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.

For quite some time Lanetro was a portal of reference in Spain, an example to follow for many internet entrepreneurs. Their founders wanted to take it public and then it was acquired by Planeta.

Now Lanetro is going through a profound renewal and it wants to turn itself into a social network based on entertainment in which the users share their experiences and opinions about the places they visit.

In the new Lanetro we will be able to see content generated by an editorial team coexist with user generated content. As in all social networks that are springing up, users can create their profiles, connect with their friends, and express their opinion on the places or events they have been to.

Another important aspect of Lanetro used to be its street map. In this new version of the site, the street map accounts for the records of all the places that are mentioned in the entertainment guide, something that will be of great utility as a complement to the contents of the site.

Lastly, the design of the web is worth a mention, very cool in my opinion and also the profiles of the users that reflect very well the activity of the user within the community. Salir.com and Gentereal.com will have an important competitor in the new Lanetro.

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.

Lingus.tv is an initiative of the company Las Buenas Lenguas (The Good Languages) that offers a videoblog with a series of tagged episodes in video for learning Spanish.

I think what stands out the most about Lingus.tv is that it doesn’t limit itself to being a videoblog with a series of lessons for learning Spanish, but rather it seeks to entertain in each of the episodes while taking much care in the educational aspect.

Also we must mention the business model of this project: apart from advertising revenues, they have prepared a system to obtain income from premium accounts where they offer teaching content associated to each program. They will also be selling user licenses to schools teaching Spanish.

More information in the interview carried out by La nueva industria audiovisual (The new audiovisual industry, interview in Spanish).