Loogic English

Today I had the privilege of attending, along with a select group of bloggers, the presentation of the web service BBVA Tú cuentas, in the presence of the the bank’s chariman and CEO.

I was very much surprised by the presentation and seeing the functioning of the product because the truth is that I didn’t expect to see something like this so soon here in Spain and much less from a bank. But the fact is that BBVA Tú cuentas is an very complete application for the management of personal finances and will be of great utility to its users.

There is a important differentiating factor between BBVA Tú cuentas and the rest of the applications of this kind that are available in the marketplace. In this case, the application connects to the website of the bank and that of other banks to obtain the financial information so the user doesn’t have to do it manually. Besides, the web connects with the utility companies (water, electricity, gas, …) saving us the labour of having to introduce the respective expenditures every month.

BBVA Tú cuentas complements with options of community in which a user can compare his/her financial situation with that of other groups of users representing different profiles. It also incorporates a service of recommendations of financial products, which uses the recommendation technology of Strands.

Strands is the company responsible for the development of the application and from what I observed, also responsible for defining much of the functional aspect of the site.

Now we are going to wait and see the reaction of the competition in face of this intiative. BBVA has taken the lead, we will have to see the response of Santander, Caja Madrid, La Caixa, … and also how it affects independent applications like MoneyTrackin.

More information in the blog of Strands.

After a few months of wait and after having been able to try in depth this new tool of microblogging developed integrally in Spain, we can say that today is the launch of YouAre.

When Jose Luis Antunez showed me in person how YouAre worked, the first thing I felt was tremendous envy because I was looking at an application that I would have loved to conceive and build myself.

YouAre is a great example of a social application, the basis of which are the connections of the users and the communications between them.

The main idea behind this service is microblogging, complemented by the possibility of linking photos and videos directly, which makes YouAre a site which aggregates multimedia content apart from text messages.

Related to the function of microblogging in YouAre, they have added two aspects which make up for a perfect complement and going by the trends that we have seen in other applications of this kind, it seems that they will eventually prevail. On the one hand, there are the professional profiles, a kind of CV on the lines of LinkedIn that give much more information about the user, something very useful if you want to use this application for networking purposes.

The second feature that complements the site is what they call Web Life, which consists of lifestreaming that enables aggregation of information that we generate in other applications like Flickr, del.icio.us, YouTube, …

With all this, one can see that YouAre is a service that’s much more complete and better thought out than Twitter. Now that it has launched, the big challenge is to create a community that converts these services in something completely addictive for the users.

More information about YouAre in Blogsmedia.

 

Noel Martín is the founder of Neuronsup, a game of questions and answers created in a community format, where the questions and answers are selected through a voting system.

Neuronsup will get built gradually thanks to the participation of the users, be it by engaging in the games and becoming a part of the rankings or contributing new questions on all kinds of topics.

The site is in launch phase and to stimulate participation amongst users, they will be gifting an iPod Touch to the most active user in the community.

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.