Loogic English

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).

The most influential blogs about internet businesses are echoing the news of the entry of Red Karaoke in the American market and I think that we all need to take example of this initiative because this is something we haven’t seen a lot from hispanic projects.

We are accustomed to seeing hispanic projects coming out in English as well as in Spanish or sometimes only in English and doing all they can to stand out in the international media and blogs by sending out their news and press releases, but it’s not very common to have a clear strategy of taking the business to the United States, and even hiring a Country Manager to develop the business over there. As for Country Managers, we know of them because of foreign sites having one in Spain, but the other way round, how many projects do you know of that have done something like this?

Another interesting aspect to emphasize is the interest to competer in their sector, talking clearly about who is their competition and how they are going to work to become the leaders of their industry.