Last night, Henri, Victor and I went to Buda Restaturante to hang out with Jeremiah Owyang from Forrester’s. Buda Restaurante is definitely an interesting place, focused on glamorous, busty blond hostesses and men who can’t help but ogle at them while buying overpriced and under-spiked drinks. And though the event was a bit repetitive given that I’d seen quite a few of the same people just one night before at Open Coffee (like Ollivier, Christian and Gregor) it was still nice to meet another American and to see how the Barcelona tech community is growing in importance and in cohesion.

It seems that everyone loves Barcelona.

And it’s interesting to see how many of Barcelona’s entrepreneurs are foreigners. The Expansión article definitely seems to be spot on in that regard.

I’d like to welcome two of migoa’s employees, Victor Aloi and Kirsten Kottman to the world of blogging.

They’ll be writing about what it’s like to live in Barcelona as young expats, real estate news generally, and the challenges and joys of promoting nuroa and trying to make it into a market-leading property search engine.

Victor is our 26 year old product manager for Spain. He started out as an intern (while he was getting a masters in corporate communications and advertising) but impressed so much that we hired him full-time back in June. In Brazil, he studied journalism and had a very popular personal blog. In addition to being a co-worker he’s also one of my best friends in Barcelona (which happened after we started working together). His blog will be in Spanish.

Kirsten is our German community manager. She’s originally from Berlin (one of my favorite cities in the world) but now lives in Barcelona (my favorite city in the world). Her background is in PR and journalism, including a stint at MTV. She’s really cool and really hard-working, and we’re lucky to have her. Her blog will be written in German. I’m looking forward to seeing how she deals with our collective craziness at our next party, which I hope will be a drunken karaoke session.

So far, the best blogger of our bunch is still Carlos, who continues to inspire us all! In fact, Carlos was going to do our presentation at Ojobuscador before it got cancelled. We miss him, but a good education is the most important thing, even more important than working at migoa!

We’ll see if Kirsten and Victor can make up for lost time and give Carlos a run for his money!

Interesting article in today’s New York Times about Bonnie Brown, who joined Google in 2000 as a part-time masseuse for $450 a week (to massage the engineers’ necks and backs) and has now retired thanks to the stock options that she received. She cashed in most of her options in 2005 and became a multi-millionaire. She held to a few and is now enjoying the benefits of investors’ continued love affair with all things Google.

That’s one way to make a million bucks.

When I was a college student, I had recurrent dreams about becoming a psychology major. I loved psychology, because it seemed to address issues that mattered, particularly when I took social psychology courses with a young Yale (now Stanford) professor named Jennifer Eberhardt. As an aspiring law professor, I was convinced that a better understanding of the human psyche would help me understand discrimination and social injustice.

Social psychology attempts to get to the core of key issues like: Why are people racist? Why would white slave-masters want to have sex with black slaves, even as they debated that blacks were less than fully human? Why do so many men have rape fantasies? Why would a member of a racial minority discriminate against another racial group or even against members of his own race?

These classes fueled hours of interesting debates, and some of the core theories have stuck with me to this day, particularly the debate regarding the unified self, which came up again the other day at the Web 2.0 conference in Berlin when I was chatting about the pros and cons of Facebook with Oriol and my new friend Ingo Di Bella.

I was arguing that Facebook forces me to be an exhibitionist, to demonstrate all of the various elements of my personality that might be captured on film when I’m acting silly or represented by my friends from various walks of life.

Oriol was arguing that that’s precisely what he likes about Facebook — the fact that you are able to peek into these other aspects of your friends’ or acquaintances’ lives. The fewer filters there are with regard to these other elements of a colleagues’ personality, the more fun Facebook is.

To summarise: Exhibitionism bad. Voyeurism good.

This made me think about the unified self debate. Some psychologists argue that the self is a singular, coherent, and specific entity. In other words, deep down there’s one Gary — the “real” Gary, and everything else is just a reflection of that unified personality. Other psychologists say that the unified self is a myth, that there is no “real” me, that Gary is just a set of characters or personas that are often contradictory and shifting depending on the context.

No simple answer to the universal question of: Who the hell am I?

I’m more in the “no unified self” school, even though it goes against certain conceptions of their being a soul. I’m very different around my parents, around investors, around my best friends, around people whom I’ve just met, when starting a new job, when I’m the boss — everything depends on how I feel in a situation and the relevant rules of conduct. There are some generally shared traits, but sometimes I can seem like two different people.

My parents don’t know all of my friends, and I’d like to keep it that way.

To me, that’s the big problem with Facebook. It assumes that there is a unified self that I want to put on display for the whole world to see. But that’s not quite true. I have so many elements to my personality, and depending on who’s around and the amount of alcohol being consumed, the image I present to the whole can be quite different.

I think that filters would be a good thing — controlling who gets to see what — but I agree with Oriol that then the fun of Facebook would disappear. Quite a dilemma . . . for Facebook.

I don’t aim to solve it. I’m not an investor, so I don’t really have to.

Instead I’ll end with the lyrics to a song that sums up the anti-unified self point of view quite nicely. They’re from Meredith Brooks’ hit song from the late 1990s.

