I'm a geek

A few weeks ago, I bid and won a PowerEdge 2650 server for three quids (plus another 6 of renting a car and collecting it).

It´s an old piece of hardware (32 bits double Xeon, 4gb of RAM), bulky as hell (or so does my back says) and noisy as a diesel generator.

When I came home, my daughters said that couldn't be a computer as it didn't have input/output devices like a keyboard or a monitor. I didn't bother to explain a server does not need a screen or a keyboard. Whether that's correct is arguable. They are learning Computer Science at school, and I only interfere when I see a big mistake.

Anyway, bringing home the computer was only part of the project. Hey, I'm a geek, but having a server on the floor of my dining room is not where the fun lies even if my wife allows it. First, I needed to open its case, take a look at the the inside (a bit insane, yes I know).

Then, I needed to install the operating system. I thought that was going to be easy. I install different operating systems all the time. But...

... I usually install using an USB drive and the server would refuse to boot up from the USB drive.

OK. It has CD-reader but ...

... I don´t have a CD-Writer. Who writes CDs anyway?

Already thinking how/where to record a CD, I decided to investigate something called PXE. PXE tends to appear in many BIOS as install from the network. In very general terms, the BIOS is enough to look for a DHCP server that looks for sort of FTP server, that provides a typical file that allows to install an Operating System.

Unfortunately, I only had a Windows machine available (having two daughters in secondary school, Linux has been unfortunately relegated)

But there is an old post that explain how to install Ubuntu from windows. The only tweak was the needed to get some current image. You need to get the image from this URL

One small tweak while installing is something that had already happened while installing a server at work. The screen would go blank with the message "Cannot display this video mode". A quick search, and one of the first results was what I needed.

Once I installed the basic server, I only installed SSH server. The rest of the server was going to be installed using Ansible. Another topic for another time

I´m a geek.

And, my wife doesn't read my blog and she is a saint.

Android 4.4.3: Sony Xperia U

A few months ago, I upgraded the firmware for my Sony Xperia U. It turns out that the place I used to download the firmware updates from, wasn't providing new updates, so sometime ago, I migrated to a new source of firmware updates.

I knew that Cyanogenmod was already providing Over The Air (OTA) updates. What I didn't know is that today's update would bring Android 4.4.3 when even people with a Nexus 7 has not receive Google's update yet.

Over the air. No glitches. 

That's awesome.

Maximizing Macbook Pro's battery

I have an old Dell Vostro 1720 and an Acer Aspire One AO110. Both are usable (and used), but have no battery.

So when I got my shiny brand new Mac, I decided I had to look after the battery.

And I read everything I could find about how to take care Macbook's battery.

Apparently, old models used to need a periodic full discharge followed by a full recharge.

Apparently, that is no longer the case.

I've tried to follow the advice in Apple's page, and I tend to leave it unplugged every day once or more times while working with it.

And I've noticed that from a Full Charge Capacity of around 8500 mAh, it has been improving to around 9000 mAh

It is too soon to know how it will last in the future, but it is a good sympton.

You can check full charge capacity at "System Information". Go to "About this Mac", then click on "More info...",  then on "System Report" and finally select "Power".

Acquisitions

Today I wanted to talk about two acquisitions.

• On one side, Facebook and Whatsapp. $19 billion. There are many different opinions. Craziness. Logic. IMO the money paid is crazy, but the deal has a lot of logic for Facebook. Because for many people around me (including teens), Whatsapp is THE social network. They(we?) share things like images and videos, status. We use it almost everyday. Food for thought: when was the last time you got to know anything reading it on Facebook? 

• On the other side, Simple and BBVA. Simple wants to be the new bank. And it has been bought by a well known international Spanish bank. $117 million. I worked for one of the banks that end up being BBVA in 1999. Very interesting project by the way (Data Warehouse). At that time, BBVA launched a pure online bank called Uno-e. It was supposed to be the way to go. Very appealing technology. Santander, another international Spanish bank bought something called Patagon. 15 years later Patagon does not exist (it is called Openbank). But both Openbank and Uno-e languish in the Spanish local market. I would be surprised if Simple does not follow a similar path.

I know there will be lots of different perspectives. But don't think about the amount. Think about the whole picture.

Techzing wives

I tend to listen Techzing podcast. It's a podcast about very different topics, recorded by two geeks, (or developers, and entrepeneurs). I don't remember when I started listening them. I do remember I started because I wanted to practice English and it was great (Justin is an Englishman and Jason is American). Soon I forgot why: they were great by themselves. The topics are very diverse from Technology, Entrepenurship, Politics (Loom and Gloom Report), Education, Genetics...

