I have another point of view on the crisis:
The money is more or less like the energy. It cannot be destroyed it can only change hands. Well, the money can also be created.
When we decided to go for free trade we forgot something. I believe the main cause of this crisis lies here.
The free trade model with the WTO does not takes into consideration the movement of people, only goods and services. Let me elaborate:
The beginning is pricing. We consumers in a capitalist world are looking for the best quality at the cheapest price.
An entrepreneur therefore, if she/he wants to be competitive has to either find a niche product or market where margins can be bigger or/and manage to get her/his product/service at the cheapest price.
With free trade entrepreneurs have outsourced production to developing countries where labour is cheaper. This has been good for the entrepreneur and for the developing country, and even for us consumers because we paid less for the end product… but…. this means that jobs are lost towards this other countries.
It is true that those loosing the jobs could move up the value chain and do something else with more value. The pie grows, at least this is the assumption.
Back to free trade. When moving production of this entrepreneur to a cheaper and efficient country we have not moved the person who was doing the job here. This person has to do/learn something else.
Theoretically if there was free movement of people as we have free movement of goods and services we would end up in a world clustered with regions or countries that are very good at one/few things doing those things only and everybody there being the best in the world at doing those things. In a way this happens even without free movement of people because we learn.
The problem with this is that we become very vulnerable as we depend entirely on trade and we are not self-sufficient.
An exception is food. Countries protect their food and agricultural sectors probably because of this fear. This is why the US, the EU and most of the countries in a way spend such large amounts of money in subsidies even if they know it would be more efficient to buy these items from cheaper countries. In the WTO a lot of the disputes and part of the reason why Doha failed is because of agricultural issues and subsidies.
So what happens? In our developed countries there are fewer and fewer jobs and the wealth is concentrated in fewer successful people and companies (remember the energy comparison).
Developing countries who benefited from this free trade are now consumer countries (We have also benefited by buying cheap). This rich people in our countries knew this would happen and now they are well established to sell their products and services there too. May be now switching production to an even cheaper country.
In theory all this is good: we buy cheap, entrepreneurs have more money and we help other countries to increase their middle class, but there is a big but. Is the pie big enough?
Wealth is partly spreading to this countries that are now consumers as well. Is the earth big enough for all of us driving cars and eating fish at 1000 km of the sea and fruits out of season?. I don’t think so.
This scenario it is not sustainable. We humans are really a plague.
Developed countries can have salaries 100 times higher than developing countries and now are competing with us at the same level…. In principle income should trend to converge with time.
So yes bank mismanagement, speculation, housing bubbles,… are contributors sure, but as I said I believe there are deeper fundamental issues.
What can be done then?
Governments should not focus on the consequences but on the root of the problem, and the problem is employment.
They should do everything to boost job creation: encouraging and facilitating entrepreneurship, aiming at being a better option for companies to stay local, by relaxing taxes, facilitating work permits, training, providing a competitive environment without subsidies.
What can we do? Expect we cannot earn the same if in other places for the same job they are paid 100 times less.
This should hopefully drop prices too or make some of us consider moving to where our skills are more valuable and cost of life cheaper.
Now for those very very rich, it is going to be difficult. The money is the power, and with money they can buy lawyers, patents and do whatever to stay on the edge. Regulation and government should then closely monitor and regulate the limits, specially after the atrocities done by the banking sector.

Most of us are like kettle. We go with the flow. There are few celebrities/leaders/entrepreneurs we follow. These include the rich who employ us, but who controls their ambition? The right laws and the governments.

What is going to happen?
I don’t know. Riots in London, disruptions in poorer districts, people defaulting payments, banks absorbing this defaults, government printing more money, countries not trusting the US money, EU bailing out Spain and others, or dissolving single currency… all this here. In the developing world? well, learning to leave without us. Us becoming the old economy, they becoming the new pole of the economy.

I see less problems for the US than for the EU though…

Note that I believe that free trade is good. It is fundamental to boost productivity and efficiency, it is just that is more complex than we believe, and it has been proven that as it is, it does not work very well.

This are just some thoughts I am writing from my iPad. I would love to see a discussion on the comments…

Once we learnt that, I was working at Shelter Centre where I was the Web Communications Chief, I asked for leave without pay, so we could have a dream trip around the world February and March. They accepted. The new Drupal website was up and running now it was just a question of fine tuning it.

