June 2025 Newsletter
- info546819
- May 31
- 4 min read
Victor could write a book about how he used and advanced technology through the years. He has always been a dreamer. Here are some of his exploits.
· “In my senior year in high school (1964) I wrote a paper how some day people would be able to touch a TV screen and make things happen. I got a D and was called a dreamer. The teacher of that class was not aware that I had been taking electronics in school for nearly four years.”
· “By 1970 I was the controller of a 30,ooo employee company. I had an EDP department with a manager, 16 key punch operators and a special air-conditioned 800 square foot room with 4 tape disk drives and an RCA Spectra 70 computer with a 64k memory. This was state of the art at the time! I started mechanizing manual processes into computers.”
· “In the early seventies I was offered a job from the owner of a then famous NYC restaurant called the “The Sign of the Dove”. His main request was to build a fully integrated system from order placement, kitchen, inventory control, accounting, and customer bill generation. I told him I could. But another opportunity arose from a group of Mad Men at the world’s largest ad agency. Where I accepted a non-financial position, and I expanded my knowledge base to global applications using IBM System 36 computers around the world. When I left that ad agency my stock portfolio was only four stocks Apple. Intel, Oracle and Disney.”
· “Fast forward to the mid-nineties in another ad agency where I was general manager for Latin America. My boss was putting together a region wide credentials presentation and he wanted something from me as to what we could say to support that we are the best ad agency in Latin America. Unbeknownst to him I had been directing the installations of new systems in Latin America to support all operating processes within the company.
o I immediately said “That’s easy. We are the most technologically advanced ad network in Latin America!”.
o “How could you support that statement?”
o “We have e mail. No one else does and our agencies can write to each other instantly”
o “So we can have creatives from one office work with creatives in other offices to solve common problems. Brilliant, what else?”
o “We have Power Point.” After giving him a demo he got it.
o “ Wow! We no longer have to do slides and project from a carousel?”
o “Correct and we can design and fix on the fly”
· “By 1999 I was the Chief Operating Officer of a dot com start up. We developed the first Latin American Portal similar to AOL and Yahoo. It was sold to the Mexican Telephone company and Microsoft.”
· In 2001 I worked on a project to provide a streaming service for a very large group of national Latin American TV stations. This is the beginning of what we wrote in the business plan.
o Operating Environment
o Full media convergence is a reality. Television is becoming interactive; telephones are capable of handling multimedia content; multimedia content is offered through a wide variety of devices; broadband availability is rapidly becoming the structural norm. The end result will be users controlling how, when and where they will consume multimedia content. Content will be routed to the most appropriate device according to the user’s preferences, mobility and interactivity potential.
Sadly, that project went nowhere because people did not think it could be done! Seven years later Netflix launched a streaming service using the same concept,
So, what does this all have to do with this newsletter? After ten years of low tech ideas during which we pioneered commercial olive growing in SMA, developed probably the only commercial hand pressed olive oil in our hemisphere, Victor is at it again.
He has fully embraced AI (Artificial Intelligence) and has sucked in all of the staff. We are all following his lead and surprisingly taking our business into new areas. Mostly we are having fun,
Simply put, at our old age we are embracing AI in almost everything we do. May has seen an explosion of different applications on our farm for new products, new recipes, plant cultivation and propagation, marketing and much more. Here is partial list of what we are working on
Lip balm
Bath bomb
Hair conditioner
Shampoo
A line of dog products
Olive leaf tea and other teas
Salad dressings
Hibiscus and Bougainvillea propagation
If successful a plant nursery
We have increased our marketing efforts for Posada Los Olivos to areas outside of SMA and the U. S.
For the coming month of June follow this link to our web site for our events (Italian Day on Jun 13 and a summer solstice dinner on June 20) as well as our cooking classes and many experiences,
When Victor was in his final years on Madison Avenue some of the staff use to call him “The most interesting man in the world!” for the many stories he used to regale them with. Who knows, he may get that epithet back. Take a look at our newly launched YouTube Channel which he put together, narrated and launched! At the very least his Newyorican accent does give the narration a bit of rustic feel which fits our farm. Don’t forget to subscribe.
Have a great summer!
Susan and Victor
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