Loogic English

I’ve been informed of various initiatives that are developing products with the objective of making companies aware of user opinions in blogs, forums and social networks. It looks like BuzzTrend has already been able to come out with something on these lines.

We came to know about BuzzTrend when we talked of La Lista Wip (The Wip List) and now we are introduced to Swotti, a search engine for opinions.

Swotti is a search engine that utilizes semantic web technologies to extract the opinions of users in blogs and forums about companies and their products.

You can try how Swotti works for a couple of searches like Nokia Maps or Asus eee and see how the search results are shown. To begin with, the graphics stand out and above all the list of words with the rating obtained for each of them. On the other hand are the results of the search in different websites, where the users’ opinions are rated as positive or negative in each case.

What I think doesn’t function in the right way is when it shows results of the words found in blogs but is not able to show the article of the blog, something that makes it difficult to find the exact place where the opinion is reflected. What it shows instead is a results page or even the main page. On the other hand, what I did like is that it was able to find opinions expressed in the comments of the blogs, something that is generally overlooked by the search engines.

Via Genís Roca.

Vote for Swotti in Loogic Rank.

A new player enters the market of vertical search engines on travel. It’s called Ulises and it has just been launched.

Ulises offers specific searches for flights (which I believe will be the most used feature), for hotels, for car rentals and for cruises. These options of car rentals and cruises are not available as far as I know in other travel-related vertical search engines developed in Spain.

Of the flight search, I would say that the results page stands out and shows with much clarity the flights found arranged by price, and moreover a comparison table of different airlines, something that helps a lot if the user is not just searching for the best price but also gives priority to the quality of service offered by one airline company compared to the other.

The search engine also has different options of filtering and on the main page, we can find the last flights searched apart from the flights that have been searched the most, which gives us an idea of which are the most interesting destinations for people.

Without doubt, Ulises will be able to compete with the three flight search engines that we already have on the scene, Trabber, Minube and Vuelosbaratos now have another competitor with whom to fight for the users.

Vote for Ulises in Loogic Rank.

Read the original article in spanish.

I’ve just been informed of a new investment in the real estate vertical search engine Nuroa. The investment is from Dennis Bemmann, founder of the German social network studiVZ, who enters the company as a partner.

studiVZ is the equivalent of Facebook for Germany accounting for 6 million users and which was sold to the editorial group Hotzbrinck a year ago for about 100 million euros. Dennis Bemmann is one of the founders of studiVZ and continues to be the CTO of this social network.

The entry of Dennis Bemmann as an investor and partner will in addition serve for the development of a social network of real estate agents and people searching for a property, as an evolution of what is now Nuroa. It seems to be a logical evolution incorporating a social layer to a web application like this vertical search engine.

Dennis Bemmann came to know of Nuroa at the web 2.0 conference in Berlin where the German version of Nuroa was launched. He was impressed by their innovative and advanced technology and so decided to make this investment.

Vote for Nuroa in Loogic Rank.

Read de original post in spanish.

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.