Loogic English

They say that karaoke is the “national sport” of Japan, so I suppose that´s the reason Red Karaoke couldn´t avoid not being in this market - although it can´t be easy. The fact that there are no other Hispanic created projects in this country is very indicative of the difficulties involved, especially regarding language and cultural differences.

Red Karaoke Japan is the second international launch for the company, after the United States. For their entry into Japan, the karaoke site has included over 31,000 karaokes of which more than 10,000 are in Japanese and have been recently added to the web.

Red Karaoke assures that this is the first available free online karaoke site available in Japan. And to show interest in the country of karaoke, they have opened their own office and have a country manager for project management.

We will soon see the arrival of new Hispanic projects in Japan (or China) and I hope that the experience of Red Karaoke serves as a spearhead for other entrepreneurs in the network.

At last month’s Iniciador in Madrid, Luis Martin Cabiedes said that you have to be prepared because you never know when a project is going to take off (he used the word ‘explode’). In Spain, we have some interesting cases of projects that have ‘exploded’, perhaps the most striking is Tuenti (who decline to comment on the financial aspect of their business). In this group we can also include Trovit, Privalia and BuyVip. Other projects that we follow with attention and ones I can dare to say are about to take off include Red Karaoke (with its WSA competition), Minube (which just received an investment from Caja Navarra), and here is where I would also include 11870.com

I think 11870.com is about to take off and this radical redesign that they have launched could be the detonant.

After the initial shock of seeing the new design on the front page of 11870.com, I spent some time browsing through rest of the site (very much liked the design of the results page) and mostly in thinking how this redesign might affect the future of the website. What I realized is that we are looking here at a redefinition of the message that is conveyed to the new user who has just arrived on the site, the base of all this is a directory of businesses and hence it doesn’t make sense disguising it as a social network. A user who arrives at the site from the search engines or in whatever way has to be able to access all the content on the site, which is only possible in two ways, with a search engine and a directory.

For me, 11870.com is the ideal site to attract traffic from the search engines and relevant geolocalized content. Add to this the fact that the content is generated by the users, and they are continually generating comments which results in the content being updated with a lot of frequency. The new front page of the site should serve precisely to tell Google that it’s going to find a lot of content for indexing. Hence the conversion from a design that highlighted things to one that serves as an access to all the information available on the site.

Allow me to conclude with another novelty that seems to be quite important: now in 11870.com, it is possible to reserve a table at restaurants (agreement with El Tenedor), reserve rooms in hotels (agreement reached with Booking.com) and reserve rural rentals (agreement with TopRural).

Also commented by Jesus Encinar and François Derbaix.

I can see many similarities between the projects Red Karaoke and Kedin. You can affirm this if you take a look at the profile of their founders (professionals with a broad experience in media companies) and when you observe how they are developing their business strategy (by striking deals with important companies). Kedin reached an agreement with Telefonica in September to sell its advertising space and now Red Karaoke enters into an alliance with Telecinco.

If you think about it, the synergies between Red Karaoke and Telecinco are enormous. From what they have confirmed, the principal synergies are exchange of traffic between their sites and the commercialization of the advertising spaces in Red Karaoke by Advanced Media, the interactive agency of Telecinco (Publimedia). But the area where they can find more possibilities is in joining forces to organize competitions and promotions directed to the audiences of the TV channel. The move from the web to the television is very important to reach the kind of users who know very little about the internet but want to broaden their participation on the net.

These examples of Red Karaoke and Kedin should serve all of us to broaden our horizons, and realize that there are great opportunities of reaching users beyond the internet. And on the other side, the work that these projects are doing will help us all because they will attract new users to the world of social networks.

The most influential blogs about internet businesses are echoing the news of the entry of Red Karaoke in the American market and I think that we all need to take example of this initiative because this is something we haven’t seen a lot from hispanic projects.

We are accustomed to seeing hispanic projects coming out in English as well as in Spanish or sometimes only in English and doing all they can to stand out in the international media and blogs by sending out their news and press releases, but it’s not very common to have a clear strategy of taking the business to the United States, and even hiring a Country Manager to develop the business over there. As for Country Managers, we know of them because of foreign sites having one in Spain, but the other way round, how many projects do you know of that have done something like this?

Another interesting aspect to emphasize is the interest to competer in their sector, talking clearly about who is their competition and how they are going to work to become the leaders of their industry.