It seems that some conservatives hate strong women who happened to be married to strong Democratic political candidates. Or maybe it’s simply that strong women make easy targets.

Hillary Clinton has learned that the hard way . . . twice. First, she was reviled as Bill Clinton’s nerdy, ultra-feminist wife. And then she transformed into a bitchy, ball-busting candidate to be President of the United States who didn’t appeal to large segments of the US population until she teared up on camera and showed she was a “real” woman.

Largely for the same reason, Michelle Obama had to go on “The View” (a US daytime talk show with a predominantly female audience) to show her “warmer” side, though it should be said that she didn’t cry. It seems that many conservatives attack any woman in the political sphere who’s not as unassuming, dainty, non-threatening and “lady-like” as Laura Bush, who knows that her correct place is beside (or more likely, behind) her husband and who evokes the image of the good homemaker and mother (as opposed to strong career woman and intellectual equal).

Not that the two are necessarily contradictory. I grew up with both of my parents in a relatively happy home, but I have no doubt that a large part of whom I am is because of who and how my mother is. She was a force of nature in our family, inspiring all of us to get the best education possible and kicking our butts when necessary. My sister good-humoredly compares my mother to Mama Rose in Gypsy, but my mother also spoiled us, buying us Reeboks when we begged for them even though money was tight or cooking our favorite Jamaican foods whenever we returned home from college. And yes, calling at least once a week once we left home to know how we were doing even as we consistently evaded her phone calls. She did all of that, went back for an advanced degree after we emigrated to the US and worked a full-time job.

And it seems that Michelle Obama had a similar path. She has two young daughters and until the recent campaign, a full-time executive job. And let’s face it, being a mom is not for wimps, much less a mom with a full-time executive job who’s also supporting her husband’s political career and has degrees from both Princeton and Harvard.

So it’s a bit sad that people are attacking her for being too “tough”. And it’s a little bit sad that she needs to go on national TV to prove that she’s “warm”, even though she’s not the one running for president. Certainly a male candidate would never be criticized for being too tough or not warm enough, and I can’t imagine that if Hillary had won the nomination, Bill would be on “The View” showing his warm, fuzzy side. In fact, a lot of people were annoyed when Bill so vigorously and pugnaciously defended his wife, but up to a certain point I guess it was normal, maybe even “chivalrous”.

That made it all the more heartwarming when Michelle paid tribute to the battles that Hillary Clinton has had to fight over the last 16 years, to prove that she can be both tough and feminine at the same time. I was touched that Michelle noted that Hillary was a pioneer, a fighter, and that sexism had played some not unimportant role in the news media’s coverage of Hillary.

In Michelle’s own words: “It’s only when women like her take the hits and it’s painful, it’s hurtful, but she’ s taking them so that my girls, when they come along, won’t have to feel it as badly,” Mrs. Obama said.

See the full interview below.

Since we try not to take ourselves too seriously here at nuroa, we recorded a video that reflects the fact that people in Spain tend to leave home at a later age than in other European countries. The Spanish government is trying to create €200 subsidies to incentivize youngsters to leave their parents’ homes, but we’ll see how well that works.

So here’s our humorous take on the situation. Please let me know what you think!

nuroa.tv, canal de vídeos inmobiliarios

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about role models and how important they are.

Take, for example, the tennis world. Monica Seles (my childhood tennis hero and the reason why I play with a two-handed backhand) dominated tennis in the late 1980s, and 20 years later there is a generation of Serbian tennis stars inspired by her success — Ana Ivanovic (women’s number 1), Jelena Jankovic (women’s number 2) and Novak Djokovic (men’s number 3 and rising). Similarly, Anna Kournikova’s success inspired a lot of Russian tennis parents to invest more seriously in their daughters’ tennis education. The result is that 5 of the top 10 female tennis players are Russian.

There are, of course, role models who are not athletes. Entertainers also have the ability to inspire. Forbes just published its list of most powerful celebrities, and three of the top 5 celebrities are black and very well paid: Oprah Winfrey (number 1 with 2007 income of $275 million), Tiger Woods (number 2 with 2007 income of $115 million ) and Beyoncé Knowles (number 4 with 2007 income of $80 million). (Angelina Jolie is number 3 with 2007 income of $14 million, and David Beckham is number 5 with 2007 income of $50 million.)

I have no doubt that Oprah’s, Tiger’s and Beyonce’s success will inspire generations of future black athletes, entertainers and moguls.

I myself draw inspiration from their struggles and successes.

