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I’ve been awaiting this news for quite some time now. In July of this year, I wrote that Trovit was one of the three most interesting hipanic projects to invest in, and now we get the confirmation with investments from La Caixa, Luis Martín de Cabiedes and Nacho Gonzalez Barros (founder of Infojobs).

Until June I didn’t realize the great potential of this vertical search engine. When I was able to see how well it functioned, I thought that this project shouldn’t take long to find financing. Now Iñaki Ecenarro, founder of Trovit and the whole team would have a lot more resources to grow this service that already accounts for more than 2.5 million unique users per month.

Also I would like to emphasize that one of the investors in this first round of financing for Trovit is Nacho Gonzales Barros, who after the huge success of Infojobs, continues his career as an entrepreneur at the helm of Salir.com and now also as a business angel it seems. Looks like we are going to see more successful entrepreneurs investing in projects they find interesting apart from starting their own new ventures after successfully selling off their first company. In this sense, Albert Armengol is the best example.

My congratulations to the team of Trovit and now I eagerly await and hope to share the news of investments in Festuc and Eyeos so I can bring out the magic crystal ball again to bet for three new companies in which to invest.

Update: the investment has been of 600.000 euros.

Read the original article in Spanish.

The staff of Fivelab is announcing the coming-out of Catodicos, the social network for aficionados of televesion series of which we talked when it was released in private beta.

Now Catodicos is open and everyone can participate in this community where basically you can follow your preferred television series and discover new ones.

As I have said previously, I like Catodicos a lot but I think there are some things which can be improved. Here are my recommendations for its creators:

Make the user’s page as the point of entry to the site. This way the user will see the calendar and timetable of his favourite series as soon as he enters the site, and also view other users involved in the community, … This will make the user identify more with the application.

Recommend a series to a friend from the page of the series itself. When you are discovering new series through the list of series, enable the possibility of sending recommendation messages to other members of the community from the page of the series. (This already exists, the people behind Catodicos are involved in everything)

List of series by types. I generally like series that have an argumental thread like 24, lost, heroes, … I don’t quite like series in which each episode is a different story, that’s why I think it would be useful to know the type for each series.

Vote for Catodicos in Loogic Rank.

Read the original article in Spanish.

Very interesting the new initiative of the rural tourism portal Escapada Rural, that of creating a series of options enabling the proprietors of rural accommodations to communicate amongst themselves, share information, consult the community, …

To understand how this new community functions, I recommend you see this video made by the creators of Escapada Rural. As the community is not open, you can view the images uploaded to Flickr to get a glimpse of how it is structured.

From what I’ve seen, the main functionality of the community is the communication between the proprietors of rural cottages with the main goal being to share experiences and useful information about all kinds of topics related to the business of rural tourism.

I think it’s the right strategy that will put Escapada Rural a step ahead of its competitors in a very competitive market.

Read the original article in Spanish.

Online travel agency eDreams just presented the documentation to CNMV to get listed on the stock exchange in the first quarter of 2008 with a valuation of 400 million euros.

After the acquisition of eDreams by a venture capital fund for 153 million euros, there were rumors of the company going public and it seems that now the news is being confirmed. Experience in the hispanic internet shows that wanting to go public doesn’t mean that it will happen, but in this case we hope that it will be so because it could be an important push to the sector.

In 2006, the revenues of eDreams touched 300 million euros and the year before, the profits were 4.7 million euros, which demonstrates the important volume of business related to everything that has to do with the travel sector on the internet.

Besides, eDreams is one of the online travel agencies that is vouching the most for the Web 2.0, which we can see in its community and in the day to day management through Twitter. It’s clear that there’s little connection between the Web 2.0 and going public, but it’s a sign of the company’s evolution and the interest it shows in communicating with its users.

Via Nacho Giral.

More information in Bolsacinco.

Update: Marek Fodor also talks about this and notes that the stock listing will be made in two phases. The first phase will be to generate an exit for the stock of the founders and the venture capital fund, and the second phase will serve to raise capital that could be used for acquisitions or promotional campaigns.

Read the original article in Spanish.

I’ve just been informed by Angel María Herrera about the people and companies that have invested capital in Bubok, the project to create “the hispanic Lulu”.

The companies participating in the project are: evoluZiona, Secuoyas, Grupo Intercom and Europa Press. evoluZiona and Secuoyas in particular will be in charge of developing the project, apart from being investors.

The people involved in the project are:

Rafael Casado, founder of Invertia.
Jose Luis Delgado Guitart, founder of Unaplauso.
Luis Martín Cabiedes, advisor to Europa Press.
Rafael Garrido, founder of Secuoyas.
Steven Joseph Posner.
Mauro Jose Martin.

As you can see, highly prepared companies and investors have become part of the project which can convert Bubok into one of the most powerful projects in the hispanic internet.

Read the original article in Spanish.