2 months ago I was posting about my astonishment of the lack of intiative to introduce the sucessful concept of Pecha Kucha in Barcelona. But it’s all good. It seems that we have an organizer for the first Pecha Kucha Night, Petz Scholtus, the hyper-active eco-designer who we featured already in this blog .

As she told me, the first event will take place during this year’s iFest (formerly Renacer by infonomia), July 10-12, 2008 in at the Edifici Fòrum. The night of July 11th is the most likely date of Barcelona’s first Pecha Kucha. More info and registration here.

At TechCrunch people have started discussing weather it is or it is not important that TOM, our all first friend and founder of MySpace, has obviously lied about his age. This and more dirty laundry about MySpace - the company, are currently talked about by Julia Angwin, a Wall Street Journal reporter who has apparently been working on book about the site.

Michael Arrington form TechCrunch says in his post:

Why would he do this? Maybe so that the company looked cooler, started by 20-somethings instead of 30-somethings when it first launched in 2003. Or maybe there’s another reason. Whatever it is, lying to your users, your tens of millions of users, can’t be a good thing in the long run. If you can’t trust the founders to be truthful in their profiles, how can you trust what anyone says on the site. The answer may simply be that you can’t.

As I personally could not care less about it - and probably the kids at MySpace don’t do either - I found it astonishing that the post even made it to the BBC’s “From the Blogosphere”.

So does it matter that the co-founder of the biggest social network is lying about his age or not?

Kedume sent me info on the upcoming changes in the MySpace platform, presented last Wednesday at the Web 2.0 summit (17-19th Oct. 07 in San Francisco) by Chris DeWolfe and Rupert Murdoch himself.

The issue here is that Facebook is setting social web standards and MySpace is lagging behind, so the basical news is MySpace will allow the creation of third party applications, like Facebook already does.

Fore more info go to Web2.0 summit or TechCrunch

I have just come back from an amazing festival trip to Amsterdam: the Cross Media Week, or Picnic 07, a unique and exquisite event at the inter-section of creativity, innovation, art and business. It’s hard to give a coherent resumee because it was simply impossible to attend everything one could be interested in the first place. We did some really good interviews with various people, among them David Weinberger (Everything is Miscellanneous), Sugata Mitra (A Hole in the Wall project), Emile Aarts (Vice-president of Philips Research Labs) and Alex Steffen (co-founder of Worldchanging.com) - the interviews should be out in the November and Dicember issues of infonomia’s “if…”.

Some of the conferences and speaches are available on video streamings at the Picnic web.

Some of my personal highlights were David Silverman who spoke about the creation of the SIMPSONS (it takes 9 month to complete one episode!). Then there was a great “hostile tête-à-tête” between David Weinberger and Andrew Keen, Author of “The Cult of the Amateur” , wisely moderated by Walt Mossberg. Then there was the US actor Woody Harrelson giving an outdoor yoga class (on the only rainless day out of 4), Pablos Holman’s live hacking of Cory Doctorow’s mobile phone box, Mr Mitra’s presentation on how poor, IT-illiterate children in India are able to teach themselves and each other with the help of a computer. During a really great “Creative China” special Kaiser Kuo, director of Digital Strategy at Ogilvy in Beijing, explained that Beijing underground-rockers can only survive in the harsh and economically dry chinese music business thank’s to their generous, wealthy European girlfriends.

There were loads of other great sessions about the future of media, virtual worlds, design, advertising, digital belonging, games, personal fabrication, AND then GREEN CHALLENGE, a competition awarded with 500,000 Euro (!) for the best idea for a product or service that reduces greenhouse gas emissions in a consumer-friendly way. Richard Branson came over to Amsterdam to hand in the price to Igor Kluin, founder of Qurrent.

Amsterdam and the Amsterdames (including it’s mayor - see video) are capable of gathering together interesting people around cutting-edge issues; the quality and quantity of foreign speakers from North America and Asia was impressive. This is possible because Amsterdam is a wanna-be place: a liberal, multi-disciplinary, open, 100% bi-lingual (ENGLISH and Dutch), relaxed, multi-ethnical city with cheap, ubiquitous communication infrastructure and an international, well-train workforce. A referrence model for what Barcelona could aspire to.