That being said, their success does little to undermine the common stereotype that blacks are just great athletes who can sing and dance. In no way do I want to downplay the success of stars like Beyoncé and especially not of Oprah. But my point is that while their amazing collective success and spending power show the value of hard work, God-given talent and clever marketing plans, and while they are trailblazers that still have to overcome remnants of racism within their respective industries, their success comes within an entertainment industry that has traditionally been relatively open to blacks.

That’s why I’m so happy that Obama won the Democratic nomination. I was rooting for Hillary, in part because I grew up with the Clintons and felt a certain amount of nostalgia. But even more importantly, I never thought that white people would vote for Obama, and I didn’t want to see another Republican in office. I thought it was impossible that a black man could become the Democratic Party’s nominee, and even more impossible that he would have a decent chance at becoming the next president of the United States.

I grew up surrounded by heroes, some of whom were famous black athletes and entertainers.

But the possibility of a black President never even entered into the realm of conscious thought, much less hope.

And it’s not like we’ll have to wait 20 years to see the immediate benefits of Obama’s trailblazing campaign. My mother, for example, is driving all over the East Coast to participate in the Obama campaign. He is causing black people of all ages to re-evaluate America and themselves. Before his campaign, my mother had never actively participated in the political process other than to vote. Now she’s giving donations, recruiting friends, calling me whenever there is an important Obama update . . . .

So I think that this is a really unique moment, not just because I can’t wait to get rid of George Bush and replace him with someone with a brain and a heart, but also because Obama’s campaign destroys one of the last areas where blacks have been denied access, where I thought it was impossible even to contemplate a possibility of success.

I mean, outside of Africa and the Caribbean, has a black person ever been elected to run a country in which blacks are a racial minority? Probably not, because there’s still a lingering suspicion/stereotype that blacks simply aren’t smart or capable enough (unless they’re Republicans, in which case they almost have to repudiate their “blackness” in exchange for political gain.)

On the other hand, there are already women running major Western countries and/or campaigning for the top spot, so we know it’s at least possible to dream of a female President.

But blacks have largely been unable to dream this dream. Until now . . .

Now it seems that maybe we can sing, dance, play sports and run countries too.

It’s official. Highgrowth Partners is the latest investor in migoa. Oriol, Albert, Dennis, Didac and I are obviously quite happy. (Si prefieres leer en Español ya puedes en mi nuevo blog, www.garystew.es.)

As Javier posted in his blog, we met Highgrowth about a year and a half ago when we were making the rounds to Barcelona-based business angels and venture capitalists. With a few years of hindsight, I can honestly admit that at that point we really didn’t have much of a clue about the Internet world or how we’d make our business work. But we were a couple of reasonably intelligent guys who were really hungry to leave our marks on the world. In addition, we had decent CVs, which meant that we were hopeful that the years of education and training at multinational organizations would translate into some possibility of success as entrepreneurs. And though we noted some interpersonal connection with Mercè and Jaume, they told us something equivalent to “keep in touch”, which is what all of the VCs tell you when they’re not really interested in investing in you at the moment but want to keep the doors open just in case you might someday become more investment-ready.

We knew that networking counts, and more than that, we thought Mercè and Jaume were pretty cool (it helps that we’re all more or less the same age), so we kept in touch with them, sending them updates about how the company was evolving, about new prizes won, new business angels who had come on board, etc. The response was always very polite, until one day out of seemingly nowhere they invited us to present our project to a network of business angels in Helsinki. So we went to Finland for 3 days, during which time we were able to confirm that we had good rapport with the Highgrowth team on a personal level. In addition, we were able to explain our ideas about nuroa in a lot more detail, and they were able to see how a group of international business angels responded to Oriol and me as entrepreneurs and to the project itself.

After Helsinki, I can’t say that we had any particular expectations about receiving an investment from Highgrowth. By that point, we’d been meeting with VCs in London, in France, in Germany — basically, any interesting investor who was interested in meeting with us. And then suddenly one day, Oriol told me that he’d received a call from Highgrowth saying that nuroa was now sufficiently mature to be investment-ready.

I guess what they liked was that ever since our initial contact, we’d explained to them our various short-term objectives and we’d accomplished them. Of course, the business model now has evolved a lot since our initial meeting with Highgrowth, which I think is pretty normal. Unless you’re Nostradamus, being an entrepreneur involves a lot of trial and error. But that being said, they saw that were progressing in a positive direction, and I guess they liked that.