I listen them while commuting, and I was a couple of months behind. However, I just listened episode 200: techzing wives.

And it's simply the best. I couldn't help but laugh in many different parts of the episode.

I guess that episode is not very interesting for a newcomer. But I'm sure that for most of their regular listeners it has been a great experience to listen to our own wives in the voices of three complete estrangers.

No more applets

For more than three years I've been managing certificate-based digital signature applications.

 One of the main source of pain always was and is generating the signature on the user browser. As it needs access to the user's keystore, the browser alone didn't have access to it, and was needed some kind of component (either ActiveX, usually a Java applet). The deployment of the component and the debugging of different OS/browser/Java version configurations tends to be time consuming.

I even was trying to create my own version of component to help stop reinventing the wheel.

For all the time lost, the existence of a group in the W3C to incorporate crypto to the browser is GREAT NEWS.

Google, where are you going?

I've been Google fanboy for a long time. I remember the invitation for Gmail I received around mid-2004. Gmail was a revolution. From 50MB mail space at the time, they offered 1000MB (1GB). But the size wasn't the only thing revolutionary. A great UI interface, faster than anything seen before was shocking.

I remember Google video chat. Being able to talk from the mail. "No installations".

Even Google Wave was revolutionary although the launch was a big failure, and the project was more in Alpha than in Beta.

Android was great, and Chrome too. ChromeOS??. It's lame that the only precompiled images are through a (great) guy.

And then Google plus. I think they had to be social at any price, and they did. Good ideas but nothing revolutionary.

Lately, change in privacy terms, most of us do not read. It's sad,

And now, Google drive? 5 GB? Are you kidding me? Is this the competition to Dropbox? Even Microsoft has a better services. I use Box.net and I'm afraid I'm not going to change.

Maybe next hit from Google is a new Twitter with 150 characters ;D

When companies just don't get it

I have a two years old Symbian cell phone and a second generation iTouch. I guess that's enough to explain that until very recently I didn't pay any attention at all to mobiles apps ads. Companies regularly announced new  apps for the Apple Store (or the Android one), and I didn't even read the announce.
More recently I've started with mobile development. I have paid the Android and Apple fee, I have developed my own apps with PhoneGap and Appcelerator Titanium (games for my daughters, but nothing too serious). And at work we're starting to thing about possible Apps.
And I'm starting to pay attention to the Apps announced.
Today I received an ad of a new App from Club Vips. Club Vips is a popular chain of restaurants here in Spain. I read the description:

Encuentra tu establecimiento más cercano del Grupo Vips, calcula tu ruta más rápida hasta nuestros locales, infórmate de nuestros horarios, reserva mesa por teléfono o envíanos un e-mail.

My own translation:

Find the nearest restaurant from Club Vips, find the shortest route, look up the timetable, reserve a table on the phone o send us an email.


Not too exciting. Anyway, let's give it a look. Oh. I cannot install it because I don't have iOS 5. "Are you kidding me?" No. I'm not kidding you.

I still remember when the web was THE THING. Every company had to have a web page or else risk to be not cool enough. And companies made horrible pages with no information, or a wonderful Flash animation (again with no information). They didn't get it.

And now social networks and mobile development are THE NEW THING.  They've read in the headline of a report from Gartner, Forrester and the like. But they didn't bother to read the whole report. Or they didn't think too much about it. Or maybe they didn't have too much money and they wanted to get something out as quickly as possible.

Mobile is very powerful, and I feel disappointed when people just don't get it.

Hey. Just because it's the end of Christmas season, and because I'm a client of them, here goes my free piece of advice for them. First the easy part:

• Not everyone has iOS 5 installed. Unless you really need that version, stay lower.
• Include a menu with dishes and quotes at each restaurant. Include the weekly menu.

Now another step:

• Give a free wifi key of each restaurant to those with the app.
• Offer special discounts, promotions and draws for those with the app.
• Order from the app. Call the waiter from the app. Tricky part: lock the actual table to the app and user. Possible solutions 1.-Bluetooth proximity 2.-Table selection from the app, and locking confirmation through the waiter.

