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The mobile version of Tuenti was the theme of the conversation on Tuesday in Seville with the friends of Flowers in Space. It was Bernardo Hernandez himself who talked to us about it and we immediately turned to our mobiles to try it out.

The first thing that draws your attention the moment you enter m.tuenti.com is that it asks you what you are doing at the moment, which means we are talking of microblogging or a Twitter within Tuenti.

If you continue surfing, you see that you have access to your profile, to see your list of contacts and to the messages in your inbox. Clicking on the profile of your contacts, you can see the photos they have uploaded, and as Javi Hernandez puts it, this could be a danger for the productivity in classrooms because of students browsing photos on their mobiles.

Another topic that I find very interesting is the phone list, from which you can access those contacts who have entered their mobile phone number in their profile information, so now there could be people who have their phone list in Tuenti.

I would like to know if, with the launch of the mobile version of Tuenti, there would be an increase in flat-rate contracts for internet connection on the mobile. I have the impression that with time, many young people would want to go for a flat rate to avoid seeing their mobile phone bill shoot up with the use of m.tuenti.com

Ana Belen Ramon, better known as Missha in the world of web design has informed me about the launch (in the “preview release” phase) of Wolpy, a social network for travellers to share their travel experiencies.

Missha is responsible for the design of Wolpy (I love the design, congratulations Missha) and the programming has been done by Miguel Abad.

Having launched in “preview release” for now, Wolpy only allows you to create a map of the places you have visited in your trips and to carry out reviews of the places mentioned. As in all social networks that take pride in themselves, you can share these places with your friends and get to know the places that they have visited.

Once the launch phase is over, the next step would be to allow users to upload photos and videos of their trips besides being able to recommend other users on the places to visit.

The ultimate goal of Wolpy is to become a collaborative travel guide on a global scale.

I find it quite amusing to give this news because I think it’s the first investment in a Spanish startup that has been announced directly from Twitter. It was on the 2nd of April when Fernando Egido of CAN and Hector Milla of Balzac TV made comments on Twitter about the meetings they were holding.

It has been since quite some time now that Hector Milla started working on the idea behind Balzac TV. In October, we talked about Balzac.tv, an idea, a voice and a camera. Gradually, the idea has turned into a company that now announces it has received funding.

Balzac TV is a videoblog about innovation. It’s not going to be as easy to make it profitable as a videoblog about cars or videogames, but the truth is that what we can see now is so well done that surely it will become a reference that companies would want to sponsor.

Another business model that surely they will be considering when the time is right would be to sell video content to the traditional media as it’s becoming increasingly obvious that the TV folks are running short of creativity and would like to count on novel content like the one offered by Balzac TV.

Via Carlos Blanco.

Some time back, I was informed of the launch of World Taximeter. Now that the Spanish version has been announced, I thought it would be interesting to publish “as it is” the mail I received with information of the project. It’s in the form of an interview but I think it’s a very interesting way to present an idea like this:

Who are we?

Worldtaximeter.com is the result of the work of three people: Jose Lorenzo, Daniel Jimenez and me, Gerardo Robledillo. All three of us are computer engineers and we started off as web programmers. We got to know each other 4 years back, working in the same company.

As good computer engineers, we are folks with restless minds and since the time we know each other, we have been exploring ideas for websites, of what we could do, creating a prototype. In fact, as you might know, I had already launched on my own, a site for language exchanges (place4langs, of which you talked about then).

How the idea of World Taximeter was conceived?

Jose was going to make a trip to New York, and a few days before the trip, he tried to find out on the internet how much the taxi would cost him from the airport to the hotel. Simply to be prepared with the cash and to avoid beind duped. On not finding anything, he had a revelation of the kind “hmm, what a pity, it would be great if something like this existed, …, hey, … just a moment, why shouldn’t we do it? Jose couldn’t believe that such a simple idea still had not been carried out.

So Jose told me about his idea one Friday, and I thought it was brilliant. That weekend, I created the first prototype, that we showed to Dani on Monday. Dani also thought it was great, and between the three of us, we sat down to convert the prototype into something usable. A couple of months later, we launched worldtaximeter.com with 7 cities. Today we have 12, and we are adding more.

What did we use to create it?

We used Ruby on Rails and the API of Google Maps.

We basically used RoR because I am in love with it and created the prototype with Rails. Jose and Dani had never used it, but having heard so much from me about Rails, they decided to try it out.

Plans?

Keep adding more cities, above all, and also add functionalities and improvements in the algorithm for the calculation of prices.

We are also beginning to explore the commercial side of the business, although still very shyly.

Although it seems to me a bit pretentious their line of presentation: Tuplaza.es is the first project in the world that allows people to share parking space through the mobile in an organized way, the truth is that it is indeed a very interesting idea.

I like the idea of being able to share my parking space when I am not using it, in exchange for being able to use other parking spaces that are free in the area where I need to park (the model of FON applied to parking spaces?). What I find even more interesting is the format of information via SMS.

The functioning of Tu Plaza is like this:

When the user registers, she will receive every day (or the period selected by the user) a message on her mobile that asks if her parking space is free (Is your parking space available today?). If it is, somebody else will be able to use it during the time indicated by the owner. The more hours a parking space is available for others to use, the more benefits the owner will accumulate to use the parking spaces of others.

If the user needs a parking space, she sends a message: Park today, and the area where she wants to park. If there is a parking space available in the area, she receives a message with information of the available space and a code that she must use to enter the corresponding garage.

The key for the functioning of this whole system apart from the SMS is the remote control Armando that allows, by means of security codes, access to the garages with available parking spaces.

As you can imagine, this whole system has some important difficulties with respect to implementation, but given the problem of parking that exists in big cities like Madrid, I understand that there will be many people willing to make the effort necessary to put it into practice.

Via Blog de emprendedores.