Loogic English

A good piece of has arrived for Oportunista, the website for online promotions and discounts, that has recently received an investment from a group of various business angels including Gustavo Garcia, founder of BuyVip, and Albert Feliú of InfoJobs. The founders of the project, Rodrigo Giménez-Rico and Alexandra Klein, plan to use the funds to expand the list of businesses in the health and leisure sectors in Spain that are already present in the portal. They also plan to make significant usability improvements to the website and are set to come out of beta in September.

We first wrote about Oportunista.com last October and since then have had the opportunity to speak with the founders in various occasions and at events such as SeedRocket that have been important for them to meet private investors including the ones that finally bet on their idea. The project is quickly nearing a time when it can compete with other big players like Cuponeo, that we spoke of recently.

There is already 28.5 million dollars invested in the web classifieds site OLX, led by Fabrice Grinda and Alec Oxenford. OLX is now closing on its third round of financing put together by General Catalyst Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, Founders Fund and DN Capital for a total of 5 million dollars.

As noted by TechCrunch, OLX is quickly becoming recognized as a global competitor of Craigslist with the site already translated in 39 languages and presence in 87 countries. The site’s popularity is greatest in countries including Spain, India, Portugal, Mexico, China and the Phillipines.

With the continuing growth of this project and additional infusion of capital they have received, we might soon be able to say that OLX is the leader in this sector. Moreover, OLX has stated that the funds from this investment will serve in their efforts for new acquisitions (like the purchase of Chinese classifieds portal Edeng), improvements in the website, further global expansion and to continue with marketing initiatives.

Today we came to know that the sales of cars in January of this year have fallen by 41.6% to 59.385 units, the lowest level since 1996. Without doubt, the automobile sector is going through a critical period, in line with the real estate sector. Reducing costs and improving the effectiveness of the advertising campaigns are now a priority for companies in these sectors. On the internet, perhaps they have the best option for both the things, the advertising on the internet is cheaper and can be more focuse to reach the target public. I can personally confirm this situation for the case of two clients from these sectors with whom we are going to start working.

In this line, comes a new portal developed for one of the most important domain names in Spanish, Coches.com, which was a property of Chris Chena and now belongs to the company Autodescuento. According to Carlos Blanco, the domain might have been sold for somewhere between 800 and 900.000 euros.
We talked of Autodescuento when we came to know of the investment by Marek Fodor and now we can see that this company is betting everything on this sector, with the idea that a chunk of the business of selling cars will migrate to the internet. Concesionarios.com and Financiatucoche.com are the other two websites of this company that we hope to pay more attention to from now on.

With respect to Coches.com, I think that it has a very good focus. Above all, I liked the search engine and the page that shows results with the filter system, and it has given me some interesting ideas for a project that we are developing.

1) It must have been a very difficult decision that of changing the name of a web project after more than a year of launching and when it’s already relatively well known.

2) I liked Properazzi, but it’s true that it’s a complicated name. I like Enormo even more though. Without doubt, Yannick Laclau knows how to choose a good name for his projects.

3) Enormo is already available in 30 countries. When a model is tried and tested and the growth is based mainly on traffic coming from Google, launching the project in other countries is a natural way to expansion.

4) I love the lack of design. It’s as if they had done the design thinking according to my taste. And take a look at the advertising, where is it? A fantastic integration of Adsense Premium, that other vertical search engine companies focused on real estate classified ads, also appear to be achieving.

5) Seasonal advertisements is an option which has been added recently I think and that competitors Trovit and Nuroa don’t have as yet. Since Idealista acquired a stake in Rentalia and included it in its content, this option will end up being offered by all the vertical search engines.

6) Now that they have changed their name, wouldn’t they also have considered diversifying in other subjects? Especially, the theme of classified adverts for jobs seems to be working well for other search engines of this type.

Eneko Knörr is a great reference for me as an entrepreneur. I believe he has made a great company out of Hostalia and transmits very good ideas in his blog related to the world of business and entrepreneurship. He is a simple person, very intelligent and it heartens me to see that after selling Hostalia, he continues to launch new projects within a new company called Ideateca.

Ideateca is described as a factory of ideas, it’s an incubator for internet projects that starts with two initiatives already functioning and with the objective of entering the themes they consider profitable.

There are three projects that are already up and running in Ideateca: Anuncioteca, a classifieds website; Videolandia, a video portal; and two islands in Second Life. Soon they will be launching in Ideateca a flash games portal, applications for mobiles and a service for photologs, amongst other things.

I find it very interesting how Eneko is starting his new business adventure. Being an expert in the world of internet, he has detected those sectors that could attract huge traffic and convert into big business. Through his extensive experience, he will be able to contribute interesting new things in each of those sectors.

Let me conclude saying that in Ideateca they are hiring professionals to work in their projects, mostly they are looking for PHP-MySQL programmers who live in the area of Bilbao.