We bought a round the world ticket with roundtheworldflights.com very nice people (thanks Jarvis) and very good price.
We did Geneva, London, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Tahiti, Auckland, Christchurch, Hong Kong, London, Geneva. All flexible. In Tahiti we bought internal flights to Moorea, Bora Bora and Huahine (see photos at http://norai.net)

Well we blogged every day in our TDM (tour du monde), so you can see our adventures, skydiving, and 9000 km driving in New Zealand.

There we conceived Kai. Our Christmas present for 2009.

Once back in Geneva Nuria started her job, and I was called by my former employer (the ITC) where I worked nearly for 5 years as a consultant and they asked me to join them, so I finished the site at Shelter Centre and joined ITC in July, where I have been an Advisor in Export Strategy and Competitiveness up to present, traveling extensively to Africa (Liberia, Kenya, Sierra Leone, Rwanda…).

When kai was born, 23 days ago, we also got our new car. We said bye to the 1989 red Golf GTI and said Hi to the new Fiat 500.

Now I can go to work in the car rather than in my Ducati. It is pretty cold and rains often. I’m very happy with my new little car too. Pack of technology by default (bluetooth for mobile, reads mp3 from USB key, vocal commands, … etc…)

So as you see, even if for most of the world it has been a bad year, not for us.

My brother lost his job. Nuria’s brother’s too. The economy is in pretty bad shape, but 2009 has been a very good year for us.

Now it is coming to an end. In less than 6 hours in fact. It is also the end of a decennium.

What happened this decennium technologically speaking?

This decennium has been a huge change in technology. Internet has changed the world. We carry our computers in our phones, specially since the iPhone came out. Internet is fast web2.0 has brought us video and ajax. The web experience has reached unthinkable limits. Google has become bigger than General Motors and one of the most profitable companies in the world… and it is in internet… who could have imagine something like that 10 years ago! They are even on the phone industry!

Information is now at the tip of the hands. Mobile phones have spread like mushrooms and have given Africa a huge step towards development and poverty reduction.

Now the big media companies (CBS, CNN and so) are not that big. Internet has provided real time news and information has been democratized with tools such as twitter or Facebook. We know what it is going on firt by social media tools than from BBC or CNN. We are the writers and we control the content with tools such as digg or delicious. Now we have millions of people feeding the news. It is a user generated era, even companies have started to learn that they should have API’s or be open source (google). Look at the contribution in kind done to the iphone platform! nearly 100.000 apps!

The hardware has progressed a lot too. My iPhone 3GS has 32Mb. Solid state memory has increased at huge steps too. Who could think 10 years ago that a mobile phone could have 32Gb or/and a 8Mp camera? 10 years ago we had 3Mp with a terrible screen. Now cameras like canon 5d mark II provide video at a HD quality with the plus of professional lenses.

What else have we seen… the web… the web has gone from a showroom to a two-way collaborative tool making our live more efficient. We buy all via internet now. I bought not only my car via internet but most of the stuff I own. And I have been doing that for a while already. My 42 LCD TV I bought in ebay in 2003. In my house, the shower with sauna, the massage chair, all the kitchen appliances and most of the stuff I bought via internet.

Last that I can think of for this last decade, having kai and Nuria sleeping on my right, is that finally the LHC (at CERN) is working! I am proud as I worked for 3 years in the conception phase of the LHC 10 years ago. To see it now running is great, specially when I contributed to it.

What can we expect in the next 10 years?

Obviously the hardware will continue to explode. Hard disk, processors, screen technology (LED or something new, ebook readers, tablets), internet speed and connectivity (wimax, 4g)… that will make information easier to access and to share. Now a smartphone has GPS, accelerometers and a lot of sensors. I foresee a step towards this sort of uses: location, using the camera of the phone to take a photo from anything and have image recognition, reviews, who is there, where is cheaper, banking, payments… all!!. Search engines will go one step further and they will have other ways to search than text, photos videos, voice… everything indexable. With my phone I will be able to see where my friends are, what they are drinking, etc… reviews are important. I use internet to review and read reviews of what I buy, the hotels I go (tripadvisor), google, tell me where, etc… so location, location, location.

