I was rewatching this video, as it’s one of my favorite performances of all time. And I was thinking that if you replace Jennifer Holliday with Hillary Clinton, and replaced Curtis (the love interest) for the dream of becoming President of the United States (or the American public), you’d understand Hillary’s Clinton’s emotional response when she realized that voters didn’t “love” her.

As Hillary/Effie puts: “Am I’m Telling You . . . I’m Not Going Nowhere . . . I’m Not Living Without You . . . I’m Staying, and You’re Gonna Love Me!”

Doesn’t Curtis (the love interest) look a little bit like Obama? Just a little?

Here are the full lyrics. Just try it. Instead of an unfaithful lover, insert the dream of becoming President of the United States or the American public. Take your pick.

———
And I am telling you
I’m not going.
You’re the best [man] I’ll ever know.
There’s no way I can ever go,
No, no, no, no way,
No, no, no, no way I’m livin’ without you.
I’m not livin’ without you.
I don’t want to be free.
I’m stayin’,
I’m stayin’,
And you, and you, you’re gonna love me.
Ooh, you’re gonna love me.

And I am telling you
I’m not going,
Even though the rough times are showing.
There’s just no way,
There’s no way.
We’re part of the same place.
We’re part of the same time.
We both share the same blood.
We both have the same mind.
And time and time we have so much to share,
No, no, no,
No, no, no,
I’m not wakin’ up tomorrow mornin’
And findin’ that there’s nobody there.
Darling, there’s no way,
No, no, no, no way I’m livin’ without you.
I’m not livin’ without you.
You see, there’s just no way,
There’s no way.

Tear down the mountains,
Yell, scream and shout.
You can say what you want,
I’m not walkin’ out.
Stop all the rivers,
Push, strike, and kill.
I’m not gonna leave you,
There’s no way I will.

And I am telling you
I’m not going.
You’re the best [man] I’ll ever know.
There’s no way I can ever, ever go,
No, no, no, no way,
No, no, no, no way I’m livin’ without you.
Oh, I’m not livin’ without you,
I’m not livin’ without you.
I don’t wanna be free.
I’m stayin’,
I’m stayin’,
And you, and you,
You’re gonna love me.
Oh, hey, you’re gonna love me,
Yes, ah, ooh, ooh, love me,
Ooh, ooh, ooh, love me,
Love me,
Love me,
Love me,
Love me.
You’re gonna love me.

It seems that everyone is talking about the fact that online real estate sites are increasing in traffic despite the overall drop in demand. The story’s been getting a lot of press recently, and El Pais, a leading Spanish newspaper, is the latest to jump on the bandwagon, noting that in 2007, Spanish real estate sites doubled their traffic even as demand dropped dramatically.

The relevant data includes:

• 50% of all home seekers begin their searches online
• The total number of Internet users that search on online real estate sites to find apartments has more than doubled, from 1,6 million in 2006 to 3,5 million in 2007
• The increase in users can mainly be explained by the rapid growth of Internet usage in general
• Fernando Encinar, Idealista’s communication director, points to Germany’s ImmobilienScout as an example of the fact that a stagnant market combined with strong growth in Internet usage can still create a highly profitable online real estate business (I’m trying to compile more detailed info to analyze this last assertion in more detail, but the facts speak for themselves — Germany has had a relatively flat real estate market, but ImmobilienScout just got bought at a valuation of €545 million).
• Fernando also notes that properties in Madrid now stay on the market 10% longer (on average, apartments stayed on the market for 189 days this year vs. 172 days last year), while in Barcelona apartments stayed on the market for 35,5% more time (183 days this year vs. 135 days last year).
• 1/3 of the apartments listed on Idealista have decreased in price, and prices have fallen over the last 3 months by 0,5% in Barcelona and 0,9% in Madrid.
• After years of more aggressive increases in the price for listing on their sites, some real estate portals have waived price increases to retain existing clients with lesser budgets.
• The article suggests that the four main challenges for the existing real estate portals are:
  • Finding ways to improve their search filters
  • Offering more and better features
  • Playing a more active role in the sale and purchase process, apart from just providing listings and similarly general information. Alternatively, offering the real estate agents a better return on their investments will be essential in deciding which websites survive and which sites fail.
  • Getting to know the Internet user better, offering more personalized service and the option to participate in helping to generate content/count on the user’s feedback.

