As noted by TechCrunch, OLX is quickly becoming recognized as a global competitor of Craigslist with the site already translated in 39 languages and presence in 87 countries. The site’s popularity is greatest in countries including Spain, India, Portugal, Mexico, China and the Phillipines.

With the continuing growth of this project and additional infusion of capital they have received, we might soon be able to say that OLX is the leader in this sector. Moreover, OLX has stated that the funds from this investment will serve in their efforts for new acquisitions (like the purchase of Chinese classifieds portal Edeng), improvements in the website, further global expansion and to continue with marketing initiatives.

Our take on it: Two American investment funds investing in a Spanish startup is a great news for us. This investment confirms the fact that the business of online outlets is perhaps the most promising internet business in Spain today.

Amongst the initial investors who betted for the project are Luis Martin Cabiedes who confirmed me that he has sold his sold his stake in the company, something that fits well with his investment philosophy: “I think that a business angel should know when to enter and exit”. Luis participated until the third round of funding which was also participated by Nauta Capital and fetched 4 million euros. Now we expect that with the returns from this exit, he will continue to invest in internet startups, something that he has done with a lot of success until now.

Seen in Expansion.

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.

Enrique Dubois confirms the news that Carlos Blanco had advanced about the acquisition of Wamba by Mio.tv. The figures of the operation, not refuted until now, could be between 4 and 6 million euros. Some considerations with respect to it:

In the sector, people had commented on the interest of the founders of Wamba to grow the project and sell it off when presented with an interesting offer, but what was not expected was such a fast sale mostly because of the current economic situation. It must be taken into account that the initial capital invested in the company was 650.000 euros by the founding team and Matias de Tezanos and in September 2007, Morten Lund purchased a 40% stake in the company for 3 million euros, although it’s not clear whether the investment was realized in its totality. In case of confirming the figures of a sale of between 4 and 6 million, it seems that the return on investment obtained would not be too big. Also should be considered the purchase of the forum Vagos.es that considerably increased the traffic at Wamba and although it surely has given them many integration headaches, it also should have been a decisive factor to set up the social network in a good situation for a sell off.

Mio.tv? Frankly it’s the first time I have heard of this project founded by Manuel Garcia-Duran, who had been a director at Telefonica and Antena 3, and who wants to revolutionise the internet TV sector targetting the hispanic community in the United States. At the presentation of the project at the end of 2007, they said the company would be worth 1.000 million dollars in 2008. I think they haven’t achieved that goal (in one year, they wanted to be worth more than half of what Google paid for YouTube, now that is setting high goals) although they must have some cash on hand to carry out an operation such as the purchase of Wamba. I’m not sure if this acquisition fits very well in the strategy of Mio.tv. At first glance, it could seem like an acquisition similar to that of Vagos.es, mainly done to add users.

A while ago, we told you that we will come back to talk about Zankyou for the upcoming developments of this online wedding lists management service. We mentioned that this subject of wedding management was very interesting for online businesses, due to the high interest of the users and the big business that it moves.

Zankyou has made an important bet. They already have the service available in 7 countries including Spain, and they just launched the Italian version. The international expansion for a service of this kind makes a lot of sense, but it doesn’t mean just translating the website. The site content must be adapted to the country and it’s important to strike agreements with companies of those countries for advertising and for the management of the wedding lists of the users.

At Zankyou, they have started generating content on the theme. Perhaps the best way to attract users is through quality information and that’s what they are looking for with their magazine and with their blog.

These are not the only premium domains that are being used or soon going to be used as brands for new projects. For example, look at the purchase of Bodas.com by Amado Martin or the launch of Coches.com, and others will surely soon follow. It seems that prices of some of these domains are starting to drop and the domain owners that were parking before are seeing that they can achieve better profitability by actually building something out of them.

Now seems to be a good time to look for premium domains at prices that were unlikely to be realized by entrepreneurs before. You can even find bargains like Mundiales.com that was bought for a little more than $5,000. But how do we find out about these types of bargains? It seems that the professionals in this sector will find such opportunities more easily but for people like myself, with little experience, resources like Sedo or Demene are useful to look for such opportunies.

Revenues of Buyvip in 2008: 28 million Euros
Revenues of Privalia in 2008: 22 million Euros
Revenues of Vente Privee in 2008: 23 million Euros

Doesn´t it seem strange that the three main Online Outlets that operate in Spain have very similar revenues? Considering that Buyvip operates on an international level and the figure presented is from global revenues, it´s fair to think that the figure is actually lower and closer to Privalia and Ventee Privee.

How can it be that all three have such similar revenues?  and why don´t any of them publicize their profits? It seems that the race between the three “big ones” is to obtain the maximum users possible and the biggest sales figures. However, on the inside, what surely should be of concern are the profits. Unless their goal is to create more jobs than to earn money.

My impression is that the sales figures are so similar because these private online shopping clubs have similar users, in other words, one user most likely makes purchases on all three sites, including some others. Also, let´s keep an eye out for Vipventa that still hasn´t publicized their revenues, only number of users which isn´t too bad.

The other interesting point to consider is why there are such pronounced highs and lows in the traffic of these sites, as seen in the graph above?

Tired of having dogs and cats as pets? Why not try something different…

Now you can put a gremlin in your life for only 10$. How is this possible? metoCube CEO Lucas Rodriguez Cervera explains this in his own words:

We have streamlined our production process so that we can produce great quality gremlins
at extremely low costs. This productivity is possible because employees know what to do and
how to do it at every moment, as they have all the procedures available in metoCube. Click
on the link below to see a description of our gremlin production process.

http://misc.metocube.com/mc/element/view-web/Mass+gremlin+production+and+delivery

Disclosure: metoCube is a partner company of iWeekend.

Today we came to know that the sales of cars in January of this year have fallen by 41.6% to 59.385 units, the lowest level since 1996. Without doubt, the automobile sector is going through a critical period, in line with the real estate sector. Reducing costs and improving the effectiveness of the advertising campaigns are now a priority for companies in these sectors. On the internet, perhaps they have the best option for both the things, the advertising on the internet is cheaper and can be more focuse to reach the target public. I can personally confirm this situation for the case of two clients from these sectors with whom we are going to start working.

In this line, comes a new portal developed for one of the most important domain names in Spanish, Coches.com, which was a property of Chris Chena and now belongs to the company Autodescuento. According to Carlos Blanco, the domain might have been sold for somewhere between 800 and 900.000 euros.
We talked of Autodescuento when we came to know of the investment by Marek Fodor and now we can see that this company is betting everything on this sector, with the idea that a chunk of the business of selling cars will migrate to the internet. Concesionarios.com and Financiatucoche.com are the other two websites of this company that we hope to pay more attention to from now on.

With respect to Coches.com, I think that it has a very good focus. Above all, I liked the search engine and the page that shows results with the filter system, and it has given me some interesting ideas for a project that we are developing.

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.