Now don’t get me wrong. We’ve made a lot of mistakes in terms of hiring and with regard to our certain aspects of the product. And I’m still not 100% satisfied with where we are with either the product or our marketing efforts. But that being said, it’s not so easy to be selected by elite analysts for prizes and/or recognition from Red Herring, Essential Web, Demo Germany, Global Innovate, etc. or to receive lots of financing from the Spanish and Catalan governments via CIDEM and CDTI (funds reserved for “innovative” technologies), or to convince experienced entrepreneurs like Albert and Dennis that they should invest their hard-earned money in you. So despite some negative commentaries for a distinct minority of  bloggers, I think that we’ve generally shown that we’re not so stupid. In fact, it seems that the funds speak amongst themselves, and the general feedback that I’ve gotten from various sources is that some international investors think that our team is pretty decent and that it’d be the basis of any eventual success that we might someday have. Investors all want to minimize their risks, and one way of doing this to look at what other investors and analysts think about you, and in our case we were greatly helped by the generally favourable feedback.

So how do I feel now? On the one hand, I’m quite happy. It’s a lot of money, so we now have the luxury of a few months of not having to worry about making it to the end of the month, which means that we can really focus on perfecting the product and increasing our profile. And it’s always nice to receive monetary validation from investors. We have it 100% clear that the money that we received was not a gift. VCs have a lot of attractive candidates, and their job is to choose the projects that they view as the most promising. It feels good to know that we were Highgrowth’s first investment in 2008.

At the same time, I guess I’m a little bit more stressed, because we’re no longer in the minor leagues. VCs impose their conditions and set their objectives, which imposes a certain amount of pressure. That being said, negotiating with Highgrowth was a very humane process. I really can’t complain in that sense. I never had the sense that they were trying to take advantage of us. The final contract is pretty fair to both sides.

Nonetheless, it’s pretty clear that I now have a unique opportunity to do something interesting and/or important with my life. All of my studies and experiences (both good and bad) have prepared me for this moment. And if I fail, maybe I’ll never have another chance quite as interesting to realize my dreams and show the world of what I’m truly capable.

But in the end, I’m a pretty confident guy, and I believe fully in our project and in our team, so win or lose, all I’ve got to say is: “Bring it!”

Tonight at 8:30PM, Nuroa and Highgrowth Partners will sponsor TechCrunch Barcelona Meetup with Mike Butcher. We organized the event on very short notice, but it looks like it will be a success, with more than 100 people signed up to attend. Of course, there’s often some variation between the number of people that sign up and the number that actually attend, but in either case, we’ve pretty happy. And nuroa got mentioned in TechCrunch, which is always cool.

The event will be at a cool new hotel, Granados 83, which came highly recommended by my friend and fellow entrepreneur Santiago Porrero, who also helped put us touch with the public relations and reservations department.

All in all, no complaints. They were able to offer us a really cool option on very short notice and at a very good price - an open bar of wine and cava (Spanish champagne), plus some light snacks for 100 on their rooftop terrace with views of the Eixample.

I’m not sure if it’s the open bar, the views, or the chance to network with other entrepreneurs and with Mike, but in any case, the response has been surprisingly encouraging.

I hope to see you there tonight! And if not, I’ll be sure to post pics from the event in tomorrow’s post.

Happy San Jordi’s Day! I’ve gotten neither a book nor a rose, which kind of sucks, but I’m trying to keep upbeat.

For those you outside of Catalunya, Sant Jordi (”Saint George’s Day” for English speakers) is a special day, similar to Valentine’s Day, but not quite as commercial. All around the streets of Catalunya, there are small vendors with small, folding tables selling roses and books for a few euros so that couples (or friends or even bosses) can express their love for and appreciation of one another. Women walk around town with roses, men show off their books and everyone enjoys the beautiful springtime weather.

Sant Jordi’s Day is the Day of the Book and the Rose in Catalunya, and celebrates a martyred Roman soldier who was decapitated when he refused to kill Christians. There are popular stories of San Jordi and a dragon. Through a random lottery, the king’s daughter was chosen to be given as a sacrifice to a dragon that was terrorizing the village of Montblanc, but San Jordi arrived just in time to kill the dragon and save the beautiful princess.

Giving roses in celebration of San Jordi has been done at least since the Rose Fair began in the 15th century. The book part came into effect around 1930. April 23 was chosen as the official day in Catalonia, because it was the day on which Cervantes and Shakespeare, among others, died. Quite logically, it’s also the accepted date on which San Jordi died in 303 AD.

Speaking of love, Mariah Carey is the queen of the love song, and I’m really loving her new hit, Touch My Body. It explains what happens after you’ve given your partner the rose or book for San Jordi’s day. Touch My Body was the number one song in the US for the last couple of weeks, only recently replaced by Leona Lewis’s Bleeding Love. In addition to the mellow beat and sweet vocals, I like the reference to a web 2.0 start-up. It gives me something to which I can aspire.

