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As you might have noticed the attention I have given to it from here, I’ve really liked the idea of iWeekend and I thought that it would be interesting to do an interview with Luv Sayal, founder of the event. Here’s the interview, hope you enjoy it.

1) Tell us how the idea of bringing StartupWeekend to Spain ocurred to you, what was your initial approach, why you thought that an idea like this could succeed in Spain, what distinguishes iWeekend from StartupWeekend?

I read about the first StartupWeekend held in Colorado and got excited by the idea. In those days, I was thinking about how to give virality to a project. An event like this resolves the issue of marketing for a startup, whatever the startup may be. I decided that this experience would be great for me before launching my own startup. It’s like an accelerated lesson in how to start a company. I wanted to live that experience where I live - in Barcelona. The idea was to organize the event in Barcelona at the earliest and so I got in touch with the founder of StartupWeekend but couldn’t reach an agreement with him. I asked the community if it would be better to do it with another name and that’s how iWeekend was born.

The tech community is vibrant in some Spanish cities. I talked to many people and everyone liked the idea. I didn’t think if it would be successful or not. I just did it because I believed in the idea.

iWeekend is the altruistic competition of StartupWeekend. iWeekend is a non-profit initiative and I believe that it’s philosophy is nobler than the philosophy of StartupWeekend. StartupWeekend is a private enterprise, while from the very beginning, I have wanted that iWeekend belong to the community. We have achieved the support of a bank like La Caixa (Spain’s 3rd largest bank) and companies like Sun and Microsoft in the very first event, while StartupWeekend has only achieved the sponsorship of Microsoft once in 12 events. We already have certain advantage over StartupWeekend.

Going on reading »

There are more than 200 projects that we could categorize Web 2.0 in the Hispanic internet; many of them are in Loogic Rank. In this post I intend to select those projects which I think are the 30 best of the Hispanic Web 2.0 and to provide some interesting information about them.

Social Networks

Sonico
Company/Founders: Fnbox.
Investment: in negotiations.
Alexa: 511
Launch: July 2007.
More information:from the creators of Flodeo.

Tuenti
Company/Founders: Tuenti Technologies.
Investment: DAD, Bernardo Hernandez, …
Alexa: 3.293
Launch: December 2006.
More information: closed beta.

Wamba
Company/Founders: Enrique Dubois y Matías de Tezanos.
Investment: 3 million euros by Morten Lund.
Alexa: 3.425
Launch: December 2006.
More information: valuation of the company 7.5 millions euros.

Festuc
Company/Founders: Toni Salvatella y Albert Armengol.
Investment: remaining first round of finance.
Alexa: 34.189
Launch: June 2006.
More information: from the creators of Econozco.

Comparative.

Going on reading »

Yago Arbeola (CEO of Sync) releases this information in his blog and from the comments of important domainers and businessmen such as Eneko Knorr, Axel Serena or Carlos Blanco, it seems the idea has been well received.

Juan Pablo Sueiro amplifies the idea and many doubts and questions spring up in my mind.

It is clear that the idea of creating an investment fund in premium domain names is very interesting and could be a huge success as a business, but due to legal issues I’m not sure if it is feasible. If it has to do with a big number of investors contributing money to a fund for the purchase of domain names, it has to be controlled in some way by some competent authority, or it could have important legal problems.

To do it legally, would it be necessary to create an investment fund like the banks do? Would it be necessary to create a SICAV (controlling entity of institutions of collective investment)? Is it possible to do it simply with an SA (public limited company)?

I suppose that if the investors throw in a good amount of money to start with, all these issues can be settled hiring experts in the field, but for people (like me) who don’t dominate these things, it could be an important obstacle

The news of the day in the blogosphere is the new design of Xataka, and for me, that the commercial blog that is the point of reference in Spanish has incorporated social functionalities like: voting of posts, voting of comments and Karma of Commenters.

As you can see, these social functionalities are centered around the conversation that takes place in the comments section, something that is totally logical in a blog with a high level of comments. The subject of voting the posts, the comments and the karma of the users can open up a lot of possibilities. But I can’t avoid saying that in this case, Weblogs SL has fallen short, because in my opinion the community shouldn’t be just based on the comments but rather the user should be given a more predominant role in the blog. I think that since now each user can have a profile, the next logical step would be to have a community page that hosts the profiles of all users and where the users can communicate amongst themselves through private messages and messages to the community.

Another point to emphasize is the importance being given on OpenID, of course I understand the choosing of this option, but I’m unable to see the utility of this system. Does someone fancy giving me private lessons about OpenID?

And about the new design: very clean, pleasing, easy to read, very well integrated advertising, … I would say that I like it a lot, if it weren’t for the fact that it is aligned to the left of the screen, something that for me is quite annoying. My manias?

For sure, it seems to me an important step ahead for Weblogs SL, again pioneering in the hispanic blogosphere and I suppose, as Julio and Antonio comment, slowly they will go on developing new functionalities to promote the community around their blogs.

The other day we were talking about DineroMail and how little was known about the investment from Clarin, now there’s a rumor going around that Martin Varsavsky could also have invested.

Carlos Blanco gives us this news in the blog OjoInternet, the sister blog of OjoBuscador and dedicated to internet business.

Since I don’t have more information, I won’t talk more about this rumor, but I do want to emphasize the following: South America is drawing my attention due to the big projects being hatched over there, some of them much bigger than projects in Spain. Talking about DineroMail, Gaston Bercun comments that it could be valued at 22 million dollars. There are other eye-catching examples of this, like Mercado Libre that went public or the “couldn’t be better” acquisition of Patagon by Banco Santander for 528 million dollars.

I think I’m not mistaken if I say that these huge successes are due to the world-class entrepreneurs in South America, with very clear ideas and a great capacity for doing business. Without doubt the mainstay is Martin Varsavsky, but other names come to mind like Wenceslao Casares (founder of Patagon), Fernando Espuelas (founder of Starmedia and starting up Voy), Marcos Galperín, Alec Oxenford, Matias de Tezanos (founder of ClickDiario and starting up Healthcare), Gonzalo Arzuaga (founder of GauchoNet and starting up Killerstartups), …