R. Javier Vega

2013 was supposed to be a year of changes; oh boy I have to agree with that. The biggest change for me so far, has been that I started to take on professionally an old project: “Cosmmo.net”, yes, for the ones that know me, I have had that project for ages, maybe too long!

I think I first started it on year 1999, when I first began to explore the internet and I finally was able to get my hands on a credit card to buy a domain. So, long before Facebook and MySpace, when I started to play with the internet intuitively I wanted to build a site similar to a social network, called “Cosmmo.net”; I have always liked that name, it all started when I was a kid and saw a movie, there was a boy that was called “Cosmmo” and saved a plane from crashing. So I kind of liked the name and started to use it.

So, my first attempts to build a social network were horrible, the technology wasn’t there, my knowledge of computer science wasn’t there and my understanding of social wasn’t there. So its no surprise that I completely failed at building anything useful for anyone. Later on, I saw the success of Facebook and MySpace to understand that the vision was there, but I didn’t feel bad about it, its just that I didn’t have the skills and what it took to build something like that.

Well, true to my vision, I pivoted Cosmmo to become a site for small businesses profiles and for people to connect commercially around their cities. Guess what, another failure, and later I see Yelp come successful again! Are you kidding me, another similar idea makes it. However, this time my failure is mainly due to my lack of understanding of businesses and entrepreneurship.

Again, true to my vision, I keep going. And after leaving another start-up I worked with a friend for 2 years, I have decided this year to re-take on Cosmmo, however, this time using all the lessons I have learn so far.

I am happy to announce that for the first time, I feel I have everything I need to build something useful, something that can add value to people’s lives. And after developing a new vision about entrepreneurship and technology, I feel I am solving a problem that it is worth the challenge.

This time “Cosmmo” has pivoted to become the best way to find local businesses in Latin America. As surprising as it seems, it is still very hard in Latin America to find local businesses on the web and mobile devices. A big reason for that is because there are still many local businesses that don’t have a web presence or if they do, their information is not properly index-able, poorly added, incomplete or plain wrong. Therefore, I have decided to do something about this and to make Cosmmo into a new type of search engine for local businesses.

Cosmmo now is solving the local businesses problem two ways, first by creating a platform where SMB can have profiles with their information; and second, by creating advanced search algorithms, so consumers can easily find any local business they are looking for. You can think of it like a Yelp for Latin America but without the emphasis on the reviews, instead, it adds a twist to the search capabilities. So its not really like Yelp; we are solving a similar problem but our solutions are different.

The core of innovation is in the search capabilities, an space that has tremendous room to growth and full potential for disruption. The search algorithm that I have been implementing analyzes real time data, users preferences, location data, previous search history, related searches and many other parameters to make decisions on local businesses results. I truly believe that the new search algorithm can make better predictions at knowning what a consumer needs, but we have to test it on the real world to be sure.

Lets hope that after many failed attempts at building anything usable I finally get it right! And can make something that people want!

This is a year of many changes, and again, I happened to fall back to an old project.

Is it romanticism? is it stubbornness? or is it simply stupidity? I guess no matter how many things change, some things just never change. And I just don’t know how to give up, that is something that will never change.

 

In silicon valley there are hundred of great companies where to work at. And as a software developer you might get harassed constantly by recruiters for large companies with great benefits and salaries.

Of course everyone tells you to follow you passion or look for work in a company that you really believe in.

What about if you just care about scoring big? What do you do if you want to make 1MM USD within the next 4 years of your life of extra income? How do you pick a company?

Well, its actually pretty simple, all you need to do is to pick a company that is likely to go public within the next 3 to 4 years, and make sure that you get a reasonable amount of stock. Then all you have to do is just seat in your stock for a little while, and very likely it will be over 1MM.

To determine which company is likely to go public in that time, you have to look at their round of finances. Most likely you should look for companies that are in their series D or E of financing. These are companies that are growing very rapidly, have a solid business model and extremely likely to succeed. These companies just need money to grow and expand their business, and the speed at that they can grown is faster than the money they can make, but the potential and market are huges. So the only means for these companies to get more funding after their series F is go to public. And then bang! There you go. You can be sure that they will go public soon.

Example of companies that are likely to go public shortly are:

* EventBrite
* Sopogy

To find additional tech companies in series E I recommend to use Google, Techcruch, and CrunchBase.

I hope this post is helpful to someone.

Cheers

It has been almost two years since I came back from Chile to California; and boy it has been quite a ride, enough ups and downs to drive anyone insane.

Amazingly enough, as soon as I came back to SF one of my good old friends had an idea for an Start-Up which I joined and helped to execute the vision for almost these last two years.

The experience was incredible, tons of work, research and development; with our highest point an offer to acquire our team for 10M, but sometimes you just have to say no. Some things are not for sale. And now, that I have completed a cycle; I am proud to have been part of that company and the amazing future it has.

