This summer, for my mother`s birthday, my father invited the whole family (on both sides of the Atlantic) to a 7 night Mediterranean cruise from July 10 to July 17 onboard the MSC Musica. Thank you dad!
We boarded in Valencia (Spain), and stopped in Marseille (France), Genoa, Rome, and Palermo (Italy), La Goulette (Tunisia), and Palma de Mallorca (Spain), before returning back to Valencia.
Although the ship is a mass market one (you could tell looking at the food, entertainment, and passengers), it was quite nice.
After a month traveling throughout Europe (posts and pictures soon), I returned to New York and I needed to catch up with work. In order to be more productive I had to tackle the “cable jungle” challenge. Quick and easy (and cool) solution? LEGO!
Just attach some velcro to the back of a Lego, attach it to the edge of your desk, get some of your favorite figures, have them “hold their arms up”, and let them hold the USB and charger cables for you 🙂
Innomedyx (Twitter, LinkedIn, FaceBook), a company I`m a co-founder of, has established the Clinical Innovation Center at the Polytechnic University of Valencia (Spain), the best BioTechnology University in Spain according to Spanish newspaper El Mundo.
photo © UPV
The Dean of the Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV), Francisco Mora, and the general director of Innomedyx Knowledge in Action, Rosa Valenzuela, signed a partnership agreement that formalizes the chair of Clinical Innovation company on July 1st.
Wednesday was a long day.
First I was invited to a VIP breakfast executive briefing and presentation by IBM at 7:45am. The event, in which IBM showcased their Watson technology and three partner companies talked about how they are leveraging NLP capabilities, lasted until 12:30pm, but I stayed for an extra hour for a meeting with an IBM executive.
Then I headed back to the office for 3 conference calls. By 7:00pm I was ready to go to the Social Radar startup launch party Stephanie and I had been invited to.
A friend got me a VIP pass for the 2014 Scope Basel Art Show (thank you, Jorge!). I had it all planned out: since I had a meeting in Stuttgart the day before, I could drive to nearby Basel, attend the VIP opening, and then fly back to New York. But the Stuttgart meeting was cancelled, so I changed my plane ticket, and returned to New York in time to go to the Amos Lee concert in Brooklyn`s Prospect Park with my wife.
After a weekend in Valencia, last Monday I went to Madrid. Awesome high speed train from Valencia in the morning, business presentation, and a delicious Japanese lunch at Kabuki with my friends Juan and Alvaro. So good was the lunch and company that I almost missed my flight. It did not help that I went to Terminal 4 as usual, when my flight to London departed from Terminal 1, and in the Adolfo Suarez Madrid Barajas airport, it takes a long time to go from terminal to terminal.
Last Thursday I arrived in Nice just in time to catch a very nice and expensive taxi (al least they are almost all brand new and very clean Mercedes Benz cars) that took me to the IBM Client Center in nearby La Gaude for my first IBM European Cloud Advisory Board meeting.
It was an interesting meeting, attended by 15 business executives, investors and analysts. Not only they were all very smart, but I was brain dead after the long red-eye flight.
