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Eneko Knörr is a great reference for me as an entrepreneur. I believe he has made a great company out of Hostalia and transmits very good ideas in his blog relating to the world of business and entrepreneurship. He is a simple person, very intelligent and it heartens me to see that after selling Hostalia, he continues to launch new projects within a new company called Ideateca.

Ideateca is described as a factory of ideas, it’s an incubator for internet projects that starts with two initiatives already functioning and with the objective of entering the themes they consider profitable.

There are three projects that are already up and running in Ideateca: Anuncioteca, a classifieds website; Videolandia, a video portal; and two islands in Second Life. Soon they will be launching in Ideateca a flash games portal, applications for mobiles and a service for photologs, amongst other things.

I find it very interesting how Eneko is starting his new business adventure. Being an expert in the world of internet, he has detected those sectors that could attract huge traffic and convert into big business. Through his extensive experience, he will be able to contribute interesting new things in each of those sectors.

Let me conclude saying that in Ideateca they are hiring professionals to work in their projects, mostly they are looking for PHP-MySQL programmers who live in the area of Bilbao.

Kedin, a social network for events, is a project that I intend to follow closely because I believe it will set trends as far as business models are concerned. The founders of the company have a broad experience and very good contacts in the sector that enable them to reach deals we are going to talk about now.

The first deal is the commercialization by Telefonica of the advertising on the Kedin site. The department in Telefonica that deals with the advertising on the portals of the Telefonica group will also take the responsibility from now on for selling the advertising spaces on this site. In Kedin, they preferred a commercial deal with Telefonica instead of with some other advertising agencies because they know the great commercial force of the online sales department of Telefonica and believe that this will bring them some important benefits. Besides, the deal contemplates the realization of joint actions of promotion on the digital platforms of Telefonica, something that will help a great deal in publicizing Kedin.

A second deal is related to the upcoming launch of channels on Kedin, similar to the ones on YouTube, that are directed to the companies that want to promote events of their sector. The first theme channels on Kedin will be dedicated to events of Fashion, and events of Motorcycling, thanks to the deal reached with the editorial group G y J Motorpress.

Three months after the launch of Kedin, the figures are very encouraging: more than 10.000 events in its database, more than 2.000 registered users, and 100.000 unique users in the last month.

More information on the Kedin blog.

90.000 euros of prize money from Eurecan for Europe’s most innovative company. The contest aims to identify, promote and reward the most innovative early stage companies in Europe.

The jury for the competition consists of 17 European level venture capital funds with a total investment capacity of 8.000 million euros.

The event will be carried out in various cities of Europe and the final will be in Barcelona.

In 2007 the winning project was Scytl Secure Electronic Voting, a company managed by Pere Valles.

More information on the site of Caja Navarra.

There are a multitude of sites on the internet with information on cooking recipes, but until now I had not come across a web application that allowed so many possibilities to manage recipes, plan the menus and create shopping lists.

Gustonic is a project of Llorenç Vallès and Jordi Vivancos (Pau García-Milá and Marc Cercos have contributed with their user interface skills).

Apart from the possibility of managing recipes, menus and shopping lists, Gustonic offers a planification tool that helps devise a balanced diet in function of the menus prepared by a user. The application makes a suggestion to the users when it detects that it is necessary to introduce new dishes or ingredients to improve the user’s diet.

Since it’s initial stages, Gustonic has a database of 3.000 recipes in 4 languages (Spanish, Catalan, English and French), and to this we can add more languages in which the users upload their recipes. So apart from the practical functions of planning and managing recipes, the site becomes a great collection that can be accessed by users in search of new ideas for cooking.

Restalo is a restaurant guide and reservation service started by two entrepreneurs with the support of Barcelona Activa.

I asked the founders of Restalo to explain to me the differential aspects of the site, and to speak the truth, I am really impressed.  All entrepreneurs should be able to explain in a few words the fundamental idea of their project and get others excited by their idea.

Here are two aspects of the site that have made a very good impression on me:

It’s a site thought for the users, as much in it’s usability aspects as in its purpose. What stands out the most is that part of the revenues earned by the site are destined to the users in the form of dinner invitations through points accumulated by participating on the site. Can you imagine a travel or hotel site gifting flights or hotel stays just for commenting and participating? In Restalo, they are doing exactly that by inviting their most active users to dine out.

It’s a useful site that only accounts for restaurants that are really worth a visit. Not all - only those that stand out for something. Apart from that, the reservation service doesn’t cost anything and one can get discounts of upto 50% in some restaurants.

I would very much like to see projects that are so well thought out as Restalo. I am sure that at some point of time, we will stop thinking that we are at the tail-end as far as internet businesses are concerned.