First, Mariah tells her lover how she feels about him:

I know that you’ve been waiting for it
I’m waiting too
In my imagination I’d be all up on you
I know you got that fever for me
102
And boy I know I feel the same
My temperature’s through the roof

But then being the paparazzi-stalked star that she is (when she’s not begging for media attention, that is), she warns her lover not to try to embarass her on the Internet:

If there’s a camera up in here
Then it’s gonna leave with me
When I do (I do)
If there’s a camera up in here
Then I’d best not catch this flick
On YouTube (YouTube)

That’s when you know that you’ve hit the bigtime. Not when you get paid $1.65 billion for your not even 2-year old start-up. Not when important bloggers and analysts note that you dominate your category more than Google dominates search. It’s when a superstar like Mariah Carey name-checks you in her number 1 song without even asking to get paid for it or having to explain who you are. That’s when you know you have become an important part of popular culture.

Two interesting bits of news.

Traffic for online real estate sites grows 

According to an article in Invertia, Fotocasa’s audience grew by 19% in February 2008. According to NielsenRatings, Spanish real estate websites had a total audience of 3.2 million viewers, or 17% of the total Spanish Internet audience. Fotocasa claims to have 1.6 million viewers, according to information provided by Market Intelligence, which would make it the most visited real estate site in Spain. The interesting bit is that Idealista generally also claims to be the number 1 real estate portal in Spain, and at least in the public imagination (as represented on the blogosphere), it is. And it’s strange that Invertia uses the sector numbers from NielsenRatings, but gets Fotocasa’s numbers from Market Intelligence, without any attempt to reconcile the two methodologies.

In any case, the good news that the crisis is not hurting the growth of Internet property sites. Fotocasa, in particular, seems to have wisely diversified its offering more to reflect current market conditions, with a healthy focus on rentals.

People will always need a place to live — the question is just whether they’ll have to buy it, rent it or share it.

But Banks Are Helping to Kill Real Estate Agencies and Developers

On the other hand, César Villasante (whom I met at SIMA and who is a really cool guy) has an interesting post about how Spanish banks are responding to the current crisis by discouraging potential home buyers. Based on anecdotal evidence, César recounts that many Spanish banks are counseling potential buyers to invest in the banks’ investment funds rather than buy property. The banks argue that property prices will continue to drop dramatically, so there’s absolutely no rush to buy right now. In fact, from the banks’ perspective, since the property itself is the biggest guarantee of a mortgage, banks have no interest in financing overvalued homes, because if and when the value of the purchased home drops, the banks’ risk exposure only increases. So the banks prefer to wait until the amount that they’re financing reflects the real value of the home, so that their risk is minimal in the event of foreclosure (and in the context of the current liquidity crisis).

When combined with the fact that the banks are not interested in bailing out failing real estate agencies or developers, the bottomline is that the banks are helping to hasten the death of a large portion of the real estate sector — on the one hand largely refusing to refinance vulnerable real estate businesses and on the other hand counseling buyers to wait until prices drop even more before buying property (or alternatively refusing to finance home purchases unless the potential buyers can provide lots of guarantees).

In the current market, time is on the buyers’ side, and it’s certainly on the banks’ side.

But with few realistic prospects of sales or refinancing their debt, the clock is definitely ticking for most real estate professionals.

Here at nuroa, our real estate search engine, we’ve been experimenting with citizen journalism.

In Spain, we’re recorded 3 videos so far under our series called “Y Tu Que Piensas” (So What Do You Think)? Our first episode asked people on the streets of Barcelona how the current real estate crisis might affect their votes in the recent Spanish elections. Our second video covered the March for Decent Housing and asked the participants to define “decent housing”. Pretty soon, we’ll launch our third video.

In Germany, we’ve recorded 9 videos when we visited Germany to attend the Re:publica conference. Kirsten has already launched two of the interviews (here and here) that we did at Re:publica asking well-known German bloggers where they live in Berlin and why. We’ll be launching our Berlin series of videos over the next few weeks.

So that’s why I read with particular fondness the post about the supposed Obama-supporting blogger that’s taking down the Obama campaign.  Mayhill Fowler, a blogger for OffTheBus.net, went to a campaign fundraiser as a citizen (press were not allowed to report on the event — it was supposed to be off the record), but she decided that as a “journalist” she had to publish in her blog Obama’s comment that poor small-town voters “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them” as a way to explain their frustrations. Of course, Hillary Clinton immediately jumped on the comments to show that Obama doesn’t relate well with an important base of the Democratic Party — poor whites. She claims that he’s elitist, as opposed to her and Bill Clinton, two Yale-educated lawyers who earned more than $109 million from 2000 to 2007. Obama, on the other hand, just recently paying off his student loans from Harvard Law School. But nonetheless, the quote is causing Obama a lot of grief, and some people are saying that it could change the course of the current race. (Maybe that’s just the traditional press looking for a story in a relatively slow news period?)