But not everything are flowers… I think that because Internet is going to be so big, Internet Governance is going to be a big issue. Now the US controls ICANN and a lot of other stuff. Internet Governance is going to be a difficult topic. Also Internet as a human right. ISP (internet providers) will try to get the maximum out of it, by capping, limiting connectivity, filtering content (like in China) and so. If this is the case, Internet could be in danger. It should be a 100% open platform. No restrictions. I hope governments intervene to avoid this sort of issues that we are already starting to see in the US with ISPs. Access to Internet should be unlimited and unrestricted. Government should be careful also not doing like in Finland where they are going to filter content at ISP level… a biiiiig mistake.

Privacy is also going to be an issue, but I guess we will be living in public. There is no problem for me, but privacy should be seriously managed. Specially when companies are outsourcing for instance email to google apps, or google docs and calendars…

Cloud computing will be big, and I don’t know if computers will trend to be more like terminals and run all the programs in the cloud. I do use google docs a lot I must say. Online photo services, backups, etc… I can’t wait to see how it progresses. The combination of cloud computing and terminals with strong browsers with offline technology could be a way. If you think about it, why not log in at any computer/terminal and have your files programs and so? Well this could be achieved with good connectivity and good cloud computing. But again, if this is where we go, we will start to see issues of compatibility and standards. Exporting things from a cloud to a computer or to another cloud… it should be standardized.

But the I wonder… when I bought my fiat 500, I printed out the price I was getting in internet and went to my local Fiat dealer. The salesman was furious. He said he could not compete with that. They have cost of personnel, stocks, training, etc… while the guy in internet buys bulk and gets incredible prices… so it made me think. There is no point in having shops or car dealers. They are simply not competitive with internet. So where is the business? Well, services I guess. Garage to repair. Warehouse to collect parts. Advise… but not in selling goods. I told the guy in Fiat that his business model was condemned to die.

There is another ethical question you could ask yourself. If you could buy cheaper 98% of people would buy cheaper. What about paying extra if it manufactured at home, or uses organic stuff, or is environmentally better? It is a difficult question. Specially for our generation. I hope next generation will think differently. Developed countries can not live from services alone, and the rest is more expensive than to do it abroad. So what to do? Free trade has given a lot of opportunities to developing countries, but we have seen with Doha failure that one size does not fit all. What about free movement of people? Goods and people are not strangers. If I am a farmer in France and all farming goes to … China (just a stupid example), then what happens to the french farmer? Should he go to China? Move to something else? Should we cluster activities wherever they are more productive? I don’t know. That would not be sustainable for the environment. Look at Indonesia, they have destroyed the forest to put palm oil plantations. It is so sad. Al fauna is dead and most of the country is monocorp…. but this is where we are going! Look at the farmers in the US. Maybe it should be studied where the environmental impact is lower and do it there.

If you go to Africa you will see how developed countries have destroyed. We imposed the capitalism there. The richer continent in earth is the poorest. Before people there did not have to work. If they were hungry they would take it from the trees. No effort. Simple and happy life….

The end of it is that we can not avoid to spread wealth with this model, meaning that developed countries will have to lower their living standards, otherwise I don’t see how this is sustainable. Closing borders? Big mistake… Anyway that is whole new story.

Happy new year!!!

I have my laptop with me at all times. My old vaio vgn-t27GP. Now is getting old. I miss a camera, a mic… but I love it. Now I have ubuntu and apart from the battery life it rocks.
I’m looking forward to buying a Macbook pro for home use. Nevertheless like small computers… like…
Sony VAIO T, sure, asus also 11″, macbook air, dell xps 13″, ….

1. needs assessment
2. strategy
3. implementation: cooperation with other agencies.
   1. if we want impact: only long term projects, in order to give the sufficient inertia for them to run independently (minimum 5 years)
   2. only projects above 1.000.000 us.
   3. have a reliable full-time local focal point.

if you can not have them all, then do not take the project.

for bigger impact, when sector related activities, then choose market driven approaches:

example: product development, marketing and tackle all value chain. the countries, regions and sectors are chosen following this criteria and not on the other way around.

a sector is not an independent entity

just some thoughts….