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Jonathan Muszkat talked to me the other day about the launch of Neositios. I didn’t want to write about it until I was able to try it out, and now that I have, I must say that the application caught my attention.

Neositios is an application to create corporate web sites with multiple options of management, apart from email service and the possibility of maintaining one’s own domain name. The options just mentioned will be available in a premium version. With this premium version and the well executed application, we are looking at a project with a solid business model.

Neositios, in a way, reminded me of Picnik, referred to as the online Photoshop. In this case, we are looking at the online Dreamweaver, except that the functionalities are much reduced, of course.

I think it’s worth it to register to see the multiple options that Neositios offers at the time of creating and managing a website. I shall leave you with some examples of sites created with this application so you can glimpse the possibilities it offers: Wallart and Mundo Bebes demonstrate that the application also serves for developing online retail outlets.

The project is also mentioned in Visualbeta where the reviews are equally positive.

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.

I loved getting to know Forvo, a site where users can record the pronunciation of words in their language and other users can get to know those pronunciations. I liked it because the site is very well developed, the system to record the words works well and the design is also pretty good.

The goal of Forvo is to be a great database of the way all kinds of words are pronounced in the maximum number of languages possible. If you would like to access the site, you could do it using the code frvloogic and you will see that they already have 518 words and 285 pronunciations in 185 languages.

An interesting aspect is also that many people can pronounce the same word which enables us to do comparisons so we can improve our own pronunciation of words in a language which is not our own.

By the way, I also used Forvo to clarify how to pronounce Finzr.

It seems people are inspired to set up Twitter clones and what was seen with skepticism a year ago has now turned into a phenomenon on the internet.

As I say, new Twitter clones are springing up in Spanish and Jisko is the last one we have heard of.

I quite liked the look and feel of Jisko, how the web is structured, and even the mascot I think is more funny than the bird of Twitter. One thing that caught my attention is the integration with Twitter which means that a user could be in Jisko but at the same time, could follow the messages that his friends send in Twitter.

But perhaps what stands out the most is the system of karma that seeks to measure the participation of a user in the community and assign him a numerical value to determine his importance on the web. And it’s also worth mentioning that the site is being translated into multiple languages.

Seen in Genbeta.

Vote for Jisko in Loogic Rank.

I was surprised to find Anywr from the links in the blog of Palermo Valley. It’s a project that had participated in Startup 2.0 and of which I had no idea that it was being started from Argentina.

Anywr is a web and mobile system that seeks to help its users easily manage all their every day information and communications, including their contacts, address book and calendar from anywhere.

Anywr facilitates all those tasks between the PC and the mobile, offering tools to synchronize and back-up data. To know more about its functionalities, I recommend you take the guided tour.

Finally, I would highlight that Anywr is available in 5 languages, and supports its users through a forum and a development blog.

Vote for Anywr in Loogic Rank.