What really excites me is what comes next. As I begin to explore new opportunities and make new friends, I have certainly grown as entrepreneur, software developer and business men. I feel that as I explore the ecosystem of start-ups in silicon valley and spend my evenings at the Hacker Dojo, it is my duty to get back into this blog and pick up old projects. Just like it was two years ago, in a estrange way, I feel I am back to square one. And so the journey goes on…

 

For quite a while, I have been a little frustrated with the way current operating system (Windows, Apple, Linux) manage the open applications.

Working with a 24″ screen and sometimes with bigger ones, I find myself opening several programs and windows at the same time. The frustrating part is that all 3 major operating systems seem to have very basic ways of manipulating the open programs. They all seem to have the “Alt + Tab” switching of windows, but the placing and sizing of each program is handle manually by the user.

I search the web for applications that could handle program switching in a more sophisticated way than just bringing to the front the desire application. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find any application that could do something as simple as automatically split vertically 2 open programs and bring them to front at the same time.

So out of frustration, I decided to quickly hack together a concept application that could do some window switching. I call this application “F12Launcher”. For now, it is just a concept application to test the idea of having a more powerful switching of applications on the Windows platform. I have uploaded the project to my github.com account and I added some videos that explain the concept a bit.

Personally, I would love to be able to save open programs, the position and sizes of windows, the arrangement in blocks, the splitting vertically of windows, and many other features that would be very helpful when dealing with multiple open programs. Unfortunately, I don’t have the time to write such application but F12Launcher covers some of the principles that would be needed to have such operation with windows.

I hope that with time operating systems with time can add features such as described in F12Launcher.

If anyone feels the same way as I do about switching application please feel free to contact me. Also, if you are a developer and you decided to write and application like this please feel free to take a look at the code and use it as you please.

F12Launcher Page:

https://github.com/rjaviervega/F12Launcher

Video Demo

 

Screenshot:

Yes, its been a long time since I sat down to write in this blog. Pretty shameful considering that my original plan was to post about once a week.

Nevertheless, its December AGAIN! Once more the year went too fast to stay aware of the changes and its time for reflection. For me, December has always been a month in which I like to step back mentally of what I am doing, and spend a little bit of time looking at what went by during the year.

Its been almost exactly one year since I came back from Chile and moved back to California. Definitely 2011 was a year of change, new project, connecting with old friend and new opportunities. Despite the usual challenges and difficult times on and off, it has been a wonderful year.

The most important part of this year, was probably that I have been able to realized why I came back to San Francisco. Weird as it sounds, after my 2.5 years in Chile, for some reason I knew I had to come back to SF, not LA or anywhere else but San Francisco. Call it a hunch, gut feeling, or whatever, but somehow, somewhere inside I knew that I had to come back to this city.

By connecting the dots now, its easy to explain with certainty why I had to come back and maybe to even think that some things are meant to happen, and somehow, that we are always in the right place and at the right moment for the choices that we have made in our lives. The challenge is understanding why, like some sort of dance between our consciousness and subconsciousness, and maybe to our connection with the higher powers that govern our realm. Who knows…

Anyway, lately I have gotten the feeling that I need to go to Japan. And I certainly don’t have an explanation rather than my passion for traveling. But there are other reasons too. Interestingly enough, I have a degree in Computer Science and Engineering, and I have been considered a good engineer. Most of the people I’ve worked with have considered me in certain groups, some think I am a Telecom guy for my background in Satellite Networks, other think of my as a hard core linux/networking guy, other also call me a “Coding Ninja” for web stuff, but I disagree with all of them.

I have always thought of myself as and artists, maybe not too talented to any specific art but that is what I liked doing most. I have always been happier doing art, rather than anything else. But when I got introduced to computers, almost seemed that all the creativity I could have could be better explored with technology. I know now that I am a technology artists, and that is the way I think of myself.

Now that 2011 is almost gone, I want 2012 to be a year of inspiration and innovation for all the projects that I started in 2011. And like every artist, I need a source of inspiration. My next hop is going to be Japan, which is supposed to be a culture that embraces technology in their society more than any other culture in the world. It would have been amazing to spend new years in Tokyo, but not enough time for planing have had to change that a bit, so for early January, Japan here I go!

My friend Derek from Chile was visiting Nor-Cal for work purposes this weekend, so we meet up in San Fran to hang out. Going to pick up the car from the parking garage downtown, we went to the pay station and kindly he offered to pay for parking, so I kindly accepted.

After paying the machine offers to print out a receipt, so he points to me, “Wow, that is great that this machine asks you if you want or not the receipt, because in Chile, it just prints it out and almost no one takes them, so the machine gets packed with unwanted receipts.” I say to him, “yeah, you are right… at least here we care enough to save some trees.”

Then on my way to the car we start talking about receipts and how it would be great if the receipt were to be just sent to your iPhone or any type of phone so it would be stored there automatically. So if I have the desire to print it, I can. Well, that sounded great, maybe some can come up with a smart application to get electronic receipts in the Phones. Wow… the conversation started to get really interesting and it sounds that this could save a lot of money for large stores and therefore lots of trees. Makes sense!

