On Monday November 3rd, right after a call with a Frost & Sullivan analyst, I was invited to the seminar “Spain: Global Platform for International Business Investment”. The event took place in the evening at Jones Day’s headquarters. The usual suspects were there, all in their dark suits and ties. The usual message was there too “Spain is a great place to invest, the government has taken the right steps and now things are finally looking up”. The usual BS crap. So, since there was not much new going on, I shook hands, met the one company I wanted to meet, and left before the event even started, taking some pictures of the grand dame of NY (the Chrysler Building, of course) on the way.

November 4th was a busy day. First I met with some IBM Research scientists at IBM offices in 590 Madison Avenue. It was very interesting, but given the nature of the meeting, and NDA agreements, I prefer not to mention anything about it. I already got in trouble once for posting information that, although in IBM’s website already, was under NDA.

After that meeting, and a quick stop at the office in SoHo (with a pit stop at Pearl River Market to buy Moroheiya green noodles and furakake), I went to New America NYC to meet Sandra from OpenITP. More about that in another post.

On my way to my next meeting I had time to stop at Takahachi bakery. Yum!

That last meeting of the day took place at 7 World Trade Center (one of the brand new towers substituting the attacked – albeit “by whom” remains a debatable question –Twin Towers), on the 45th floor, with amazing views.

It was at the NY office of renowned law firm Wilmerhale. We met to discuss my legal options regarding some corporate move. Another “still secret” corporate information, sorry. I’m having a blast with this sweet moment, and I wish I could share it. All will be revealed in due course. The only part of the meeting I can talk about here and now was the Telepresence Room we used to connect with their Palo Alto office. It was one of those very fancy and expensive Cisco set ups, where Cisco provides everything, even the chairs, at a ridiculously high price. They even throw in a “free“ T1 line! No wonder the image and sound quality is amazing. It truly is “the best thing to being there”.

It was interesting to see the difference between the NY lawyer (dark suit and tie) sitting on my left, and his Palo Alto counterpart (plain shirt and sports vest) speaking from a life-size screen image.

After the very interesting meeting I left feeling I was in good (and extremely expensive) hands.