And then try to combine the app with your registered customer program (Tarjeta Club Vips):

• Reserve a table through the app.
• Personalized promotions. 
• Some of your restaurants offer the ability to order the food, wait for it to be prepared and take it away. Be able to order the food through the app and get a estimated time for taking it. 
• Rating of specific meal experience.

My first mobile application

I'm learning some technologies. I'm tempted to write new, but they're not new. I'm learning Ruby on Rails and mobile development. I still have to keep learning Java, and Grails, but I have a project in mind and I wanted to separate clearly from my day to day job, for lots of reasons.
Some other day I'll posts my thoughts about mobile development. But today I wanted to share that I have deployed my first application to my iTouch. It was easier to develop (it's some kind of game for my daughters to add and multiply, and it's really rough) than to deploy. But I did it.
And here goes an screenshoot (it's not a picture, but you get the point).

Spring course

I'm attending this week to a Spring Framework course. It's a very small class: the teacher, my boss and me.

I don't consider myself slow, and neither is my boss. No, he doesn't read this blog. But we two were trying to keep up the frenetic pace the teacher is imposing. I had already used Spring, but up to now I didn't suppose who little did I know about Spring, about TDD, or even about Eclipse. Watching the teacher coding, and trying to understand what he was doing, and trying to type as fast as him is a rewarding but extremely demanding experience.

Regarding Spring Framework, I do think it's a very powerful tool, and we probably are going to use it at one of my teams (the architecture group). But I don't think it's something it can be used in other teams. We'll see.

Some thoughts about Tecnimap 2010

I’ve been a couple of days in Zaragoza (Spain), participating in Tecnimap 2010 last week. Tecnimap is a conference on IT for the Public Administration in Spain. I had presented a paper about one of the applications I manage: DocelWeb.
Overall it has been a nice experience, but I wanted to share some thoughts about it.
On a personal level, I think I was wrong in my planning. I planned to assist to few conferences and talks that I really wanted to assist, and scheduled the rest of the time for relationships and stands. It turns out I was completely wrong. I had too much time wasted on the stands. Some people in the stands didn’t really know what were they talking about. For example, some random commercial was explaining his digital signature product, proudly saying it worked with XAdES-XL (a digital signature format). When I asked if they haven’t planned introducing XAdES-A (long time archival variant of the former: a must for public administrations), he looked at me as if I didn’t know what I was talking about, and said "of course not". And that is just an example. Of course, I don’t blame them. But I’m a technical guy and I was looking for technical answers, or for technical "I don’t know but I’ll look up the answer and contact you". Commercial babbling gets me bored. Next time I’ll dedicate less time to that, and more to the talks.
When talking about the conferences, I wanted to remark two. One about ISA and Interoperability in Europe. And the other about STORK. Both, very interesting: I will comment about them (and my opinion on the new tendencies about eGovernment) in a future post.
With respect to the organization I think it has been a great event and almost everything was perfect. I must congratulate Zaragoza for hosting the meeting, and to the organization for doing such a good job.

Netbook Operating Systems

A few months ago I got a new Acer Aspire One A110. It's an Atom N270 with 512 MB RAM and 8GB SSD hard disk and 8.9'' screen. It came with a personalized version of a Linux distribution called Linpus Lite based in Fedora 8. Since the first day I've been testing several Netbook OS and I wanted to share my thoughts about it.

• The original distribution, (as I've said) is a personalized version of Linpus Lite. It boots very fast, and works smoothly. However, it's locked, and configuration and installation of new software (or updating of existing) is daunting. Fortunately Acer put a repository with new packages, although it's still not enough.


• The first OS I tested was Ubuntu Netbook Remix. It's a distribution based in Ubuntu 9.04. It has some interesting things, like a menu/desktop interface more usable in small screen netbooks than traditional Ubuntu or Linpus. It also had access to the full Ubuntu repository. However, it took twice or three times more time to boot than Linpus. And it seemed sluggish.


• Following I tested Moblin. It boots very fast, and works pretty well. The first version I tested was a bit unpolished, but it's being updated pretty fast. However has two things that I personally don't like. The first one is that Moblin seems to encourage a particular way of working. For example it has a specific place for a specific twitter client. And the same for the browser. "What if I want another browser or if I don't use Twitter?". The second thing is that sometimes is difficult to close and application because top menu gets unfolded. To sum up it's very fast, but not designed for me.


• I also tried to test Live Android OS. It worked pretty well on a VirtualBox under Windows 7. However I couldn't make it boot on my Acer, and it seems a known bug. Of course it's an early port to i386 architecture.


