Tweet 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

Tweet When my brother, Andrew, and I were in Madrid, sitting in front of the Reina Sofia Museum, two young women sat down next to us. As they were preparing some signs to put up nearby, they were laughing. What were they doing I asked in Spanish? Looking for a job they told me, using the following flyers with tabs that had a URL on YouTube since there were a number of advertising agencies in the neighborhood. Evidently, Seth Godin’s blog post about “why bother

Tweet 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

Tweet 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

Tweet 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….

Tweet 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….