Loogic English

A while ago, we told you that we will come back to talk about Zankyou for the upcoming developments of this online wedding lists management service. We mentioned that this subject of wedding management was very interesting for online businesses, due to the high interest of the users and the big business that it moves.

Zankyou has made an important bet. They already have the service available in 7 countries including Spain, and they just launched the Italian version. The international expansion for a service of this kind makes a lot of sense, but it doesn’t mean just translating the website. The site content must be adapted to the country and it’s important to strike agreements with companies of those countries for advertising and for the management of the wedding lists of the users.

At Zankyou, they have started generating content on the theme. Perhaps the best way to attract users is through quality information and that’s what they are looking for with their magazine and with their blog.

Recently, Jésus Alonso made an important argument at Iniciador regarding the use of premium .com domains for web projects because of the potential branding implications and the ease of remembering the name for users. Antonio Andujar, who just bought Teatros.com, was also at this talk and surely has taken a good look on how Jesus Alonso is developing his Restaurantes.com project.

These are not the only premium domains that are being used or soon going to be used as brands for new projects. For example, look at the purchase of Bodas.com by Amado Martin or the launch of Coches.com, and others will surely soon follow. It seems that prices of some of these domains are starting to drop and the domain owners that were parking before are seeing that they can achieve better profitability by actually building something out of them.

Now seems to be a good time to look for premium domains at prices that were unlikely to be realized by entrepreneurs before. You can even find bargains like Mundiales.com that was bought for a little more than $5,000. But how do we find out about these types of bargains? It seems that the professionals in this sector will find such opportunities more easily but for people like myself, with little experience, resources like Sedo or Demene are useful to look for such opportunies.

Founded in 2006, Spotify (a combination of spot and identify) just went viral. They received the music website of the year award in the UK,  and the New York Times calls them the “iTunes killer”. People can’t stop talking about it in Twitter. We thought it would be interesting to do an interview with Lutz Emmerich, Spotify’s country manager in Spain. Hope you enjoy the interview:

Please present yourself, tell us about your professional career in Internet Business and tell us what is your function in Spotify?

I work now for 12 years in the online Business in different functions like Consultant, Sales Director or Country Manager in several companies like United Internet, Ogilvy, Wanadoo, TradeDoubler, etc. For Spotify I am the Country Manager heading up the local office and responsible for roling out of the marketing and sales strategy in Spain.

Carry on reading »

Imanol Iglesias is starting a social network for travel called Genviajero and has done it utilizing Google’s App Engine platform. I think this is the first site I’ve come across that is being built using the App Engine and I think it would be worth talking about a bit.

As we can see in the video of the presentation of App Engine made by Joaquin Cuenca in the Campus Party, what Google is looking for is to support those web projects that have the most possibilities for growth. If Google provides them with solutions for scalability, then we will have projects with high traffic and both Google and the project will be able to earn more money through advertising.

Here’s how Google App Engine works: the programmer, in this case Imanol, develops the application in Python (the only language available as of now) and uploads it to App Engine to have his web operational. The programmer doesn’t need to worry about databases, servers and other such issues related to the systems. App Engine also permits users to log in to the platform using their Google accounts, so users with existing accounts do not need to register on the web. As I am not a technical guy, I don’t want to go into detail in this aspect. If you want to know more, I recommend this article by Andreas Krohn.

As for Genviajero, I must say that as a social network for travellers, its basic function is sharing information on travel destinations and based on these favourites, make comments, opinions, recommendations, … Images of the sites added to the social network can be viewed on Panoramio, and soon it will allow users to upload their own pictures. On these lines, I think that in a social network like Genviajero, it makes a lot of sense to aggregate the maximum amount of information available related to places like hotels, restaurants, weather information, etc.

It was time we dedicated some words to Psicofxp, an internet community founded by Ismael Briasco in the year 2000 and which is now one of the most important websites in Argentina.

I find it interesting to see how a site established since so many years renews its design and offers many new functionalities to turn itself into a site that is much more social. Psicofxp should become an example for all those sites who continue with their outdated design since years thinking that if they tamper with it, their users will leave the site en masse. As long as the interests of the users are respected and the main line of the site is maintained, a change of design should be positive as it shows that the site is evolving and adapting itself to the changing times and styles.

This new design of Psicofxp is the most visible part of the evolution of a forum towards becoming a social network, where the users, apart from sharing opinions and conversations, can upload their photos, videos and create their profiles to strike up connections with their friends in the community.

Lastly, the employment section of Psicofxp is managed by Bumeran, which I understand is some kind of commercial agreement. This contrasts with the tendency we were lately observing in other social networks of creating a classifieds channel with the platform of OLX.

Seen in Kabytes.