• Next I tested Jolicloud. It's a new Operating System, and tested only under invitation. It seems based in Ubuntu Netbook Remix, and has two very interesting concepts. The first one is that in the installation process you have to select the model of the netbook. That seems to make a personalized version of the operating system perfectly adjusted to the model. The second interesting thing is a great catalog of applications some of them web applications, some of them client-only. The good thing is that for the user is indifferent. Besides those concepts, being based in Ubuntu Netbook Remix have the same problems than the original. Slow boot and slow operation. Also, the installed web applications seem based in Prism, and I don't feel comfortable clicking links there because it has to start a new browser.


• Last I tested Xubuntu. Xubuntu works better than Ubuntu Netbook Remix, but boots slow. Also I installed the governor dock applet. If selected powersave, sometimes it went jerky. If selected ondemand battery disappeared. For the record Chrome with plugins is still unstable in Linux.


• I also installed Windows XP in my brother-in-law's netbook, the same brand and model. It could run WXP, but again it seemed slow.

The bottom line is that I like Moblin for the speed, Ubuntu Netbook Remix for the software and look and feel, Jolicloud looks promising... but I'll keep using Linpus, while waiting to Google Chrome OS.
What I want? An operating system that ...

• ... can boot and launch a browser very quick.


• ...tries to save battery. Bonus point if I can remove an USB stick while suspended without crashing.


• ... runs fast


• ... apart from a browser, has already installed (or one-click away) Flash Plugin PDF viewer, and a media player. Bonus point for an Office suite.

Nothing too strange for a Netbook, I bet.

Yahoo: A declining star (II)

I wrote on the previous post that for a particular combination of search terms, Yahoo seemed to offer better results than Google. I read long time ago that in fact search was turning to be a commodity. I didn’t believe then, and I’m not convinced yet, despite the simple test I described on my post.

Anyway Yahoo has services that are (in my opinion) far better than Google’s. My favourite is a nearly unknown project called myweb, which could be said to be related to Google Bookmarks or Google Notebook. I also like Yahoo Pipes although I think it needs something easier to extract information from pages (not structured sources), something like Dapper. Of course, you also have one of the best news sites with Yahoo news, and the killer-app of online photography (this one an acquisition): Flickr.

So Yahoo has a decent search engine, some very good services. Notwithstanding, it has each time less importance, less market share and more problems. I don’t know where it all started, but today Yahoo looks like a knocked out company.

Are Google’s developers better than Yahoo’s? I don’t think so. Although maybe there is a problem when (as Jeremy told a few days a ago) in your company people are being laid off and is not the first time.

What makes Yahoo a “declining star”?

I think the true difference is the absence of ambition. I see in Google they have the goal of changing the world. They fight to be the first, to make things different. Some of its movements are successful, some are not. But they always try to make a new twist. They try to rethink everything. And they continue doing it even when they lead the race.

No doubt, you need good leadership to point a (and keep) your goal. I think leadership, ambition and vision are quite related.

Yahoo doesn’t seem to have that ambition/vision/leadership.

Yahoo: A declining star(I)

I like products coming from Google, and I’m usually less critic with Google’s errors than with others’. I use Google search, Gmail, Blogger… I even have a ridiculous financial position on Google (8 shares).

I’m a Google fan.

But I wasn’t conscious of how much I was a Google fan until I was preparing this post. I was getting ready to write about Yahoo’s CEO (Jerry Yang) resignation, and widening the scope, about Yahoo’s future.

One of the obvious paths for post-Jerry’s Yahoo is being acquired by Microsoft. Microsoft tried it hard before summer, and many Yahoo investors would certainly welcome a bit of money. Especially when they don’t know where will be Yahoo in (say) two years.

But now the price would be less than before summer, and it seems that Microsoft it’s only interested on the search.

I always thought that a Microsoft-Yahoo merge (which is different from a Yahoo’s acquisition by Microsoft) would be a great idea to put more competition on the table. Internet is the present and desktop have no-future. As consequence, Microsoft has plenty money but has no future. And Yahoo could give Microsoft the future it doesn’t have.

The obvious problem with a merge is that it would require a new leadership with an ambitious vision for the merged company. And that leadership currently on the table seems to be the Microsoft’s one. Moreover, it seems to be a leadership that, from a few years ago, is completely reactive. It fought against Internet (Netscape), against Open Source (Mozilla), against SAAS (Google). If Microsoft is a healthy company is because of the same products of nearly 15 years ago: Windows and Office.

