My friend Fernando Bravo at Grupo Editorial Expansion introduced me to the folks at Quo España via email, so I stopped by for a visit. Interesting to hear about what they are doing compared to what Quo Mexico is doing. Our web sites are especially different. Quo Mexico’s site hasn’t been redesigned in a while. Quo España’s site is currently part of France Telecom’s network – Orange – although they indicated that they may take it back and build up a business on their own.

During my week in Madrid, I visited Gumersindo Lafuente, the founder and director of a brilliant Spanish-language site called SoiTu.es (or roughly “I am you” in English). Even while it provides up-to-date news and tons of helpful/interesting blurbs and links to other sites, it really excels as what I would call a “user-generated content portal” with content written by both their editors and a growing pool of volunteer writers who submit stories or comment. Note: the readers are truly engaged in participating in and making

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

Yesterday I took the high-speed Renfe AVE train from Madrid to Barcelona. It used to take 8+ hours and now takes about 3 hours. An amazing experience. The best part of it is that instead of having to go to the airport in a taxi, wait 2-3 hours, go thru security, etc, you can show up 30 minutes or less before the train is supposed to leave, jump on the train and arrive in the center of Barcelona. Check out the video here….

Last week, my brother and I spent a week vacationing in Madrid.  Great fun.  On the way there, the Iberia plane I flew on featured a view from the tailfin occasionally during the flight.  I had never seen anything like it before. Take a look here….  

After my previous post about user-generated stock photography, my friend and fellow blogger Timothy Dahl commented about a site based in Hungary that has been around since 2001 doing the same thing as PhotoShelter: stock.xchng.   My friend John Rozzo (who helped me build this blog) also clued me in about another couple of leading services in the user-generated photo stock sector: Dreamstime and iStockPhoto and a number of user-generated services that provide vectors, or stock designs and illustrations: VectorStock and Vecteezy.com. The amount of innovation in this space is amazing.  The more I look, the more

After my last blog post about Flickr versus Getty Images and the advent of user-generated stock photo agencies, I got an interesting email from the PR/Marketing folks at PhotoShelter, a kind of hybrid between Getty and Flickr.  See below for an excerpt of their explanation of what PhotoShelter does.   Two things learned here: 1) It really pays for companies to provide pro-active customer service and reach out to bloggers to explain new products and services.   2) The innovation in user-generated stock photography and journalism

Could Flickr become the next Getty Images (one of the top stock photography suppliers to news companies)? Hellman & Friedman recently bought Getty Images for $2.4 billion dollars as reported by the BBC here.  It will be interesting to see what they do with Getty and how they compete with “open source” photo sites like Flickr. Search for any city, building, person, or newsworthy subject and you can usually find it on Flickr. With the growth of camera phones, user-generated photo news will only become more widely available, cheaper, faster-to-market and ultimately

After writing my post the other day about Nielsen’s global online survey of online shopping habits, I wanted to take a moment to compare their global numbers to Mexico’s numbers.  This can provide a valuable point of comparison between “developed” markets like the US and Europe versus “emerging” markets such as Latin America. Nielsen’s survey says that 85% of online consumers worldwide have made a purchase online.  But if you take a look at AMIPCI’s research (Mexico’s leading research organization for Internet usage and habits) about

However bullish I am about Internet usage globally and its corresponding growth of online advertising and services, this study from Nielsen seems overly enthusiastic.  It says that 85% of the world’s population has shopped online.  The vast majority of US online consumers have bought something online (94% according to this study), which makes sense. South Korea, the UK, Germany, and Japan are other markets where that also makes sense.  But for developing markets such as Latin America, China and India, where it is more difficult to obtain