Loogic English

90.000 euros of prize money from Eurecan for Europe’s most innovative company. The contest aims to identify, promote and reward the most innovative early stage companies in Europe.

The jury for the competition consists of 17 European level venture capital funds with a total investment capacity of 8.000 million euros.

The event will be carried out in various cities of Europe and the final will be in Barcelona.

In 2007 the winning project was Scytl Secure Electronic Voting, a company managed by Pere Valles.

More information on the site of Caja Navarra.

Restalo is a restaurant guide and reservation service started by two entrepreneurs with the support of Barcelona Activa.

I asked the founders of Restalo to explain to me the differential aspects of the site, and to speak the truth, I am really impressed.  All entrepreneurs should be able to explain in a few words the fundamental idea of their project and get others excited by their idea.

Here are two aspects of the site that have made a very good impression on me:

It’s a site thought for the users, as much in it’s usability aspects as in its purpose. What stands out the most is that part of the revenues earned by the site are destined to the users in the form of dinner invitations through points accumulated by participating on the site. Can you imagine a travel or hotel site gifting flights or hotel stays just for commenting and participating? In Restalo, they are doing exactly that by inviting their most active users to dine out.

It’s a useful site that only accounts for restaurants that are really worth a visit. Not all - only those that stand out for something. Apart from that, the reservation service doesn’t cost anything and one can get discounts of upto 50% in some restaurants.

I would very much like to see projects that are so well thought out as Restalo. I am sure that at some point of time, we will stop thinking that we are at the tail-end as far as internet businesses are concerned.

I couldn’t hold anymore to talk of Twittday. Its appearance in the official blog of Twitter and the announcement of Twittok herald the arrival of this informal meeting of users of Twitter that began with a first meeting on the 2nd of October, 2007.

The architects of this movement are the argentinians Marilín Gonzalo and Juan Gigli who with the excuse of getting to know other argentinians based in Madrid, have been able to attract a lot of people who think that Twitter is a new way of communicating, sharing and getting to know.

A number of Twitterers and bloggers have joined the organization of the event and are helping spread Twittday to other Spanish cities and looking at Twittok, it seems also internationally.

For more information on Twittday, I recommend you read the interview given to Pisito en Madrid.

Via Mauro.

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 »

A quick post to comment on what has happened in the iWeekend held this weekend in Barcelona.

From the ideas presented on Friday evening, the idea selected was Democratic Advertising and on Saturday they started working on it. It seems that the first hours of work on the idea were filled with tension because they couldn’t come to agreement on the method of working.

The idea was first named LimonAds, but a cheeky/greedy/creepy/thief was quicker and stole the domain name, so they quickly changed the name to AdLemons, which I like more.

From what it seems, they have had time to shape the business idea, but I don’t know much more. I think that a weekend falls short for starting a web and do the first trials. It would be interesting to see how the project develops from now on.