When I was thinking about this, my feelings went quickly to that video of Steve Ballmer jumping all over the place and saying “developers, developers…”. I couldn’t remember Mr. Ballmer’s name, and I had a typo writing the keywords, so I searched for

developers, develepors microsoft

I put the same words on Yahoo and Google. And aside that both suggested me to correct the typo, Yahoo’s results were, for what I was looking for, far more relevant, than Google’s ones.

For the record, Microsoft results seemed to compete on another (let’s say “amateur”) league.

I know that in no way this was a scientific test. But for me it was quite shocking that Yahoo had (for that particular query in my particular opinion) much better results than Google. And it made me think about Yahoo. I’ll try to write some thoughts in the next post.

Gmail and the future

As I said on my last post, I think that integration of Video and voice chat could be part of a greater strategy. What would be that strategy?

In my opinion it should have two parts.

The first one would include the ability to search on your communications. Not only your written communications, but also your oral/video communications. The technology is not too far. We can today search on Youtube's speeches, probably thanks to GOOG 411. The only thing Google would need would be vast amounts of disk space, as video and voice need far more resources than pure text. Anyway, considering the prices of data storage, I don't see it too distant in the future.

The other element in the strategy is related with the ubiquity of communications. Every single day, less of our communications takes place through our desktop PC, and more of them goes through cell phones, netbooks and other on-the-go devices. Being tied to what telecommunications companies allow is "dangerous" (for Google), because sometimes, their interests are different from Google's ones. That's one of the reasons why Andoid is so important, and, as I mentioned on my first comment about this topic, why it's important for Google that white-space spectrum is open.

With those two things in mind, you would have your communication center in your pocket all day. You could instantly remember every word you said or was told to you by phone, video or email.

Obviously I know that this strategy would have privacy problems. No more than today with the mail, but people would be more conscious.

"The day Skype died" revisited

Sometimes you realize you've written a weak post too late. It was my case with yesterday's annotation.

I thought nobody would even read it. But it seems that, because of a trackback at Gmail Blog, I was wrong.

Fortunately, Matt Sealey (thank you, Matt), was kind enough to comment, pointing out one of the weakest parts. He says that Google's movement only affects a portion of Skype's services. With Gmail you won't be able to call to real phones (he says "yet"). And so Gmail isn't a fully replacement of Skype.

That's absolutely true.

It's also true that Google's plugin to get the Video Chat isn't available for Linux.

And it's also completely true that many email accounts are not Gmail. Hotmail and Yahoo accounts are very popular, probably more than Gmail. And through Windows Messenger you could make voice and video calls.

What I was trying to say is that the Google's movement is "good enough" to defeat Skype. And that this movement seems part (or let's say "could be part") of a larger strategy. Let's try to explain the first and left the larger strategy to other post.

We have a free Skype-to-Skype, because there are others services that make the money. This revenue comes, among other things, from SkypeOut minutes, which is a non-free service to call (at a rate) to real phones (whether land or mobile based). Rates of SkypeOut minutes are cheaper than traditional phone companies, in particular when you call to other countries' phones.

But there are many companies that provides similar services. In Spain, you can even buy cards that allow you to make long distances call at a cheap rate. In fact, because of VoIP ("calls through Internet"), international calls through traditional phone companies are much cheaper now than five years ago.

What made Skype different to the other companies is that with Skype you had in the same place calls Skype-to-Skype free. It was like a communications centre.

However, there was a trend already in place where calls to real phones from Skype were fewer. I think that's because cell phones are a pervasive technology in many countries and, at least in Spain, you call Skype-to-Skype if you're at home and it's just talk, or use your cell phone if you're away.

Going to Ebay's third quarter results, and looking at revenue per user and Skype-to-Skype minutes, we see that while users and Skype-to-Skype minutes grows (in a way that the make Skype-to-Skype minutes per registered user without trend), the revenue grows much less (in a way that it can be seen a falling trend on the revenue per registered user)

	2007-3	2007-4	2008-1	2008-2	2008-3
Registered users (million)	245,7	276,3	309,3	338,2	370,2
Revenue (thousands)	93823	110364	119791	130151	137201
Revenue per user (calculated)	381,86	399,44	387,30	384,83	370,61
Skype to Skype minutes (millions)	9,8	11,9	14,2	14,8	16
S2S minutes per registered user	0,040	0,043	0,046	0,044	0,043

Before Google's movement, Skype already needed to rethink about it's future, from a business point of view.

