the new iLife and the Pro products.

Well and the best of all, Apple still has a lot of space to grow. Not only because the Apple stores are mainly in the USA (and there is a lot of people, outside of USA) but also because the market share is relatively small (but growing for several years now).

As an Apple user of some of its products (iPod, MacBook and a lot of Mac Software) I simply love them.

As a (small) shareholder, and because of all I’ve wrote so far, I love Apple and I’m very happy to have stocks of this company, my only regret is not being able to buy more stocks years ago when I started to invest on this great company.

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This is cool!

Microsoft and Novell have excellent relations and the “diplomatic” work that has being done, it’s starting to give its advantages.

Microsoft will support a GPL project?! Nice… This will allow anyone with any OS to access SilverLight content.

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A very interesting interview.

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I’ve found this nice site.

Basically is a site, that records all politics moves, in a way that is easy to anyone to understand it. Like vote trends, biographical information, financing, etc. What I would love to see would be this kind of information available for every polititian in the entire World.

Transparency is one of the most important things to allow any democracy to work. I’m not against people voting for they own belief, even thought I don’t agree with them. Nothing wrong about it. What is wrong is people don’t know what their representatives are doing, by whom are being finance, etc.

Informed citizens are better voters

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The Spiegel has a very interesting interview of the famous Russian writer and Nobel Prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn, about Russia.

It surprised me a lot the intelligence and wisdom of this 88 years old man. His opinions about the past and present Russia’s political issues shows why he his one of the brightest minds of our contemporary history. I recommend it.

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My friend Davide has published an excellent post, with a great presentation of John Doerr about Greentech and about the way Entrepreneurship can save the planet’s climate. I simple loved it!

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Ars Technica wrote an article about Novell’s Hack Week.

Novell’s Linux Department, introduced recently new initiative that shows the power of individuals in a free environment in action.

During one entire week, also know as Hack Week, all Novell’s Linux Engineers around the World had the freedom to work on any project they wanted, related to Linux.

The results were really amazing! Lot of innovations were introduced on such short period of time and people loved the experience.

In the end, awards were given for Best Overall Project, People’s Choice Award, Best Cross-Pollination Team, Best QA project, Best power management project, Best Failure, Best Unix Attack Project, Best Unix Attack Project, Best openSUSE community-building Project, Best L3 support Project and Funniest Project, uff…

The results can be seen here.

Google have also a similar initiative, where every Engineer can spend 20% of his/her week time, to work on any project they want related to Google. These projects are taken serious by Google management and some can be in the origin of new products and new services (Gmail is a good example).

These experiments shows that individual freedom can be a very powerful source of innovation and add a lot of value to an organization.

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