My First YouTube Video (La Playa en España)

Posted: September 29th, 2008 | Author: Joe Kutchera | Filed under: Video | No Comments »

This past April I visited my friends Antonella, Mauricio and their daughter Isabel in Barcelona. We had a tremendous time together. I filmed the train ride along the seashore as I approached Barcelona from Tarragona, about an hour to the south. Enjoy the sunshine and palm trees….

Vicky Cristina Barcelona Funny

Posted: August 19th, 2008 | Author: Joe Kutchera | Filed under: Reviews | 1 Comment »

This past weekend I saw Woody Allen’s new, well-crafted movie Vicky Christina Barcelona about two young American women coming to Barcelona for the summer and their foibles of finding love and the ensuing relationships’ disappointments. The story is very “Woody Allen” in that the characters fall in love with the wrong people and are never satisfied. But how humorous those messy relationships are!

I’ll admit that I am totally biased as Barcelona and Oviedo (where the movie is filmed) are two of my favorite cities in Spain. Penelope Cruz, Javier Bardem, Scarlett Johnansson and Rebecca Hall all put on great performances. I recommend it. See the trailer here…

Two (Spanish) web companies to watch

Posted: June 21st, 2008 | Author: Joe Kutchera | Filed under: Blogging, Innovation, International, Reviews | 1 Comment »

During my recent trip to Spain, I got to know the executives/founders of a two interesting companies: Gonzalo Garcia and Ramon Leonato of GeoVirtual and Eduardo Arcos and Arturo Paniagua of Hipertextual. While they are under-the-radar now, I wouldn’t be surprised if they make it big in the future, especially as Internet penetration increases in Spain and Latin America. Currently, Internet penetration is 45% in Spain and 25% in Mexico. Even though those penetration rates are so low, Spanish represents the 3rd most used language on the Internet.

GeoVirtual, based in Barcelona and founded in 1990, develops 3D maps for governments, utilities, as well as energy and transportation companies. While they have been very focused on their B2B solutions, in the coming months they plan to roll out their consumer product to compete with Google Earth. You can download it from their site and use it on a PC now (but it is not available for the Mac yet). They plan on licensing their 3D mapping technology to media or yellow pages companies that want to offer classified listings in a virtual environment.

Hipertexutal, much like Weblogs or Gawker Media in English, is a network of 16 popular blogs in Spanish with 4 million readers per month. They are a prime example of the virtual corporation: the company is based in Madrid but their readers and bloggers hail from around the Spanish-speaking world. In addition to making money from the advertising sold across their network, they offer consulting services to businesses that want to start corporate blogs. While their most popular blog, ALT1040, was started in 2002, they incorporated the company in 2005. Martin Varsavsky, who founded FON and is an investor in a number of other Internet companies, invested in Hipertextual in November, 2007.

Check out this short video of Eduardo Arcos to learn a little more about Hipertextual:

It’s all in a (Spanglish) brand name: Bicing and Vueling

Posted: May 4th, 2008 | Author: Joe Kutchera | Filed under: Innovation, Interactive Marketing, International, Trends | No Comments »

During my trip here in Spain, I have learned about two new, innovative companies based in Barcelona that use funny, Spanglish brand names. The first is Bicing (combining the word “bicicleta” or bike in Spanish with the English suffix -ing), which provides rental services for people that want to bike around the city. You sign up on their web site Bicing.com and once you have a card, you can “take out” one of their red bikes from one of their many bike stands around the city where you swipe your Bicing card and unlock one of the 20 or so bikes. When you arrive at your destination, look for the nearest Bicing stand and lock up your Bicing bike there. It’s a kind of Zipcar service but for bikes.

The other company is Vueling.com. Their name combines the Spanish word for “flight,” or “vuelo,” with the English suffix -ing. You can see here from their YouTube videos that they do everything very differently compared to other low-cost airlines.

Here is a video of a launch party on one of their planes. Were they in the air? Most notable is their funny series of vignettes on YouTube of a group of their flight attendants visiting and commenting on cities that they fly to. Check out this video of the flight attendants visiting Paris set to the music from the movie Amelie…

On-train magazines – High-speed trains that is…

Posted: April 24th, 2008 | Author: Joe Kutchera | Filed under: Innovation, International, Reviews | 1 Comment »

Here is something that is totally foreign to North American travelers: on-train magazines. That’s right…just like in-flight magazines but on the train. I neglected to mention on my previous post that when I took the high-speed train from Madrid to Barcelona that I read my first on-train magazine: Pasajes, which is produced by the editorial company COMFERSA here in Spain. In addition to the magazine for Renfe’s AVE (high-speed) train, they also have a magazine for their regular trains called En Punto. Will Amtrak ever come out with something like this? Or how about building up the high-speed trains in the US? Interestingly enough, the Southern Pacific Railroad came out with its own magazine in 1898 – Sunset – which is now part of Time Inc.