Now comes Google with its offer. And then, you (as a user) have two options.

Install a program, and try to convince the people on the other side to do the same, just for the case you want to talk to them...

...or do it from your browser, with your contact lists already there.

Yes, I know that it seems there's not many differences. With Google you have to install a plugin.

But I see it very different. First, because a plugin is less frightening for many people. But second and much more important, because you already communicate with that people through Gmail.

That's Gmail's power. Gmail is now THE communications centre. You can communicate asynchronously (with mail), nearly synchronously (with text chat), and in real-time (with video and voice). From your browser.

The day Skype died

I read it first on Google Operating System, but I haven't seen too much buzz on the blogs I follow.

For me today is the day Skype has definitively died.

Maybe it was long before from a pure bussiness view. There hasn't been anything new since Skype's adquisition by Ebay. And my contacts on Skype were offline most of the time lately.

But from now I don't have any reason to even install Skype. Of course, there were a lot of others programs apart from Skype.

But from today I can open Gmail, and chat with video and voice from the browser. And my contacts are already there.

But I think the movement hits further than Skype. I'm afraid this only the begining.

MobuzzTV

I heard about MobuzzTV for the first time long time ago. I don't watch news on TV, (I prefer to read than watch), so much less watch on the Internet. I didn't pay much attention then.
From time to time, I read about Mobuzz on Enrique's blog, but again I didn't pay much attention.
Last week MobuzzTV announced they would had to close unless they got 120,000 euros in donations. I read it first in Enrique's blog, then in Borja's one. I agreed much more with Borja than with Enrique, but again I didn't pay much attention.
But today I read this Borja's post, and I thought Borja had lost a bit of focus. Then I read Enrique's post which is previous, and then I didn't know who has lost focus, and according to the comments, balance.

I also read Varsavsky's blog. Similar to Enrique, although I learnt Martin’s (and probably Enrique’s) shares on MobuzzTV were a gift.

As Borja says, I think companies exist to make money. If you can't get money enough to keep your company going, you should think about how to make more money or how reduce your expenses.

If you can figure out how to increase your income or how to reduce your expenses, or if even after doing it, it's not enough, maybe you should close.

If you think it’s only a matter of budget (your idea is great, and it’s going to work, you just need enough time), then you should rethink(everybody thinks their ideas are great). If you continue thinking, you’ll have to put more money in, and/or to sell your idea to others. If you can’t throw in more money, maybe (again) you should close.

Ignoring comments like these, saying that come from people that don’t know anything about entrepreneurship, or that they come from people’s envy or resentment, it’s like looking at the finger when someone points the moon. It seems that there have been people that made a donation of 0.60 euro, to later send a letter to the media telling that Mobuzz didn’t want to return the money back (which by the way is wicked), but it doesn’t mean all the critics did it. And even if all the critics have done it, it doesn’t mean what critics say is false.

Of course, MobuzzTV can ask for donations (as it did). It’s a way to increase income. I don’t think it's a great idea (see above). But they can try.

I’ve also read donations have legal implications (enterprises in Spain can’t receive donations). I don’t think they’ll have problems. It also has legal implications selling shares (it seems that in Spain you have to inform very carefully about investment oportunities). Both accepting donations and selling shares were legally risky.

I usually prefer shares in exchange of money when you give money to a (nearly) bankrupt company. I prefer donations to NGO, and loans or capital with companiues. In fact, with the recent finantial crisis, we’ve seen a lot of those helps, some in exchange of shares and others for free, and I know I'm not alone.

But in this case the money is of those who voluntarily donate. If people feel fraud, they can ask for the money back or go to the judge. If Public Administration feels fraud, it should investigate. It wouldn’t be the first time

If I were from a capital-risk firm, I should doubt about these people’s ability to manage budgets. These people say they had a crisis and they were not able to cut expenses, foresee, plan, or adapt. It resembles when people say they have financial problems and they go to the TV.

The example Borja points seems an entrepreneur much more reliable than Mobuzz. And if your company can’t survive, probably you learnt. Next time (if there’s “next”) you’ll do better. That’s something companies can do, and people (in Spain) cannot.

But in any case I wouldn’t call this episode "a lie" or "a fraud". I can’t believe it was planned as a marketing tactic. They (Martin, Enrique, or the rest of the MobuzzTV people) have burnt too much personal credit here.