Loogic English

At Inventa Internet, we are pleased to present Hostarting, a service that compares prices and the characteristics of different hosting services and domain registrars, with the ambition of becoming a reference in the sector. Our objective for Hostarting is to provide professionals and companies looking for hosting services a place to find solutions that fit their unique needs. Until now, people who wanted to sign up for a hosting service had to hop from one website to find the most suitable option or trust the recommendations of another person. Now all the price plans and product details of the major companies in the sector are easily accesible from a single place and it’s possible to do comparisons between different plans.

Hostarting targets hosting companies as well as individuals or companies who need those services. We want to maintain a balance between the services provided to both kinds of users because we believe that everybody can benefit from such a service. We are looking to create more transparency in the sector, better communication and above all, less conflicts between companies and clients. The aspect of participation and community is fundamental in Hostarting. We want to create a place where the hosting companies and their users can communicate, and users can comment, recommend and review the different services. This is our challenge: to creat value in a setor of huge interest for many people and companies, where we want to be a point of reference through our indpendent point of view.

This is the start of Hostarting, we have big plans for this project, many ideas that we want to develop and that we hope will fructify in the coming months. We will continue working to build a tool of great utility for all. We hope you will accompany us in this journey. Thank you all for your support and help :)

Thanks to:

Cusomedia, for the excellent work of design and programming. Without their help, it wouldn’t have been possible to start this project. Thanks to Oobo for gifting us the name, we like it a lot and hope you also liked it. Thanks to Blogoff for accepting to write a scoop, for doing an excellent article presenting the new site and for helping us improve through their recommendations.

And thanks to the betatesters: Agustin Vivancos - Impulsa, Jordi Pérez - Brandea, Javi Olmo - Tutecnologo, Javi de Rios - Guiadeconcursos, Lucas Rodriguez - Metocube, Miguel Angel Ivars - Adlemons, Roberto Pérez - Erasmoos, Tomy Pelluz - Qapacity, Aurora Garal - Worthidea, Alex Dolara - Plootu, Ignasi Prat - Allrankings, Javier Lopez - Erasmusu, Fabio Nuñez - Escapadarural, Raul Jimenez - Minube, Javier Gracia - Misscompras and to Enrique Brito.

Note: we are in Beta. We appreciate all the comments and suggestions. We will also appreciate (with a link in Loogic ;) all the blog articles that help us spread the word.

This is one of the good news we started the year with: Caja Navarra has invested 400.000 euros as convertible debt, in the travel seach engine and social network Minube.

I’m very happy to share this news because I really appreciate Raul and Pedro and because I know that Minube is one of those projects that is going to take off in 2009. The current figures of 49.395 registered users, 27.752 corners (places), 1.094 blogs on travel, 133.907 photos, 1.369 videos, 147 countries and 5.466 cities, will go up to double or triple by the end of the year with all certainty.

Also important is the fact that the first investment announced in an internet company this year in Spain has been carried out by Caja Navarra, the protagonist of 2008. Many of us expect Caja Navarra to continue to bet on internet businesses in 2009 as it has done until now.

A new competitor has arrived in the segment of airfare vertical search engines, this time it´s Mirayvuela, with the financial backing of B2B Factory, as well as a group of “family offices” and private investors. I discovered this search engine in Baquia TV from the recorded interview of Rodolfo Carpintier with Diego Lopez-Salazar, their managing director.

Mirayvuela enters the highly competitive landscape of travel search with the potential of becoming the preferred site for users searching for cheap flights.  In this group we already have a few well-known sites, such as Trabber and Vuelosbaratos.es, that both provide unique airfare search offerings as well as Minube, a combination of search engine and social network for travelers. Other competitors in this sector include Travenjoy for Spain and at the international level, the massively known Kayak and the novel Mobissimo.

Among such competitors, Mirayvuela is not going to have a spare moment to waste.  Even so, I understand that there are companies that launch in this market because the business model is very clear - the facilitation of airline ticket sales. A business that has become an important source of referrals for the travel industry.

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.