On saying that, the 2 businesses they pulled off in Hong Kong were great. Lucy attending the breakfast business meeting, starter for 10, and Natalie enlisting the help of 2 employees working for free. Lucy winning was expected, leaving poor Natalie after 6 weeks of hell on her own, making her own way home as The last Millionaire. It was a chance each of us took on board.

This show was much harder than you saw on TV, and the one dimensional characters portrayed are not who we all are. I was really upset how I was edited, I was the winner, yet portrayed as somebody I am not, ruthless, arrogant, and the loser, is the loser, who is the hero of the piece. Bizarre beyond belief. The main point all the guys failed is, they did not stick to what they do in real life. Instead setting up things they did not have a clue about. No research, no planning just nuts.

Running my own businesses, there are highs and lows. Stresses, celebrations but mostly hard work. And you know what I enjoyed the challenge of the programme, setting a business up from nothing in a foreign country, and using my skills as a business woman, entrepreneur and unlike the footage on TV, having a laugh is important. Next time………………..

I am working on new TV stuff for next year, but this time you will see the real me which thank goodness is very different to the portrayed character. Everyone who knows me in business or friends tell me I was stitched up to appear horrid. But hey I ‘m over it now, adios The last Millionaire from the first winning millionaire. Just watch this space 2009.

The dogs pool in Barcelona.

Ciao Jaq x

I am really looking forward to tonight’s episode, as I know who’s going out, but I don’t know what they did. Last week’s show was very entertaining. And me and my friends celebrated Olli Norman’s victory with his mum in his bar in Glasgow. His hospitality and charm (wine cups like goldfish bowls) left us all nursing hangovers the next day.

Its Cairo tonight and I must say by now all the contestants will be desperate to get out. So the competition should really be kicking in and I’m sure the sparks will be flying. The guys on the show told me, that they stayed in a youth hostel where camels were sleeping close by, “Que Horror” as we say in Barcelona. The last time I was on a camel was Dubai, and they smell, and they are big and they bite. So will anyone be organising camel runs or is that the situation just for the loo’s.

So I will be tuned in tonight with my friend’s and my brief appearance on the show, squinty face, badly dressed, really is not quite me, or maybe I was that week, is enough for me to squirm every time I see the trailer.

A final thought…………….

The current business climate is tough, so watching 8 entrepreneurs battle it out in Cairo should be fun to watch. And what is the currency in Cairo ? Let’s find out.

Jaq

So the guys who come out tonight I always would have put one of them on the list of entrepreneurs that are instantly good in business, as you can tell this from experience, manners and approach. However that is merely my opinion.

The concept of putting business people to a competition is fantastic, however if an Alan Sugar was judging the show the round up of what goes on would be better.

In last weeks show you did’nt really see what we achieved, the focus was on the rows that James and I had.

As did every other partnership, and also my character is not really what you saw on TV. That was one sided, I do like to laugh a lot, have fun and could easily have been portrayed in a completely different way if I had stayed in for show 2. But the idea was to win and that’s what we did. So Times Online please do not call me a ball-breaker, although it possibly, might be, speak to people who know me really well almost true.

So tonight I will be watching in Olli Norman’s bar in Glasgow with him and some friends as I am sure after a long business, rainy day in Glasgow I will celebrate the winners tonight and watch my new friends on TV in the Last Millionaire.

Also, I will be doing more TV work in 2009, just not a Reality show.

Ciao

Sometimes in Life is it me or do you wonder why you do things ? Put yourself through a certain challenge, event or meeting when it is always easier to say no or turn the other way. Lets take the easier route instead of the route less travelled, well in the case of appearing tonight on BBC3’s The last millionaire, you can guess it was an experience that I won’t forget for all the right reasons. Every year for the past few years I have been offered something by the BBC, some show or idea well in March this year when the producer flew in to Glasgow to meet me, I thought why not.

The concept of the show appealed to me, take 12 determined,competitive business owners throw us together in a country were there is no pre planning, no phones,no basics and set up a business, and every weeks 2 people get to go home if they make the most money, until the last man or woman is standing. My goodness what a challenge or what a potential disaster. It would be fabulous or hideous.

After living on a mountain in Barcelona, building and designing a house, setting up a business, cultural differences, 2 languages catalan and spanish, trying to do the basics in life that you take for granted here (siestas etc..) I thought bring on this challenge it will be fun. How wrong can one girl be !

