Interview with Didac Lee Diario Negocio www.diarionegocio.es

Didac Lee’s Biography

Dídac Lee is the CEO of Inspirit , a international group made up by the following companies: Inspirit Labs (business incubator), Spamina (email security), Conzentra (internet services) and Intercomgi Argentina (development center). Inspirit employs more than 240 people in Gerona, Barcelona, Madrid , Buenos Aires and the Silicon Valley. He is a usual speaker at Barcelona and Gerona Universities and collaborates with the economic section of El Periodico newspaper.

Awards

2008, “Empordà Award 2008″ Alt Empordà District Council
2008, “International Young Entrepreneur Award” granted by CEAJE
2007, “Gironí de l’Any ” award
2007, “Best ITC Company of the Year”, awarded by the Unió Empresarial del Penedès
2007, “Ferrer Salat Entrepreneur of the Future Award ” by Fomento del Trabajo.
2007, “Best Overseas Entrepreneur Award” by the Taiwanese government.
2007, “Young Entrepreneur Award”, awarded by the International Chamber Youth of Catalonia
2006, “Best Entrepreneur of the Year. Awarded by AIJEC
2005, “Technology Entrepreneur” by the University of Cambridge

Sonia Rodriguez, Ana Ariño, Victoria López-Agudo, Iñaki Berenguer, Borja Marcos, Ignacio Marín, Cristian Lucas and Sara Carner attended the event, which was a fun and cheerful dinner in a very Spanish setting, with tapas and sangria included.

During the event, the Rafael del Pino Alumni had the opportunity to share with Dr. Prous his views on the current status of the biotech industry in Spain as well as the prospects for the biomedicine sector. Several experts of the pharmaceutical and biotech industries as well as MIT, Stanford, LBS, Wharton, Columbia and Chicago alumni attended the event.

Josep Prous Biography

After obtaining his PhD in Biochemistry , Dr Pous worked as researcher in the Pharmaceutical industry where he realized information about new drugs was scarce and spread among several publications. As a consequence of the discovery, the first product of Prous Science, the magazine “Drugs of Today” was created in order to inform about innovation in the development of new drugs.

Prous Science launched several successful products that incorporated the latest advances in information technologies such as Dailydrugnews.com life-science newsfeed and Integrity, the first integrated new drugs discovery and development website, with access to over 295.000 drugs and 100.000 patents.

With 350 employees, Prous Science is based in Barcelona and has expanded to US, Argentina and Japan. Prous Science has been awarded several prestigious international prizes including the European WWW Business Award by the European Commission. In 2007 Prous Science was acquired by Thomson Reuters

In 2000 Dr. Prous started a new endeavour in the Scientific Park of Barcelona, Prous Institute, a center for new drugs research using computational technologies for the treatment of cancer, diabetes or neurological conditions. Prous Institute is currently cooperating with the FDA in food and drugs toxicity prediction programs.

On Wednesday November 18th, the Rafael del Pino Alumni Association was pleased to organize a lunch-colloquium with Mr Alejandro Zaera-Polo (see complete profile below), founding partner of  Foreign Office Architects. During the lunch, Mr. Alejandro shared with the alumni his vision of the Architecture as a social transformation power as well as the role of Spanish architects in the global market.

Alejandro Zaera-Polo

Alejandro Zaera-Polo is founding partner of Foreign Office Architects together with Farshid Moussavi, and occupies currently the Berlage Chair in the Technical University of Delft, the Netherlands. Prior to this current role at the TU in Delft, he has been for four years the Dean of the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam, until 2005. Previously he has been also Unit Master at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, and a Visiting Professor at the University of California in L.A., Columbia University in New York, Princeton University, the School of Architecture in Madrid and the Yokohama School of Architecture where he currently has an advisory role. He has also been an advisor to several committees, such as the Quality Commission for Architecture in Barcelona City and the advisory Committee for Urban Development of the City of Madrid and is a member of t he Urban Age Think Tank of the London School of Economics. He has published extensively as a critic in professional magazines worldwide, El Croquis, Quaderns, A+U, Arch+ and Harvard Design Magazine amongst them, and contribute to numerous publications, such as the Endeless City curated by Ricky Burdett and Dejan Sudjic.

Diana Gonzalez Blanco (Scholar 2006. MBA 2008 - NYU Leonard N. Stern School of Business), has launched her business venture October 1st, 2009.

Top MBA Mom is an exclusive, membership based, social and professional online community for MBA women (candidate, student or graduate), who are also mothers or might become one. The main goal of this community is to open lines of communication for these women, allowing them to share their experiences, seize business opportunities, find mentors, participate in exclusive events, socialize, discuss current topics and/or simply build an invaluable network.

Additionally, Top MBA Mom offers customized consulting services to female MBA candidates (business schools evaluation and selection, essays optimization, resume reviews, choice of recommenders); MBA students (summer internship and full-time recruiting coaching, one on one industry preparation); and MBA graduates (career coaching).