Fast Company has published its verdict on its 30 “Fastest Cities” of 2007 divided into 9 categories. Barcelona is among them, in the category of “Cultural Centres”, together with Miami and Dakar (Senegal).

Out of 30 Fast Cities, only 5 are European.

To my surprise (and ignorance) Tallinn, the capital of Estonia is among the hottest 3 in the “Urban innovators” category. In the description it says: 58% of the city’s population use internet with the cheapest fares in Europe, which makes it the most connected European city! That’s something we can ONLY DREAM of…

Then there is Berlin as one of the 3 most “Global Villages“; it says:

“Talent from all over the world, drawn by reasonable rents, acres of studio space, and a rebellious, daring spirit, is fueling a red-hot design, fashion, and architecture scene, while world-class research centers spin off technology startups”. We can only DREAM OF RESONABLE RENTS, can’t we…

Then there is Stockholm, one of the greenst fastest cities on the planet, being Europe’s least polluted mayor city. Well, we have Bicing and the sea brise to blow away CO2 car emmissions… the rest of the public transport (infrastructure) sucks!

And of course, my all-time favorite London, the European start-up hub, with the LSE that guarantees that start ups get feeded well.

And than there is the culture centre category: and there is Barcelona. Well, at least we are in any category. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that “culture” is less important than any other. But take a look at the text and you see what I mean - if you know how I think about certain thing, which you actually should, reading my posts in our blog

So it says:

Paris and Milan may still get more ink, but Barcelona is the style capital of the European continent. Behind the twin towers of Richard Rogers’s Hesperia Hotel and Jean Nouvel’s Agbar high-rise, the congested district of Eixample is recovering its public spaces, with plans for a park with playgrounds, magnolia trees, benches, and statues within 200 meters of every resident by 2010.

Go to Juan Freire’s blog and read his sharp analysis on the Fast City list, its concept and its errors.

and I tell you who you are… I just came across a really interesting study by Danah Boyd, a female US social scientist, especialized on social networks. He has just published a first essay on “Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace“. She comes to the conclusion (in an what he says is not an academic article) that the “good” white kids with higher education are leaving MySpace and migrate to Facebook whereas the non-white, freaky, geeky kids, with parents who did not go to college are on MySpace.

It’s interesting to see how the virtual world reflects the real world: the digital divide is going on even in the age of the digital natives.

Let’s hope that Woody Allen’s new film will bring more international film productions to Barcelona and not only more tourists. Just by the way, our recently elected mayor said that Barcelona has not reached its maximum potential in terms of touristic development. For me it’s hard to believe, with 280 hotels and more to come and an annual 5 million foreignes visiting our common ground of just 100 square kilometers.

Anyway, the good news is that Woody is still looking for extras for his film. Rol, a local casting agency has been commissioned to look for the right people for the shootings in Barcelona. You find more info here.

Good news ! Things have started moving in Barcelona and lately the web 2.0 starts up in Barcelona. The first good news is that YAHOO! is expanding the BCN location and is about to open up a new commercial department in order to increase the online advertising share of YAHOO! in Spain and optimize their customer service. The second great news is SCLIPO: the German entrepreneur Gregory Grimmy (ex Sillicon Valley technology consultant) and his team have set up the first social network for video-based knowledge sharing among users. Have a look, it’s great, you find incredibly good video-based tutorial and virtually everything. I had the chance to see Gregory at an infonomia event about Internet TV and his project looks VERY promising; check out the interview with him in “if…” no.53

And then, finally international internet projects like Daily Motion are settling down here. The Paris-based company is a video-based community, just like YouTube but with a better interface.

I think with that kind of news, we’ve already overcome the whole MySpace’s issue… Did anybody go to their Secret Show in Madrid?

Happy Sònar, everybody!