But my point is less to focus on Bill and Hillary, or Obama and Michelle, and to focus more on figuring out what a blogger’s responsibility is when she is both “citizen” and “journalist”. On the one hand, it’s clear that the Obama political team hoped to exploit “citizen journalists” by inviting them to political fundraisers and expecting traditional, fluff coverage about how great Obama is. On the other hand, it’s not clear that a blogger who’s invited to an “off-the-record” political event should be writing a story in which she breaks the basic rules by quoting the political candidates. After all, she wasn’t the only “journalist” invited to the event, she was just the only one to quote Obama in her blog.

What are the limits and responsibilities of a “citizen journalist”, and do they differ in any substantive way from the limits and responsibilities that “real journalists” face? What do you think? Is Mayhill Flower a snake in the grass, or a modern day Woodward and Bernstein?

Today, we’re launching a photo contest to find the most f*cked-up apartment. We’re launching the contest primarily in Spain, but anyone from any country with a picture of a f*cked-up apartment can participate.

We’ll be handing out 1 iPod shuffle per week until the grand prize is announced — a 32 GB iPod Touch.

The contest ends on 15 May.

As long as you are the legal owner of the picture, there’s a chance that you could win!

If any non-Spanish speakers have any questions whatsoever, don’t hesitate to be in touch with me: gary [AT] migoa.com.

Good luck!

The New York Times has an interesting op-ed piece about bringing hope, confidence — and buyers — back to the US real estate market. The author’s premise is pretty simple: To get home buyers back in the real estate market, it’s not enough to focus on lower prices, because a lot of potential home buyers are simply too scared to buy anything right now. And if they’re not scared, then they’re being very clever — that is, they expect prices to keep decreasing, so they’ll just keep on waiting to get the absolutely lowest price. A good deal is no longer good enough. Many buyers want the very best, cheapest option. After all, it is a buyer’s market.

The result is inertia fueled by a hypercautious speculation and fear, which would spell disaster for large sectors of the economy if left unchecked.

The solution therefore requires returning hope and confidence to real estate buyers. We need to convince them to suspend disbelief despite all they’ve been reading about credit crunches, foreclosures, sub-prime bla bla bla . . . The media is selling papers by selling fear, but it’s clear that a moribund real estate market is not in any country’s mid-term interests.

So the big question is: How do you return confidence to home buyers back in the context of carnage and despair that define current real estate market conditions not just in Spain but in many countries throughout the world?

The author suggests that the best measure would be to give potential buyers rebates to incentivize them to buy property - in this case, the author suggests a 5% tax rebate of up to $25,000.

And he argues that it should be done after the real estate market after the market has sufficiently corrected itself, which the author estimates should be between August to December 2008. Under this approach, the rebate would last for 12 months.

I’m not sure a rebate of €25,000 would be sufficient in the US market, but it might work in Spain, if done in conjunction with other measures. In Spain, the problem is two-fold:

• Buyers need to begin to have faith that now is the right time to buy — that they shouldn’t feel stupid for not waiting a little bit longer, and
• Banks need to be willing to lend people the money to buy property at an affordable price.

It’s clear that the first problem won’t be solved until the second one is addressed. In the last few months of my real estate business, one of the most frustrating experiences was finally getting an interested buyer only to have the bank reject the application or request a double guarantee or some other very stringent requirement that sent the buyer running back to live with Mommy and Daddy.

That being said, the sub-prime crisis is sufficiently scary to make me empathize with banks’ unwillingness to extend credit to risky applicants. Banks really shouldn’t be lending money to people whose only asset is the dream of being a property owner. If you don’t have a steady job, assets or any sort of guarantor, maybe you really don’t need to be a home owner.For me, the essence of the current quandary is stemming the circle of fear. Banks have lost confidence in businesses and in home buyers, and home buyers have lost confidence in ever being able to afford a decent home. And it seems that in large part, it’ll be up to normal economic forces and the government to instill confidence in both parties.

What do you think? Should the Spanish government offer similar incentives to home buyers to get them back? At which point should the rebate be offered? Will it make any difference, or are more fundamental changes in the Spanish real estate market required? If so, what might they be? And in light of the current credit crunch, what, if anything, should the Spanish government do to convince banks to support the real estate industry and potential home buyers, without going in the direction of the sub-prime mortgage debacle?