Diana would like to extend an especial invitation to all female Rafael del Pino Scholars who have been admitted to top MBA programs, are current MBA students or graduates, to join this wonderful community and to become a Fan on Facebook, via the following links:

www.TopMBAMom.com
www.Facebook.com/TopMBAMom

The Forum took place on 17 September, at “La Camarga” restaurant in Barcelona. David spoke about his entrepreneurial experience and about the future applications of the electronic National Identification Document (D.N.I.) on today’s and tomorrow’s society. Among those present were ex –scholars of the Rafael del Pino, “La Caixa“, Fulbright, March, Caja Madrid, Ramón Areces and Barriè de la Maza foundations, as well as post-graduate ex-alumni from MIT, Stanford University, London Business School, Wharton, Columbia and University of Chicago.

DESCRIPTION AND HISTORY OF TRACTIS

Tractis was founded in 2005 with the innovative concept of providing a legal system 100% online to the Internet nation; a fast and secure dispute resolution system that overcame the complexity and the slowness of the traditional legal systems. In order to achieve its objective, Tractis relies on European legislation about electronic signature (Directive 1999/93/EC), which grants the “qualified electronic signature” the same legal effects than a handwritten signature. Further, Tractis uses electronic National Identification Documents in intelligent card (e-ID) that are being issued by all governments of the European Union. In 2010 82% of the European population will live in a country with e-ID. After its launch in Spain, Belgium, Estonia, Finland, Portugal, Chile, Finland, Dominican Republic, Slovenia, India and Colombia, Austria becomes the eleventh country at a Worldwide level where Tractis has set up the signature with electronic certificate.

Tractis is already providing its services to Caixa Galicia and has recently won a contest with which it will distribute e-ID readers for a value of €1,750,000 among citizens before the end of the year.

Selected by Business 2.0 as one the 31 most promising start-ups outside the U.S, Tractis has won the Entrepreneurs Prize 2005 of the Everis Foundation and the Yahoo Web revelation 2007 prize under the Finance and Employment category.

Some of the participants were : Arnau Gutierrez-Camps, Fernando Bermejo, Alberto López Toledo y Judit Anido During the evening the following topics, among others,  were discussed: current political situation, the present and future of science and technology in our country and the effects that the economic crisis is having on the population. We hope to meet up again soon and keep analyzing the current situation in such fun and interesting manner.

The new scholars of the Rafael del Pino Foundation are:

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• Bayas Fernández, Guillermo. New York University, Columbia University, Georgetown University*, (United States)

• Buades Castellá, Joan. Chicago Booth Business School, (United States)

• Febrel Benlloch, Álvaro. Harvard Business School, (United States)

• García Bereguiaín, Miguel Ángel. Emory University of Atlanta; Gladstone Institute, University of California, San Francisco*, (United States)

• García Reymundo, Víctor. University of California, Berkeley, (United States)

• Giménez Rasero, Manuel. New York University, (United States)

• Junco de Miguel, Ricardo. London Business School, (United Kingdom)

• López-Agudo Manresa, Victoria. Columbia University, Harvard University*, (United States)

• Marín García, Ignacio. University of California, Berkeley* (United States)

• Ortego Martí, Víctor. London School of Economics, (United Kingdom)

• Travesedo Juliá, Álvaro. Columbia University, (United States)

See original information.
Congratulations and welcome to the Rafael del Pino Alumni Association!

José López was born in Madrid in 1967. In 1992 obtained his degree as Telecommunications Engineer from the Madrid Universidad Politécnica. After obtaining a scholarship from the Pedro Barrié de la Maza Foundation, he completed his studies in 1994 with a Masters in Electrical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania).

He started working in 1994 at Bell Laboratories (Allentown, Pennsylvania), from where he moved to Lucent Technologies in Tres Cantos, Madrid. After four years in the Technology and Product Departments, he was hired in 1998 by Sema Group España, where he created an Intelligent Network and GSM Departament. In 2000 he joined, as Technical Director, Inspira a small technological company in Madrid that he had founded in 1995 with Ignacio Luque and other colleagues from university, devoted to electronics and to photovoltaic solar energy.

In 2001 José López founded, together with his brother Guillermo, Netspira Networks, a spin-off of Inspira to explote a product created by both of them. It was an intelligent router for IP data in mobile wireless networks. With the investment of the private equity fund Bullnet Capital, Netspira grew fast and achieved big clients in Europe, America and Asia, and in 2005 a href=”http://www.netspira.com/”>was acquired by Ericsson. It can be said that Netspira Networks is one of the few successful examples in Spain of the start-up “classic” model of Silicon Valley.

From 2005 to 2007 José López manages Netspira within Ericsson I+D, where Netspira’s product undergoes an important growth. After a sabatical year, from the beginning of 2009 he is commencing a new business adventure, www.bequant.com, again with his brother Guillermo and again in the data networks area.

• Antonio Alfonso
• Cristina Nestares
• Javier Camacho

Global leaders:

• Javier Oliván
• Eva García-Bouzas

Intellectual leaders:

• Aitor Lacuesta
• Patricia Gabaldon

It is a true honor for the Rafael del Pino Alumni Association to have them among us. Further, it is a good opportunity to thank and congratulate the Rafael del Pino Foundation for all the effort it makes in its scholarships and in the selection of scholars. Again, congratulations to those selected and to the Rafael del Pino Foundation.

See PDF excerpt of Capital magazine.