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Ana Belen Ramon, better known as Missha in the world of web design has informed me about the launch (in the “preview release” phase) of Wolpy, a social network for travellers to share their travel experiencies.

Missha is responsible for the design of Wolpy (I love the design, congratulations Missha) and the programming has been done by Miguel Abad.

Having launched in “preview release” for now, Wolpy only allows you to create a map of the places you have visited in your trips and to carry out reviews of the places mentioned. As in all social networks that take pride in themselves, you can share these places with your friends and get to know the places that they have visited.

Once the launch phase is over, the next step would be to allow users to upload photos and videos of their trips besides being able to recommend other users on the places to visit.

The ultimate goal of Wolpy is to become a collaborative travel guide on a global scale.

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.

We first wrote about Tuenti on the 29th of December, 2006 (I think it was our first exclusive in Loogic).

On the 4th of March 2008, the CEO of Tuenti, Zaryn Dentzel, announces in Mobuzz TV that they have reached 2.000 million page views a month.

Incredible isn’t it? I’ve been talking often to the folks at Tuenti and the truth is that they are a role model for all of us who are into creating a business on the internet. Let’s have a look at some of the reasons for their success:

1) A young but very well prepared team that doesn’t like to boast of its achievements, but that has been hardened by the thousand battles they’ve had to confront with in the last few months to meet the demands of an enormous growth in traffic.

2) Highly influential investors with great experience (Bernardo Hernandez and Rodolfo Carpintier among them) who have had their role in advising the team of Tuenti, and that has been decisive in taking them where they are today.

3) A closed model (one can enter only through invitation) that has led them to turn into a social phenomenon, so much so that there’s talk of Tuenti on the streets, and even some people have created songs, recorded them with their friends and uploaded them to YouTube.

4) No advertising, at least for the moment, which has allowed them to dedicate all of their time to grow without worrying about making money. Now the time will come when they can make good use of all that traffic to earn money.

5) Right time and right place to start. They started a year ago when Facebook was not looking towards Spain as a market to expand, and a country where the users were navigating in portals and forums, not in social networks. For Tuenti, being the first in their market has been a great idea.

Impressive, right? The best thing is that the success of Tuenti is a reality and I’m sure that it will be an incentive for all.

I’ve been informed of various initiatives that are developing products with the objective of making companies aware of user opinions in blogs, forums and social networks. It looks like BuzzTrend has already been able to come out with something on these lines.

We came to know about BuzzTrend when we talked of La Lista Wip (The Wip List) and now we are introduced to Swotti, a search engine for opinions.

Swotti is a search engine that utilizes semantic web technologies to extract the opinions of users in blogs and forums about companies and their products.

You can try how Swotti works for a couple of searches like Nokia Maps or Asus eee and see how the search results are shown. To begin with, the graphics stand out and above all the list of words with the rating obtained for each of them. On the other hand are the results of the search in different websites, where the users’ opinions are rated as positive or negative in each case.

What I think doesn’t function in the right way is when it shows results of the words found in blogs but is not able to show the article of the blog, something that makes it difficult to find the exact place where the opinion is reflected. What it shows instead is a results page or even the main page. On the other hand, what I did like is that it was able to find opinions expressed in the comments of the blogs, something that is generally overlooked by the search engines.

Via Genís Roca.

Vote for Swotti in Loogic Rank.

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.