I couldn’t agree more. The ideas are clear. Now it’s time to see who executes best.

As anyone who reads this blog must know, I am a huge Beyonce fan. I think that she has an amazing work ethic wrapped up in a superstar package (extremely beautiful, great voice, great performer, wonderful at transmitting emotions while performing and singing, etc.) while still being humble and accessible. And, of course, she is famous for doing complicated dance routines in superhigh stilleto heels.

Nonetheless, even I had to admit that I found this video — and the analysis on CNN — hilarious, not because I like seeing my favorite star fall, but because I think it’s amazing the way that she got up and just kept on giving an amazing performance. No break. No pause. No time to check for injuries. No obvious embarrassment. Single-minded focus and determination. The show must go on, literally.

The best review of the fall that I’ve read is on a blog that I read religiously called “Young, Black and Fabulous”, which tracks all that’s happening in black entertainment in the US. I’ll have to translate the post from black slang into plain English, but the best part of the review is the following: “I’m just trippin’ that this chick bounced the hell back up like her weave was an invincible air mattress and kept the party goin’ without missing nan a beat. Her recovery game is on point. I know that mess had her dazed and confused…. Concert goers say she had a bloody knee and sat down to do the next set, but continued the rest of the concert full out. . . . These other chicks in the game still aint got nothing on B. ”

Translation into plain English: “I’m so surprised (tripping) that this young lady was able to recover so quickly from her fall as if her fake hair extensions were some sort of invincible air mattress that softened her fall. She continued to dance and party without missing a beat. Her ability to recover is amazing. I know that the fall left her stunned. . . . Concert goers say she had a bloody knee and sat down to do the next set, but otherwise she continued to perform at the highest level as if nothing had happened. . . . Beyonce is still the best pop diva out there.”

It reminds me a lot of my favorite episode of “Sex and the City”, “The Real Me”, when Carrie gets invited to be a model for a day, and she falls flat on her face in front of everyone because she’s wearing “hooker heels” and had been drinking too much Veuve Cliquot to calm her nerves. She gets up in front of the entire audience only dressed in jeweled underwear trying to give her best sexy looks and then takes a huge fall. For a moment, you see her trying to decide if she will just get off the stage and drink her sorrows away, or finish the show. She decides to finish the show, and the audience goes wild for her obvious courage and determination. And then she ends up being the star of the fashion show because of her chutzpah.

The voice-over then sums up her motivation. Carrie had wanted to be a model, but her stumble proved that she was just a normal person. Someone real. And “when real people fall, they get right back up and keep on walking”. I think Beyonce, a big Sex and the City fan, has obviously taken this message to heart.

I stayed up on Sunday night to watch the Academy Awards. I wanted to see which actors would win. Up until very recently black actors weren’t even nominated. We talked about this a lot when I was growing up in the Bronx whenever the Oscars rolled around. It was a show for white people, we thought. Most of us knew that the only black actors to win Academy Awards in the 20th century were Hattie McDaniel in 1939 (the actress who played the maid “Mammie” in Gone With the Wind), Sidney Poitier (1963), Louis Gossett, Jr. (1982), Denzel Washington (1989), Whoopi Goldberg (1990) and Cuba Gooding, Jr. (1996). Of these actors, the only black actor to win in a leading role was Sidney Poitier. In 2001, Denzel Washington became the second black lead actor to win, and Halle Barry became the first black actress to win as best lead actress. Jamie Foxx also won as best lead actor in 2004 for Ray.

How things have changed in my generation! To paraphase Ellen DeGeneres (who did an awesome job as host, by the way): What would Hollywood be without blacks, Jews and gays? This year black actors were nominated — and were favorites in — 3 of the 4 catgories. In the end, Jennifer Hudson won as best supporting actress and Forest Whitaker won as best lead actor (the third black actor to win in a leading role in 6 years, after a period of 38 years between the first and second wins for lead black actors!). Eddie Murphy, the third favorite, lost and left the awards early. Seems that he’s not so popular in Hollywood as he is notoriously difficult to work with. It’s difficult to win in a vote of your peers if you’re not so well-liked.