I am not going to spoil the show, but my personal viewpoint was take extreme, double it, add on a dash of playground behaviour and you have a receipe of what Reality TV is like. The city we flew in to was Istanbul, which I had never been to. It is amazing on all levels. So A big thank you to everyone who helped me and my business partner for that week and although it was unbelievably tough it was great. I met some fantastic people and for sure it’s a country for business, enjoyment and fun. Maybe next time I return without the Tv crews. Also a thank you to the BBC for spotting the Diva in me that everyone for sure who knows me will laugh at. Un beso.

Ps. The photos used really scare me, never squint at the camera………………………………This is why I have chosen George Frier the 2Fluid fish.

They pair off and set up money-making schemes in five days. In the first show the teams are dumped in Istanbul and given only 150 Turkish lira, about a week’s wage, to get them started.

Scheme.
While they didn’t always see eye to eye Jacqueline commented: “I chose James as a partner and simply accessed the internet and found the wealthiest companies and offered my creative services.” As for her motives for going on the show, she said: “I wanted to show people that you can set something up from nothing. I understand these fundamentals. “I didn’t come from a middle class background. I did three jobs to pay my way through art school. My story to other people watching the show is if I can do it, you can.” Jacqueline made her fortune with 2FluiidCreative, a web company based in Glasgow.

DAILY STAR, Saturday,
November 8, 2008

One of the most prevalent rumours has been that Google would launch their own web browser. Some dismissed this claim citing that it would in endanger Google’s current relationship with a major player in the Browser market, Mozilla Firefox. But these doubters were silenced on the 1st of September when a letter and comic from Google arrived on the doorsteps of some of the most influential Bloggers in the technology industry.

Written by the development team and illustrated by Scott McCloud this comic gave the first glimpse of the Google Browser, Chrome. As a link to the comic was circulated around the developers in 2FluidCreative, each of us felt excitement and trepidation in equal measures.

Excitement; as the creation of separate processes per tab, the completely new Javascript Virtual Machine and the built in task manager would enable us to build larger, more complex RIAs (Rich Internet Applications) while ensuring that response times and performance would not suffer.

Trepidation; as we would now have yet another browser to add to the ever growing list we need to test all new websites within, if three versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer, four versions of Mozilla Firefox and two versions of Apple Safari were not already enough!

Luckily for us Google had decided not to create a brand new rendering engine (the part of the browser which is responsible for turning our lovingly crafted HTML and CSS into a visible page) but instead had used the open source WebKit engine, which also powers Safari, meaning that any website which works in Safari should, in theory, also work in Chrome.

A browser from the company who arguably knows the most about the web, after all they have indexed more than 8 billion pages and found over a Trillion unique URLs. What could be better? I couldn’t wait to try it.

But as with most software during installation Google Chrome would present the user with a EULA (End User License Agreement). Most people, myself included, will normally agree to this block of ‘legalise’ without reading or giving it much thought. Luckily for me, there are people out there who do stop to read them, and they were not very happy with some of the terms included with Chrome.

“11.1 By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services”

This small block of text meant that anytime you submitted something through Chrome, such as emails, company blog posts or any other content you immediately granted Google rights to use that content basically in anyway they saw fit. However Google quickly replaced this clause once users started to complain.

They claimed that it had all been a mistake; someone on the development team had simply lifted the Terms & Conditions from Google Accounts without checking whether all the conditions should apply to the new software. The 11.1 clause was replaced by “You retain copyright and any other rights that you already hold in Content that you submit, post or display on or through the Services.” Which as you can see no longer grants Google rights to your content.

So they made a mistake, but they acted with alacrity and fixed it, so all is forgiven? Well not quite. Many people have raised privacy concerns about the new browser. The Federal Office for Information Security in Germany is quoted in the Berliner Zeitung as saying that it is “risky that user data is hoarded with a single vendor. With its search engine, email program and the new browser, Google now covers all important areas on the internet.”

One of the biggest privacy concerns surrounding Chrome is the ‘Omnibar’. The ‘Omnibar’ functions as a combined address and search bar, as well as offering autosuggest features. This autosuggest means that every keystroke entered is sent to Google, before the user has even pressed submit. These keystrokes could provide a wealth of information about users, much more than normal searches. Google has already announced that they have plans to store around 2% of this data alongside the IP (Internet Protocol) Address of the computer that entered it.

This is where the benefit of Open source really shows. If you don’t like something, Fork it! As Google Chrome is Open source some enterprising hackers at SRWare have already modified the source code to create the ‘Iron browser’. This fork of the Chromium project has all the advantages of the Chrome browser but removes many of the privacy concerns.

Now as long as the Technical Director doesn’t start adding all the Chromium forks to our test plan, I’ll be happy.