Loogic English

A new player enters the market of vertical search engines on travel. It’s called Ulises and it has just been launched.

Ulises offers specific searches for flights (which I believe will be the most used feature), for hotels, for car rentals and for cruises. These options of car rentals and cruises are not available as far as I know in other travel-related vertical search engines developed in Spain.

Of the flight search, I would say that the results page stands out and shows with much clarity the flights found arranged by price, and moreover a comparison table of different airlines, something that helps a lot if the user is not just searching for the best price but also gives priority to the quality of service offered by one airline company compared to the other.

The search engine also has different options of filtering and on the main page, we can find the last flights searched apart from the flights that have been searched the most, which gives us an idea of which are the most interesting destinations for people.

Without doubt, Ulises will be able to compete with the three flight search engines that we already have on the scene, Trabber, Minube and Vuelosbaratos now have another competitor with whom to fight for the users.

Vote for Ulises in Loogic Rank.

Read the original article in spanish.

I’ve just been informed of a new investment in the real estate vertical search engine Nuroa. The investment is from Dennis Bemmann, founder of the German social network studiVZ, who enters the company as a partner.

studiVZ is the equivalent of Facebook for Germany accounting for 6 million users and which was sold to the editorial group Hotzbrinck a year ago for about 100 million euros. Dennis Bemmann is one of the founders of studiVZ and continues to be the CTO of this social network.

The entry of Dennis Bemmann as an investor and partner will in addition serve for the development of a social network of real estate agents and people searching for a property, as an evolution of what is now Nuroa. It seems to be a logical evolution incorporating a social layer to a web application like this vertical search engine.

Dennis Bemmann came to know of Nuroa at the web 2.0 conference in Berlin where the German version of Nuroa was launched. He was impressed by their innovative and advanced technology and so decided to make this investment.

Vote for Nuroa in Loogic Rank.

Read de original post in spanish.

Since some time now I had the desire to see new things developed for ‘themselves’ by the people at The Cocktail as they did with La Coctelera.

Alberto Knapp has been commenting since long on his twitter that he is very much interested in mobile applications, and apart from that is supporting specific events for developers of these applications and also collaborating with the Open Movilforum platform.

This interest has manifested itself with the launch of Tvienes, which Alberto has just announced. The application has been developed by the team of The Cocktail based on API’s available in Open Movilforum and it basically serves the purpose of meeting up with a group of friends via messages to the mobile or email.

As I so much like the applications developed at The Cocktail, I threw myself in to try it out. I loved the registration process, everything is explained to perfection and the process to create an event and invite people is also very well executed, not as much as the registration process though, but it shows that the work has been done by experts in usability.

The structure, design and functioning of the web reminds us of Twitter, which made me think as soon as I started using it that apart from being able to send invitations to events via mobile or email, it should also allow the same function in Twitter.

After trying it out, I thought that one thing that could be added is that the message sent to the mobile includes some information regarding the event. As it is right now, you only receive the name of the event and a web address to enter and see the rest of the information.

Vote for Tvienes in Loogic Rank.

Update: I forgot to mention that Alberto Knapp will be in the next Iniciador to talk about product development.

Read the origital post in spanish.

 

Today is the presentation of Bloguzz, an initiative that could bring a lot of dynamism to the commercial blogosphere and could help companies discover that blogs could play an important role in their strategy to be visible on the internet.

Bloguzz is an initiative of four entrepreneurs who saw that they could contribute their knowledge of the sector to become a link between the companies who want to market their products or services in the blogosphere and those specialized bloggers who are interested in trying out these products or services and sharing their opinion of them.

For me, the most interesting thing about Bloguzz is that it automates the process that until now was carried out by some advertising or PR agencies, in such a way that the companies offer their products and the bloggers ask to participate in the review of these products.

Also I think it’s important to emphasize that Bloguzz inculcates between companies and the bloggers a kind of code of conduct related to “the conversation” that will take place in the blogs around the products and services offered by the company.

To conclude, I think it would be worth saying that Bloguzz is not a system of pay per post, nor sale of links, …

And I almost forgot to mention that Bloguzz has a ranking of blogs that will help companies to get an idea of the relative influence of the different blogs.

More information in the FAQ and in the blog of Bloguzz.

Note: I am part of the advisory board of bloggers of Bloguzz.

Read de original article in spanish.

In eyeOS they are inaugurating their new website and I think that it’s a good opportunity to understand the business model of this project of which we talk about a lot over here.

Until now we have been used to see eyeOS in its .org model, which has been now named Free Software Platform, but the real business of this project lies in business solutions which, in fact, they have already started to execute for some important companies in Europe.

I believe that with this, one can understand a lot better what I wrote a few months ago when I put forth the business path of eyeOS. What they have been doing at eyeOS since quite some time is to offer their platform for technology companies, and educational and public institutions.

I wish that the folks at eyeOS could publicly disclose some of the projects in which they are already working as I feel it would be something really worth writing about and also would serve to check how the intelligence and tenacity of these young entrepreneurs can yield big results.

Vote for EyeOS in Loogic Rank.

Read de original article in spanish.