I left the US in 2000, because I was tired of racial politics, tired of seeing everything through a racial prism and tired of always being seen through that same prism. I wanted to experience “blackness” in other contexts, or maybe not to experience it at all. I wanted a break. In the US, you are black first, and that is usually regarded by others as a bad–or at least, stigmatized–status. It’s tiring representing an entire race 24/7, particularly in the mostly white settings in which I tended to find myself. So I pulled a Tina Turner, packed up my bags and decided to change my primary identity from “black” to “American”. People might not like Americans, but they have at least a grudging respect for us. The dislike is often based on our status as the only superpower. I don’t mind so much if people associate me with power (that’s the goal of every American, isn’t it?). But I do mind people feeling superior to me. At a very early age, one of my favorite aunts taught me a phrase that as a young, Black person you can never forget: “Good as any, better than many and inferior to none.”

Being in Europe is different. In the US, you are always representing a race, but that creates a certain power in numbers that leads to social change and political power. Colin Powell’s status as a “racial representative” has an effect in Hollywood, in the business community, in everything, because his very presence and success redefines the public conception of blackness. This is what we see in the case of the Academy Awards. The increased presence and socio-political power of the Black community gets reflected in cultural events like the Academy Awards. The Latin community will be next, and in fact, this year made important advances as well with films such as Pan’s Labryinth and Babel.

In Europe, there is no such thing as black consciousness, black power or black politics. So no one apparently cares if blacks are represented in politics, arts, on television or in any other cultural space. In Spain, for example, the only consciousness that I see relates to regional and linguistic differences (Catalans vs. Basques vs. Madrileños, etc.). You can’t imagine the city when Barça beats Madrid, or if Barça loses. But I don’t see anything like black pride, or Arab/Muslim pride, or Latin-American pride. There’s not even so much gay pride! There’s no pride at all!

The US might be racist, but we accept racial minorities as our own. Maybe as disfavoured cousins, or maybe even unwanted stepchildren, but still part of the family. And this means that talented members of racial minorities have opportunities to reach the very summit of cultural power (the Oscars, the Grammies) or political power (Condeleeza Rice, Barak Obama, Colin Powell, etc). I view my life as a living example of this access to opportunity. But this doesn’t appear even close to being possible in Europe, and I doubt that I would have had the same opportunities growing up here.

This is, in part, why the New York Times is reporting today that Dreamgirls will be an interesting test case of international acceptance. The title of the article tells a sad story: “Film With Black Stars Seek to Break International Barriers”. The US market made Dreamgirls critically and commerically successful (the film passed the ever-important $100.000.000 mark), but there is doubt that the film can do well internationally. Apparently, US marketers believe that the international community is “the new South” (referring to the once-slaveholding region of the US). As one marketer noted: ““The international marketplace is still fairly racist.”

One might argue that it’s just that Europeans live racism in a different way and so don’t relate to US racial tales. But then again, such limitations of imagination generally don’t stop movies starring actors like George Clooney or Brad Pitt from succeeding, even if the themes involved are distinctly American. I liked Bend it Like Beckham and “Pride and Prejudice” is one of my favorite books even though their characters do not reflect my daily life. Suspension of belief / universal tales.

It’s an interesting dilemma, an example of the typical “individual vs. society” conversations that are had in political science and philosophy classes: on a personal level, I feel free from racial politics and thus more content personally. But on a political level, this freedom might be damaging in that it risks tacitly accepting the continuing marginalization of communities to which I belong.

For all of you who still aren’t aware of what Dreamgirls is in any of its incarnations (the original Supremes, the Broadway show or the current movie), please see the performance below from the recent Academy Awards and let me know what you think.

I’ve just read The New York Times’s very positive, almost gushing review of Blinkx. At first, I thought it must be some sort of paid advertisement, but I have unwavering faith in The New York Times’s journalistic standards. The journalist, Jason Pontin, seemed in-love with the product, and he’s not exactly unfamiliar with the technology space–he’s the editor-in-chief and publisher of MIT’s Technology Review.

