Loogic English

Sugiere.net is born again, this time with Fernando del Pozo as the sole driver behind the helm and without the company of Fivelab. The new version of the website is much more completed and continues to focus on providing channels so that users can make recommendations to businesses.

With the new Sugiere, designed by Customedia, users can become fans of companies, provide personalized feedback and vote or make comments about the recommendations made by other people.

The main functions that are available to businesses for interacting with the users are: manage  the community of fans of their products, engage conversations with their customers, adopt suggestions and give details of the process to their customers, promote and add new products, conduct opinion surveys about a new idea or product.

We recently mentioned some new things happening with Goolzoom that is making for a very interesting project.  The project was developed by Jesus Barrio towards the end of 2006 and presented in January of 2007.  Since then, new improvements have been continuously introduced to provide a very useful tool for professionals that work with maps, such as topography, geology, architecture, … In a few words, we can say that Goolzoom is an enriched version of Google Maps.  What it offers is maps from Google with additional maps added like maps of catrasto, aerial photographs of Sigpac (well known and used in Spain) or general municipal plans of some cities in Spain.

All of this additional geographic information included alongside of Google Maps provides  great value and allows companies, institutions and professionals to use Goolzoom as part of their daily work. It´s a tool that did not exist before and now can help facilitate their work to a large extent. In this situation it is logical that an entrepreneur like Jesus Barrio sees that this project can utilize a premium account business model and that companies are happy to pay 90 Euros a year to Goolzoom for additional services: print maps, obtain a complete report for all that maps of one place, obtain maps in an image format with customizable sizes, navigate in 3D mode, street maps with dual two at a time, and not display advertising.

In just over three months of running the premium version of Goolzoom, there are already 300 users providing a revenue stream greater than a website like this could achieve from advertising.

This is in addition to the personalized services that Jesus Barrio is offering to public institutions with GoolGis which integrates customizable maps that the institutions already have in Google Maps.

Seedcamp, founded by serial entrepreneur Saul Klein is growing and expanding its reach far and wide to support promising entrepreneurs in their quest to launch great businesses. Paris is the venue of the next Mini-Seedcamp on the 24th of February and startups from France, Benelux, Spain and Portugal are invited to apply. 20 seed stage tech startups will be selected to attend an intensive day of presentations, panel discussions and 1-to-1 mentoring sessions with a select group of experienced entrepreneurs, investors, and developers from all over Europe, including Saul himself. Teams have till 9th of February to apply. That’s less than 2 weeks from today.

We thought it would be interesting to ask Reshma Sohoni, CEO of Seedcamp, some difficult questions. Here are the easy answers:

Carry on reading »

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.

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.