Tiago Matos’ Nest

http://catnipdiary.tumblr.com/post/12012843769/words-to-santiago
http://catnipdiary.tumblr.com/post/12432990575/to-my-friends-in-santiago

Quoting someone I know

A cidade de Santiago não é dos locais mais interessantes, como o Tiago e outros dizem no programa, o melhor no Chile são as paisagens (deserto do atacama, andes, patagonia etc). No entanto, é sempre bom as pessoas ficarem a conhecer uma cidade da América Latina, com uma realidade muito diferente do que a maioria das pessoas imaginam
http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santiago_%28Chile%29

Parte 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wI2I06sOnVE
Parte 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEiTSp6M-xU
Parte 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5yDmHMxukM

It has been many times I see this simple question posted in a email or chat to me, asking me about when am I back to Portugal.

There’s no big problem on answering the question but I always sense a tone of disappointment or confusion on the question.

Like if the question would be: “Till when do you need to be there?”, “Can you come back?” or “Why in the hell don’t you come to Portugal?”.

I suppose this comes from the incorrect vision of people about South America and Chile in particular. Santiago de Chile, owns very little to any European big city, it holds 7M people and in terms of connectivity to the world it ranks at the same Alpha position as Lisbon. By no means this is a boring place, with concerts (Justin Biber is coming for those interested), cinemas (love the old cinemas, called “cine arte”) and crazy parties on every corner (right now they normally smash glasses and burn cars just for fun).

Better and best, mountains are white around the city and any car will take you to ski in one hour and a bit further you can swim a bit in the fucking freazing ocean.

No, I still don’t get when people ask that in that tone but anyways I am re-booking my flights to Portugal this month.

Lifestyle design is all about change. What kind of change? A change for the better.

via my friend Claudio http://fracktal.posterous.com/what-is-lifestyle-design

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.

As most of you guys know I am an avid TED Talks viewer. It’s just absolutely fantastic to listen some of the talks there. This one is impressive.

The nerve disease ALS left graffiti artist TEMPT paralyzed from head to toe, forced to communicate blink by blink. In a remarkable talk at TEDActive, entrepreneur Mick Ebeling shares how he and a team of collaborators built an open-source invention that gave the artist — and gives others in his circumstance — the means to make art again.

via http://www.ted.com/talks/mick_ebeling_the_invention_that_unlocked_a_locked_in_artist.html

Listen at

http://podcast.zwame.pt/1082/podcast/showcasept/showcase_pt14-tiago-matos/

and sorry about the constant sound cuts.

Vendder - Chile from Vendder on Vimeo.

Why on earth wouldn’t ANY sane country want to import as many go-getting highly skilled young entrepreneurs full of energy as possible? It’s always amazed me that other countries haven’t figured this out, but they are often stuck fighting the last war in that 19th century factory mindset. Most countries have entrepreneur visas that require investments of millions of dollars, etc. That means they miss out on the giant growth that occurs when these tiny tech companies take off.

via http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2240081

Considering the difficulty on getting in YCombinator, the non-existence of seed capital in Portugal apart from seedcapital.pt, which usually takes 30% for 30kEUR, this is a good deal for many young tech companies in Portugal.