In any case, the excitement being generated by Blinkx makes sense, given how obsessed with video everyone is after the sale of YouTube to Google. The consensus seems to be that Blinkx’s technology is not perfect, but that it’s better than the competition. As Pontin explains: “[S]earch engines — like Google — that were developed during the first, text-based era of the Web do a poor job of searching through this rising sea of video.” If these guys can really create a decent search engine for videos (something that no one else currently does), they’ll make a lot of money for themselves and for their investors.

I briefly tested out the site, and the first thing that you notice is that it looks really cool. I like the video wall.

The website claims that they already have 7 million hours of searchable video content. I did a search for videos with the singer “Jennifer Holliday” and got 15 results, including Podcasts and previews of some videos. Not all of the results were relevant. Many related to Dreamgirls or to the song “And I’m Telling You I’m Not Going” without any obvious reference to Jennifer Holliday (other than the fact that she’s the one that originally made both the show and the song famous).

The New York Times notes that Blinkx has received $12.5 million from angel investors. Those must be some big angels. It seems that they’re now making the rounds talking to VCs. Fred Destin of Atlas Venture, for example, has a brief review of Blinkx and notes that the founders had apparently gone to Atlas Venture to present their product, though he didn’t have the chance to meet with them. In Spain, Atlas was involved with eDreams until its recent sale to TA Associates.

Check it out! This might be a star in the making.

I recently saw the movie Dreamgirls, since I’m a huge Beyonce fan. What some people don’t know is that Dreamgirls is a loose translation of the story of the Supremes, the most successful African-American singing group of the 1960s and one of the most famous all-girl bands of all time. The band was founded by Florence Ballard, widely seen as the group’s most powerful and best singer. Ballard ended up dead at age 32 largely due to chronic depression and alcoholism. She just couldn’t get over the fact that she essentially lost control of her dream for factors that had nothing to do with her or her talent, namely that Diana Ross was slimmer and looked more biracial and thus more appealing to a predominately white audience in the US in the 1950s / 1960s (remember that the legal segregation of blacks and whites ended in the US only in 1954 ).

In some sense, Dreamgirls is an all-American story of Rags to Riches. But why is it that the founder and most talented member of the group ended up dead and bankrupt while the less talented back-up singer became an international star with millions of dollars in her bank account? As I watched the movie, it made me reflect a lot on my current project, migoa.com, a vertical search engine focused on homes, jobs and cars that we will launch soon. Finding financing for an ambitious start-up is not easy in general, but even less so in Spain, and there have been many times when I have related very much to Florence Ballard’s frustration over the fact that her dream was in danger of being taken from her. It’s easy to become frustrated when you realise that:

• A lot of times, the key ingredient to success is not talent, it’s luck. Or put another way, being in the right place at the right time. The most important skill in this regard is being able to identify the opportunity and try to take advantage of it, but even then you might still end up failing for reasons that have nothing to do with you or your individual talent:
• It’s really painful to watch as your dream is taken away from you or at least severely compromised, particularly when others might profit more than you do from your original ideas, dedication and passion. A lot of entrepreneurs end up being forced to leave their own companies when outside investors / VCs decide to bring in better, more professional management. In many cases, it might be the right business decision, but it still sucks if you are the entrepreneur that founded the company.
• Life isn’t always fair, and complaining about this truism is pointless. You just have to get over it and keep moving forward.

As a matter of fact, the most celebrated part of the movie “Dreamgirls” comes when the Florence Ballard character gets kicked out of her own band, and she sings one of the best and most powerful songs ever written: “And I Am Telling You That I’m Not Going”. (I’ve attached a copy of the original Broadway version of the song sung by the legendary Jennifer Holliday in 1982.) The point of the song is that she’s telling the other members of her band–and a former lover that profited from her initial leadership–that no matter what, she’s not going anywhere. She sings: “I’m staying, and you’re gonna love me!” That has become my motto in life! The song is really about perseverance, single-minded obsession, determination, borderline insanity and above all else passion. Despite the tragic elements of the story, these are the traits that I most identify with as to me they define the essence of a true entrepreneur–the mix of passion and determination with a hint of insanity and almost evangelical faith.

So as people talk about “dead pools” of web 2.0 companies, or about the fact that the majority of start-ups fail, I just keep telling myself that “I’m Not Going”. Life is tough sometimes and it’s often not fair, but that’s just too bad. Adapt or die, but you’ve got to continue dreaming, having faith and working really hard, of course.