So thinking some more, then came the idea of having stores send your receipts to you by email, instead of a phone app. So when you go to buy something, at cashier you can choose to have the receipt send to you by email or printed out. I would always choose to have it send electronically to me. It would be so nice to have an electronic copy of all of my receipts. Imagine then, if the electronic receipt had all a format specified, so then, someone can come up with a really smart application for filling tax returns that would read electronic receipts and calculate my taxes… damn, this is getting better. I hate filling taxes because of the damn receipt calculation. I would love to have all of these done for me. Makes sense too!

Its so nice to dream, but wouldn’t it be nice if all stores implemented a system like this?

Maybe we can start a campaign for this movement. This could also benefit the stores, imagine the first store that comes with a solution like this. It would be of great publicity for it as it can be thought as “the green store that cares to save trees, and makes your tax return easier”

If there was an store with this system, I think that most people at least in Nor Cal would definitely choose to buy their products there. Specially in San Francisco, where the community cares so much about the environment. I would definitely choose a store like that instead of the non-green ones.

So I hope this blog makes it to some marketing guy in some of the big chain companies, and decides to do something about the stupid paper receipts. It would just take one big store to do this for all the other stores to follow and do the same. Or hopefully, some tree-huger will read this, get pissed off about the stupid paper receipts and start a motion against them. That would be cool.

In case any one wants to start a campaign to push for the end (or partial end) of paper receipts let me know.

~ Javi

Using the iPhone I have discover quite a few applications, but one that interested me more than most was: “Unblock me” – really nice puzzle game with about 7200 puzzles to solve.

At first, the puzzles seem a bit difficult but once you get a hold of the logic behind them, they are actually quite easy. After playing with it for a few weeks in my free time, I got to solve most puzzles in the expert mode in less than 30 seconds. Every once in a while I would get a hard one that would take 1 or 2 mins to solve, but nothing too challenging.

So life was good and the game was keeping me entertained while waiting in lines for grocery stores, waiting for my buddy Dan to get ready (he takes forever to move anywhere), stopping in red lights, etc.

However, one morning before I woke up out of bed I was doing my daily puzzle to get started with my day and I got to Expert Mode 314… damn… I spent 15 minutes and I wasn’t able to solve it… I was shocked… I couldn’t believe it! Such a simple game, and I wasn’t able to figure it out… so I went on my day, kind of pissed off and I wasn’t able to get my mind off the puzzle… later on the afternoon I tried it for another 10 minutes, and nothing… damn it!!! Then I was really pissed off… so I checked the web and it seems that lots of people were not able to solve the same puzzle claiming spending more than 3 hours and no results.

So I checked the website of the game, and they actually got a guide to solve some of the hard ones. They had a guide for 314 of course. But being stubborn as I am, I wasn’t going to check the solution, came on… that would be embarrassing. Such a simple game with a fix number of moves, I HAD TO FIGURE IT OUT. So I spent another 5 minutes and I saw the solution… finally, what a happy feeling.

Here it is the game in case you are interested:

http://www.kiragames.com/games/unblockme/

If you are looking for the solution to the puzzle here it is the link:

http://www.kiragames.com/games/unblockme/guides/

Ok, so I am not sure how many people are already talking about this or not but its fun just to put ideas out.

The topic of this post is to think about the “Consciousness of the Internet”, and what I mean with this is basically to think of the internet as a rational living organism… just like us, humans; and therefore determine whether it has a consciousness or not.

To start with this, the first think we need to do I guess is to define what determines a consciousness.A good starting point is saying that a “consciousness comes from rational thinking”, therefore beings capable of advanced rational thinking should posses a consciousness.

From wikipedia the definition is:

Consciousness is a term that has been used to refer to a variety of aspects of the relationship between the mind and the world with which it interacts.^[1] It has been defined, at one time or another, as: subjective experience; awareness; the ability to experience feelings; wakefulness; having a sense of selfhood; or as the executive control system of the mind.^[2] Despite the difficulty of definition, many philosophers believe that there is a basic underlying intuition about consciousness that is shared by nearly all people.

Following this definition, for the internet to have a consciousness, it should have (1) a mind, (2) a world where this mind lives, (3)awareness, (4) feelings, (5) selfhood.

So looking at the internet as a rational been, which is made from all the users that user it and their rational thinking, it makes sense from my point of view to think that the consciousness of the internet is the collective consciousness of all the individuals that use it (of course the contribution of each individual’s consciousness will depend of their contribution to the use of the internet). Therefore the manifestation of this consciousness is experience in a collective level that involves a mayor change in the consciousness of thousandth of single individuals.

We’ll keep the brainstorming going…

~

So I have finally decided to go “Social”… One of the reasons for me to do this is basically getting tired of having so many opinions and things to say and not recording that anywhere.

Now I start this blog to capture some of my thoughts and opinions, and hopefully connect with some people with similar ideas.

I have chosen the most simple and clear template for this blog with the intention of keeping it simple, easy to read and clean. None of the flashy stuff that if not done right are just useless and ugly.

I hope that who ever reads this blog finds it interesting and feels free to send me comments about anything I post here.

Truly yours,

~