I hate the world today
You’re so good to me
I know but I can’t change
tried to tell you but you look at me like maybe I’m an angel
underneath
innocent and sweet
Yesterday I cried
You must have been relieved to see the softer side
I can understand how you’d be so confused
I don’t envy you
I’m a little bit of everything
all rolled into one

Chorus:
I’m a bitch, I’m a lover
I’m a child, I’m a mother
I’m a sinner, I’m a saint
I do not feel ashamed
I’m your health, I’m your dream
I’m nothing in between
You know you wouldn’t want it any other way

So take me as I am
This may mean you’ll have to be a stronger man
Rest assured that when I start to make you nervous
and I’m going to extremes
tomorrow I will change
and today won’t mean a thing

I was recently invited to be a speaker at the International Classified Media Association’s general meeting, which was entitled “100% Digital”. I was supposed to represent and explain web 2.0 to traditional print media classified companies. Henri and I took the trip to Amsterdam on Wednesday (i.e., Halloween), missing the puente but looking forward to the famous coffeeshops.

When preparing for the conference, I was expecting a bitter backlash from incensed traditional media types given that my message was: “Promote online or perish! Property search engines like nuroa are the future!”.

Ouch!

Harsh, right?

But the general response was: “Yeah, we know that, so how can we work together? Let’s sit down and consider the possibilities. We are all prepared for co-opetition”.

In general, everyone was very receptive to the message, and in fact, my message was one of the milder ones out there. Some members of the organization said it in far more blunt terms, making sure that members clinging to purely traditional models got a kick in the pants, in case they were still stuck in the 1990s.

And equally as impressive, a bulk of the presentations were “member-to-member”, meaning that current members of the organisation explained to their co-members how they’d updated their sites and what advantages they’d reaped as a result.

I spoke a bit with the CEO of a Dutch vertical search engine and learned abot how classified sites in Estonia, Finland, Russia and the US were working on integrating web 2.0 features. It’s amazing how people in such diverse places are generally doing the same sorts of things.

And there were workshops on usability, SEO, applying classifieds to the mobile world, etc.

In general, not a web 2.0 stone was left unturned.

And you definitely had the sense that the members had formed a close-knit family, facing an adverse situation, but determined to survive. This despite that fact that some of the participants were from “big” companies like Careerbuilder, Schibsted and Trader.

I thought it was a great conference, and I’m happy that they invited me (after reading a comment that I’d left on another post and then reading my blog). I made a lot of great contacts, some of which will likely result in collaborations and/or friendships, and as importantly, I learned a lot about the classifieds industry from people who’ve been working in it for the last 20+ years.

Congrats to Lucie and Shay.

Sorry, that’s a random reference to one of my favorite “dumb” movies — White Chicks from the Wayans Brothers. It’s basically the ghetto equivalent of saying “Bring it on!”or “Let the Games Begin!”

Long story short, News International has invested in a UK property vertical search engine called Globrix. A few key facts:

• The investment was for “a multi-million pound funding round”. Combined with the valuation that Properazzi got from Mangrove just for the initial idea of a vertical search engine a couple of years ago, it shows that the property search engines like nuroa are an increasingly interesting area.
• The company, Globrix, still hasn’t launched, but intends to launch during this month. The company was founded in 2007. If you go to their website, you will see that they are still in private beta. This makes me a little better about all those people who asked “When are you going to launch nuroa?” Sometimes the prize doesn’t go to the person who launched first.
• The million-pound investment appears focused on marketing and advertising, as the goal is to make Globrix one of the most trafficked property sites in the UK within the next 12 months. So they’re going to buy their way into being a market leader.
• Globrix’s business model appears to be exactly the same as nuroa’s.
• News Corp claims that the technology is “next generation”, which is simply another way of saying “a web 2.0 property search engine”, just like nuroa. As the CEO of Globrix explains: “Globrix is about answering a fundamental need in this marketplace - creating a Google-style model for the property search industry. By enabling agents to list for free we cover virtually every property in the UK, which in turn provides a hugely compelling proposition for consumers and creates a new opportunity for an ad-funded model.“
• News Corp argues that investments in vertical search are a key part of its digital strategy (it should be remembered that News Corp invested $13.5 million in the US jobs vertical search engine, Simply Hired ( www.simplyhired.com), which Google is reportedly in talks to buy, a fact confirmed to us by a News International representative at a conference that we attended recently. In any case, News Corp appears committed to vertical search. As Clive Milner, Group Managing Director, News International, said: “Through its digital and print media, News International is one of the largest single players in the UK property media market, so this investment is about us remaining at the forefront of what’s happening commercially and technologically. Globrix is set to be a truly disruptive business in the online property search marketplace - it essentially turns the economics upside down and creates an unparalleled consumer offering from an innovative business model.”
• News International invested in a property search engine, despite already owning 50% of the number 2 property portal in the UK (Property Finder — www.propertyfinder.com). As mentioned above, they note that the new technology is the next step forward, even taking in account their years of experience in the classifieds sector, both print and in web 1.0 vertical real estate portals like Idealista and ImmobilienScout.
• All of this despite the fact that the UK property market is one of the most difficult, given the economic power of Rightmove (a valuation of €1.2 billion) and its exclusive control of the real estate agents (the top 3 real estate networks that control about 60% of the market are their original JV backers). No other market in Europe has barriers to entry as high as the UK market or as many strong already existing competitors. By comparison, the France, Spain and Germany are relatively easy — the market leaders aren’t quite as dominant and there are fewer property search engines covering those markets.

I think this is good news for other vertical search players, particularly those of us not focused exclusively on the highly competitive UK market. It seems that Globrix will do essentially the same thing, but will now count on a few million pounds to attack other UK players such as Extate, OnOneMap, Nestoria, Zoompf, Right Move, etc.

More news to come tomorrow about the recent ICMA conference, and the present Web 2.0 conference that I’m attending.